Despite the amalgamation of bloodlines flowing through her veins, Ygraine’s opinion of other races had always been that of weary trepidation. While her papa Callum seemed to embrace people of all shapes and sizes, laughing and dancing and being merry around campfires, his daughter and long held grudges passed down from stories from her baba Nimueh. The Alkidike, he said with a world weary heaviness, were exclusionary and aggressive - especially to those who had ‘stolen’ their blood. While that blood gave her her markings, her eyes, and her height, the people would reject her - this was a warning sewn into her being. There were Alkidike outside of Jauhar that were kinder - like Ygraine’s mentor’s wife, but that was the exception not the rule.
Zena was where Ygraine was most comfortable, with people whose livelihoods she understood, but there were cautionary tales threaded even to those experiences. Zenans were noble and prideful, but while she felt most comfortable among the furs and snow everything about her appearance marked her as an Other. Even in Sauti, among the traveling wind earthling, there was a tightness to her papa’s eyes and normally carefree face that marked them as unsafe.
As a child, Ygraine had disliked the times her family stayed in Jauhar - the muggy hot air, the strange homes in the canopy… compared to the cabin her baba had in Zena, the memories of the months her fathers had gone missing all built up to a deep seated resentment of the jungle and lands around it.
Oba was a land of heat and mystery and traitorous people who viewed her parents, and people like her, as playthings; the haunted looks in her parents’ eyes when they returned from their time as captives by nobles there should have been enough to convince Ygraine to retreat to Zena, and never dare leave the familiar cold again.
… But then Nimueh died.
Ygraine had always dreaded the unfamiliar, but … in the months following news of her father’s death, her tiny family clung together and, in a way, found its own kind of healing. Jauhar, through this new lens, was a place that she and Sol and their parents had been together happily. Oba, with its dark parts and history of war, was also where a festival years ago brought light to her father’s eyes, where she remembered sitting on her baba’s shoulders to watch as Callum fought in a tournament - gleaming with pride.
Distantly, Ygraine knew of Yale and Belrea but her fathers had grown up in the wary, tumultuous period during and after the Oban war, and had given little thought to meeting these strange people - and for a long time, as she’d studied in Zena, any interactions with these people were few and far between, and certainly not anything as involved as a conversation. Why should she care that strange people in a continent she had never been to had traveled and met more strange people, who lived underwater? It sounded fantastical and like the stuff of youngling’s stories.
But now, everything was different. Perhaps death had skewed her world onto a new axis, or perhaps this was the longest Ygraine had stayed put in Jauhar and Tale since becoming a young adult, with agency, but… she saw them everywhere. In the markets in Jauhar, high in the canopy, there were wobbly, uncomfortable looking Yael travelers - and for the first time, Ygraine was just as startled and intrigued by a strangers’ dark, strange eyes as people were of her own. Once, traveling with a set of merchants through northern Oba, the soft plucking sounds of a stringed instrument she’d never heard before stole her attention to a smiling, sunny looking lightning earthling who plucked away and sang with a warbling, haunting tone that she’d never heard from other minstrels.
… And perhaps, the completion of this metamorphosis of thought was that these strange people looked at her with open awe and curiosity the same way she did them, and the same way they did to any other earthling or Alkidike. There was wariness built into every fibre of her being, and yet in the same vein, she could settle around a warm fire, sharing warm ale with an Oban, while a group of Tale children danced to the strange, vibrant tunes of a Lightning musician; clapping and singing… laughing to the chimes of ghunghroo bells on a dancer’s ankles, and castanets tapping, and the terrible stories of the extremist expansion, or the Oban war, or bloodshed from slavery were a generation away.
(759 words)
Reply
