The Aether's Fourth Daughter

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Never forget, Weskimerans, that their arrival heralded an imbalance that has spread like an infection through the Aether. Now, ifrit multiply across the Salina Desert. Flamehounds spark destruction throughout the Phalean Range. A phoenix, unnatural abomination, was recently sighted in the Northern provinces. Historians have done all they can to restore the Aether's trigonal balance, but it is to no avail. A Fire Age is dawning. We must anticipate a return of the Inferned before the century's end.

After reviewing the Historians’ most recent Aether Report, the Chamber has unanimously voted to weave Weskimera's first Dousing Institution. We will call upon the knowledge of the ancients, so when the fire mark begins to show on the skin of our people, we will be ready. I don't share this information with you to spread undue fear. I only wish to be transparent about the future we face. As much as it sorrows me, I do believe it is inevitable.

—Excerpt from the Semibiannual Letter of Sovereign L.M. Wexmore, Spring, Solar Cycle 1179

Seeds are sown and grown with wind, soil and rain.

—Weskimeran Proverb

Chapter 1

It was raining when Lihea finally reached the farming village with Maybelle asleep in a bundle on her back. Smatterings of greenish light pulsed from distant windows, like a swarm of glow beetles hovering at the foot of the Valley. The Breeder's hands pulled at the air around her as though she were weaving an invisible loom, gathering the rain into swirling silver ropes that parted above her head. Around them, the storm bore down so violently that it tore apart the ground, detritus flashing like shrapnel in the moonlight.

It had rained just so in the first few weeks of Maybelle's life. It was the season for it then, too, and Lihea remembered rocking her spawn under the protective cover of the pagoda in the Breeding Quarter gardens and watching the earth flinch at the water’s touch just the same. The Jacaranda blooms had recently begun to shed, giving the illusion that a legion of little purple frogs were leaping across the burgeoning puddles. She made up names for each amphibious creature that wasn't, whispering them against the warmth of her spawn's fragile body along with her own secret name. Maybelle. A lovable, tinkling sound. She remembered inhaling the downy scent off the crown of her head and floating, blissfully, into certain madness.

For that was not how rearing was meant to be. Surely the Quarter sisters might have said something of this molten, shimmering feeling—even one, just once? Lihea was young when she conceived, barely a few lunar cycles into service. A timid and gullible fawn. But she always had an empathic sense for emotions that weren't her own. Tired, the rearing sisters would say, trying to make a fussy spawn latch while they explained away the imprint of something morose that Lihea could taste on her tongue, I’m not sleeping.

Lihea eventually came to discover first-hand what she had tasted of her solemn sisters' moods. When she did, nothing warm or sweet could wash it down her throat. It was heartache from knowing that one day Maybelle would Emerge, and the Breeder would never hold her spawn again. As Maybelle grew bigger with every passing lune, her despair spread like an invasive weed.

"Your sentimentality will cost you," Yaya had warned her once, when the pearl-skinned Northerner caught her holding a pair of tiny silk slippers to her swollen belly. Afterwards, the Quarter Mama pinched her lips and hurled her grave attention to the task of folding. Lihea helped her stack spawns' garments in tiny, perfect piles and wondered why it was that Yaya, who was once a Breeder herself, had the flavor of a person who touched a hidden thing. Peppery, slightly bitter but with a nuance of depth. The way cocoa is bitter, or love letters stashed beneath closet floorboards are bitter. The bitterness of truths that could break a person or set them free.

Lihea didn’t understand, then. She was so well-trained. Her lessons prepared her for the immense discomfort of gestation, for the joyless duty of rearing, for the noble sacrifice it took to create Emerged, Aether-marked children.

How malleable she had been. And of course, Yaya's prophecy was true. Lihea had proven the stereotype that water-marked didn't make good Breeders. Whimsical imaginations and emotional excess left them too predisposed to the fantasy of spawn bonding, and the fantasy had gripped her even before she held Maybelle in her arms. Long before she had begged earth-marked Ishmal, clever Historian that he was, to weave with her that clay...

Lihea swatted her thoughts away, boots squelching in the mud as she made the final slog to her destination. The dwelling she stopped at was most curious. Not because of the perimeter fencing—a folded accordian composed of sheets of a silvery blue metal compound that Lihea recognized as cobalmine. The same barrier enveloped all the homes on the border of the Valley. It was the home's original structure that looked nothing like the others, appearing as though it was built from the turned-up roots of a tree, or the sturdy chords of a tremendous vine. What puzzled her most of all was that there was not a window or door in sight.

With one hand working to maintain the weave that kept them dry, she leaned across the cobalmine barrier to slap the other against the slickened wood.

"Hello?"

Her cries crackled against the storm's siege. Maybelle squirmed against her back, then started to wail. Panic wrapped around Lihea's ribs and squeezed. She squinted through the darkness towards the fields. They looked textureless and barren. Abandoned? She reached to pull Ishmal's map from the folds of her cloak, her mind mincing through the journey it had been to get here, terrified at the possibility that it had led her to the wrong place all along.

But as she rooted around in her pockets, the house itself began to move. The vines twisted and wiggled like octopus tentacles, pulling apart to reveal a portal of viridescent light and the shadow of a woman, hands raised in weaving, at its center.

"Thank the Aether," Lihea muttered, bouncing in a fruitless effort to placate the spawn.

"Come! Come in, dear," the farmer dropped her hands, and the vines stilled. Her voice was wobbly with age and had the stretched vowels and twangy clip of someone raised in the far Southern provinces. Lihea reached out to grab the woman's proffered arm, balancing against the soft, crepey skin so that she could heave herself and Maybelle over the cobalmine barricade.

“Have a seat, anywhere you’re comfortable,” the farmer shouted over Maybelle’s cries. Her eyes darted in the distracted way of a person unused to the sound of young things, but there was a kindness in them that Lihea hitched her hope to.

The space was warm from the cookstone. The large gray slab was dry, but the pots atop it were simmering with steam. The earth-marked didn't need to wet the stone in order to heat it with their weavings. Over a dozen small phosphorescing orbs hung from the domed ceiling, casting everything in a greenish glow. At the center of the dome was a round glass window. The combined effect of the lamps and the skylight created marbly shadows from the pitter-pattering rain that gave Lihea the impression of being underwater. The farmer's furniture was made from wood that had been hollowed with kaleidoscopic shapes, and heavy hemp fabrics that were rough to the touch but filled with something plush and forgiving to Lihea’s aching muscles.

Tenderly, Lihea contorted to free her spawn from the wrappings. Maybelle's fists curled into Lihea's braided hair, tiny fingers tousling dark strands out of their knitting. Lihea rocked and hm-hm-hmed, but the spawn's cry did not abate.

"I have a warm meal for you here oughta fix her right up. G’on, take your shoes off. Can she eat boiled potatoes? I don't know the rules for feedin’. Me and Frent, rest his spirit, weren’t favored with one of our own. Our names were never pulled, but as it goes, some things just aren't in the Aether."

"Potatoes are a fine meal, thank you."

The farmer clanked a serving ladle against iron pots of various sizes. The sound agitated Maybelle and she shrieked louder, drenching the small space in a cacophony that Lihea found barely tolerable in her tired state. She wished to be more amenable, to express more gratitude for the risk that the farmer was taking on her behalf, but she spent every ounce of energy she could spare on staying alert. She had the constant perk of a doe that heard a twig snap.

"You're safe here, dear," the farmer eyed her sideways, "You and me both know Ishmal takes near too much care in who he allies himself with, so we must be a good sort, the both of us. Poor fellow's so selective, he's right trackin' to grow old lonely… Well, he was," she added toothily.

Lihea chuckled a breath. It wasn't like that with Ishmal. Never had been, but not many could understand the type of friendship that could bring him around to the Quarter so often as he was. Most people just assumed that they were lovestruck, that her service kept them apart, but they were bonded from the innocence of childhood. He was nothing less than a brother to her soul.

"And 'sides, my auntie was a Breeder. That's right, I said auntie... My mother had proper kin. Back then, two to a brood wasn't so uncommon. I grew up hearin’ stories about her, I know she missed her terrible. She spawn-bonded herself. 'Course, it was easier to run back then, too. Always made me feel for your kind in the Quarter. Your service is admirable, dear, even if too few seem to remember it that way these days. Marked children are the Aether’s greatest gift.”

"She is not a child yet, if you please, ma'am."

Child meant Emergence. Child meant Lihea was replaced. Child meant loss.

"Of course. Here you are, dear."

The farmer proffered two bowls, crinkled eyes flickering with unspoken wisdom. Lihea was discomfited by her frankness. The farmer spoke of spawn-bonds and fleeing Weskimera with the offhanded chitter of someone sharing Chamber gossip. Those were unlawful thoughts that had lived privately in her head for so long. She had shared them only with Ishmal, and even then only because she needed to explain herself if she ever hoped to convince him to help. That the farmer could express them so casually made her feel inside-out, over exposed.

Even so, Lihea was starving. The meal was a heaping medley of root vegetables swimming in a fragrant herb gravy. Her stomach lurched like it was reaching out for it, but she turned herself to the task of feeding Maybelle first from a smaller helping of plain white potatoes. Lihea was touched that the farmer must have prepared them separately in anticipation. Some of the tension in her mind eased when Maybelle finally quieted against the comfort of warm food.

"Thank you for your kindness."

"I'm honored to pay it, dear. It's awful, what they've done to your lot, you know. Inferned! Tosh! They've been on about it for suns, but I tell you, it's solar cycle twelve-fourteen, and what's changed? We haven't seen 'em yet, have we? We'd be better served by handlin' the threats in our own backyard. Instead, they're payin' Chamber Guards to keep watch on you sweet young girls, like you're any danger, or payin' 'em to maintain the weavin' on that empty Institution. Waitin' on a scary story come to pass and doin' nothin' about the very real dragons burnin' down my fields. Oh, it boils my ichor..."

Lihea shoved her mouth while Maybelle pawed at the potatoes with a jaunty, toddler-like rhythm. The farmer took her own dish and sat across from them, legs kicked up on an ornately carved stool. She leaned her head back and watched the rain make shapes against the skylight.

"You know, in my day, Breeders walked the village like they owned it. You oughta seen it—every trader passin' through near fell over themselves to give them what they were peddlin' for free. Fine silks, jewelry. Salt even, come all the way from 'cross the Sea. Yet, I haven't so much as laid these old eyes on one of your sisters in a long while. Or salt, come to think," the farmer smacked her knee with a gusty laugh.

Maybelle shoved her messy hand in her mouth, and her eyes rolled towards the farmer with a deliberate, saccharine smile.

"Precious, sweet girl. Is she water-marked, like you?"

"How do you know I'm water-marked?" Lihea's retort was urgent and defensive, but she realized it too late. Heat bloomed on her cheeks, a beacon that betrayed too much.

The farmer's eyes creased. "Well, the sky is pissin’ barrels, but you and the child are bone-dry, dear."

The air-marked had ways of warding off the rain just as well as she, but she didn’t have to guess at the assumption. Sentimental water-marked Breeder, running from her duty, from all good sense, and crashing like a tidal wave into the most dangerous decision of her life. The farmer's aunt had probably been marked by water, too.

"I've said, she is not yet a child."

The farmer made an assenting sound, regarding Lihea with suspicion for a moment. She shrugged, but unease rolled over Lihea's tongue. The taste was there through a mouthful of food, like a walnut gone rancid.

"I might've known anyway. Your eyes give you away. Bein' touched by water often comes with those big saucer eyes, does it not? Such a beautiful feature. Your... spawn, seems to have inherited them from you."

Lihea averted her big saucer eyes. "Aye, she was touched by the water."

She hoped the farmer wouldn't ask for proof. It was rude asking to see a person's markings. They could appear anywhere on the body, often by the first solar return and never later than the second. But this was not a typical circumstance, and most of this conversation had been rude by common standards.

Instead, the farmer recited a familiar passage in a cooing voice at the spawn, "By the current that holds the world together, and patiently wills it apart. That's right, little water-touched one."

"Runi," Lihea dropped her shoulders, recognizing the words of the ancient Historian. "Ishmal loves Runi." He used to read passages to her all the time when they were children, in those blurry, too short, gold-tinged years. Before their lives were wrenched apart by such very different paths.

"Oh, that he does! Look here," the farmer groaned out of her seat and hobbled to a small stack of books on a tall, narrow table that bore the same ornate markings as the rest of the furniture. "One of Frent's most prized. Check the inside cover, g'on."

Inside, where she said to look, Lihea found a note:

To Professor F. Esso, a true Force of Nature. -Ishmal.

It was a play on words, of course. A reference to the subject of their study as Historians, the natural forces of the Aether, and so like Ishmal to write.

"I really mean it when I say you're safe here, dear. You and the spawn. I can't speak to where you're headed after, you know well enough the dangers 'tween here and the North Sea. But I can tell you as much. Here, you won't be found, no matter how long it takes for Ishmal to come and fetch you. You saw yourself the build of this place. Frent's own design, brilliant oak of a man. It's a weavin' you can only work proper when you know't from the heart."

Lihea yearned to trust the woman before her, and most of all to trust in Ishmal's plan. And maybe she could. Maybe soon, they would be free. Before she could respond, Maybelle reached across Lihea's lap and made grabby hands at her bowl of half-gone potatoes.

"Mo' eat!"

Lihea and the farmer locked eyes and shared a grin over the spawn's tiny grunts of exertion.

"Thank you. Truly. I cannot adequately say how much this means to us."

"Well, Frent loved Ishmal like a son. It's the least I can do to honor his memory," her eyes began to redden. She cast them around in search of a distraction. "Oh look! The little one's mark is showing through."

Lihea froze. Time warped and slowed. Each tick happened in icy, out-of-body flashes. First, Lihea looked down to see dark slashes beneath clumps of potato on Maybelle's face. Then, the farmer reached down and swept her fingers under the spawn's chin before the Breeder could intercept. The farmer's voice turned guttural and slow beneath the ringing in Lihea's ears.

"Must be the wards. Unfamiliar weavin's melt away like soft butter in here—Like I said, brilliant oak of a man, bit paranoid though—say, why would you clay her cheek? Sod it to the fashions today, face markin's are so lovely..."

It wouldn't just be her cheek, soon. The mark wasn't showing all the way through yet, and in the low, liquid light, under the mess of supper, under a concealment that was yet only half-faded, it was easy to mistake those sooty black glyphs for the pure cerulean of a water mark. At first. Maybelle giggled and chuffed at the farmer's touch, making a mockery of the ship that was sinking in Lihea's stomach. The Breeder yanked her spawn from the farmer's grip, an act that betrayed as much as Maybelle's skin. Bowls clattered to the ground. Starch and gravy painted the floor like blood spatter. The farmer's sudden pang of fear lashed against Lihea's tongue like the bite from a wraith pepper.

The concealment clay weaved by her and Ishmal to hide Maybelle's cursed marks was powerful and unique in a way that only Ishmal's clockwork mind could conceive. The weaving, which held at every spawn check at the Quarter, which hadn't failed her in the two short lunes since the marks appeared, was, in fact, melting away like butter.

"By the Aether... Is that...? A fire mark. It can't be... Girl, what have you done."

The farmer backed towards the wall. The rain shadows painted her wrinkled terror in elegant, moving waves. An expanse of glyphs was now rapidly revealing itself on Maybelle's skin. The lattice of diamonds and whirls was sharper than the soft circles of a water mark, thicker than air's waif-like strokes. They were black like char, black like a burnt field, and they covered a perfect half of Maybelle's cherubic face from hairline to chin.

"You must know the stories, the burnin' of the world... Frent was so sure it was impossible for their ilk to ever return. The control we have of the Aether, now... a fantastical relic of history, nothin' more. If it's true what they say, she'd turn this whole village to ash before she could gain an inch of mastery... The fire mark can't be tamed in our kind, girl, it can only destroy. She'll make the dragons look like pups. Where will you go with her? Where in the world will you take her that won't leave a trail of death blazin' behind at every turn? I can't... In Frent's name, I won't... Oh, Ishmal. How could you..."

The grief of betrayal arrived next in Lihea's mouth, sour and pungent and rotten. The invading feeling curled against her own, sharpening the shame of a spawn bond that would never relent, and the guilt over the one-tracked recklessness it gave her. But she knew she could never forfeit any small chance for Maybelle to have a future. With her. Together. The only way a future could ever make sense, now. Her eyes began to sting.

"Please—"

"There's a guard station not half a mile off. You know it, you slithered 'round and past it on your way to me. We’re bringin’ her there. Dousin' could give her a chance. A small hope, but the only hope you have. I'll see to it that you go there, girl. You're no longer welcome here."

The farmer turned to weave an open door. There was no time for Lihea to grab her boots, or the wrap that fixed Maybelle to her back and freed both her hands for weaving. With one hand she gripped her spawn to her hip, and with the other she reached for the rain like a prayer and pinched it into an arc that splashed against the farmer's face. It was a weak attack, but the farmer was old. It startled her just enough for Lihea to slip past with Maybelle.

Lihea nearly tripped over the cobalmine barricade and felt a pang of shame. Those retractable metal fences were built by the Historians for what was left of the homes and inns and shops on the border of the Valley. They were built for the families on the fringes, the ones who weren't already displaced by the growing boldness of the very force that had shepherded a creature like Maybelle back into the world. They were built to keep out fire.

Lihea had only one way she could go. The guard station was south, and there were more farms to the east and the west. Naked feet catching in the sloshy mud, she sprinted north towards the Valley.

The further she got from the house, the more traction she gained on the wet ground. She realized it was because the ground was covered in a thick layer of ash that turned tacky in the rain.

Lihea chanced a glance over her shoulder to find that the farmer was following her. For a woman so brittle with age, she moved with the sturdy determination of a wild boar. Lihea caught a movement of the farmer's hands and turned just in time to evade a fountain of mud and gravel that shot up ahead of her. The farmer's practiced mind was no worse at weaving the Aether than a person with sturdier joints.

The ground erupted in confident bursts, each one wider and thicker than the last. With Maybelle bouncing against her hip, Lihea only had one hand to retaliate. She used the rain to slice openings through the mud, but it wasn't enough. Every spec of dirt and ash that latched to her skin made her an easier target for the rest. Soon, the mud was wrestling her and Maybelle to the ground like an angry animate blanket, and Lihea lost her footing.

The slap of approaching feet grew louder, until the farmer appeared above her, and Lihea watched helplessly while her hands worked the empty space like a sculptor with wet clay. As she did so, the mud trap thickened and clenched.

"Find your senses, girl," the farmer's trembling voice was punctuated by wheezing gasps for air. "You got two paths here. Only one'll keep her alive. She needs to be doused."

"No!"

Ishmal said the same, at first. When Maybelle's marks first showed, Lihea claimed a wicked bout of sickness for them both. It wasn't hard to keep the Quarter sisters away, and even vigilant Yaya was all too happy to be absolved of caretaking duties as soon as she heard the violent sounds of Lihea forcing herself to retch on the other side of the door.

Ever a loyal friend, Ishmal came quickly with the remedy she sent for, but it was not the remedy she truly needed. As a Historian, Ishmal knew more about dousing than a commoner might. He explained that it involved subverting and returning the spirit of fire to the Aether. It wasn't done for the sake of preserving the life of the Inferned, but as a practice that would, with enough repetition, restore Aethereal Balance. With tender honesty, he told her that some translations of the ancient scrolls likened it to a fate worse than death.

In the end he promised to find a way to get them out, and together they weaved the concealing clay of water and earth that they thought was infallible.

It wasn't, but the mud that held her now would be, for as long as the farmer kept weaving. With horror, Lihea realized that the thick mud was wrapping itself around Maybelle's face, stifling her cries and surely her breath as well.

"I beg of you—"

Lihea reached for the farmer's name and realized she did not know it. Ishmal had only called her Professor Frent Esso's wife, and Lihea had been so guarded, she had not even asked.

"Ishmal! He will find another way. You know his mind, like your Frent—"

"He is nothing like my Frent. Only a selfish git would think to put the whole world in danger on accoun’a one pretty face. Oh dear girl, stupid girl, forgive me..."

The farmer curled her fingers into skyward facing fists. The ground squeezed the air from Lihea's chest. She was going to kill Maybelle. She was going to kill them both.

Lihea twitched her fingertips, but it was to no avail. The farmer's weave was too strong, it gripped her too tightly, and the trickles she mustered through the mud did nothing to release its hold on her and the spawn.

"You're right. You're right! We'll go with you. Please, we'll go."

The farmer did not relent to her gasping lies. The hospitality she had been possessed of only moments ago was fully transmogrified by slithering, ignorant fear. If only she knew how impossible it was for Maybelle to be anything like the monsters of those stories. But she couldn't get the words out. Wet ash wormed its way into Lihea's mouth and nostrils. It spread across her face and covered it until she was nothing but a pair of big saucer eyes staring out from a mound on the ground.

Then, quick as a blink, a massive pair of talons dropped from the sky, grabbed the farmer by the neck, and snapped it easier than a butcher killing a chicken. Her body slackened and fell like an unstrung puppet.

Lihea fought to free her hands first. She weaved the water out of the mud until it was dry and loose enough to burst through. Far above her, the sky boomed with the leathery beat of flapping wings. The Breeder brushed fervently at her spawn's face, even as she sputtered for air through her own earth-packed sinuses.

Lihea tried to beg the child to breathe, but all she could do was cough.

Each second yawned into its own sickening eternity.

Lihea felt a sharp pain on the skin of her hand before she comprehended what was happening.

Instinct made her recoil. Had it just stopped raining? It was suddenly so warm. She glanced down at her palm. A boil was forming that was curiously visible, as if the night had snapped its fingers and woken the sun.

But it was not the sun.

Lihea looked down and choked on a dirty scream. Maybelle's prostrate limbs and soft belly were as still as a portrait. But her open mouth and eyes beamed three cylinders of white-hot flame so far into the sky and so infernally hot that the rain turned to vapor around them.

Being marked by the Aether meant you could only weave what was already there. No one could create the world anew. This stretched the bounds of possibility so far that Lihea's mind, stunned by the fearsome might of this small, delightful thing that once grew inside of her, tricked itself away from the sickening truth of it. Gripped by a quiet stupor, the Breeder swayed beside the farmer's corpse like a reed in the breeze. The spawn's hand twitched once, and the Valley returned once more to darkness.