It had been five years now since Ustule’s parents had died. On a misty July morning, she built a cairn on the beach and prayed to Eleusinia for the spirits of her parents. The sea slowly pushed at the land, caressing his sands with foam-lace fingers. The sea murmured and whispered his name, over and over, and over again: o land, o land, o love! In the distance, beyond the curtain of fog, the foghorn sang his lonely cry with the occasional croons of seabirds as they flew over the grey ocean. The smell of fish, brine, and seaweed was heavy on the air. It bit at and kissed the nose in equal measure, bitter and mild and sour and salty all at once. The salt chewed on Ustule’s eyes, or perhaps it was sleeplessness from the night before. Or perhaps it was the last touch of tears on her lashes. The beach sand was silver dotted with tufts of sharp grass and strewn with braids of kelp and great logs of driftwood. Beneath her feet was black sandstone that shimmered tiny specks of violet in the pale, dim light. In front of her, the two cairns.Ustule’s mother and father had died in a hunting accident. The three of them had been hunting that fateful summer in the tundra. Ustule had requested the night before that they hunt deer. Venison had been her favorite food from an early age—she loved the taste, loved the texture. Loved the steaks and the sausages and the stews, too. So that morning they had gone hunting deer, the mother, the father, and the little Litch. But the stag had turned around, and with a kick crushed her mother’s chest until it was flat and bleeding; with a twist of its mighty head, it ran Ustule’s father through his broken heart. In terror, she had turned and run away. She could not find her way back to camp, and so hid in a crevice for two days to weep and weep and weep. At last, she had crawled out of the crevice to look for water—and found instead a Demon bundled in fur.
The rest was, as Demons would say, history. But Litches thought differently from them. Ustule didn’t want to be a Demon, like her classmates. She wanted to be a Litch, like her parents, like her village—but that was the problem. It was time to think, and then time to decide. She couldn’t keep living like this.
It was alright to mourn. It was proper to be sad, and she knew this. There was nothing wrong with mourning the dead, because every moment you spent mourning them was another reminder that they had once been alive. That they had once held your hand, dried your tears, wiped away your fevers, chased away bad dreams. Every teardrop was another memory of her family, and shedding them did nothing but to keep those memories close and the love even closer. Yes, to mourn for the dead was good. But it was not her mourning for her dead parents that was slowly killing Ustule—it was the mourning for her lost village. For the Winter Solstices, for the beltanes and harvest festivals. The mourning for the trees and the frozen sea and the shambling farmhands and the snowball fights in winter. She was mourning it, and yet…and yet…
Ustule looked out to sea. In geography, she had learned that the sea touched everything, every part of the world, every continent, and that all oceans were connected to each other. She had learned that all oceans are interwoven and that the water from one becomes the water from another over time. So the water that lapped at the shore here had once, thousands of years ago, lapped at the shore where her village now stood. Ustule took a deep breath. Her village still stood. It was still there. It wasn’t gone just because she was. She might not know where it was, but it was still out there, still out there…
She didn’t know where it was. So…no. Ustule could not return to her home village. Not…for a while, at least. There. She’d finally said it. The truth that she had been hiding in her heart for so long, and it flew out from her like a bird set free. She…was going to be here, in Euros, for a while. So…what could she do now? She could keep her people alive in her heart. Her parents. And the memory of the people back home. She touched one of the cairns gently. She didn’t have to be in Boreas to be a Litch.
“I em settling in in Euros, I theenk,” she murmured. Her voice, broken at first, grew stronger. “I heve made friends, end I heve learned theengs. You might not theenk thet I em working hard, because I em et a table all day, but I em! I em…I em learning how to count theengs in complicated ways—they call it ‘meth.’ It’s short for ‘arithmetic.’ End I am learning about other races. Like Imps, end how Graven’s Gift hes affected them. End did you know thet the Imps hed friends under the sea?”
She talked for a while to her parents. It had been a very long time, after all. They must have been worried sick, wondering when she’d talk to them…
“…End then there’s a cless about the netural world. It’s called science, end we’re learning about enetomy. It is very interesting. They say if you do very well in enetomy, you cen be a doctor. End…end fix things. Thet’s how you become a healer. Here in Euros. You work hard, end you study, study, study.” Ustule wiped her eyes once again with her sleeve. “Thet’s…thet’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stahdy. End…I’m going to become a doctor. A healer. End then…then I’m going beck to Boreas. End I’m going to make new friends.”
She leaned over the cairns. “End Mama? Papa? …I’m going to live.” She kissed the tops of both cairns, then stood up and walked forward into the future.
