Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(2)
“You’re destroying part of the world. It’s the principle of the thing.” She turned her gaze on the younger ones. “Now run on home before I tell Jumi and she erases you out of the worldbook!”
The children squealed and ran for the trailhead. Revan folded his arms, annoyed. “You shouldn’t scare them like that.”
“Oh? How should I scare them?” Elsa said, eyebrows raised. “They need to learn to respect Veldana, and you’re not helping any, encouraging these stupid games.”
“While I’m sure you find Jumi’s squirmy little sea creatures thoroughly enthralling, the rest of us have to make our own fun.”
That was the way it was among the children: her versus the rest of them. Revan’s mother, Baninu, was as close to a friend as Jumi had. Baninu hoped their children would someday marry, and this more than anything else had driven the wedge between Elsa and Revan, for she did not plan to marry. Ever.
“Just … find something else. Don’t do this again,” Elsa said coldly.
Revan stared at her like he was memorizing the face of a stranger. Elsa felt a sharp twinge of regret, but she turned away so he would not see it in her face.
The vanished starfish and the Edgemist’s strange behavior still nagged at her. A few pebbles shouldn’t have caused that instability all on their own. Best to rush straight home and consult Jumi.
*
The village lay nestled in a valley, bisected by a rocky-bottomed creek that emptied into the sea—now that there was a sea. The shallow banks were lined with moss, and Elsa’s shoes sank into the springy stuff as she hurried upstream.
She crossed a little wooden bridge and wove her way between the scattered cottages with their dark thatched roofs and whitewashed wattle-and-daub walls. Past the gentle slope of the hill was the cottage she shared with her mother. There was a vegetable garden along the side and a chicken coop behind, and as Elsa reached for the door she reminded herself that one needed weeding and the other needed sweeping.
The cottage itself had one large room on the ground floor and a loft for sleeping space. Hearing the door latch, Jumi glanced up from her writing table.
Looking at Jumi was like looking in a mirror that showed the future. Elsa’s skin was a shade darker, bronze-brown to her mother’s sienna tan, but they shared the black hair, clear green eyes, and even the shape of their faces: strong cheekbones sweeping low over an expressive mouth and sharp chin. Elsa took pride in the similarity, and if anyone saw parts of her father reflected in her, they did not dare to say. She herself had no idea what he had looked like when he was alive, and this was one of the few ignorances she felt no desire to correct.
“Elsa, dear. You’re back early,” Jumi observed.
“Afternoon, Mother.”
Elsa came around the table to look at what her mother was working on. Jumi was scribing in a large worldbook—one that did not look familiar to Elsa, though she couldn’t be sure since it was open to a mostly blank page.
“What’s this?” Elsa said, curious.
“It’s our freedom,” Jumi said.
Elsa eyed her mother, wondering if she could press for a less cryptic answer. Veldana had been created by one of those self-superior European scriptologists, a man named Charles Montaigne, who had treated the Veldanese as subjects of an experiment. The damage he wrought to the Veldanese language alone had taken Jumi years to correct after she learned the scientific discipline of scriptology and negotiated Veldana’s independence. How, exactly, she had wrested control of the world from Montaigne was a subject Jumi always skirted around.
“What do you mean?” Elsa asked.
Jumi did not answer. Instead, she set her fountain pen aside and brushed her fingers across one thick off-white page, a soothing gesture, the way another person might stroke a nervous animal. “You’ll be seventeen next month. A grown woman. I think it’s time you have access to the Veldana worldbook. It will be your job to care for our world someday, and you’re skilled enough now to take a more active role in the expansions.”
Elsa felt a swell of pride. Nothing mattered more than being worthy of Jumi’s approval, worthy of inheriting her role as caretaker of Veldana. “Thank you, Mother.”
Jumi smiled one of her rare, soft smiles and put a hand to Elsa’s cheek, a gesture of affection that would have been embarrassing if they hadn’t been alone. “I could not have asked for better,” she said.
Elsa covered Jumi’s hand with her own, holding it against her face for a moment before letting it go. Flustered by her mother’s praise, she wasn’t sure what to say, so she changed the subject. “I think we might have a problem with the newest revisions. I’m not sure.…” Despite her earlier threats, Elsa found herself reluctant to betray the boys to Jumi. She decided to leave them out of the story. “The Edgemist was behaving strangely. It looked disturbed. And there was this starfish that seemed stable, then it up and vanished right out of my hand.”
Jumi frowned. “I scribed the expansion hours ago. The Edgemist should have settled away to its new location by now.”
“I know.” Elsa shrugged. “Perhaps it was nothing, but—”
There was a loud crack, like the sound of a branch breaking. The room began to fill with smoke, and Elsa covered her nose and mouth with her sleeve. A sickly-sweet smell crept through the fabric as she ran for the door, but she stepped on something and slipped, and the hard slate floor came up to meet her, knocking the wind from her lungs. The smoke was making her dizzy, too dizzy to get back up. Somewhere nearby Jumi coughed and wheezed, but Elsa couldn’t catch sight of her through the smoke.