Chapter 1
She returned to the entrance of their cotti at the time she expected Kolyat to come home. Opening the door after unlocking it, she gazed out at the garden path, over the lush blue-green fronds lining the way down to the fields. She waited for him, leaning against the frame. In the distance, the clouds in the sky were white and grey, moving along with the push of the higher winds above. Irikah rubbed her violet tebris along her jaw, feeling much in common with the drear of the sky.
Days like this, when the clouds were spacey and white in between their grayness, she remembered stormy days at home in Nualavera, when storms came down from the northeast, and hit the 'Horn cliffs aside her family's city. The Beirchardt would be foaming. The crests would froth in the storms, and the waters churn darkly, as she recalled. The Beirchardt had two sides to it those days. Her father would issue the warning throughout the city, that the piers were to be gated off, the sauls lashed down tight to the galiennas floating in dock. She could hear his voice issuing the orders to the barra burrells and burrellas.
"There will be another storm after this one," her father was looking out over the balustrade of her mother's lower balcony, in her quarters, the lower salon….It was dawn and the skies were white and grey.
"Papua," she spoke from the inner room, "….when will Mamua come down and play?"
Waiting in her mother's salon, Irikah saw her father gaze back at her as he turned from the view, his broad shoulders exposed either side of his white ba'tran, sashed with gold and green colors of silk along his arms, waist, and chest.
"Never mind your mother, Irikah," he strode towards her in thonged feet, "….Go to your studies."
Irikah blinked her eyelids as the rain and humid air pushed towards her with a gust of wind. It came perfectly at her under the covering to the cotti's entrance. She could see in the distance, above the treeline, a large podlike vessel skimming the treetops towards their fields. She readied herself by practicing her smile.
The pod approached, lowering to the field in front of the cotti. It was an egg at the bottom where it hovered and opened its sliding door. From the parting door stepped down a leggy, reed-thin Drell with baggy clothes, a bag over his shoulder, other youths his age shouting and calling after him as he turned his black and teal crests to wave goodbye while he walked backwards up the wet garden path towards her….Eventually, he turned and looked up the path towards her from his friends who were leaving in the transport from school.
His young black and teal face pointed directly at hers, and there was something among the youngster's expression as his countenance quieted.
When he had reached the middle of the garden path, close enough for her to hear him, he stopped.
The transport had lifted away with a soft hum and departed. The calls and shouts from the vessel grew distant until all was heard was the rain and the wind through the grasses.
"Did he leave?"
His voice was young and thin. With a rehearsed smile, "….Yes, Kolyat, he's left."
Kolyat dropped his black-tinted eyes to the path through the garden, as though looking for evidence of his father's bootprints….His hands, large for his age, gripped the strap of his bag over his shoulder and adjusted it in place….The bag was full of work from school.
"He didn't leave me a note, did he?"
"You'll have to look in your room, Kolyat…." She straightened from the frame and stepped forward under the entry's covering, "….Come in now, it's raining again."
"It always rains, Mamua."
"It does…." She nodded.