Threefold (Youjo Senki/Saga of Tanya the Evil x the Wheel of Time)

[Readhead]

(Thank you to TheBattleSage for editing.)


Arrene, Germanian Empire
May, 1925


My second death came much like my first; unanticipated, and delivered courtesy of a disgruntled subordinate. Much as before, I had done no wrong to this particular subordinate. In fact, I had once saved the life of my second assassin, although that was difficult to remember through the haze the cursed Type 95 had left over my memories.


And just like the coward who had pushed me off the Yamanote Platform long ago and a world away, I am sure that Second Lieutenant Vooren Grantz had felt supremely, if momentarily, justified in his actions.


Or, perhaps not. I could hardly see him from the corner of my eye, but the lieutenant's stiff expression looked far from triumphant. In fact, his blue eyes were wide with horror, the rifle he had used to shoot me in the back frozen mid-fall from his nerveless fingers. I could only hope that he realized he had effectively killed both of us with that same bullet. If Visha and the rest of the 203rd didn't get him first, the ponderous but thorough Imperial military justice system would.


Guaranteed or not, vengeance was cold comfort. What did I care that this new coward sometimes known as Second Lieutenant Grantz would surely join me in death soon enough? Revenge wouldn't make me any less dead. Nothing would, except perhaps for my old enemy, who had turned up once again to harass me in my final moments.


Like a carrion bird, Being X had smelled death and had winged its way down from whatever celestial platform it reclined upon while enjoying the peepshow of mortal existence and slacking off on its duties. Once again, the old crow had come to taunt me, reveling in its power and self-righteousness bloviations. It yammered endlessly on about my failures to accomplish what it saw as my purpose, all the while using my killer as its mouthpiece.


"Oh, shut up already and get this over with," I mentally snapped at the being who spoke with Grantz's mouth, fed up at last and entirely aware that it could hear my thoughts. "Your incompetence wasn't my problem the last time I died, and the number of people cursing your name because of my actions in this life isn't my problem now.


"In both cases," I continued, almost perversely relieved that I was dying once again now that I had an opportunity to rant directly at the true target of my spleen, "you only have yourself to blame, but since you lack the intelligence or bravery to recognize that obvious truth, I'm sure you'll take your frustration out on me. So kindly skip the moralizing; we both know you recognize only your own morality and have no respect for law or obligation anyway."


"SUCH INSOLENCE! YOU HAVE GROWN PRIDEFUL AND ARROGANT UPON YOUR PETTY SUCCESSES, MY LOST CHILD! CAST ASIDE YOUR PRIDE AND WORSHIP ME AS YOUR GOD."


"I will not." My statement hung in the ether with the weight of a solemn promise, a sworn oath. "I will not worship a being as incompetent as you; to do so would be to demean myself. Feel free to skip the threats of obliteration, by the way – we both know they'd just be more bullshit. You accuse me of pride? Your pride is the reason why I'm here at all, and I'm sure your pride won't let me go now either. I'd spit at you, if I could. Bastard."


"HEAR THIS AND KNOW MY MERCY. THOUGH YOU ARE NOT YET FORSAKEN, YOU SHALL BE REBORN ONCE AGAIN. YOU WILL BE REFORGED INTO A TOOL OF MY LIGHT, TRAINED TO MAKE MY WILL MANIFEST UPON THE WORLD, AND PUNISHED FOR YOUR FAILURES. AND IN THE END, YOU WILL BOW BEFORE ME. IN THE END, YOU WILL CALL ME GREAT LORD. IN THE END, MY TRIUMPH IS BUT AN EVENTUALITY.


"THERE IS ONLY ME."


And then, all I knew was searing light, utter darkness, and crushing pain.

~+~+~+~​

Sunday (Midsummer), Amadaine, 980 NE
Shende Hold, Chareen Aiel, Aiel Waste


Sorilea of the Jarra Sept of the Chareen Aiel, Wise One of Shende Hold, cradled the bundle in her arms with a tenderness that many generations of apprentices would have found uncharacteristic.


Sorelia had heard the same mutters from generation after successive generation of apprentices: That she was as tough as a strip of cured meat, that she was as merciless and unsympathetic as the Termool itself, that desiccated land south of the Threefold Land where not even the Aiel could survive.


Those apprentices Sorelia judged sufficiently circumspect in their gossiping were allowed to discover their own failures and were permitted to set their own toh obligations. Those whose wits were less keen were further shamed when she revealed that two centuries of life had left her ears remarkably keen indeed.


At no point, Sorelia with a smile, had she ever denied the truth of their gossip. She was as tough as a strip of cured meat; she had been made as such by almost two hundred years of life in the Three-fold Land, being sharpened and tested and punished in turn.


"And as young Bair is so fond of saying," Sorilea murmured to the bright blue eyes looking up into her ancient green pair, "the Three-fold Land is not soft; soft things do not live here."


The infant gurgled in her arms, seemingly in agreement. Sorilea smiled down at the baby, her youngest greatdaughter's greatson. "But, you can still be soft yet, little one. Your time will come, and with it shall come the three blessings of the land for our people: a sharpening stone to make us, a testing ground to prove our worth, and a punishment for our sin."


The baby fell silent, its eyes glistening with an awareness that seemed far too old for such young eyes. Sorelia considered her many-times greatchild; it was absurd, but the not-yet day old child seemed to understand what she had said. A ridiculous thought, but Sorilea had seen many strange and ridiculous things over her very long life.


"Ayesha," the Wise One called out to her last surviving greatdaughter's daughter, even as she touched the Source and with her feeble power guided a strand of Spirit to touch the infant's head, "what name have you chosen?"


"Taric, Honored Ancestor," replied her descendent from the cot where she rested, still recovering from the trial of the birth earlier in the evening. From her trip to a proving ground just as rigorous as Rhuidean and equally deadly. Sorelia had attended the birth as both an honored ancestor and as the only healer in a three day run. "My son's name is Taric."


"A good name," Sorilea muttered approvingly, her eyes focused on her greatson, many generations removed, "for a child born the night before the longest day. A strong name. His cries have stopped not even a day after his birth, without a teat in his mouth and without sleep. His eyes are fixed onto my own. Ayesha and Leiran, teach him well of Ji'e'toh, that he might grow truly strong in body and soul."


"We shall, Wise One," answered Leiran, speaking the ritual acknowledgment from his place by his wife's cot. Sorilea eyed the Thunder Walker, and nodded in acknowledgement. He was of the Cosaida Sept, hailing from the territory near the lands of the Tomanelle Aiel, and despite his missing eye still an apt dancer of the spears.


And more than that, she mused, he is a man who understands well Ji'e'toh. He has captured many Gai'shain and is honorable in his dealings, bringing much ji upon himself. Ayesha chose well when she laid her wreath at his feet.


"Then may you find water and shade, until the Last Day," Sorelia replied, fulfilling her part of the ancient ritual, "and may your child and his children likewise find water and shade, til shade and water are gone on the Last Day."


With only the faintest regret, Sorelia returned the newest member of her family to his mother's arms. Even then, the newly-named Taric was silent, observing his parents with a grave solemnity. If she hadn't delved the infant herself, Sorelia would have worried that his lungs were underdeveloped, but her meager talent had found nothing amiss.


Perhaps, Sorelia thought as she withdrew from the couple's small adobe room within Shende Hold, young Taric had simply emerged from his mother's womb as stolid as Shae'en M'taal, a Stone Dog.


"But even a dog should bark around family," Sorilea grumbled as she stumped her way down the hallway of the Hold's ancient dwelling. "Stone faces that never settle or relax always crack and break, after all."


The hallway itself was built of mortared stones, the internal walls providing structure for the branching adobe residential rooms and storehouses. Tucked up under the first rise of the Dragonwall and built under the protective overhang of the cliffside, Shende Hold was always warm, even in the Threefold Land's bitterly cold nights. It was a quirk shared by the Jarra and the neighboring White Mountain Sept; both had built their Holds into the stone faces of the Dragonwall.


As she had grown older, Sorelia's ancient bones had begun to appreciate the year-round warmth of Shende Hold more and more; as a result, she had made a point to spend at least half of the year living in the hide tents used by the hunting parties.


The tents were common to all of the Aiel, though the eastern clans – Shaarad, Goshien, and Nakai – and the Tomanelle also sheltered under their earthen hogans. It was in those tents, maintained and handed down generation to generation, that the beating heart of Aiel culture thrived.


And it was that beating heart that had so recently crossed the Dragonwall, that had brought justice to the Treekillers. Four years ago, four clans had crossed the Dragonwall to pursue Laman wherever he would flee. They had pursued him through the snows of winter all the way to the Shining Walls themselves before they had hunted the coward down.


That justice, Sorelia knew, had not come without exacting its own price. The Taardad, the Shaarad, the Nakai, and the Reyn Clans had all earned much ji through their sacrifice. And yet, though they had earned much honor, so many spears had gone to spit in Sightblinder's eye in the process.


The two years following Laman's death had been hard in the Threefold Land. Even though the Chareen, her clan, had not ventured across the Dragonwall, fewer strong bodies meant fewer farmers to till the maize, reducing food supply across all of the clans. Raiding, always a constant between the Aiel clans, had reached a fever pitch. The Tomanelle raided the Shaarad incessantly, while the Shaido pressed aggressively into Taardad and Reyn holdings.


"The Threefold Land may test us and iron may sharpen iron," she pushed aside the curtain that was the door to her own abode in Shende Hold, "but we will need more babies, across all the clan… But I suppose I can wait to remind Ayesha of her duty; she has done her part for now."


And again, the oldest living Wise One's thoughts went to her youngest descendent, her greatdaughter's greatson. To his shock of sun-bright hair and his solemn expression, so ridiculous on a child only a day and an hour old. And to that gaze, which had seemed far older than a day and an hour.


When Taric had been handed to her, still in his swaddling clothes, she had expected to see the familiar indignant anger seemingly inherent to all newborns. Instead, his chubby cheeked face had been surprisingly somber, his eyes bright and darting for all that they could barely focus. Somehow, the infant had possessed the mien of an experienced warrior, familiarizing himself with his surroundings and scanning for danger.


Had a new thread been woven into the Pattern, Sorelia wondered as she tended to the bowl of goat stew with coarse maize bread left by her apprentice on the hearth, warmed by the sullen embers of her banked fire, or had an old thread been shuttled back across the loom?


Only time would tell. Sorelia only hoped that she would not wake from the dream before she had the chance to see what kind of man her descendent would prove himself to be.

 

[Readhead]

(Thank you to TheBattleSage for editing.)


26 Tammaz, 993 NE
Shende Hold, Chareen Aiel, Aiel Waste


"The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again."*


Or, at least, so the Wise Ones taught. There are, they claim, no beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time.


My own feelings on the matter were more mixed.


For one, with two past lives under my belt, I knew with absolute certainty that reincarnation was possible. While my rebirths had been directed to specific circumstances by Being X, it had mentioned at our first meeting that it simply managed the cycle of death and rebirth. So, if individuals were born and reborn, the existence of some sort of endless loop was implied. A wheel, perhaps.


On the other hand, the idea that every Age would come again in time struck me as horrifyingly deterministic. If, over the slow turning of the Wheel, all of the figures whose memories were destined to eventually solidify into legends (and then degraded into myths and so forth) were inevitably brought back to life in every age, then that meant that every decision had already been made time and again. Everything would just continue to loop endlessly.


Needless to say, I took the words of my tutors in Shende Hold with a grain of salt. While my people, the Chareen Aiel, lacked any form of organized religion, this universally accepted folk-belief that the entire world was a never-ending cosmic cycle smacked of religiosity nonetheless. A religion seemingly without gods or commandments or moral imperatives, although it did recognize a Creator and someone or something called a Dark One. Curiously, only the Dark One was ever given any sobriquets.


"Wise One," I had once asked, speaking up in my eighth year during one of the informal teaching sessions conducted by the hold's wise woman, who apparently happened to be some distant relation of mine, "who is Sightblinder? What is he? Was he ever a man?"


Does he look like an old man? Does he speak through the mouths of others? Does he take the form of a nutcracker doll that creepily smiles through his wooden teeth?


"Who is Sightblinder, you ask?" Sorelia was rarely amused, so I had been shocked to see a thin smile stretch those leathery lips. "He is chaos and destruction. All that is unnatural and discordant has its utmost source in him. His voice leads men into depravity. The urge to put oneself over sept and clan comes from him."


Ah, just a concept, then. Not an entity, just a way of explaining away the natural conflicts of life.


"But someday, on the Last Day," ancient Sorelia had continued, lecturing us as we sat in a circle around her, combing raw cotton into fibers usable for spinning; there was never any end to work at Shende Hold. "We will get the opportunity to dance the spears with Sightblinder himself."


"As it is prophesied," she said in a remarkably matter-of-fact tone, "so it shall be. Our blood will be poured out on the sands, but if we are sufficiently skillful, a remnant of a remnant will be saved. And that, children, is why we dwell in the Threefold Land: the land hones us to an edge, to better fight that last day; the land tests us, so we may survive that last day; the Land punishes us, so we will not forget our failures on that Last Day."


Numbly, I had focused on the comb in my hand, straightening out and polishing the cotton fibers and letting my ancestor's voice roll over my head, trying to sort through the implications of the apocalyptic vision she had so carelessly dropped at my feet.


What was immediately clear to me was that I couldn't ignore the statement of prophecy as the ramblings of a demented elder; while Sorelia had allegedly seen her two hundredth birthday the year before my birth, she was still the Wise One of Shende Hold. In addition to being a living repository of cultural and technical knowledge regarding all the tools of the Chareen Aiel, she was the village healer and the obvious power behind Parrag, the Sept Chief of the Jarra.


Beyond all that, she was also a channeler of the One Power, or so the whispers went. Nobody I'd asked could give me any details, as all female channelers of our people were Wise Ones, and, as my father had once told me, "no man willingly asks after a Wise One's business."


There were no male channelers of our people. Any man who could channel was a dead man walking, sent away from the People to throw himself against the endless hordes of Shadowspawn, twisted half-beast demons, that lurked in the blighted lands to the north.


Taken together, Sorelia spoke with both the voice of tradition and of authority. In a very literal sense, she was the Chareen Aiel; assuming an average Aiel lifespan of fifty years, Sorelia had guided eight generations from the cradle to the grave. And that guiding voice, that heart of the Chareen Aiel made manifest, was telling me that I had once again been born into a nation built for war.


Perhaps, I had reflected as I presented my sack of freshly combed cotton to my mother for spinning, the Wheel truly does weave the same patterns over and over again..


That lesson now five years in the past had settled like a stone in my gut. Each of my last two lives had been different, yet each had ended the same way. Elements of both were already echoing in this, my third life. I was once again male and already tall for my age, just like my first life. I had been born into a culture dedicated to war, just like my second life. I had been born into a loving and intact family, like my first life. The resonance was impossible to overlook.


And yet, I refused to resign myself to hopeless determinism. While the environment we inhabited informed our choices, it is our choices that inform us. In my previous life, I had volunteered to join the Imperial Army out of the sincere belief that I possessed no better option. I had submitted to the militarism to facilitate my own long-term survival. In the end, while I had been born into a militaristic society, it had been my choice that had ultimately led to my second betrayal.


So, I decided that I would make a different choice this time.


The Aiel, the Chareen included, were a military people, marked by a cultural mythology that held them eternally penitent for long forgotten crimes and destined for death in battle. Divided into clans, the Aiel were eternally at war with each other. But to call the Aiel barbarians would have been entirely incorrect. To my surprise, the constant violence was very carefully regulated.


When a clan raided the hold of another clan, the attackers would only take at most a fifth of the material goods of the hold, and never any of the food or water. Ji'e'toh, the unwritten honor code that defined what it was to be Aiel, held that taking an enemy prisoner was far more prestigious than killing. Forcing someone to kill you by fighting on in a hopeless situation was dishonorable, but abusing a prisoner of war was profoundly worse.


It was a remarkably civilized affair, for all that men and women died for puddles of water and sometimes for something as meager as a bundle of sticks. Most interesting to me was the prisoner-taking tradition, the taking of Gai'shain. Gai'shain, literally "sworn to peace through battle," could be taken in battle, enemy warriors outmaneuvered and forced to surrender, or they could be taken from the inhabitants of a Hold as part of the "Fifth", but in either case they were only ever held for a year and a day. While they were forced to work for their captor, abuse of a Gai'shain was strictly forbidden.


It was in the lesson about Gai'shain, from Sorelia of course, that I found my different choice. As it turned out, the taking of the Fifth from captured holds had more caveats than the simple prohibition against the seizure of foodstuffs; Wise Ones, children, pregnant women, women with a child under the age of ten, and blacksmiths were exempted from the Fifth as well.


For now, I was still safe; at thirteen, I would be a child for another five years before my father would proclaim me a man and I would become a guest under my mother's roof. Unlike my second life, the paths of a Wise One or a mother were closed to me. Blacksmiths, though, were rare in Threefold Land, and along with Wise Ones were the only Aiel who could wander from clan to clan armored in the certainty that no Aiel would raise a hand against them.


Two months after my thirteenth birthday, I followed the loud, resonant beats of a hammer through the cool, shadowy corridors of Shende Hold. As I neared the source of the rhythm, the heat began to grow. As I turned around the last bend in the hall and approached the smithy complex, the heat became almost unbearable, even by the standards of the Threefold Land, even through the wooden door, a rarity in the deserts of my people, the Aiel.


After hours in the cool dimness of Shende Hold, the sudden light was almost scalding. With only three walls to support the roof, the smithy was entirely open to the outside; I knew that in the event of a dust storm or high winds, the heavy cloth of a treated curtain would be unfurled to keep the grit from the shop, but at all other times, no matter the scorching heat or the freezing cold, the smithy would remain open, venting fumes and smoke out of the enclosed spaces of the Hold.


A man, tall even by Aiel standards, was silhouetted against the eye-watering glare, towering over the anvil before him. A great arm rose and fell with metronome regularity, its mate clamped around a pair of tongs pinning a cherry-red ingot against the cratered surface of the anvil.


For a moment, I was almost spellbound by the giant at work, his exposed back and arms dripping with sweat and scarred with shiny burns where sparks had slid past his heavy leather apron. Except for his hands and face, he was pasty pale, as most Aiel were. The sun of the Threefold Land was death, and the mottled cadin'sor, the lightweight but covering trousers and jacket traditional to all the clans, as well as the shoufa scarf wound around the head and neck and the black dust-veils, were the key to survival.


The blacksmith is the beating heart of civilization, I mused, watching the hammer descend again and again. This is the true magic, more than any mana channeled through an orb. Creating something from nothing, with just a hammer and an anvil.


"You there, boy!" The giant barked. "Did the sun slow your wits? The forge must be fed!"


I snapped into action at once, darting over to the creaking leather bellows and seizing the handle. The rawhide bound tightly around the ancient grip was slipping, revealing the old wood underneath, stained dark with sweat and polished with uncounted generations of hands. The bellows resisted my pull until I put my back into it, and then the air wooshed out into the stone-lined forge, breathing a new life back into the orange and yellow flames dancing over the sullen red coals.


Two heaves later, I released the handle and darted over to the basket standing open a sensible distance from the forge, a shovel propped beside it. The coal heaped up in the basket was dark brown and coarse, far from the shiny black anthracite I vaguely remembered from the wealthy homes of my second life. The shovel scraped over the roughly hewn stones, but I managed to negotiate a few of the more uniform chunks onto the blade, which were swiftly shuffled off into the roaring furnace.


Another pump of the bellows and I was back at the basket again, this time abandoning pretense and scooping the gritty bituminous lumps onto the shovel with one hand, ignoring the stains they left behind on my skin. Underneath the cadin'sor my mother had woven for me just months earlier to fit my rapidly growing frame, I could feel my back and arms prickle as I began to sweat. The load of coals went into the fire and I joined the smith in stripping to the waist as I hurriedly scooped a third load onto the shovel.


"Don't glut it now, boy!" The giant growled as he strode forward and thrust the half-finished spearhead, almost cooled back to its typical dark gray, back into the forge. "The bellows, boy, the bellows! Long and slow, now; we're stalking a capar now, not running after a Maiden!"


I grinned my acknowledgement and wrapped both hands around the handle. A capar was a wild pig, wily and fast, and hunting the things usually entailed running them into exhaustion. A Maiden, on the other hand, a member of Far Dareis Mai, the Maidens of the Spear, should be pursued with everything a man had, if the gossip my father and his friends exchanged was to be believed on the rare nights they gathered to enjoy a bottle of peddler-purchased whiskey.


I pulled the bellows down slowly and firmly, the forge sighing like a marathoner as the flames flickered down to a vivid orange the color of Enaila's hair. Enaila, a Maiden of the Spear, had taught all of the children living at Shende Hold the basics of the spear. She was only five years older than me and had been in that same circle sitting at Sorelia's feet, but her unquestionable skill made it easier to accept her directions.


"Easy now, boy… Slow and steady…" The smith reminded as he rolled the spearhead under construction between the coals. "Patience is not among the secrets of the Wise Ones; good iron cannot be rushed."


"I hear you," I replied politely, redoubling my focus on the smooth, rhythmic focus of the pump. Up and down, up and down… The lungs to the anvil's heart, birthing new life in iron and steel… Up and down, up and down...


Fifteen minutes of steady pumping later, and the smith pronounced the head ready for further work.


"Now hold those tongs steady, boy!" He directed, passing the wrought-iron implement over to me. Judging by the clear hammermarks, it could well have been made in this very same smithy. "The iron will be soft, so I'll be putting a blank into the haft. You won't collapse it if you over squeeze, but you will leave a mark and introduce weakness. You don't want the head to snap away clean mid-dance, do you? Then hold steady, hold gently, and hold on."


I nodded my understanding, but the hammer was already descending on the anvil. It slammed onto the spearhead's blade, carefully balanced on the lip of the anvil, with shocking force. The tongs, bereft of any materials around the handle, easily conducted the impact up the length of my arms and tried to spring away. I ground my teeth and tensed my muscles, against the pain and against the attempted rebellion of my tool.


"Steady boy, steady!" The blacksmith reminded me with a growl, but nodded clear approval at my lack of reaction to the shock. The moment of reinforcement was short lived; the hammer was already stooping once more.


And again and again the short-handled blacksmith's hammer descended, the giant himself effortlessly shaping the crucible steel into a spearhead four hands long, double edged and tapering to a leaf-like point. My people had carried spears tipped with such heads for thousands of years in the Threefold Land, using them to hunt for food or to war with the Trollocs to the north, or to raid the Sheinarans to the northwest, the Sharans to the east, or the other clans.


"Ah, and now he's finished," crowed the smith, stepping away from the anvil with a smile as he wiped the sweat from his brow. "Quench it, boy, quench it! He needs to drink heartily to gain confidence!"


I followed the wave of his hand and saw a large ceramic basin, full of water. Dirty water, blackened with soot and no doubt full of metal flakes, but… Water, liquid water, a whole bath of the stuff? In the Threefold Land, septs paid with blood for puddles the length of my arm. The only thing more valuable than water in my people's home was wood, which could only be purchased off the foreign traveling merchants called peddlers and only at great expense.


Almost reverently, I lowered the heated spearhead into the water, and after shooting a questioning glance at the smith, I loosened my grip on the tongs, allowing the newly forged spearhead to disappear into the depths of the bath.


"And now…" The gigantic man carefully laid his hammer on the anvil, tilting the handle until it rested at a precise angle for some unknowable reason, "why have you come to my smithy, boy?"


"I see you, Salin, blacksmith of Shende Hold," I replied, offering the correct response for a first meeting. "I have come to learn the ways of the smith, if you will teach me. Jeorra, your previous apprentice, has gone to Shiagi Hold to forge arrowtips and spearpoints for the Salt Flat Sept of the Nakai Aiel. I would take his place."


"And I see you, Taric," Salin rumbled, leaning against a rack laden with nail-presses, casting molds, and blanks. "Taric, son of Ayesha and Leiran of the Cosaida. Greatson of Sorelia the Wise One's greatdaughter Amaryn, also a Wise One. Why do you come to me? What calls you to the smithy?"


"I come to you, Salin, because I wish to learn your trade," I repeated, falling into the easy cadence of Aiel debate. In a society where insults were a deadly business, one that could easily bring as much toh, dishonor, on the one who spoke them as on their target, direct conversation free of confrontation could be something of an art. "I wish to forge useful tools for my sept and for my clan, both for our use and exchange, so that I may bring benefit to Shende Hold and find worth in the eyes of our kin."


"There are many ways to help the sept, many paths," Salin noted, unconvinced. "You are strong of body, Taric, and quick of mind. In a few years, you could join a society, perhaps your father's own, the Sha'mad Conde, the Thunder Walkers. If your hands prove as deft as your wits, you would rise high in their ranks. This is the path the other boys will choose, for even those who farm our maize, our peppers, and our cotton dance the spears with the other clans.


"Tell me," he demanded for a second time, "why do you come to me? What calls you to the smithy?"


"Wars come and go, and dances begin and end, yet the Dream continues on," I replied, mind spinning as I sought to convey my thoughts in a manner appropriate to Aiel sensibilities. "The Threefold Land tests us endlessly, and the sept must always be prepared. A smith can forge new spears, but can also forge pickheads to claw the coal from the Dragonwall or hoes and trowels to plant the maize and the melons.


"As long as I am a smith," I continued, "I shall always be a boon to the sept, providing the tools that keep our people strong, warm, and fed."


"Wars between the clans come and go," Salin agreed, nodding his grizzled head, "but the war against Sightblinder ends only on the Last Day. There will always be another dance until that Last Day, and perhaps, dare we hope, even past that. The Threefold Land is a place to hone our People's skills, as well as a place of punishment. To live in our Hold is to prepare to wake from the Dream at last.


"So tell me," Salin the Smith said for the third and presumably last time, "why do you come to me? What calls you to do work and learn the ways of the smithy?"


I sensed that this was the moment my future job security and safety hinged upon. I had presented good, logical reasons for taking up the smith's trade, and Salin had pronounced me of sufficient mental and physical prowess to take up the honored trade. And yet, I knew that this was the moment that would make his decision.


I said I'd make a different choice this time. I said that I'd fight the turning of the Wheel, the endless recurrence.


And so, I pushed away the memories of the man climbing the corporate ladder and the hard-won impulses of the girl scrambling up the military hierarchy. Instead, I let myself sink into the traditions and cultural ethos built after three thousand years in the desert, three thousand years of struggle.


I tried honesty.


"Salin, blacksmith of Shende Hold," I began, my tone as implacable as the death-march my people had set themselves upon so many centuries ago, the death-march of which my ancestor Sorelia was the living icon, ancient and hardened past any attempt at diversion, "I would rather use my hands to create, rather than to destroy. I have no wish to dance the spears, to wake others of my People from our shared Dream. While we all must wake from the Dream eventually, iron sleeps forever, regardless of the dreamer's waking."


The last line had not been part of what I had meant to say, but I knew it to be true. Life was so very fragile, most especially of all in the Threefold Land. Scorching hot by day and freezing cold by night, the plants and animals as dangerous, if not more, to the unprepared, as the inhabitants, and water all but a dream, life in the Threefold Land was a constant struggle, a losing game. Yet, even in this desert, the works we left behind lingered on. High up in the peaks of the Dragonwall were the remnants of ancient cities, whose wharves protruding out into the air spoke of long vanished seas.


The inhabitants of those cities were thousands of years dead, yet their works remained.


Salin stared at me, eyes glittering in the unrelenting sunlight streaming in through the open wall. "You almost sound like you would rather put on the white rather than pick up a spear," he said conversationally, no hint of accusation or even curiosity touching his voice. "Indeed, boy, you almost sound like one of the Lost Ones, wandering endlessly in search of their song."


The only Aiel who wore white were the gai'shain. The implication that I would voluntarily submit as a gai'shain danced on the edge of insult, but I doubted it had been meant as such, especially not by a smith, who could neither take nor be taken as gai'shain. The mention of the Lost Ones, the traveling pacifists who roamed in small trains of brightly painted wagons...


"I am not of the Lost," I replied carefully. "I do not hate the dance, nor would I stand by and let Shadowspawn from the north come down to devour the world in preference to taking up the spear and the bow. I simply do not wish to seek out the dance for its own sake. Should the dance come to me, and should I be forced to dance the spears to defend my family, my sept, my clan, I will."


I spread my hands in a gesture of acknowledgement. "I would rather defend my sept by giving it the tools to prosper and grow strong and swift, a task of much ji; while the Sovin Nai Knife Hands would rejoice in going to the dance without so much as a belt knife, I doubt the other eleven societies would be as joyous."


Salin stood silently against the forge's wall, his pale blue eyes peering at me from under his sun-baked brows. As the quiet dragged on, it grew as oppressive as the heat of the smoldering forge beside me, but I paid it no heed. In the hierarchy of teachers and students among the Aiel, the student always waited on the teacher.


Oftentimes, the wait proved to be its own lesson, if looked at the right way.


Besides, as Salin just said, good iron cannot be rushed. The wait is definitely part of the work.


Finally, the big man levered himself up from the wall, limber despite his age and exertions. "Get your tongs, boy. That spear has drunk deeply enough to quench his thirst. Bring him over to the anvil, and I'll show you how to put an edge to his tongue."


Without showing a flicker of the relief flaring inside me, I did as I was told, pulling the spearhead from the precious water. Actions always speak louder than words; when Salin told me to resume my work on the spearhead, when he said he would share his knowledge, starting from the very basics, he had announced his acceptance of my offer. In doing so, he had given me both a job and much ji. Recognizing that fact directly would reduce the implied honor, and I would not be thanked for it.


After the edges and point of the spearhead had been sharpened to a deadly hone, Salin demonstrated how to use the nail-press to mold the pegs necessary to fix the spearhead to the precious wooden shaft, the penultimate step in the weapon's manufacture. He finished the lesson by skillfully assembling the spear, sliding the shaft into the head's perfectly sized socket and driving the freshly forged nails home with two swift blows of the hammer.


As he sat on a bench and completed the finishing work, chanting to the shaft as he polished and oiled the wood against rot and the wet, he set me to work with the first of the many tasks of the apprentice: fetching coal. The storage room was two hallways down in Shende Hold and the first of the many large baskets waiting there was heavy, at least five stone, and after my time with the tongs my arms were worn sore.


It took most of my remaining strength to wrestle the basket into the smithy, and I was thankful that I had not put my coat back on when I realized how the dark dust had mixed with my sweat and smeared across my body. Salin looked up from the shaft, in the process of binding rawhide cord around it as a grip, and held up a pair of fingers, indicating two more baskets.


I fought down the urge to groan. I had pursued this job, hunted down this quarry. I would not shame myself and Salin by backing down now, no matter how much my back and arms protested.


Besides, I thought as I wrapped my arms around another basket of bituminous coal, learning a new trade is always a difficult task. And if some coal dust is what it takes to finally break away from my cycle of violent death?


With a heaving grunt, I lifted the woven basket up onto my shoulder and began staggering back to the smithy. Then that is the price I will pay. I am my own man and I will make my own choices. If that means breaking the Wheel, then so be it.


(*From the opening narration of the Lord of Chaos.)

 

[Readhead]

The Aiel: A desert dwelling nation divided into twelve extant clans and one extinct clan, all of whom dwell in the Threefold Land. The Aiel shun swords but are masterful warriors, whether with the spear, the bow, or unarmed. The Aiel are generally tall, lighteyed, and pale.

Threefold Land: The desert inhabited by the Aiel, known to non-Aiel as the Aiel Waste. The threefold aspects of the land are, for the Aiel, "a shaping stone to make them, a testing ground to prove their worth, and a punishment for their sin."

The One Power: The threads that bind the world together in the Wheel of Time universe and the source of magic. The One Power is divided into two aspects, male and female. The female power is called Saidar and the male power is called Saidin.

Wise One: An Aiel woman who has gone to Rhuidean and passed the trials, as well as received recognition from her fellow Wise Ones. Some Wise Ones are channelers of Saidar, but not all. Wise Ones adjudicate disputes, dispense wisdom, preserve tradition, administer medicine, and as some of the few untouchables in Aiel culture carry messages between feuding clans.

The Dark One: The source of all darkness and evil in the Wheel of Time universe.

Sightblinder: An Aiel name for The Dark One

Sept: A subdivision of an Aiel clan. Each sept has a hold, an either permanent or semi-permanent settlement.

Chareen: An Aiel clan. The other clans are Codarra, Daryne, Goshien, Miagoma, Nakai, Reyn, Shaarad, Shaido, Shiande, Taardad, and Tomanelle.

Rhuidean: A deserted city in the heart of the Threefold Land.

Shadowspawn: Twisted creatures from the Blight to the north.

Trollocs: The most common type of Shadowspawn, a twisted mix of human and bestial features.

Warrior Societies: Aiel warriors are divided into twelve societies, which can cross clan and sept lines. Often, society bonds are stronger than clan bonds. In clan wars and raids, warriors of the same society rarely will fight one another. Each society focuses on a particular specialty, either in the use of their weapons or in their tactics. Eleven of the societies are male only, but the twelfth is exclusive to women.

Far Dareis Mai - the Maidens of the Spear. The only female warrior society.

Sha'mad Conde - the Thunder Walkers. They are considered reckless and prefer to attack enemies who outnumber them.

Shae'en M'taal - the Stone Dogs. They are considered stoic and resolute as a group, and are generally defensive in battle. Often found in rear guard actions.

Ji'e'toh - the complex honor system that governs every aspect of Aiel life and culture. Ji, honor, is earned by great acts of sacrifice, battlefield accomplishments, or by speaking wisdom. Toh, dishonor, is accrued by violating tradition or proving otherwise dishonorable.

Gai'shain - defeated Aiel taken in battle or captured as part of a raid. Gai'shain are honorbound to pacifism and service to their captor for a year and a day, upon which point they will be released to take up their role in Aiel society once more. It is very dishonorable to abuse a Gai'shain or to remind them of their life outside of the white robes of servitude. In Aiel combat, at least with other Aiel, taking an enemy alive as a captive to be made Gai'shain earns the victor a great deal of ji, while simply killing an enemy earns only minimal ji.

The Fifth - Aiel culture permits the seizing of a fifth of all of a captured town's goods and people, exempting food, Wise Ones, pregnant women, women with a child under the age of ten, children, and smiths.

Cadin'sor - a set of clothes, generally leggings and a coat, and generally mottled brown and grey, worn by all Aiel. The cut and patterns of the cadin'sor vary by clan and by sept, and an Aiel can generally identify another Aiel's origins just by their cadin'sor.

Shoufa - scarf worn wound around the head and neck, generally either grey, brown, or tan. Necessary both to camouflage the typically bright hair of a sneaking Aiel warrior, and to avoid heatstroke in the Threefold Land.

Dust Masks - Aiel warriors typically wear black masks over their lower faces that are pulled up in battle, to keep dust out of the mouths of fighters. Pulling on a mask signals intent to kill.

Capar - a species native to the Threefold Land similar to a peccary or a Javelina.

The Dream - Aiel believe that life is only a dream, and that one day they will wake up to experience the true nature of existence. To wake from the dream is to die.

Sorda - a species native to the Threefold Land similar to a rat.

Oosquai - whiskey, commonly brewed by the Aiel from zemai, maize.

Staera - a curved bronze disc with a dull edge, used to scrape the grimy residue away from skin and clothes in the sweat tent. Sometimes these are personal items, sometimes they are shared among bathers in the sweat tent.

Seia Doon - the Black Eyes. They are considered unusually honor-focused even by Aiel standards, and specialize in twilight and nocturnal combat as well as the interrogation and questioning of prisoners.

Roofmistress - the ranking Aiel woman in a hold, generally the first-wife of the sept chief or, in the central hold of a clan, the clan chief. All fixed structures are the property of the senior woman who lives there, with individual dwellings typically belonging to the first-wife of the man who dwells there. All men except for Gai'shain must request permission to enter under a roof, either when entering a sept hold or a private home. Tents are not fixed structures and thus do not count as roofs.

Kardon - prickly pear cactus, the fruit of which is considered a delicacy.

Sister-wife - a term used to describe the plural wives in an Aiel marriage, with the senior most wife by order of precedent or by social rank called the first-wife.

 

[Readhead]

Okay, since there's been some interest (and since I'm always hungry for ideas), I wanted to talk a bit about the cultural package I'm trying to piece together for the Aiel.


Please keep in mind that I'm not educated nor qualified in this matter, so I've probably made some mistakes.


According to the Wheel of Time Wiki, "Robert Jordan has said that the Aiel are based on the Zulu, Bedouin, Apache and Japanese cultures, among others. This can be seen through their nomadic lifestyle and disdain for cities, as well as, their fierce warriors who have the clothing and skills of American Indian trackers." The clan and sept structure parallels Scottish social arrangements and Ji'e'toh echoes the honor system of Bakufu-era Japan.


So, using a map of the Aiel Waste found on the Wiki, I learned that the Chareen Aiel in particular have a range of terrain in their territory, including the eastern mountainsides of the Dragonwall/Spine of the World as well as foothills and their slice of the open flat desert that makes up the central Threefold Land. This is important, because a source of fuel is required for smithing. Mountains and hills represent opportunities for drift mining. In the case of the Aiel, I decided to give them the most common form of coal, bituminous coal, which is extracted in relatively small amounts using hand tools.


Iron ore is also extracted via drift mining of the hills and mountains of the Dragonwall, or through the use of scraping shallow veins in the hillside. The raw iron ore is smelted twice: First, the ore is smelted into wrought iron via a bloomery, which is used for most of the bread and butter smith-work, things like nails, hoes, shovels, hammers, cheap knives, and chains; second, some of the wrought iron is further processed into crucible steel, which is used for weapons primarily. In effect, Aiel spearheads and arrowheads are Wootz steel.


Now, that brings us to the agricultural package.


Mister Jordan specifically cited the Apache as an inspiration, which means there's likely a great amount of hunting. However, at Cold Rocks Hold, we specifically see that the Aiel are at the very least only semi-nomadic, as the Hold's inhabitants live in permanent structures. We also get a glimpse at an Aiel meal: Cornbread, corn, tomatoes, beans, and prickly pear fruit. The prickly pear fruit could be wild or domesticated, but the others must be domestic crops. So, the Aiel aren't completely like the Apache, or at least not fully.


We also know that the Aiel herd livestock, specifically goats and cattle. Since I can't imagine that the Threefold Land is super consistent in terms of providing fodder, presumably at least some supply of fodder is grown and harvested for winter if nothing else.


Altogether, my mind began to shift to another group of Southwestern peoples, the Puebloan tribes. A more settled and agricultural people than the pastoral herders and hunters of the Apache nations, the archaic Puebloans were accomplished dryland farmers. More information about dryland farming.


This is why Shende Hold is a cliffside dwelling, after the style of the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. The Jarra Aiel are close to some accessible source for coal, another for iron ore, and are able to grow enough food to provide for a settled hold, presumably supplementing their domesticated stocks with hunting, which is probably how the young men and maidens get their kicks when not raiding another clan.


So, all told, I think that there's grounds to say that there is some level of regional differentiation across the Aiel clans. Presumably some clans, like the Taardad and the Chareen, are more settled, while others, like maybe the Reyn, are more nomadic. There could also be differentiation across the septs. For example, maybe the Jarra and White Mountain septs of the Chareen Aiel are more settled and agricultural while the Cosaida sept is more pastoral?


Anyway, this is where I am at the moment, worldbuilding wise.

 

[Readhead]

(Thank you to TheBattleSage for editing. Thank you to Ye Banished Privateers for Annabel, which I used as the basis for Taric's chant.)


15 Aine, 997 NE
Shende Hold, Chareen Aiel, Aiel Waste


Clang!


The flat-faced smith's hammer, a product of my own work, descended upon the ingot, meeting the heated steel in a sparking kiss.


Clang!


The ingot writhed and jumped at the blow, bucking against the tongs I had smithed a year ago, which held it firmly in place against the anvil's broad back.


Clang!


The tongs recoiled back into my calloused palm, the now-familiar shock traveling to my shoulder like an old friend coming by for an expected visit.


And like a gracious host, I accepted the reverberating blow. The acceptance had long since become second nature; I no longer had to resist the impulse to clench defensively against the shock. Instead, I let the energy pass through me, the blow I had meted out to the ingot with one arm returning to me through the other.


Clang!


The bellows creaked as Salin pumped air into the forge, maintaining the exact level of heat necessary to soften crucible steel into a workable state. My mentor and teacher was silent as he pumped, his pale eyes keenly observing every move I made as I hammered a brand-new spearhead into our shared Dream.


Clang!


This would be my first spear, for all that smiths were generally forbidden weapons. It was the first I had made entirely by myself from start to finish.


I had smelted the ore myself, feeding charcoal into the bloomery as the hematite mined from the slopes of the Dragonwall was slowly refined into wrought iron within the smoking clay pot. I had mixed my newly smelted wrought iron with molten pig-iron in a ceramic crucible, and for my efforts had produced banded ingots, swirls of black and gray like rising smoke frozen into solid steel.


Clang!


I felt sympathy for the steel under my hammer; over the last four years, I too had been hammered upon the anvil, slowly shaped into a tool useful to the purposes of the sept and clan, and a shape that I desperately hoped would suit my own secret purpose. I could not complain, though, no more than the steel could. I had gone to Salin and asked him to make me a smith, and he had agreed.


And so, my time upon the anvil had come.


Clang!


Like all things in the Threefold Land, my apprenticeship had been a process of three parts. The smelting had come first, the sept's smithy my bloomery. I still lived under my mother's roof, but for my first two years as an apprentice all waking hours had been spent either in the smithy or at the smelter at the mineworks. At all times, Salin had stood beside me, correcting me as necessary and chiding me for my occasional failures.


It had been in those first years that I was first initiated into the minor mysteries of the smith. In a different world, I would have called them his trade secrets, but to Salin, such knowledge was a mystery known only to smiths.


"The Wise Ones have their secrets, aye, and so do the Societies," Salin had explained when I asked why some information, such as judging when to add charcoal to the smelter to increase the carbon content of the iron, was kept exclusive to the smiths. "It is their business and their privilege. So too is it our privilege to know the secrets of our trade."


"Besides," he had continued, "what use would the Spears have for our songs? You know they sing only dirges and battle hymns. To them, singing is a thing of women, save when they prepare to wake from the dream. They would not understand. Their songs are for the passing moments, for those who have awoken and those who are prepared to wake. Not our songs. Only those who listen to the iron will hear our songs true."


After a moment, Salin shrugged. "Perhaps the Wise Ones would understand," he conceded, "but the truly wise know better than to trifle with the forge's mysteries. They have enough to manage, keeping watch on the chiefs and the septs. No need for them to put on aprons and join us around the smelter too."


Clang!


After two years of hauling coal to feed the ever-hungry forge and assisting Salin with necessary tasks like holding ingots steady on the anvil as he worked, the old master was content that I understood and appreciated the basics of the smith's craft. Finally, he began assigning me apprentice-work; small pieces, but my first chance to truly work in the smithy.


The rudimentary projects Salin entrusted to me were those he felt I could complete without his supervision or participation. While my newly assigned tasks were simple, the work was just as important as forging spearheads; if the Aiel relied on a market system for intra-sept exchanges, my tasks would be the bread and butter of the smithy during times of peace. While no such market existed, the tasks still put food on the table for all at Shende Hold.


Farming in the Threefold Land was difficult enough as it was; no need to increase the difficulty by trying to scratch a living from the baked ground without the help of iron tools, after all.


Clang!


Over the next year, I advanced from nails, chains, and hoes to pots, shovels, and pins. I melted down damaged pickheads and old, dull knives, and forged new tools from the recycled iron. I began to learn the fine art of maintenance as well, of how to put a keen edge on any blade, how to mend a holed pot, and how to carefully band the always valuable wood of tool shafts with rings of simple iron, which prolonged the work life of the handles.


Clang!


And in that same year, the third of my apprenticeship to Salin, the master began to instruct me in the art of listening to the music of the blazing metals. And, also how to sing. More accurately, how to sing the ancient selection of blacksmith's songs, each as well-worn by preceding generations of smiths as the bellows' handles. To the Aiel, it seemed, knowledge of these songs was just as much a part of being a blacksmith as knowing how to temper steel.


When Salin first broached the topic, I had foolishly thought that this would be an easy few days of training. I was soon corrected; the sheer variety of songs was daunting, and Salin was relentless in his demands for precision and recall. Every song had a myriad of uses, and every song had been carefully shaped by generations of ancestors to suit those uses. In this, as in all things Aiel, the invisible weight of tradition was a constant burden.


But, unlike many traditions, the blacksmith's songs were far from pointless. In a world without the resources, incentive or the industry to produce clockwork, in a desert where water clocks would represent a decadent luxury, time was a more abstract thing than it had been in my two previous lives. Seasons passed, and on the shorter scale the sun's progress marked the hour of the day, but neither method was conducive to the precision required for good smithing.


Which was where the songs and chants of the smithy entered. If I were to ask Salin how many minutes an ingot of ordinary steel would require to fully anneal to the softness necessary for the inner core of a spearhead, he would have glared blankly at me from between his creases. If I asked how many verses of "The Maiden's Kiss" I needed to sing to the steel to put it into a good mood, however, he could immediately tell me that five verses would bring the sand-colored band of impurities out to the surface.


"And once the snake slithers to the edge of the bar," Salin had said, wiping his brow with a stained rag, "the steel will be as even-tempered as we may hope to see it in our smithy, and ideal for the inner heart of our spearheads."


Clang!


So I had come to learn all of the chants and the songs that demarcated the times needed to smelt and temper iron and steel to the correct consistencies and degrees of hardness. I had joined Salin's smoke-roughened voice in chorus, chanting to the bloomery and to the forge, to the grinding wheel and the quench basin, marking out the necessary time as we created tools that would in time forge new tools that would feed, clothe, house, and protect the Sept.


Interestingly, the songs needed to time specific grades of metal were often thematically joined to the purposes the tools which would be made from those metals would be put. For instance, the steel that would become a cold chisel, a dusky carbon-loaded gray, received only two brief repetitions of "Stone Tapper", a brief chant extolling the merits of shaping stone, during the initial heating and three in its second trip through the fire.


Clang!


In my fourth year as an apprentice, Salin had given me my first true assignment as a smith, the first true assignment any smith took up. That is, of course, the task of forging his own forge tools, each piece both a demonstration of proficiency as well as a tangible sign of entry into the brotherhood of metalworkers.


"A smith's tools are his hominy and his whiskey, as well as his heart and soul," Salin had told me on the morning that had marked the start of my fourth year under his tutelage. The night's cold still held the smithy in its iron grip, the relentless heat of the day still an hour off and the forge left almost cold overnight, with just enough coals left lit to keep the stone from contracting in the cold.


"The only things a man can truly own are the tools of his trade; all else is merely a distraction or else the common holding of the Sept. Your tools, young Taric, will be your life. Take your time: the chance to forge yourself will come only once."


I had nodded my silent acceptance to his words as I slowly pumped life back into the forge's heart. Stripped of the mysticism, it was clear that my tools were expected to be the first examples of my individual style and competency. They would be my diploma and my resume as well as my means of labor.


This is my chance to showcase my competency, the part of me that had never left the office pointed out. By creating a high quality set of tools customized by what I remember of the industrial style of the tools I used in my first two lives, I can accrue value by producing something novel! Applying a heat-patina to the sides of the hammer would be easy, and texturing the heads of the chisels with a wire brush even moreso!


It was a practical thought. By creating a set of tools stamped with a truly individual style, I would draw the attention of all who saw them. If I could create the smooth bevels and artful curves I saw in my head, I would be able to teach that style to any who cared to learn. I would create a new style, and would bring recognition to myself and my sept.


It wasn't even a necessarily foreign thought to the Aiel mindset. Warriors, although almost always the young warriors, wore plenty of seized booty with their cadin'sor and shoufa. Particularly comely Aiel girls would even wear the gifts presented by their suitors as war trophies, multiple necklaces jangling around their necks. For all that the Threefold Land had sunk an indelible streak of asceticism into Aiel sensibilities, material displays were not explicitly against Ji'e'toh.


Or, I considered, such displays aren't against a surface level interpretation of Ji'e'toh. Parrag, the Sept Chief, wears no jewelry nor does he boast of his accomplishments. Nor do most of the seasoned warriors. Nor do the Wise Ones. Nor, I thought, turning to look at the tools arrayed over the smithy's workbench, does Salin, who made his own tools to be simple yet of high quality.


Perhaps that's the point? Only the young brag, because they know no better. Killing an enemy might earn some minor ji, but true honor comes from taking the enemy alive to be made Gai'shain. Similarly, true ji comes not from announcing one's victories, but from your competency being known without any announcement necessary.


I remembered Salin's very first lesson, imparted four years ago to this very day. Good iron cannot be rushed.


"I hear you, Salin," I said aloud, ducking my head without taking my hands away from the bellows handle. "I request time to think. I must consider who I am, and what I would make."


A brief glow of satisfaction radiated from Salin's face, between his bristling beard and his furrowed brow, before Aiel stoicism reasserted itself. "Think as you will," he grunted, "but don't stand around, boy. There are nails to be drawn, hoes to be sharpened, and that forge will not heat itself. Get to it."


Good, I thought as I pumped the bellows, the first tongues of flame darting up to lick as the fresh black coal Salin shoveled into the pit, that was the answer he was looking for. A smith thinks carefully and only starts to work when they understand what they will make.


I have earned ji in Salin's eyes.


To my surprise, the thought warmed me to my core. It was strange that a society where all of the rules were as unspoken as they were carved in stone, but I had never felt like I had understood Germania with the certainty as I did the Aiel.


Sincere compliments masqueraded as mocking insults among the Aiel, with only subtle clues to conveying the true intent. Blood feuds spanning across generations rose from barbed compliments, while killing insults were salted with false geniality. The loudest brags were air and dust, yet quiet competency rumbled like the summer windstorms. Waste, sloth, and thoughtlessness were dishonorable, and true honor never needed to draw attention to itself.


It all seemed so clear. The rules of Ji'e'toh weren't written down because any written code of honor was meaningless. The only meaningful understanding was internal, and comprehension could only be demonstrated through acts, not words. It was an entire society explicitly built around signaling theory as a means of inspiring competency.


More than ever, it is such a tragedy that it is married to a self-destructive death cult, to a culture wide suicide pact, to the atonement for crimes so ancient that nobody can truly remember them anymore. That story has long since faded from fact into legend and then out of memory entirely, and yet it still blights the heart of the Aiel with an inexplicable shame that no amount of honor can fully extinguish.


It was not the home I would have chosen, this cliff-dwelling amongst a people who believed that life was but a dream, and yet it was my home now. I was Aiel, and so I would follow the path that was honorable for an Aiel as much as I could, without succumbing to my new people's fatalism. Through honor, I would gain worth, and through worth, I would gain respect and affection and would finally be safe from the treachery that had brought both of my previous lives to a shattering end.


I would not stand alone, by trackside or atop a shattered building. I would walk with the sept and the clan, never a leader but always valuable. In doing so, I would live in peace, and prove the Wheel a lie, the pattern of my lives mere happenstance.


Clang!


Six months had passed before I finally set to work on my toolset in earnest. Six months of pondering what it meant to be a smith in the Threefold Land as I sharpened knives and mended pots, knocked molding off freshly hardened ingots and, always, hauled more coal to the eternally gluttonous forge.


Then, without fanfare, I began. Under Salin's watchful eyes, I started with the simple, ancillary tools: A leather-punch, a crowbar, an awl, a set of three chisels, an etched file, and a set of two tongs, large and small. Each I presented in turn to Salin's watchful eye, carefully attentive to his grunts and muttering over the details. Thankfully, those mutters were confined to trivialities, and without even a mild reproach over anything of note.


So encouraged, I moved on to my first tool that would create other tools: a set of stone-worker's chisels, a one-point, a claw, and a bush. These would not be part of my permanent set of trade tools, but were instead the prerequisite for a crucial part of my kit, my sharpening stones.


The chert necessary for the gritstone I acquired from one of the sept's miners in exchange for a new knife to replace his worn blade. From the hard metamorphic stone I carefully roughed out a coarse-grit side and a fine-grit side, massaging rendered lamb's fat into the pores of the stone to seal the surface against grit and filings. Finally, I smoothed and polished the sides to sculpt in a comfortable handhold.


Then, I followed a similar process in refining a honing stone from the finer-grained flint, chanting to the stone as I knapped the edges into the perfect tool to grind fine edges.


Finally, I made a deal with the tanner to provide a new scraping knife in exchange for several strips of variable grade leather, treated in oil. From these, I made the strops necessary to add the killing edge necessary for arrowheads and spears.


Clang!


More tools had followed. Hammers great and small took shape on the smithy's anvil, from the mighty sledge with its hand-and-a-half handle to the ball peen hammer, perfect for tapping pins and fine nails into place. Vices, tongs, pliers, hand-drills of multiple sizes, shears, tinsnips, and a matched set of fire-tongs and a poker all came next.


The crowning jewel in my burgeoning kit was, of course, my blacksmith's hammer. More accurately classified as a cross-peen hammer, it has a slightly rounded flat face paired with a tapering chisel-like tail. I had worked my way up to the chief tool of my trade and, in my opinion, it showed. While completely free of any decoration or ostentation, the hammer's lines were clean and the steel as refined as I could manage in Shende Hold's smithy.


The haft was a gift from my teacher. Among the Aiel, quality wood of sufficient length and hardness for use in tools was valued almost as highly as water. For the clans whose territory touched the Dragonwall, there was no shortage of easily mined iron, copper, and coal, but no trees grew on this side of the great mountain range, and so frequently the haft of a tool was more valuable than the ironmongery.


"Teak," Salin had said, by way of explanation, as he'd handed over the smooth-grained blank, "from Shara, brought over the Cliffs of Dawn. It's not the easiest wood to work with, lad," he cautioned, "but then, what point would there be in anything, if it did not test us?"


Following my teacher's lead, I had chanted to the wood as I had carefully shaped it for my purposes. I had likewise chanted to the steel as it ran like water into the ingot mold, and again as I'd beaten the ingots into hammer-form, using Salin's hammer for the last time.


When I held the final product aloft for one last critical look, when I saw the whorls of ash and smoke in the steel that almost looked like wings, when I let my eyes trace the multitude of engravings I had etched onto the teak's surface before lacquering the surface against the desiccating heat… I could only think one thing of my hammer as I offered him to Salin for his inspection.


He was beautiful.


Clang!


And now that hammer swung down, as natural an extension of my arm as my own hand, meeting the nearly finished spearhead in a resounding Clang!


"-Met my lass from Hot Springs Hold," I sang, turning on my heel and plunging the glowing spearhead into the bath below. My tenor cut easily across the hissing sputter as the liquefied goat fat was suddenly brought to a boil by the heated steel's intrusion. "Heave away, haul away!"


My hammer, his steel brightly polished, gleamed in the orange light of the banked forge as I set him to rest upon the anvil. His work was done, at least for now, with this spearhead. Now, I would need my file to coax the rough contours that my gritstone would grind into killing edges.


"Eyes she had of green and gold." My file found a resting place beside my hammer as I pulled the spearhead from the grease bath. I let the newly cooled weapon drip clean for a moment as I reached for the rag resting on the shelf, my song continuing as I managed what was normally a two-man job in the Shende Hold smithy by myself. "All I want is water."


The rag in my hand made short work of the rapidly congealing fat; the work of scraping away at the spearhead took much longer. Fortunately, I had no end of verses to accompany my careful rasps.


"Whiskey's not my drink of choice, heave away, haul away!" The steel glimmered as the outermost layers gave way beneath my assault, the inner smokey swirls twirling and swirling under the mid-afternoon sun. "Sharpens my tongue and roughens my voice! All I want is water."


Soon enough, it was my gritstone's turn. Where my file had attacked the steel, defining boundaries and making forceful demands like a strutting Shaido, my gritstone was implacable in imposing its will upon the spearhead-yet-to-be, the Wise One to my file's Chief. And like the shawled women to our septs and clans, it was my gritstone that truly gave shape and meaning to the spearhead: By the time I set my stone aside, fine-grain side up, the blade sported a matched pair of razor edges tapering to a wicked point, deadly sharp and almost glowing with pride and hunger.


"Not for me, the White or Leaf, heave away, haul away!" The polishing cloth glided over the blade, wiping away the swarf and grit from his full three hands length, or, as I internally parsed it, just over a third of a meter of steel. Like my hammer, he was a beautiful piece of work, his blade flat enough to slip between ribs, long enough to find the heart, and broad enough to leave an awful, sucking wound behind, from which a man could easily bleed out in minutes. Just in time, for my song had reached its coda."Just for me the gnawing grief… All I want is… Water!"


Silently, Salin handed me the length of wood, already carefully smoothed and polished, that would become the spear staff. He handled the precious wood, banded near where it would join the head with bronze and bound with leather cords for grip, with immense care. It was by far the most precious part of the spear, and letting it touch the gritty floor of a working smithy would have dishonored the great worth it represented.


I took the prepared shaft from him with equal reverence and in equal silence. For all that fitting tool heads to shafts was a smith's work, it was one of the few tasks that had no song to accompany it. Perhaps it was because it did not directly involve metalworking or preparations for metalworking. Perhaps it was to encourage the smith to focus their full attention on the scarce wood. Either way, the only sound in the smithy was the quiet tapping of my fine ball-peen hammer on the reinforcing nails destined to hold the head's fitted socket close to the shaft no matter how deep its wielder sank it into a foe.


Suddenly, it was done; my first project as a smith, a smith in my own right, was completed. The spear rested in my hand like it was meant to be there, the swirls of leaden and argent shades in the head a brother to my hammer, the leather grip-cords perfectly rough against my palm.


Mutely, I held my first work out to my mentor, the old anxiety familiar from two lives returning in a wave of stress. Salin's brow furrowed as he glared down at the weapon, and suddenly I was back in an office, waiting for a graying general to render his verdict on my plan for a rapid-reaction mage force.


I was surprised how potent the sudden stress was, but upon further reflection, it made sense: Life among the Aiel was different in many ways, after all. While I'd had to worry about training injuries or drawing the ire of my teachers, parents, or my great-many-times-over-greatmother, I had never had to worry about being rejected. Ji'e'toh had been an open path to me, and I had walked with the sept in their ways, following expectations.


More importantly, considering my self-imposed mission to break free of the pattern of repeated betrayals and violent death, following Ji'e'toh had in some ways kept me below notice. As an apprentice to a smith, any praise my work garnered reflected back on the master who guided my hands. As a child, earning ji in the eyes of the people of the sept brought ji upon my parents for raising me well.


In essence, there was no reason for anybody to hate me, no motive for anybody to betray me.


But now, I was being judged on the merits of my work, as an individual, as a man. While I was still moving under the auspices of Ji'e'toh, for the first time in years I was claiming something as my own, something that could provoke jealousy and resentment in others. After so long, it was exhilarating. It was terrifying.


The burst of worry and fear was shameful. I have toh, I thought, and knew it to be true. I had been betrayed in other lives, but that didn't mean that Salin or the rest of the Jarra Sept were eager to sink a knife in my back. Thinking of them as if they were dishonored them unduly.


And yet, that knowledge did nothing to soothe the horrible sinking feeling I felt as I offered my work, my beautiful spear, up for my mentor's approval.


Thankfully, Salin took the spear into his hands before my anxiety made my own pair start to shake. He handled the weapon with a gentleness that would have been surprising to any who hadn't spent hours and years in the man's close company, hands wrapping around the shaft's grips with long familiarity.


Breathe, I told myself as I stepped back. He is your mentor, your teacher, not your enemy. You have the skills necessary to be a smith and the wisdom to use them for your People's best interests. To him, you may be young, but your work will surely speak louder than your years. Be like good iron, and smolder patiently for your time to once again endure the anvil.


My internal monologue and the accompanying deep, healing breaths helped. My heartbeat, elevated by the anticipation more than by the physical work, smoothed and slowed. My hands calmed, as did my thoughts. I crouched down into the comfortable resting squat of a culture mostly free of chairs, letting my weight rest on my heels as I waited for Salin to finish his inspection.


I didn't have to wait very long, at least, not very long by Aiel standards. As darkness gathered in the smithy, the sun already vanishing behind the Dragonwall, Salin looked up from my spear.


"This spear," he began, his voice rumbling like the storms high up in the Dragonwall, "is acceptable. To bring such a partner to the Dance would make any Maiden or Spear weep." Like the sky after those storms, his expression was now almost radiant in comparison to the preceding gloom. "Rejoice, Taric, son of Ayesha and Leiran of the Cosaida. Today, you are no longer a child. Today, you are a blacksmith. Today, you are a man."


"You honor me," I said, standing from my crouch and angling my head respectfully, "Salin, smith of Shende Hold."


"You honor yourself," my former teacher replied, clapping me on the shoulder, thankfully with the hand not currently holding the spear. "Of course," he continued, still smiling with his rare joviality, "The path to recognition as a master-smith is far from short, and a single spear is just a step on that track. You have years and years to go before you can call yourself a forgemaster. But… A journeyman? Oh yes, certainly, Taric, a journeyman you are, capable and competent."


Again, I angled my head in the not-nod, not-bow gesture that indicated an unvocalized but sincere respect among the Aiel. It was a quirk of my new People, just as it had been among the People of my first life, that the most sincere compliments were never spoken aloud.


And of course, since sincere compliments could never be delivered on their own, I echoed my mentor's previous comment. "Your instruction was also adequate," I said, mimicking his ponderous tone. "I'm sure any Maiden would likewise weep to bring a partner such as you to her dance."


It was a joke like my father would tell one of his cronies over a bottle of whiskey, a joke from one man to another, one with whom he was close. A joke one told an equal. If I was still a student, still a boy, I would never have made such a joke about my teacher. To do so would have brought toh upon my shoulders, even if I was the only witness to the joke, even if it had never passed my lips.


But today, Salin just barked a laugh at the joke, releasing my shoulder and swatting me on the back, chivvying me out towards the door. "You smell like ash and goat grease," he announced as he shoved me out of the smithy, "and your thoughts linger too much on the Maidens. Stop stinking up my smithy and get to the sweat tent."


I frowned and pointedly looked at the heap of clinkers piled by the forge, the steel filings strewn across the floor, and the greasy rag I'd absentmindedly left draped across the anvil's horn. It was generally bad form, to say the least, to leave the smithy in such a state.


Salin interpreted my unspoken question with ease. "This mess, I can clean up," he said, before theatrically waving his hand under his nose. "Freeing the smithy of your stench, on the other hand, is a duty you alone may discharge. Begone, Taric, and be content tonight with your labor. Tomorrow…" The burly man paused, considering. "Return tomorrow. We have much to discuss."


And then Salin turned his back on me, a sign of great trust and a dismissal as clear as any shut door. Without further ado, I left the smithy, venturing into the main structure of Shende Hold. It was home, but when I had left my mother's roof this morning, it had been as a child. When I returned home from the sweat tent tonight, I would have to ask her permission for entrance as a guest for the first time.


I was now well and truly a man of the Chareen Aiel, and thus a valid target for duels and raids. Or I would be, if I was not also well and truly a blacksmith, and thus I could walk unarmed and alone with confidence, even in the lands of the Nakai and the Tardaad Aiel, both of whom were currently feuding with the Chareen.


For what felt like the first time in three years, I let myself relax. I was as safe as any Aiel could be. I had done everything in my power to secure a position that would make me untouchable in war and universally valued. I could only hope that I had done enough to prove that while the Wheel may turn, its course was far from fixed.

 

[Readhead]

(Thank you to Sunny for beta-reading and editing this chapter. Thank you to WrandmWaffles for suggestions. Thank you to TheBattleSage for edits.)


15 Aine, 997 NE
Shende Hold, Chareen Aiel, Aiel Waste


Despite the last fading touches of the day lingering in the west, the temperature was plunging. The night's bitter chill was upon me as I left Shende Hold proper and walked out onto the stony plain stretching out to the east of the Hold.


The shivers began almost before I set foot outside the grand roof of the Hold's main structure. I had toiled for hours in the smithy, and between the hard work and the blazing heat of the forge, I was slick with sweat. In the growing chill of an early spring night, out under the swelling moon, that perspiration sucked the heat from my skin and stiffened muscles already heavy with fatigue.


Shende Hold, built into the side of a cliff with well-mortared stones and thick adobe walls, was generally warm all year round, a luxury for a People who dwelt in a land that was by turns scorchingly hot and bitingly cold. Indeed, it was such a luxury that some of the elders of the Sept grumbled about it in their oosquai. I could understand their point, even if I approached it from the other side; the third aspect of the Threefold Land was punishment, punishment for all who lived within it for ancient and unspecified crimes, and enduring the seasons in the hide and felt tents certainly sounded like a punishment to me.


Personally, I found it hard to believe that anybody could commit such a profound crime that a life of near-exposure was warranted. Not to mention that it was so much easier to weave, to carve, and to craft when one's hands weren't shaking with the cold.


The tents still had their uses, though. The Sept's highly mobile hunting and raiding parties still used the traditional tents as they ranged far from the Hold, for example. Likewise, the shepherds and the miners who spent weeks and months far from the Hold among the lower slopes of the Dragonwall carried their tents with them on their backs when they left the shelter of the cliffside. Indeed, even some of the families who dedicated themselves to the cultivation of the arid fields where the soils were firm enough and sufficiently rich to yield beans, maize, and squash spent months away from the Hold in small clusters of tents, returning to the rest of the Sept with the harvest.


And, of course, there were the sweat tents.


While rain was rare in the Threefold Land, the occasional storms that crossed the Dragonwall tended to be quite strong, capable of downpours that could ruin exposed mud bricks in minutes. Those storms necessitated measures to defend the Hold against the damp, and so the adobe walls of the Hold's exterior were proofed against water intrusion with plaster, the upkeep of which was always a high priority for the Sept.


Participating in the annual replastering was one of the great bonding rituals of the Sept. Chipping off the old layers of plaster and reapplying fresh stucco was one of the many tasks traditionally left to the Sept's children, and every year weeks would be dedicated to it. When the heart of summer came and even the nights were warm, the children of the Sept would wake up early and scramble to make as much progress before the dawn brought the full heat of the day. By the time the sun had set, the fresh plaster would be set dry and the walls ready for the second coat of the day.


All of the armoring plaster would do nothing to save the walls of our home if the wet came from within the Hold, though, which was why the Jarra Sept used the same sweat tents for hygiene purposes as the rest of the Aiel.


Sweat bathing had taken a great deal of getting used to, more than almost anything else in my third life. The Japanese of my first life had preferred the glories of the bath, the onsen a cultural staple expanded by technology and industry into the private home tub. My second life, spent in the institutional care of orphanages and the Army, had been one of practical showers, cold and quick and economical. In a way, steam bathing took elements from both.


It was a simple ritual. A pot full of stones, heated almost to a glow over a low and smokeless fire, sat in the middle of the tent, and water was ladled over them. Upon touching the rock, the water would instantly evaporate into clouds of steam, moisturizing the bathers, who would quickly rub soap, made from tallow and ash, into their hair and skin. Once soaped, the bathers would scrape the grimy mixture off, wiping the residue away with a rag.


Sweat bathing was markedly different from both of my previous lives in the practical absence of water from the ritual. It wasn't a difference that I disliked or felt strongly about, but, more than the cultural differences, the lack of easy availability to abundant water had required a shift in my sense of normalcy. In the Threefold Land, water was made precious by its scarcity, and revered and coveted for the same reason. Enough water to fill a tub in one place would be almost unimaginable.


Even after I had internalized the sense of value that the Aiel put upon water, it had still felt strange to rely on steam for bathing.


The other Aiel traditions when it came to the sweat tent were much less strange to me. Aiel bathed in the nude and in groups of mixed gender and age, and tended to sit around for long periods of time in the sweat tent exchanging gossip and chatter. In fact, the communal sweat tents were an important social hub in Aiel life; as all Aiel of every Society, trade, and gender used the same tents, it represented an opportunity to interact with a broader variety of conversational partner than the family, the Society, or the work unit. Besides, the steam seemed to somehow soften the usual Aiel stoicism, opening even the least talkative elder's mouth along with their pores. Jokes were common, as was something clearly recognizable as flirting between the unmarried, the young, and the widowed.


In my first years at Shende Hold, I had felt a great deal of nostalgia to the childhood of my first life when I had gone to the baths in the company of Ayesha my mother and Leiran my father. Those memories of my earliest years were badly faded with the passage of time, but I could still dimly recall visits to onsens with my father and mother, of sharing the family baths and of listening to my mother and father laugh as they darted from the showers to the warmth of the bath.


Of course, matters weren't so simple once I grew older and no longer bathed solely with my family. Once my eighth birthday had passed, my father encouraged me to bathe with the other children, which was my first introduction to the full complexities of social bathing. The chief difference was that the youngest or the lowest ranked person in attendance was tasked with sprinkling more water from the kettle on the heated stones in the central pot whenever the steam began to thin, instead of my father handling the ladle as he had when I bathed with my family. The unfortunate junior was also tasked with refreshing the stones in the central pot with newly heated rocks from the smoldering fires outside the tents.


At the very least, I thought with a hint of smugness as I picked my way across the rocky ground, I won't need to worry about that any more. As a recognized smith, I won't need to fetch rocks or water unless everybody else in the tent is a Wise One or a chief!


The low-slung hide tents were clustered around the communal well on the stony ground extending around the cliff face Shende Hold was built under. Not purpose-built for sweat bathing, the tents were identical to those used by the hunting parties; stitched animal hides spread over a framework of yucca stems bound with fiber cord and, without dirt to drive the poles into, anchored against weighty stones. All of the flaps bar one were tightly laced to keep the steam in, and unlike the hunting tents a pelt had been slung over the smokehole at the top of the tent.


My teeth began to chatter just as I reached the ring of steam tents, and only by drawing deeply on my fortitude could I resist the urge to dart between the flaps of the closest tent like a sorda squeezing into the crack between two loose stones. Instead, I forced myself to pause outside the ring and to take a deep breath, standing completely still in my sweat-stained cadin'sor as I regained my demeanor. I was a man now, recognized by my teacher and thus accepted by the sept, and I would not be driven from the cold like a steer fleeing the herder's goad.


I endured the heat all day, I told myself resolutely, so I can endure a bit of cold as well without running like a child. If I want to be respected for my work, I must demonstrate respectability at all times.


Once I was my own master once more, I stepped over to the nearest tent and began to strip, again resisting the urge to rush as the cold rushed in to steal the meager heat my jacket and trousers had preserved. The flat wind-worn surface of the stone was smooth under my feet as I neatly folded my clothes and piled them atop my soft, knee-high boots.


Tomorrow is Laundry Day, I decided, wrinkling my nose at the unmistakable scents of rendered goat grease, smoke, and exertion rising from my mottled clothes. Hopefully Mother allows me into the room tonight with that stench.


For a moment, I was tempted to work the worst of the grime out of my clothes with the bar of tallow soap I had brought with me when I had left for the forge this morning, but the prospect of walking back to the Hold after I left the steam tent in wet clothes dissuaded me. Instead, with the leather pouch containing my soap and a drying cloth in my hands, I lifted the tent flap to the smallest degree I could manage and slipped inside.


After the furnace dryness of the forge and the desiccating cold of evening in the Threefold Land, the sudden wet heat of the sweat tent was like a physical blow and I moaned in involuntary relief at the feeling of moisture settling over parched skin. The sudden warmth, felt everywhere but the soles of my feet, was also just as welcome as it was shocking in its intensity, and I quickly stepped forwards onto the rugs of knotted fiber to escape the cold of the stone, ignoring the chuckles of those already in the tent.


The tent was full of bathers, with at least twenty Aiel crammed around the wide central pot and its load of hot stones. Two of the nearest budged aside to clear a place for me in the ring and I gratefully dropped down and sat cross-legged in the newly opened space.


"I see you, Taric," said Rokka, the woman seated to my left, greeting me as she handed over a staera, a thin bronze disc used to scrape away the sweat-loosened dirt. Her hair was a deep red, like the embers of a banked forge, remarkably dark for an Aiel and darker still in the heavy dampness of the sweat tent. "Did Salin finally free you from your labors?"


"My labors freed me from the forge tonight, Rokka, daughter of Janani," I replied, adding after a pause, "Salin only recognized and gave voice to what my hands had already wrought."


"Did he now?" The rumbled question came from Kinhuin, a spear of the Seia Doon, Black Eyes, who put his skilled hands to work weaving baskets for transport and storage from the fibrous roots of the yucca. My mother's roof was the home to several storage baskets he had woven, all decorated with simple geometric patterns picked out in green and yellow ochre. "Well done, Taric, son of Leiran. I see you truly and greet you, man of my Sept."


As he spoke, Kinhuin stretched out and picked up the water gourd and the ladle from their resting places by the kettle of heated rocks. Without looking away from me, he poured a measure of water into the ladle, which he tilted and moved in a slow circular pattern over the central pot. Fresh clouds of steam hissed up from the sullen stones, almost concealing Kinhuin's tanned face and green eyes from view.


"I greet you, Kinhuin, man of my Sept," I replied, tilting my head in quiet gratitude for the ji he offered me. My father's age, Kinhuin was respected and respectable, a man who had danced the spears with the Goshien and Shaarad Aiel on many raids. By tending to the steam when I, a much younger man, sat at the kettle, he signaled his public recognition of my new status. "And I thank you for the steam. It has been a long day; the succor is welcome."


"A long day in a long week, yes?" asked Rokka sympathetically, patting my bicep and grinning as the worn muscle twitched under her fingers. "We all have heard the clanging from the forge; now that your hammer is completed, how will the quiet of the night be broken?" Her turquoise eyes scrunched mischievously. "Perhaps you would like to disturb the Hold's slumber with a different pounding tonight? I think I would make a more desirable partner than Salin, should you beg shelter below my roof. Come," she said, flipping her hair back over her shoulder, "let your forge grow cold and tend to my embers instead."


"Prettier than Salin, perhaps," I said, making a deliberate show of running my eyes up and down the sitting form of the woman a year my senior, smiling as I returned the joke, "but I fear you would be far less enduring. Old he may be, but Salin can keep going for hours, shaping iron in the fire's heart with shaft in hand."


"Ah, I would not have to endure long tonight, I suspect," Rokka replied, talking over the slight chuckle that rose from the rest of the circle of watching Aiel, their eyes fixed on the byplay as they ran staera over shoulders and chests and down arms, flicking the discs periodically to clear away the grime. Two women who I knew to be Maidens were smiling broadly, their fingers dancing as they communicated in their Society's secret language. "After all, you shake like a baby goat just sitting at the fire. But," she smiled, letting the joke end, "you have spent all week cooped up in the forge, so let me tell you of all that has happened in the Hold."


As Rokka held forth, relaying a week's worth of gossip with the help and contributions of the rest sitting around the circle, I sat back and cleaned myself, rubbing the shard of soap I had brought with me into my hair as I tried to free myself from the lingering scent of smoke. As conversations about the various happenings spiraled out, I sat silently, content just to listen and to feel like a member of the community, a member of the Sept and of the Clan. While none of my family were here in this particular tent, I was still surrounded by family, in a way.


After all, I thought as the low fire that burned below the second, smaller heating kettle cast our shadows on the tent's hide walls, what else could they be to me but family? After seventeen years among them, first as a boy and now as a man, all of that time spent learning their ways and joining in on the labor projects necessary for the continued survival of the Hold, I am one of them. And yet, they all still think only of waking from their so-called Dream, which is our shared life…


The thought soured my jubilant mood. I had taken a major step forward towards my own private goal today, earning myself the recognition of manhood and smithship in one blow. So long as the Shadowspawn did not surge across the Threefold Land all the way to the domain of the Chareen Aiel, I would never be expected to fight, nor would I be deliberately targeted by any Aiel.


But what is the point of finding a place of safety to myself in the culture of the People, if the Aiel remain wedded to their fatalistic mission? How do I dissuade them from following the path of prophecy when there is a solid chance that the prophecy has legitimate grounding? I have known the endless recurrence myself, the Wheel that Sorilea spoke so often about. There is something beyond it that interferes, that forces events along certain paths of causality. I vowed to break my own cycle even if it meant breaking the Wheel… But can my people, honed, tested, and punished for a millenia, do likewise?


"Thank you, Rokka," I said, passing the staera back over as I slowly levered myself up from my position around the fire. "I must return to my mother's roof and ask her permission to enter before she goes to sleep tonight."


"Ah, yes," Rokka nodded understandingly. "You are a man now, no longer a boy. And," the teasing smile blossomed anew across the wiry woman's face, with perhaps a hint of something else within, "if she denies you shade and salt beneath her roof… Come to me. I shall not make you ask more than once for both."


"I will keep your offer in mind, Rokka, daughter of Sagrala," I replied, toweling myself off as I prepared to face the night's cold once more. "But I hope I have held my mother's favor sufficiently that I shall not be left to make a bed by the forge, not on my first night of manhood at least. Good night and deep sleep to you."


Outside, the crisp air welcomed me with an icy embrace, and I dressed rapidly in my stinking clothing to ward it off. Putting on my filthy cadin'sor after cleaning my body was unpleasant, but walking back to the distant warmth of Shende Hold an hour after the sun had set would be even moreso.


Clean clothes are waiting at home, I told myself as I strode across the flat, rocky ground between the circle of sweat tents and Shende Hold, and… yes, yes it is still home, even if I do have to ask my mother for permission to enter. Until she says otherwise, it is home.


After the blazing heat of the forge and the soaking heat of the sweat tent, the moonlit chill was quite enjoyable, if only as a contrast against the swelter of the day. Still, I couldn't help but speed up slightly as I approached the entrance to the Hold, brushing aside the thick hanging rug that served as a door. The residual heat of sun-warmed brick reached up to engulf me, but I didn't set foot inside yet. Instead, I turned to Rheaba, first wife of Parrag and Roofmistress of Shende Hold.


"I see you, Rheaba, Roofmistress of Shende Hold," I began, nodding to the slender woman, whose long blonde hair was graying rapidly by the year, "and I ask leave to come beneath your roof."


"Do you now, Taric, son of Leiran?" Rheaba peered at me from her nest of wrinkles. She had the severe misfortune to suffer the premature loss of her sight. Though she could barely see past the length of an arm these days, her mind remained as quick and agile as it had been back when she taught the children of Shende Hold how to cut and skive leather for use in boots, telling us stories of the Sept's history as we worked. "So, Salin has given you his nod, has he? Then come in, man of my Sept; there will always be water and shade for you here."


With a deep, respectful nod, I set foot once more under Shende Hold and relaxed, luxuriating in the warmth as I took a moment to shake the stiffness from my shoulders. Then, with a parting nod to Rheaba, who must have caught the motion because she returned the gesture, I began to tread the familiar path back to the room that was my mother's roof to repeat the ritual.


When I arrived at the entrance to the room where I had dwelled for the past seventeen years with Leiran, my father, and Ayesha, my mother, and for the past fifteen years with Gharadin, my younger brother, I found the door rug hanging in place. No doubt the smoke hole was likewise all but closed, keeping the heat of the low-burning fire inside while still permitting adequate ventilation.


Well, that's inconvenient. Poking my head around the rug hanging over Shende Hold was only acceptable because of Rheaba's unfortunate eyesight issues, as well as the more public nature of the Hold. Doing the same with the entryway to a family's personal dwelling would be decidedly less appropriate. No need to take on toh on today of all days.


"Ayesha, daughter of Amaryn," I called out, pitching my voice low in the hopes of not waking up everybody in the rooms branching off from the same central hallway as my family's roof, "Roofmistress, I ask leave to come beneath your roof."


"Enter, Taric," an unexpected voice bid, issuing forth from behind the hanging rug. "Come in, Greatson, and find water and shade. We have much to discuss."


I hesitated for a moment. Was this some sort of elaborate trick to see if I would slip-up and break the strictures of ji'e'toh on my first day of manhood? I was being told to enter, but not by the roofmistress…


But… Greatson? There are only two people alive who would call me that. Amaryn, my greatmother, and Sorilea, her greatmother. Neither hold my family's roof, but both are Wise Ones… And a Wise One is a Wise One, no matter where she sets foot.


And so I stooped and, pulling the door rug aside, set foot under my mother's roof without her blessing, pushing down the instinctive chill at the transgression. The part of me that had become Aiel over the last seventeen years sank, shamed with the knowledge that I bore toh. It was unfortunate, but inevitable; defying a Wise One without reason would bring toh as well, much more than my trespass.


Such were the ways of Ji'e'toh, set to both guide and to test us. And if at times it was contradictory, seemingly without any right answer? Then the only correct answer was to shoulder one's shame like a man, without attempting to shift the blame.


In the end, we all were accountable to the Clan, to the Sept, to one another, and most of all, to ourselves. The only one who could truly toh upon a man's shoulders was himself, just as how ji could only come from others. For me, there was no excuse to violate the social contract; there hadn't been in either of my previous lives, and that held true now. The social morays of my first life, the military law of my second, and now the Ji'e'toh of my third… There would be no excuses, including the excuse of following orders. Not for violating Ji'e'toh. For that, there was no excuse.


Inside, I found my family seated on pillows around the central dining mat, the three that I had expected along with an unexpected addition. Sorilea, Wise One of the Jarra Sept of the Chareen Aiel, Wise One of Shende Hold, sat next to her great-greatdaughter, carefully peeling the skin from a kardon fruit.


Unlike most evenings spent gathered together in this familiar room, the air crackled with tension, the silence ringing so much more loudly than the usual din of conversation. Ayesha, my mother, sat perfectly still, hands resting on the knees of her crossed legs, my younger brother Gharadin next to her. My younger brother, usually so garrulous, was silent. Leiran, my father, sat jaw-clenched on the white-haired elder's other side, his eyes fixed on me.


In the middle of it all, Sorilea gradually flayed away the fruit's skin, her hands still dextrous with the tiny bone-handled knife. Several more peels sat in a tidy pile on the mat before her, every scrap of meat picked cleanly away. While her fingers worked, ancient jade eyes held me in cool regard.


Immediately, before she could utter another word, I bowed my head almost to my chest, my hands held out with a fist pressed into a flattened hand in salute. "I see you, Honored Ancestor," I said, greeting her respectfully as I channeled two lifetime's worth of schmoozing experience.


"And I see you, Greatson," Sorilea replied, her voice completely untouched by age. "You give me much ji. Far too much, now that you are a blacksmith."


"I give ji as it is deserved, Honored Ancestor," I demurred as I rose from my bow, setting aside everything but the conversation at hand. Sorilea was old, but she was crafty as well. She was also someone I had conflicting feelings towards, as both the pillar of strength supporting the entirety of the Sept and the conductor of its endless death-march. Regardless of whatever else she was, she was a formidable presence. "Wisdom demands respect, a Wise One twice that, and my greatmother's greatmother twice that."


"I see the ringing of iron has yet to drive your wits from your head, oh Greatson," came the dry reply, but I caught just a slight twinkle of amusement in the old woman's eyes. In appealing to Ji'e'toh and to filial respect, I had rendered my petty disagreement with her unassailable without undermining the rules that bound us both to our roles. It was a small skirmish, but so had her demand that I enter under my mother's roof without her permission. Unlike the last, this round had unquestionably been my victory.


I had shown myself uncowed before her will and her reputation, yet still showed proper deference to the unspoken strictures of Ji'e'toh.


"Come, Taric," Sorilea beckoned towards the last available cushion placed around the dining mat, "come and join us. Tonight, I am your greatmother, so cease standing around like a concussed goat. Prove you haven't left your wits in the forge and enjoy the sweet kardon I brought to share."


Before that hammer of matriarchal authority, I stooped and reached for a kardon before kneeling down on the indicated cushion. Resting on my knees, I methodically sliced the tips off either end of the fruit and began to cut away the waxy skin, revealing the juicy, mouthwateringly delicious fruit within. Kardon was a rare treat and one that I had come to love, as it was one of the few sweet things in the Threefold Land. The spines had to be scorched away before the skin could even be peeled, but a properly cooked kardon was almost syrupy sweet, a vision after a diet of beans and peppers and squash occasionally accompanied by meat.


The Wise One allowed me to enjoy two of the fruits before speaking again. "I come to congratulate you, Taric, son of Ayesha. After a mere four years, Salin has acknowledged you. You have accomplished that which takes most men seven years in half the time."


"I thank you, Honored Ancestor," I murmured, busying my knife with a third fruit, which I passed to Gharadin once the warty green skin fully gave way. "Salin has honored me greatly with his teachings and with his time."


"He has," Sorilea agreed, her weathered head nodding as she popped another kardon, the exposed flesh of the fruit a purple-red pulp, between her teeth. "Do you feel worthy of this honor, young Taric? You are a smith now, and a man full grown, though you have only seen your seventeenth nameday."


"A smith I am," I agreed, turning my knife over in my fingers as I locked eyes with Sorilea again, ignoring the unlovely sucking sound Gharadin made as he all but inhaled his fruit, "recognized for the temper of my steel and the finished works of my hands. Whether I feel worthy of this honor is meaningless; it is mine, as my name is mine. But…" I continued, the words brimming on my tongue as I spoke to the living heart of the Aiel, "I say this, that so long as men sleep in the Dream, it is up to them to test and to expand the boundaries of our shared vision. The Dream shall only cease to grow when we cease to press forwards and become content.


"As for myself," I inclined my head respectfully, speaking not as a dreamer in the old sense but as a dreamer of the Aiel, one engaged with the world and its practicalities, "I am certain of my abilities to smith spearheads and arrowheads, knives and pots and tools and a hundred other things. And," I added with a grin, taking Sorilea at her word that she was here tonight as my greatmother, "I am fully confident in my ability to mend pots, Honored Ancestor, so my mother's roof will never again be forced to wait for a peddler's visit for repairs."


That won me a thin smile and an approving nod. "Well said, Greatson," Sorilea replied, an approving note in her voice, "and I commend you for your certainty. Others may heap praise upon your shoulders, but only you will know the true extent of your skills and your capability."


"Thank you, Greatmother," I said, relief washing over me when her smile lingered. "I am certain of my skills, yet I cannot claim the same about my capacity. I have much left to learn."


"Oh?" Her smile widened slightly. "Already you would seek to expand the boundaries of your Dream, I see. Perhaps that would be for the best… Salin certainly anticipates regaining the fullness of his forge again, though perhaps he could be convinced to take another student, and you would have the opportunity to explore as all young men yearn to do and to expand your skills…"


"As you say, Wise One," I replied cautiously, feeling the jaws of a trap closing around my legs.


"Perhaps," said Sorilea, with a tone that left no room for doubt, "but as your greatmother, Taric, I want only that you find a forge where you can practice your trade and sharpen your skill, as a whetstone sharpens a spear. Of late, I have heard that a forge in Cold Rocks Hold has grown dark, as one of the two smiths in residence among the Nine Valleys Sept of the Taardad Aiel has woken from the Dream." While the smile lingered on Sorilea's face, it had grown implacably firm. "As your greatmother's greatmother, I am certain that Roofmistress Lian would welcome you below her roof, should you ask. She is all too eager to see that forge alit once more."


Ah, I thought, and there it is. Shende Hold doesn't really need two fully qualified smiths, especially when the presence of the surplus smith would make it all but impossible for the current smith to take more students. Even though I still have much to learn, Salin's time would be better spent instructing a fresh boy on the basics of smithwork. So, I am to be sent away.


Another thought crowded in on the first. Did my early graduation truly come as a surprise to Sorilea? Considering how it seems as if the preparations were already laid out before she arrived this evening, I doubt it... But what does that mean? To think that Salin would recognize me as a fellow smith if the Wise Ones ask is absurd, as is the idea that they would ask as such. On the other hand, as Rokka clearly indicated, the fact that I was building my tools is common knowledge around the hold.
The Wise One must have simply had confidence in my abilities. Confidence enough to decide where I would be put.


Such confidence, I decided, was a mixed blessing indeed.


"Cold Rocks Hold…" I rolled the name over in my mouth, trying to decide how I felt about the idea of dwelling in the stronghold of the Taardad Aiel and perhaps the single largest hold in the Waste. Cold Rocks Hold stood leagues to the north of the Chareen, north of the empty city of Rhuidean, where those who would be clan chiefs or Wise Ones went to be tested. As far as clan politics went, I didn't remember there being much bad blood between the Taardad and the Chareen; the Taardad tended to fight the Shaido and the Nakai, though they had made peace with the latter in the previous generation, while we tended to dance the spears with the Shaarad and the Goshien.


As far as prospective assignments went, there were far worse, I decided. Working among the Shaido, for example, would almost certainly be unpleasant, treacherous bastards that they are.


"Of course," Sorilea continued, relentless as the summer sun beating down upon the mesas and sandy plains of the Threefold Land, "you will have to earn your rights to the forge and its tools. You will likely have to accept reduced payments during that time, as the cost of the tools and materials are repaid to Lian's roof. But I am certain that she will accept your hard and dutiful work as adequate payment, and she knows better than to permit any of mine to starve or be cheated. Once the debt is paid and the tools and forge yours, you will stand equal to Garlvan, the smith still living among the Nine Valleys Sept."


"I understand, Greatmother," I replied, bowing my head again. It wasn't an ideal assignment, considering how I would be starting off indebted, but there would clearly be room to grow. I was still hesitant to leave Shende Hold, though. The hold had been my home for seventeen years, after all, and I still had much to learn from Salin. I was especially uneasy about leaving my home unarmed save for a hunting bow; a smith would not be deliberately targeted, but carrying a spear might lead jumpy Taardad clansmen to attack first before noticing that I wore the cadin'sor after the manner of a craftsman, rather than as a member of a warrior Society. "I thank you for sharing this information and your wisdom with me. I will think further upon it."


"As you shall, Taric," nodded Sorilea, "as you shall. Think also upon the fact that Lea, youngest daughter of Amys, sister-wife of Lian, and Rhuarc, Chief of the Taardad Aiel, is still unmarried though her nineteenth nameday will soon pass. I have heard that no man is courting her, so I doubt she will be laying any bridal wreaths at the doors of bachelors any time soon."


And Amys is a Wise One, isn't she? The daughter of a Wise One and of a clan chief, marrying the greatson of two Wise Ones... Or perhaps, at least making a show of pursuing that daughter? The Wise Ones always scheme; that is part of their role as the hands that freely reach across clan borders to guide all the Aiel. Guessing at the point of this particular scheme is beyond me, but my role here is clear.


"...Thank you, Grandmother, for your advice," I said, tilting my head in understanding. Her message was received. My grandmother had let me know about a valuable opportunity I could avail myself of; the Wise One would order me to take up my hammer and go live among the Taardad, should extra motivation prove necessary. "And thank you, Wise One, for your knowledge. Before the sun touches Shende Hold again, I will leave for Cold Rocks Hold."

 

[Readhead]

(Thank you to TheBattleSage for editing. I'm going to say that this is a "better good enough than perfect" chapter, but I hope y'all enjoy it regardless.)


16 Aine, 997 NE
Shende Hold, Chareen Aiel, Aiel Waste


An hour before sunrise, I followed the familiar path to Salin's smithy one last time as a resident of Shende Hold. From long experience, I knew that the open wall of the forge that faced east, out over the broad expanse of the Threefold Land, would already be lit in the gray predawn, the first scouts of the sun infiltrating the vaulting skies that stretched over the low hills and arid plains of my homeland. Soon, those scouts would be followed by the main force of the day, the disc itself rising over the mountains on the far side of the Great Rift.


By the time that disc rose high enough for its light to touch the Hold's adobe walls, I would be gone, the ground falling away behind me as I loped towards Cold Rocks Hold and the Taardad Aiel at my ancestor's command.


But before then, I had one last obligation to discharge.


I had toh.


Behind me, peering around at the unfamiliar corner of Shende Hold he found himself in, Gharadin silently trailed.


Just as he had been his entire life, Ayesha and Leiran's younger son followed in my footsteps.


It was to him that I owed toh, for I had not behaved as an older brother should towards his younger sibling. Before I stepped away from the roof I had sheltered under as a child, I would make that shame right.


We had never been close, Gharadin and I.


Two years my junior, he had tagged after me as often as he could, as closely as our difference in ages allowed. When we were young, he had always been at my heels, joining in with plastering the walls of the Hold or spinning cotton. When I had learned as all young Aiel the art of the spear and knife, the bow and arrow, Gharadin had done his best to keep up before the instructor sent him back to his cohort after his younger arms proved too weak to draw back the bowstring or drive the flat blade of his spear through the target's leather hide.


That had always been the essence of the distance between Gharadin and I. He was a child, a true child, a young man looking to make his way in the world unencumbered by the memories of two previous lives, by the intimate knowledge at how cyclical existence truly was, the Wheel be damned. He was not stupid, nor dim, nor weak, nor rash. He was ignorant, immature, and undeveloped.


Gharadin was a child, and in many ways, I was not. While I had been encumbered by the brain and body of a child and all the affectations that came along when puberty decided to finally grace my body, I had the perspectives of an adult and of a veteran soldier as well.


I had never been the best at relating to people, often finding it difficult to establish more than casual connections with my peers even in my first life. The nightmare scenario of my second life, with so much stacked against me, had made finding common ground with others even more troublesome. Professionalism and the formality of hierarchy had broken a path forwards for me, but alone they could carry me only so far, could only bridge so much of the gulf between myself and the others.


My last moments in Arene proved as much.


As the years passed, the distance between Gharadin and I lengthened despite his best efforts to race after me. Questions that Gharadin struggled with I answered with ease, pleasing the Wise Ones and the warriors who tutored the Sept's youth alike. Where proficiency with the recurved short-bow of the Aiel eluded Gharadin, my shafts never missed their target, a legacy of years of training and killing. In spars with the knife or the spear, only two of the youth of Shende Hold could best me in the Dance; Gharadin was not among them.


When I set foot on the path of the smith and apprenticed myself to Salin, I took the final step that Gharadin, no matter how hard he tried, could not follow. Salin would certainly not take two apprentices at once, and to be apprenticed even as young as I had been was highly uncommon.


With all of that, how could my relationship with my younger brother ever have turned out in any way different from what it had?


I could have tried to teach him, I thought, answering my own question. He isn't stupid; he could have learned. He would have relished the opportunity to develop. Perhaps with some personal instruction, he could have found a place on the fast track towards leadership within a Society, perhaps even our father's own, the Sha'mad Conde, Thunder Walkers. Well trained and groomed for leadership, Gharadin would have represented a valuable resource.


It was an opportunity that I had squandered, a sacrifice I hadn't even fully realized I was making when I set forth to prove myself worthy to Salin.


For that, and for all of the times I could have lent a helping hand to Gharadin, son of Leiran, I had toh.


The forge's door stood ajar, the precious iron-bound timber creaking slightly in the early morning's breeze. Through the open entry, I could see the Threefold Land spread out before the Hold; while only the slightest light fell on the land and the smithy, I knew that the familiar sullen glow of banked embers waited for me on the other side.


"Brother?" Gharadin broke his silence at last, coming to a halt on the smithy's threshold. "Is it… right for me to enter?" His voice, thin and childish, not yet broken to a man's timbre, sounded almost like birdsong as the wind whistled through the portal.


"Cross my threshold and be welcome, Ghardin, son of Leiran," came Salin's familiar baritone, the man himself turning from where he had stood facing out over the Threefold Land, watching as the world woke from its passing dream. "All of my sept are welcome in my smithy, so long as they keep their hands well away from my tools or the forge."


Gharadin glanced up at me, quickly checking to see if it was alright to enter. I nodded, the motion a slight tilt of my head, not looking away from Salin. My teacher, my mentor. My equal.


"I see you, Salin, man of my Sept," I said, raising my voice in ritual greeting. "I see you, hammer-handed Aiel, fellow of the Forge, and by the forge I greet you."


"I see you, Taric, man of my Sept," Salin replied, stepping forwards to stand on the other side of the threshold, Gharadin scooting out of his way and vanishing behind him into the forge. "I see you, Aiel of smoke-caught steel, fellow of the Forge. By the light of the forge I taught you from, I greet you."


Concluding the greeting, Salin stretched out a burly arm and I clasped it, my hand locking on his forearm even as his iron-fingered grip found my own. With a firm movement that was half a welcoming shake and half a tug, he pulled me across the threshold and into the forge. Surrounded by the scents of smoke and steel, coal and rendered fat, I relaxed almost immediately.


In a way, this broad, three-walled room was more my home than Ayesha's roof.


"You have come for your spear, I suspect," Salin rumbled, releasing my arm. "I had wondered if you would remember it before you passed Chaendaer."


That was a joke, as there had never been any chance of my departing Shende Hold without stopping by Salin's forge. For one, it would have been incredibly disrespectful as well as unkind to not bid my mentor farewell before beginning my trek northwards; for another, all of my tools were still at the forge where I had left them the previous day.


I somehow doubt that Roofmistress Lian would be happy if I showed up at Cold Rocks Hold empty handed. A smith without his tools is like a Maiden without her spear; to whit, she isn't.


"I knew I was forgetting something," I replied, stone-faced as I returned Salin's joke in kind. "If you would be so kind, Salin, I have come to collect what is mine."


"Then take, Taric," said Salin, impassive as he looked past me. "Will you take also your father's son and your mother's consolation?"


I followed his gaze to Gharadin, who stood by the banked forge, shifting slowly from foot to foot and clearly trying to take advantage of the meagre warmth of the coals without making it too obvious.


"No," I said, catching Gharadin's eye and beckoning him to my side with a nod, "I have only come for what is mine… And to pay that which I owe."


Slowly, Salin tilted his head to one side, considering. Then he nodded and stepped back, gesturing towards one of the shop tables, upon which a large, box-framed leather pack sat. Next to it, an oblong shape wrapped in leather and bound with a rawhide cord rested.


"I gave your tools a last hone and polish before packing them away in my old pack," the old smith said, his voice even more gruff than usual. "It's yours if you want it, Taric; I do not anticipate much travel in my future, certainly not without the company of sufficient Spears to carry my load for me."


"Thank you, Salin," I said, nodding deeply. It was a fine gift; it was his farewell, a fitting gesture from a master to his departing journeyman. I had no gift with which to reciprocate, save for a promise against my future. A promise I had already intended to swear. "You have taught me much. I shall endeavor to learn yet more, and then I shall return to Shende Hold. When I do so, you may rest easy, content to know that neither the Jarra nor Chareen shall lose a finger of your skill when you awake from the Dream."


"Pwah!" Salin snorted, shaking his head. "It will be years yet before you find shelter and water below the roof of Shende Hold again, if that is to be so. Nonetheless, I will see you again before my last day, Taric. This I know. Now," he gestured again towards the table, "take what is yours and begone. There can only be one smith below the roof of Shende Hold." A smile crinkled the maze of lines worn into his sun-darkened face. "Be at ease, Leiran's son; I will keep the forge warm until you return again."


With that, Salin turned back to the open wall and resumed his place watching as the morning broke over the Threefold Land.


Gharadin at my heels, I stepped over to the table and eyed the pack. It possessed an external frame made of lacquered wood. On close examination, I thought I could make out worn engraving on that frame, and traced the faded vines with a finger.


Trefoil leaves… Chora leaves? The leaves of Avendesora? Or perhaps… of Avendoraldera?


That frame, at least, I suspected had been purchased long ago; purchased or gifted. It was certainly not war booty, because by the engravings, it was a near certainty that it was a product of Lost One hands.


Coincidence, perhaps? Or a subtle message from Salin? And indeed, how did Salin come into possession of a Tinker pack?


Perhaps, one day, I will ask.


The pack itself was, upon closer examination, double-lined, a leather exterior with an interior of paraffin-treated canvas, proof against grit and water alike. Sewn into the interior were many smaller pockets and slots, into which my tools had been slotted. Additional material padded the flat-faced hammer from the tongs, the tinsnips from the punches, and all of the other tools of my trade and works of my hands.


I closed the pack again and turned my attention to the second object resting on the scarred, carefully repaired tabletop. Nine hands long, a meter in the parlance of the worlds I had once known, the leather wrap did little to conceal the identity of its contents. At least, not from me or, judging by the harsh intake of breath from Gharadin, from my brother.


Below my fingers, the bindings fell loose as knot by knot came undone. As I unknotted the last string, I paused to stare down at the pale leather that swaddled this last possession of mine.


Simply handing it over, I decided, would be another wasted opportunity. Besides, can a gift like this even be meaningful without some ritual or ceremony? Certainly not to an Aiel!


"Gharadin, my brother," I said, naming the youth. Naming the boy, for I was now a man. "I have toh."


Even without looking up from the leather-wrapped package, I could feel his eyes upon me.


"You have toh," he dutifully agreed, completing his side of the ritual without understanding why.


Ji'e'toh was, by its nature, just as personal as it was universal. Every Aiel held to Ji'e'toh, which meant that every Aiel assigned themself either ji or toh. While the standards of Ji'etoh were universal, implementation was internal. To tell somebody else that they had toh was a great insult, for it implied that they had no understanding of honor; likewise, to tell an Aiel that they had no toh was an equally great insult for the same reason.


And of course, telling somebody that you have toh when you do not, in fact, have toh gives you toh for imposing upon another in an unwarranted manner, I thought wryly, reflecting again on the complexities of a people who I knew the worlds of my previous lives would write off as barbaric. Just to keep things relaxed and clearly understood, of course.


And so I doubted Gharadin understood why I had toh.


Or perhaps I am again underestimating him. But if I am not… I will not leave a cloud between us when I leave.


"I have not been the brother to you that I should have been," I said dispassionately, eyes fixed on the leather as I explained myself. "As your elder brother, you were mine to teach and to guide. That was my obligation, and in that obligation I have failed. Instead of pressing forwards towards my own goals with all of my vigor, I could have diverted some of my energy and time towards helping you along your own road to adulthood. I knew that you wanted to follow me, and I did nothing to help you as you fell in my footsteps."


"...You are talented, Taric," Gharadin said after a pause, his voice thick, but steady. "I could never best you with the spear, and none of the other children of the Hold could outmatch your skill with a bow. Why… Why did you become a smith, brother?"


"Why did you leave me behind?" echoed unspoken behind his question.


"...Bow and blade will not be my path," I answered. Not again. "Save for defense, or the defense of my family, or the defense of those of the Sept or the Clan unable to defend themselves, I shall never take up a weapon."


Not again, I thought, Grantz's horrified face swimming in the pool of my mind's eye. I will not be betrayed and murdered again, nor will I walk the same roads I followed before. I might live again, but my path is mutable, my way unfixed by those I followed before. Wheel be damned, Being X be damned. I am my own person, to the end. Til the Last Day and beyond.


None of which I could say to explain my reasoning adequately.


"To destroy is easy," I said instead, "and it is the province of those who cannot find another resolution to their problems. For some problems, there can be no resolution save through violence; for the Trollocs who boil out of the north, only spear and arrow can quench their thirst for blood. For all other problems, though…" I paused, trying to find an answer. "There are other answers. Consider, brother, that the greater ji comes from taking a foe alive, from putting a spear to their throat and demonstrating mercy. So too must the greater ji come from preservation rather than destruction."


That might have been a bit too far, I thought, annoyed with myself. It is true, but it was perhaps not what a fifteen year old boy wants to hear. For all that… It is true. I killed in my second life, but only because I had to, because the Empire was at war… But what was the value of the war? Wasted resources, ruined lives, devastated land, and millions of marks squandered on mud and blood.


What could have been accomplished had peace carried the day?


I turned to face Gharadin. Predictably, he looked angry. His jaw was thrust pugnaciously forwards, his hands trembled in tightly clenched fists by his side. In his eyes, though, I caught the glimmer of confusion; that was likely the root of his anger.


Behind him, I caught a slight motion from Salin, a nod as he pretended to ignore us in favor of the landscape spread out before him.


He, at least, understands. That much was unsurprising; I had said as much in fewer words when I had become his apprentice. I had hoped Gharadin would as well… Oh well.


"I will become a Spear, brother," Leiran and Ayesha's younger son spat, glaring impotently at me. "Would you say that your honor is greater than mine? That your path is more worthy than mine? Just as it always was?"


Killing words, those, if he said them around someone inclined to take them as offense. Blood feuds stemmed from words like those.


"You will be a Spear, brother," I replied, meeting Gharadin's eyes squarely. "You will find much ji as you follow in our father's footsteps. Your path is your own, just as my path is my own. For your sake, I hope that you find water and shade in abundance along your path, as I hope that I shall mine. As for that which lies between us… I cannot undo the past, but our Dream is not yet over, and so I can yet support your future."


With an almost negligible twitch of my hand, the leather wrapping flipped open. Within it, my spear rested, the first of my hand and just as beautiful as I remembered him. A wide blade three hands long crested a haft twice that length, wrapped in rawhide for a firm grip. As with my hammer, shadows of whorling charcoal-gray gyred up the flanges of that blade, rising from the tip.


Aiel of smoke-caught steel, Salin named me. Fitting.


"It is yours, Gharadin, Leiran and Ayesha's son, youngest greatchild of Sorilea the Wise One, if you would have it." I stepped away from Gharadin, swinging the pack onto my shoulders, grunting as eighty pounds of metal settled onto my back. "Be a Spear, my brother, and carry the first spear forged by your brother. May you find shade and water, and may you spit into Sightblinder's eye on the Last Day… And may that Last Day be far, far in the future for you, Gharadin."

---

19 Aine, 997 NE
Outside Rhuidean, Jenn Aiel, Aiel Waste


Ahead of me, the Threefold Land stretched out to the distant horizon.


To my left, foothills gray with brittle shrubs and exposed rock rose to embrace the Dragonwall. I knew that, if I turned back to look down the faint peddler's track I had followed for the last three days, I would see similar hills, shaded to blue shadows by the distance, hunching towards the mighty range.


Dug into the split-away face of one of those hills was Shende Hold, my house and home for these last seventeen years. The place where I had become a man once again, and where, for the first time, I had become a smith, a worker of metal. Where I had made a thousand useful things, and where I had worked inert ore into ingots of smoke-swirled steel and then into the blade of the spear that my brother had clutched, even as he watched me take the first strides out from under the shelter of the Hold's roof.


I did not turn to look back. I focused instead on the blue shadow far ahead of me, the distance rendering the lofty peak of Chaendaer, the mighty mountain overlooking forbidden Rhuidean, into little but a mole on the Threefold Land's cracked hide.


I would be skirting wide around that great mountain, though not for fear of ambush. The Peace of Rhuidean, one of the great traditions upheld by all Aiel, guaranteed safe passage to all travelers to or from the empty city held sacred by our people, for all that religion, as I had known it in my past lives, would be an alien concept to the Aiel. Beyond that, I was a blacksmith, likewise held sacred by traditions so deep that I doubted many Aiel would even consider raising a hand against me, even among the Shaido, a clan generally scorned as dishonorable even as far south as the Chareen.


Instead, I would be skirting wide to the east around the city in Chaendaer's shadow because every story the Wise One, my ancestor Sorilea, had spoken of Rhuidean screamed warnings to never set foot in the city.


After all, the best possible outcome would be that I would leave as a chief!


The thought brought a simultaneous shudder to my shoulders and a thin smile to my unveiled lips. The shudder from the prospect of the Wheel turning and once again dragging me into a position of authority, of control, just as it had over my last two lives. Both of which had been cut short by the hands of treacherous subordinates. The smile, to the contrary, rose from the prospect of a blacksmith being named chief over the Chareen Aiel. It was an unthinkable concept, to an Aiel, but one I struggled to describe in the context of the fading memories of my past lives.


A chief was, fundamentally, a warrior among warriors, who could be challenged to dance the spears to defend his decisions and his authority. A blacksmith disdained all weapons and shunned the dance, save for when Shadowspawn raided from the north.


The same direction as the one my feet are carrying me, onto Cold Rocks Hold…


The faint twang of discord that thought evoked within my heart resounded as I heard the faint crunch of footfalls on gravel.


I was not alone.


Keeping my hands by my side, I slowed from the league-eating lope long-perfected by the Aiel to a trot, then a jog, and then finally a walk, my mind waking from the dull stupor the endless footfalls had lured it into as I came to a halt. Muscles great and small, and not a few joints beside, took my renewed alertness to register complaints. Legs ached and my back, laden with almost half my body weight in smith's tools and iron rations, burned like the indomitable sun far above my head.


"Well met," I said to the unseen watchers. "May you find water and shade at the end of your journey, wherever that may lead you."


"Our journey will end in the same place yours will, Man of the Chareen," came the call, and a black-veilled figure rose from a narrow gully some thirty paces ahead, buckler strapped to his arm and brandishing a spear in his hands. "All journeys end in the same place, though some find their journey's end sooner than the rest. What brings you to the lands of the Goshien Aiel? Do you come for Rhuidean?"


Do you fall under the Peace?


That question remained unspoken as I peered at the warrior's cadin'sor, carefully examining the cut of his shirt and searching out familiar patterns in the dappled gray and beige, no doubt as the Goshien Spear did the same. A moment later, he stiffened and all but dropped his weapon as he hastily thrust it back into the leather bow-case strung across his shoulders.


"Apologies, Honored Smith!" he cried out, fumbling to lower his veil as he ducked his head, the cry taken up by another four Spears rising from behind scrub and from the same ditch as the first. "I have toh. May you find water and shade on your path."


"And you as well, oh Spear of the Jihrad Sept of the Goshien Aiel, honorable brother of the Duadhe Mahdi'in, Water Seekers," I said, acknowledging the warrior by his sept and society, giving him his honor back as best I could. There was no need to punish diligence, after all, especially since no harm had been done. "Your society is known to all for your keen eyes; make use of them and guide me to the next seep, for my waterskin is near parched and Imre Stand is yet a day and a night away."


This was halfway a lie, but it had two virtues, the first of which being that the truth of the matter was plainly obvious. Fat waterskins hung at each of my hips, the tanned bladders draped over opposing shoulder and refilled scant hours ago from a hidden spring known to the Chareen. The Goshien Spear shot me an unmistakably grateful look, though, for the other virtue was the short and clear path it gave the man towards regaining his honor after drawing steel on a smith.


"Certainly," the young man replied, and he was young, I realized. Scarcely more than a year or two older than me. "I know of a spring as sweet as you could please, scarcely five hours' run to the north and one to the east. Will it please you to follow us on that path, Honored Smith?"


"Only if you call me Taric of the Jarra Sept, son of Leiran," I said, walking to the man and extending my open hand towards him. "Who is guiding me to the sought-out water, Man of Jihrad?"


"I am Garan," the Goshien spear replied, grasping my forearm and pumping it in greeting. "I thank you for your understanding, Taric."


"And I thank you for the conversation," I replied, smiling politely at Garan. He was, I noted a full two heads shorter than me. "It has been a silent three days for me, since I set out from Shende Hold. Hearing a voice other than my own is a relief sweeter than any water you could bring me, I think."


"Don't say that yet," Garan said, softening the chide with a quick, clever smile. "Not until we reach the spring."


"Lead on," I invited, and fell into step beside the Water Seeker as we began to walk, then trot, then run across the sun-baked clay, the other four Goshien falling in behind us in a loose, tailing column.


As we ran, Garan continued chatting.


"So, I see nothing a smith could seek from Rhuidean," he began, his tone conversational as he hurdled over a low segade, "but yet you follow the track north?"


"Aye," I agreed, not breaking pace as I stepped around the outstretched skeleton of a cholla cactus, "there is little call for a smith in fog-shrouded Rhuidean, but there is much call further north, in the lands of the Taardad Aiel. I go to reheat the cold ashes of the Nine Valleys Sept's forge."


"The Taardad?" Garan puckered his lips into a sour expression, as if he had bitten down into a fruit and discovered it green and unready. "Surely there are smithies in the lands of the Chareen. If there aren't, perhaps you would care to forge spears and mend knives for the Goshien?"


"Alas," I replied mournfully, only halfway pretending as I shook my head regretfully, "my teacher still hammers steel at Shende Hold, and no other sept of my people were in present need of a newly forged smith. The Taardad, however, found themselves short a hammer, and the Wise One of my sept volunteered my services."


The implication was clear: If a Wise One had come to a decision, it would be backed by all Wise Ones as soon as they heard about it. Including those among the Goshien. Garan's wince at the prospect of contravening the decisions of that great convocation made it clear that he got the message and he ceased immediately his none-too-subtle attempt to poach me for his own sept and clan.


We continued on in our talk as we ran the remainder of the afternoon away, reaching the spring as the sun began to drop behind the Dragonwall. Garan offered me temporary accommodation by his small band's fire and I eagerly accepted, more than slightly tired of sleeping in the freezing cold of the Threefold night unshielded by roof or by Roof.


I returned the favor by putting a fresh edge on each warrior's favorite spear, honing each with my grindstone, coarse-grit then fine. I held off on using my strop as we were just squatting by a campfire, not in the relative comfort and ease of a Hold smithy, but the Goshien were all quite appreciative and thankful for the relatively minor and routine servicing of their weapons.


In the morning, Garan bid me find water and shade, and then immediately made that wish come half-true by offering me one of his own refilled waterskins and additional rations, sun-cured capar spiced with fiery chiles and a handful of motai grubs. I accepted both, immediately popping a grub into my mouth and savoring the initial crunch and the following gush of sweet juices as I chomped down on the fat little thing.


Like the shadow hills far behind me, I left the tiny Goshien ambushing party behind me as well, reshouldering my pack as I walked, then trotted, then ran north once more, north and west. Ran on towards Cold Rocks Hold, and towards the smithy that awaited me.

---

26 Aine, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste


Before me, the fissure yawned open, a wind-worn mouth into the heart of a mesa rising from the table of the Threefold Land. My tongue flicked over parched lips. The signs of traffic, stone further softened by generations of booted feet, confirmed what I had already known from Sorilea's directions to the Hold of the Nine Valleys Sept.


After ten days of solitary travel, I had arrived at last.


Now, I had to announce myself. It was customary when approaching a hold for purposes other than raiding to come unveiled and with a cacophony of noise, making it absolutely clear to all involved that you came in peace.


Like many Aiel traditions, the announcement was deeply sensible and served multiple purposes, the first and most important being that it reduced the number of instances of mistaken identity, thus likewise keeping the number of accidental stabbings down as well. It also meant that whoever was guarding the entrance to the hold had enough time to send a runner to find the Roofmistress and alert her to the new arrival, so everybody had to spend less time standing around out in the sun.


If I were a warrior, arriving at the hold of a clan in peace, I shout my arrival, roaring for all to hear… But I am not a warrior. I am a smith.


I will allow my steel to announce me.


Thanks to the clever pockets of Salin's Tinker-made pack, it was the work of a moment for steel to enter my hands. Hammer and tongs, as emblematic of the brotherhood of the forge as spear and buckler are to the twelve warrior societies.


Shouldering my pack once more, I took up the long open-jaw forge-tongs with one hand, and with the other I held the flat-faced cross-peened blacksmith's hammer, the capstone of my toolset, whose whorled ash and smoke reflected the spear I had last seen glimmering in my brother's hands.


Holding both tongs and hammer above my head, I took my first step into the gorge in the cliffside.


CLANG!


The echo rang out before me as the jaws of the tongs met the side of my hammer.


Another step, and then another.


CLANG!


Already, I was within the shadows of the cleft, cool and dark. It felt like I had stepped directly into late evening from midday, the first touches of the freezing Threefold night ghosting down from above even as the last of the day's heat radiated up from the stones.


Only the thin slash of blue, bright between the towering walls, belied the impression of night-come-early.


CLANG!


Up ahead, the fissure turned, cornering at a natural chokepoint. Three figures formed a line across that turning in the rock, only one of whom wore the cadin'sor of a Taardad Spear. The other two wore the bulky brown skirts, voluminous white blouses, and light shawls ubiquitous to all Aiel women who had not taken up a spear.


I lowered my tools; my arrival, it seemed, had been noted.


"Who comes to Cold Rocks Hold?" The challenge came from the woman standing in the center, slender and perhaps on the cusp of her upper-middle years, her long blonde hair paleing to white at her temples. "Name yourself, stranger, and state plainly your purpose."


Gold glimmered at her wrists and at her throat, all of it captured war-booty. Amidst the Treekiller gold, however, strings of silver in the traditional Aiel fashion, sheet-silver cold-hammered into chunky rings and bracelets and etched with intricate patterns, shown as well.


None of which was necessary to announce this woman as Lian, Roofmistress of Cold Rocks Hold and wife of Rhuarc, Clan Chief of the Taardad Aiel. The postures of her two companions were more than adequate to make her authority known.


"Roofmistess," I said, nodding in respectful greeting, "I am Taric, son of Leiran and Ayesha. By the recognition of Salin of Shende Hold, I name myself a blacksmith. At the word of Sorilea, Wise One of Shende Hold and my greatmother's greatmother, I have come to Cold Rocks Hold to relight a forge gone dark. I ask leave to come beneath your roof."


"You have my leave, Taric," Lian replied, her ritual stiffness softening as she smiled a more personable greeting. "Beneath my roof, there is water and shade for you. You are most welcome, Sorilea's child."


"I give thanks, Roofmistress," I dutifully said, closing the ritual, "but am I only welcome in my ancestor's name? I was told that there was work to be done."


"Oh, there most certainly is," Lian agreed, her necklaces jangling as she nodded, "and we shall talk, Taric, of roof-rights and payment and many more things. But before all that, Garlvan has asked to meet you, to see for himself Salin's new prodigy."


I nodded slowly. This development wasn't a complete surprise; I was young to be recognized as a journeyman smith, and no doubt Garlvan, the surviving smith of Cold Rocks Hold, wanted to ensure that I hadn't played some trick on Salin to cheat my way into his recognition.


It is a reasonable ask, I told myself, but galling nonetheless. Perhaps that is why the warrior is still here. Young men and their hot-blooded pride, eh? What nonsense.


I was a smith, duly recognized by my master. I would act accordingly.


"I am eager to meet my brother of the forge as well," I said, raising my head to look Lian straight in the eyes. "Roofmistress, where might I find Garlvan? I would go this very moment to lay his doubts to rest."


The other woman, standing in Lian's shadow, let out a cough that sounded very much like a half-concealed laugh. When the Roofmistress turned to stare at her from the corner of her eye, the younger woman quickly stiffened back up, her face returning to typical stoicism, but the corners of her mouth still twitched with a buried smile.


"Aye, you certainly are Sorilea's," said Lian with a sort of familiar, fond exasperation. "I see that she still has spine enough to share with all her line. Well then, Taric, be welcome in Cold Rocks Hold. I'll take you directly on to see Garlvan, and then…" her eyes darted back to the other woman, and then to me. "Then, we will talk."


With that, the Roofmistress turned and strode back into the fissure, sweeping her companion up in the swirl of her skirt as she passed. Unslinging my pack under the Spear's watchful eyes, I quickly returned hammer and tongs to their appropriate pockets before hurrying after Lian… Only to stop, rocking on my heels, as I rounded the corner.


The narrow walls of the fissure immediately widened into a short, broad expanse, which only a hundred paces ahead widened again. And in that wide hollow space, ringed on all sides by the towering walls of the mesa…


By the standards of my past lives, to eyes jaded by the brick and marble of Berun and even moreso by the glass and steel of Tokyo, Cold Rocks Hold was nothing, barely even a village. But to Aiel eyes though… It was a vision. The air was thick with moisture, the humidity shocking after the bone-drying hammer of the Threefold Land. Vegetation of an almost shocking green climbed the walls of the hidden canyon, and everywhere farms rose on terraced plots brimming with t'mat and algode, pecara and above all zemai which grew in heavy-kernaled abundance.


Between the garden plots, low-roofed houses rose from the ground, built with yellow adobe blocks similar to those that made up the walls of Shende Hold, though without the coats of white-washing plaster necessary to keep those walls safe from the driving rains occasionally escaping over the Dragonwall.


And in the center of it all, in the middle of the hold… Water. So much water. An abundance, an over-abundance, in a land where clans would trade the blood of dozens of Spears for a pool three paces wide and half a handbreadth deep. Flowing from a spring in the wall of the mesa, the water poured forth and pooled in a central oasis, from which Gai'shain filled pitchers they carried up to the rising terraces, watering waiting lines of peppers, melons, squash, and beans.


"First time you've seen so much water in one place, I'll wager." It was Lian's shadow, the laughing woman, who had hung back to watch my reaction. Judging by her smirk, whatever had crossed my face had pleased her. "Do you have anything like our hold back in the lands of the Chareen?"


"Not that I have seen," I acknowledged, "though I cannot claim to have traveled to all the holds of my mother's clan. From what I have seen, though…" I shook my head, still stunned by all the green, all the water after days spent running through the desert. "Truly, I wish you to find water and shade, but it seems clear that you already have both in abundance. I am Taric, though I suppose you know that already."


"Aye," she bobbed her head, a smile flickering across her lips as she fell into step with me. Lian, I noticed, was a full ten paces ahead of us and carefully maintaining that distance. Just close enough to listen in, while still far enough away to offer an illusion of privacy. "I suppose you know my name as well."


"Lea?" I hazarded, drawing on the only name I knew from Cold Rocks Hold, save for Lian and Garlvan's. "Daughter of Amys the Wise One?"


"Aye." This time, the reply came out almost more as a grunt. Not quite surly, but certainly far from happy. "That's me. Daughter to a Wise One and a Clan Chief."


How am I supposed to respond to this? I had never met any of the kin of Erim, Chief of the Chareen Aiel, but none of Parrag's family, the family of the Jarra Sept Chief, had spoken of their high-placed kinsman with such tetchiness. I should respond in kind, clearly.


"...Is that why you have no suitors?" I asked, my voice innocently open and brimming with simple curiosity. "Surely it would take a bold man not to flee when a Wise One's daughter pursues."


"Few are the men bold enough to wed a Wise One," Lian observed from up ahead, discarding any pretense of privacy. "Even one who has yet to accept apprenticeship, much less become a Wise One in truth."


Lea scowled at her mother's sister-wife's back, but perhaps wisely kept her mouth shut.


"And yet your husband accepted a bridal wreath from Amys," I said, speaking to Lian, "as did my greatfather from my greatmother, Amaryn. Rhuarc in particular is known as a chief of great honor. Surely," I mused, looking up as if tracking a stray thought, "if dancing the spears while outnumbered and barehanded earns a Spear great ji, then taking up a wreath of braided thorns and herbs must be like taking a chief gai'shain while armed only with a paring knife. I see your conundrum, Lea. You have my sympathy."


At this comment, both Lian and Lea turned to stare at me, the Roofmistress coming to a complete stop to turn and look back.


"After all," I continued, smiling at the brewing rage on Lea's face, "both a Spear and a Wise One's husband may wake from the Dream at any point in their dance, but one must hold out for only a few hundred heartbeats, while the other must last for a few hundred months. Scarce indeed are men with such endurance!"


That earned a laugh from Lian, as did Lea's look of scandalized betrayal. "Aye," the Roofmistress said, a younger woman's smile in her eyes, "Rhuarc may be getting up in years, but he still has the stamina to wield his spear with strength and fortitude. With the seasoning of years, his precision only improves."


"Beware the old warrior," I nodded sagely, grinning at Lian as Lea, eyes burning, turned back to me. "While sap may dry and leather might curdle, the shaft remains long and grindstone and grease can only make the head grow keener."


"Roofmistress," Lea said, her voice tight, "if you do not need my help in guiding Taric to the old smith, then I must be about my duties."


"Go on, then," Lian said indulgently, taking mercy on her sister-wife's daughter. "Thank you for joining me in bidding welcome to our new smith."


I didn't need Lian's sideways look to prompt me to make nice. "It was good to meet you, Rhuarc's daughter. May you work in the shade today, and may the fields you tend soon bear fruit."


This last comment was a somewhat novel twist on a traditional farewell, generally wishing the receiver good luck with whatever project they set their hands to. It was also, however, a farewell reserved almost exclusively for young wives, or those who would soon be wives.


Rejection, after all, was hard and unpleasant. Especially if the rejection rose from a factor over which one had no control. Lea had not chosen to be born to two high status members of Aiel society, nor had she chosen to be a Wise One, though from Lian's remarks it was clear that the Wise Ones had marked her for their own.


For all that I had teased her about the high bar to entry that came with forming a relationship with a high status member in a society as centered on obligation and duty as the Aiel, I had spoken truly about the sympathy I felt for her. I had no wish to make an enemy from that misunderstanding.


By the way her eyes widened, I thought Lea understood the message.


Though by the speed she fled, perhaps not.


"Smiths have much endurance," Lian idly remarked as she waited, resuming her path forwards into the hold only after I had caught up by her side. "Apparently, smiths have clever tongues as well."


"As you say, Roofmistress," I murmured, trying to evaluate her mood from the corner of my eye. She didn't seem upset; indeed, she still looked mildly amused. "It takes a degree of deftness to work the raw steel into something more malleable without ruining the temper."


"Is that what you were doing?" An eyebrow arched as she turned to look at me, the white wings at her temple flashing. "See to it you don't mistake my near-sister's daughter for an ingot, then."


Ah, perhaps not as amused as I thought.


I still didn't feel like I had toh, though. The only time I had addressed Lea directly had been in offering my sympathy, which had been sincere. The other comments I had made, while perhaps somewhat mocking, had all been broad in their subjects and of mild fun at most. Indeed, I had referred to Lian's husband and my greatfather as honored by their long and happy marriages to Wise Ones.


No… That's not the issue. It's not that I have toh, but rather that Lian is ensuring that neither Lea nor I end up overstepping ourselves in the future, thus incurring toh. A pinch of prevention outweighs a pound of cure, after all.


"I will keep my hammer confined to my forge, Roofmistress," I said, assuring her.


I have no intentions of dishonoring your husband's daughter.


"So long as you do, I can assure you water and shade," she replied, motherly smile returning. "You must be hungry from your trip, Taric. If you would like, Garlvan can wait until this evening, if you would prefer to eat and rest before seeing him."


"Thank you for your offer, Roofmistress," I replied, shaking my head, "but I am certain that I would rest more peacefully knowing that I have found recognition in my forge-brother's eyes."


Garlvan, as it turned out, was not as I had envisioned. I had halfway expected to find a second Salin, a thick-limbed man almost as broad as he was tall and sporting both a beard and prodigious body hair. Instead, Garlvan was thin, almost lanky, though the long ropey muscles that stood out like cables on his arms whenever he clenched his fists showed that he had spent many a long hour pounding away on his anvil. He had a long, clever face sporting a wide mouth that, when he opened it, almost seemed to split his jaw away from the rest of his head entirely.


He was also only seven years my senior, for all that Lea had called him the "old smith".


After Lian made the introductions, we were left on our own. The battery of questions began immediately.


"What color should the ingot glow in preparation for the first stages of forging a spearhead?"


"What is the correct ratio of coke to iron for wire-steel?"


"Let me see your hands."


At the last, I held out my hands to Garlvan, who peered down at the banded calluses running across my palm and lumped along the pads of my fingers.


"You have a smith's hands," he allowed, stepping back as I dropped my hands by my sides. "And you know the basics, at least. You've forged your tools?"


I nodded towards the pack, which I had left resting on a table by the door to the smithy. "See for yourself."


Garlvan did so, flipping the rawhide strap up free of the toggle holding the pack closed and whistling appreciatively at the contents. "All your handiwork? By your honor, Salin didn't hold your hand at all."


"By my word as a smith," I confirmed, "I bartered for the raw ore, I smelted it down into steel and coked the bloomery myself, and every hammerblow was delivered by mine own arm."


"Well then…" Garlvan looked down once more, eyes resting on my hammer. "What did your master name you then?"


"Smoke-Caught Steel," I said, parroting the phrase Salin had coined only a week and a half ago. "And you?"


"Wire-Armed," Garlvan said, grinning as he held his arms up for inspection. "The name proves itself."


"So it does," I agreed. "I see you, Garlvan, man of the Nine Valleys Sept. I see you, wire-armed Aiel, fellow of the Forge, and by your forge I greet you."

"And I see you, Taric," Garlvan replied, "man of the Jarra Sept, at least for now. I see you, smoke-caught Aiel, fellow of the Forge. May your arms be strong, your fingers quick, and your skin unburnt."


"And may sparks never fall in your beard," I returned, falling for a moment into the banter Salin and I had enjoyed. "I look forward to working with you."


"And I look forward to seeing what you are truly capable of." Garlvan shook his head. "Seventeen years… Bloody ashes, but you move fast? Well, skill will out… I will tell Lian that your iron is true, but first?"


Arms like steel ropes lashed around my shoulders and pulled me in tight. Off-guard for a moment, I quickly returned the embrace.


"Welcome to Cold Stones Hold. May you find water and shade, brother."


When I left Shende Hold, I left a brother in blood behind. But, I dared to hope, perhaps here among the Taardad, I have found a brother in craft.


That alone would make the run worth it.

 

[Readhead]

 

[Readhead]

(Thank you to MetalDragon and TheBattleSage for edits.)


26 Aine, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste


After Garlvan vouched for my skills to Lian, the last embers of suspicion in her eyes sputtered out. Bidding my forge-brother a farewell, the Hold's Roofmistress escorted me to the vacant smithy, pointing out local landmarks and introducing me to passersby as we went.


As far as softening up tactics went, her gambit was quite effective, albeit unnecessary; my greatmother's greatmother had been quite pointed in her instruction to travel to the Taardad, after all, and had made no bones about the sort of terms I could expect.


It was still a kind gesture. While I was certain that the Nine Valleys Sept would be welcoming of a smith regardless of his company, having the Roofmistress herself personally make the introductions certainly produced more enthusiastic greetings. Everybody I met made me feel quite welcome in my new hold, all of them tastefully overlooking the poor taste I had exhibited in being born to the Chareen Aiel instead of the Taardad.


By the time Lian broached the topic of the terms of my employment as we entered the smithy with its forge full of cold ashes, I would have already considered myself fully sold on the offer, had I the freedom to decline.


In the end, it was about as I had anticipated. For two years, half of my day's labor would be for the good of Cold Rocks Hold and the Nine Valleys Sept, meaning I would have to work on whatever projects Lian as the Roofmistress or Rhuarc, chief of the Nine Valleys Sept and the broader Taardad Aiel, set as a priority. If no such projects existed, I would take on any work members of the Nine Valleys Sept needed done free of charge. This labor would both recompense the members of the sept dedicated to mining the iron and coal my ever-hungry forge devoured as well as essentially pay off the mortgage on the smithy itself. When the first two years were up, the smithy and its tools would pass into my ownership as the resident smith and my daily communal work allotment would be reduced to two hours.


That wasn't to say that the other half of my working day would be my own. As an unmarried man without any female relatives in the Hold, I was in a bit of a tricky situation regarding lodgings. Per Aiel custom, men do not own houses; per the lack of traffic through the Threefold Land, there was nothing like an inn or a common house at Cold Rocks Hold. The handful of travelers that did pass by the hold, if welcomed by Lian, would typically be hosted by her, finding water and shade beneath her roof. However, since Lea was the daughter of Rhuarc and lived under the same roof as Lian, along with Rhuarc's other wife and Lea's mother Amys, my specific circumstances made that common solution regrettably unworkable.


Very few mothers would be inclined to allow their daughter's potential suitor to sleep below their roof, after all.


There was, however, some precedent for us to fall back upon for a solution to the conundrum of where I would rest my head. Warriors of the same society recognized one another as brothers, and so a warrior visiting from another sept would often shelter under the roof of a wife, sister, or mother of a fellow society member, the society bonds providing a surrogate for the absent familial bonds. While smiths lacked anything as formal as an official society, or even something so comparatively prosaic as a guild or union, we still recognized one another as family. Garlvan had already welcomed me as a brother.


Unfortunately, the simple solution presented by those bonds had fallen off the table before I had even set foot in Cold Rocks Hold.


"Garlvan is newly married," Lian informed me as we approached the home of Neiralla, widow of Jhoran, the smith whose forge I would soon be occupying, "and I suspect would not welcome your presence overly much. He and Brienda are trying quite hard for a child." A light smirk touched her face. "Their neighbors argue over whether he makes more noise in the forge by day or the bed by night."


"I have heard such comments before," I dryly replied, remembering Rokka's quip in the sweat-tent. "I suppose some questions surpass all walls between sept and clan."


"Then I am certain you will welcome a place below Neiralla's roof instead, should she be willing to offer you one," said Lian briskly. "And in this way, both of you shall benefit from this arrangement."


I suspect Neiralla will benefit far more than I from this arrangement, I thought, but nodded anyway. It wasn't an unreasonable situation, and I could certainly understand Lian's desire to kill two birds with one stone.


Of the half-day not tied up with working towards the communal good, half of my remaining time would be dedicated towards working on Neirella's account. This could mean that half of any food or goods bartered to me in exchange for smith-work would go into her hands, or it could mean that I spent two hours or so a day helping her tend to the roof's garden plot, maintenance of the house itself, or any other work she needed doing. In exchange, she would act as my host, providing me with a warm place to sleep as well as my daily board.


I would have a place to rest my head, and the widow would have a man stepping up to support her and her roof, filling the shoes left vacant by her husband's death. A neat solution that neatly fulfilled all cultural obligations, even if it did leave me somewhat shortchanged.


A factor I am sure was well-known to my ancestor when she offered my services. And of course, she also thought far enough ahead to provide me the means to escape my unequal situation, if I should take it. After all, this situation is only necessary because I am unmarried…


"What was it that caused Jhoran to wake from the Dream?" I asked, glancing at Lian from the corner of my eye as I changed the topic to a question that had dogged me on my trip from Shende Hold. "Was he a particularly old man?"


"No," said Lian, regret ghosting across her voice as she shook her head, "he was only a few years younger than me. It was the Smith's Sickness that woke him from the Dream, Leiran's son. My sister-wife has little talent in Delving, but Tanna, Wise One of Four Tears Hold, said it was his kidneys that betrayed him, halting in their labor and filling his blood with poison. He had the rashes and the numbness in his feet and hands for years, but in the last months, as his memory began to leave him…"


"...We sent him on to spit in Sightblinder's eye," I finished for her, nodding my understanding, my sympathy. "May he stick like a bone in the Leafblighter's craw."


Lian nodded back silently. Nothing else needed to be said. It was an unfortunate reality that such things happened with little recourse, but it was part of being an Aiel. An errant arrow or plunging spear could quench any of the Algai'd'siswai, any of the Dancers of the Spear, and mercury poisoning could leave a metalworker fading as his heavy metal laden blood shredded his kidneys and killed nerves.


"Always the Threefold Land tests us." That's what Sorilea would say. For all that medicine among the Aiel is only herbal poultices and occasional healing from the Wise Ones with the talent, she would be correct.


We continued on in silence, stopping in front of a house much like the rest in Cold Rocks Hold.


Compared to the great cliffside bulk of Shende Hold, the house looked almost crude in its construction, rough at the edges and walls unplastered, molding away into the wall of the terrace behind it. A flat roof of tightly bundled yucca stems chinked with dried mud stretched over walls of yellow brick mortared with dried clay. I recognized the bricks as adobe, similar to the ones that protected Shende Hold's inhabitants from the heat of day and the cold of night. Below the walls, a foundation and floor of gray stones, chiseled into blocks and polished smooth, stretched back into the similarly gray stone of the mesa's interior slope. Judging by the lack of protective plaster over the walls and the light roof, it was clear that the rare storms rampaging down the Dragonwall's slopes never got so far north and east as to trouble Cold Rocks Hold with rain. On the other hand, the finely worked foundations of all of the houses I saw were sure to keep the interior temperatures of the dwellings cool even in the heart of summer.


As with the other houses on this tier, all of which were oriented towards the hold's central pond, a tight avenue winding before them before joining the broader sloping path leading downhill, a thick hook-hung curtain served as the house's door while slighter curtains in light fabrics hung over narrow-cut windows. In the case of this house, the curtain-door was open, tied off to a wrought-iron hook protruding from between two bricks, allowing the sun and sun-warmed air into the dwelling.


Just inside the threshold, a woman squatted, booted feet flat to the foundation stone and hands clasped neatly in front of her. Seeing the Roofmistress approach, she rose to her standing height, though she remained on the other side of the invisible barrier of the threshold from us.


Neiralla was tall for a woman, even for an Aiel woman, standing less than a head shorter than me. In all dimensions, it seemed as if she had been stretched: Her face was long and thin, flaming red hair pulled back from a broad forehead which tapered down to a narrow chin; likewise, her limbs and fingers were long and slender, while her trunk almost swam in her loose white shirt, the length of her abdomen making gaunt what would have been a perfectly normal amount of flesh on a smaller woman.


Her hands, I noted, were deeply stained, those long clever fingers blotchy with gray and yellow, brown and black.


"Roofmistress," the widow said shortly, cocking her head in recognition to Lian. "Smith of the Chareen Aiel," she added, reddened eyes sweeping towards me, noting my cadin'sor before refocusing on the hold's mistress. "So, he is to be my husband's replacement at the forge?"


I didn't need the coaxing glance from Lian to prompt me. Stepping forwards, I nodded deeply to Neiralla, nearly bowing. "Wife of my forge-brother, may you find water and shade all the days of your life. I beg water from you and shade beneath your roof. I am Taric of the Chareen Aiel, son of Ayesha and Leiran, student of Salin of Shende Hold. Garlvan of the Wire Arms has named me brother, and Lian the Roofmistress has granted me the shelter of her roof."


"Garlvan has seen you?" Neiralla's tone was skeptical as she looked me up and down, clearly noting my youth. "So be it. You are brother to my Jhoran, woken from the Dream, his last day come at last after painful months. I see you. Cold Rocks Hold's Roofmistress has offered you the shelter of her roof; why then do you trouble me, Man of the Chareen?"


"I have come to Cold Rocks Hold to light anew a forge that has gone dark," I said, falling into the cant of ritual call and response. Lian, I noted, had stepped back, just as she had remained outside the forge when Garlvan had tested me to prove my credentials. Facilitating this interaction had been her role, but only Neiralla could permit me to shelter beneath her roof. "Your husband was forge-brother to me. I have come to your hold as a stranger, with no kin to shelter me nor a wife to bake my bread. Should I relight your husband's forge, I would provide for you as your husband did, with the labors of my hands and the sweat of my brow, for at least two years and longer, should I remain unmarried and roofless by then."


"You are my husband's forge-brother if Garlvan acknowledged you as such, young though you be," Neiralla agreed, dark blue eyes peering into me. "Should you provide…" her focus flickered to Lian again, verifying something before returning to me, "a quarter of your daily labor to support your forge-brother's family in his stead, I will bake your bread and brew your oosquai, mend your clothes and promise you the shelter of my roof."


"By my word," I said, raising a hand to my heart, "as you ask, it shall be given. I shall support you and your roof."


"By my word," she replied, "as you ask, it shall be given. I shall shelter you below my roof."


"I have seen your oaths," Lian announced, stepping back up beside me. "Let it be done."


"Let it be done," Neiralla and I chorused.


And that was that. Lian clasped Neiralla's wrist and leaned in, perhaps whispering a condolence, and then clasped my wrist in farewell. Then she left, no doubt attending to the next of a long list of chores with admirable diligence, leaving myself and the stranger who had become my landlady standing alone in front of her house.


"Well then," Neiralla said, the ritual weight lifting from her tone as she brushed her stained hands against her voluminous skirt, leaving only the slight but noticeable huskiness of someone who had recently wept behind, "I hope the trip from Shende Hold wasn't too hard… Taric, is it?"


"It is," I confirmed. "The trip was arduous and my pack heavy. I am relieved to be beneath the roof of a hold once again."


"I imagine you are." A faint smile ghosted across the weary contours of her tired face. "I imagine you are… Well, no need for you to carry your pack any further. Come below my roof, Taric, and relieve yourself of it. Let us sit and talk. I would know more of you, including how you came to be a journeyman so early."


"My pack is lighter now that I have stopped off at your husband's smithy," I said, eagerly stepping over the threshold and happy to be out of the noon heat. "His smithy is admirable, though I daresay not fully a match for my old master's. I regret that I hadn't the chance to meet him before he woke from the Dream."


As with all things Aiel, grief was complex, deeply situational, and wedded to the bone-deep understanding of duty and obligation so centric to our understanding of ourselves. For a start, no Aiel mourned the death of another, no matter how intimate and dear; this was because, to the Aiel, nobody was ever truly dead so long as they continued to defy the Lord of the Grave, the anthropomorphization of death called Sightblinder, that my ancestor had taught me of years ago. As all Aiel took defiance of Sightblinder to be core to their identity as Aiel, nobody who was Aiel remained dead, only waking from the Dream called life to dance the spears with death itself.


And yet… While the Aiel didn't mourn for the deaths of friends, family, and lovers, they did mourn the absences those deaths left in the lives of the survivors. The only times it was acceptable for Aiel Spears to sing was before battle and after, when it came time to sing dirges for the fallen. So long as more than a single Aiel survived, those dirges were sung together; likewise, grieving was a communal process in the holds of the Aiel as well as on the battlefield. Families would come to brag about the accomplishments of deceased kin. Coworkers and friends would come to speak glowingly of masterful works, biting jokes, or acts of physical prowess accomplished while the dead had yet drawn breath.


When tears were shed, they were shed in private. It was a minor act of dishonor against the dead, that quiet weeping for those who had awoken to the true war, the endless struggle against the life-smothering Shadow, but of all the toh one could incur, it was the most self-correcting.


The only way to discharge it was to live on, fulfilling the dreams and desires of those who were gone.


"A good smith, was my Jhoran," Neiralla agreed, drifting back into the house towards the sitting rug spread out next to the central cooking fire, which burnt merrily in the neat ring built for just that purpose into the polished floor itself, over which a well-maintained pot simmered. "A good smith, a good husband, and a good father."


"You have children?" I asked, surprised. Lian hadn't mentioned any children, and apart from Neiralla the small one-room house was deserted, though I noted the decorations hanging from each wall. A multitude of colors and patterns swam against brick and stone, the eddies of the wind stirring the fabrics no Aiel had woven into life. I knew that the sept chief of the Jarra had similar hangings; that the smith's dwelling had them too underlined the prosperity of Cold Rocks Hold. "Have they already married, then?"


"Jhoran has gone to join our sons in dancing with Sightblinder," Neiralla said matter of factly. "Neisha is away for now, keeping watch over the sept's goats with her friends." A thin smile graced the widow's long face. "Just like her brothers, she brims with energy. It was always impossible for any of the three to sit still long enough to pick up their father's craft, or my own. Perhaps that is why they were so eager to take up the spear."


While the revelation about her sons had been almost untouched by any hint of emotion, the following tidbit about her energetic children echoed with wry amusement and old regret. Regret that none of her children had followed Neiralla into her trade as a dyer, considering her stained hands? Residual shame that her children hadn't mastered the usual Aiel stoicism, the willingness to sit in quiet readiness for hours on end, ready to pounce in ambush? Recrimination of her own failures, that if she had pressed her children more firmly to take up a craft rather than a spear then they would still remain with her?


Impossible to know, and impossible to ask.


"Tell me of your sons, and of Neisha and of Jhoran," I said instead. "Tell me of their deeds, that I may see them before me, and that I may greet Neisha as a sister when she returns from her watch."


Neiralla's thin smile softened and widened at the invitation. The grieving period for her sons had certainly long since passed, their stories already told by family and friends in a collective outpouring of grief, but clearly their absences in their mother's life still yawned wide, as did the absence of their father. The man at whose feet Neiralla had once set a wreath and her heart had woken from the Dream, but in introducing him to me he would live again, ever so briefly.


"Leiden was the eldest of the twins by two minutes," she began, lowering herself to a secondary carpet, thick and plush and undoubtedly some piece of foreign war-booty, draped across the broad central rug. Hastily, I swung my depleted pack off my shoulders and began unlacing my boots. "Though he was also the shorter by two heads, much to his brother Feiden's great amusement. They quarreled often as children, and Feiden always enjoyed putting a hand on his brother's head and keeping him away in their struggles."


"Did they quarrel once they took up the spears?" I asked as I lowered myself down to the rug, remembering Gharadin and his confused anger. I wondered how he was doing, whether the spear I had given him was serving him well, whether our father was helping him maintain the killing edge I had ground into the spear's blade.


"Oh, always!" Neiralla laughed, eyes wrinkling shut in merriment. "The arguments were endless, the competitions constant! Both joined the Sovin Nai, Knife Hands, and were constantly wrestling in the guise of practice! Though," she smirked, "neither could ever move their father. Ah, I remember the first time they both challenged Jhoran at once! He left them both as knotted as old roots, all tangled up in a pile together!"


Shadows lengthened as the stories flowed. At first, I was almost passive, only asking the occasional question to prompt fresh stories whenever the flow of words and memories seemed to taper, but after an hour or so Neiralla began to ask about the home I had left behind, about my family and the apprenticeship that had ultimately brought me to her door. So I told her of the Jarra Sept, swapping a story about Salin accidentally hammering his thumb for a tale of Jhoran competing against Garlvan to make the most arrowheads in a day, and trading the story of Gharadin's first capar hunt for her laughing account of how Neisha had bested another girl in a naqa'id, a verbal battle of boasting and insults that had ended with Neisha basking in the approving roars of her audience.


After a certain point, the oosquai came out, as it always did. After several drinks from the flask of the home-brewed liquor, the other stories began to emerge from Neiralla the Dyer, Jhoran's widow. Stories of tending to a once-powerful man laid low by wounds below the skin. Stories of strength fleeing and contaminated water pouring unstoppably from top and bottom, of abominable cramping pain and creeping numbness. Of slipping memory and mounting confusion, of breaths desperately fought for and ever-mounting blood in the urine.


And finally, a story of holding hands, her daughter holding Jhoran's left hand as Neiralla held his right, and of the Wise One assisting Jhoran onto the next battle, waking him at last from a Dream that had turned into a nightmare.


Neiralla had wept as she told that story, though she refused to acknowledge her tears. Perhaps the oosquai kept her from noticing the wetness seeping down her face.


I was no Algai'd'siswai, to sing only in the heat of battle or in mourning, but smiths had their own songs, their own traditions. And so, as Neiralla told me the story of the last hours of the life of the brother I had never met, I sang for him a dirge of my own hasty composition.


As I helped Neiralla set out the sleeping mats and blankets, I thought about Jhoran. I could believe, both as an Aiel and from the strength of my experiences, that nobody truly died and that death was only the door to a new struggle against an enemy who could never truly be bested. It was a part of our culture, the laughing dismissal of death. When I was younger, I had considered that apparent disdain for mortality almost aberrant; what sort of person would care so little for their own life, after all?


But of course, I thought as I stretched out under my own blanket, on the other side of the cooking fire from Neiralla, I know for certain that death needn't be the end, that those who have died can, at least, carry on and live again. But my case is the explicit result of interference on the part of a malign and petty entity. What of Jhoran? Would he want to live again, after such a protracted death? Or would that simply be another cruelty?


Those last questions, at least, I knew the answer to. He had died an Aiel, and though he had suffered in his last days, he had died in the company of his family. If every deceased persisted and not just myself, I was certain that he would remain just as Aiel in the next life as he had been in this one.


There are worse mindsets to die with, I considered, remembering my last panicked request that my sadistic tormentor reconsider before my first death was completed. Better I suppose to remain defiant to the end rather than ever give Being X the satisfaction.


What sort of person would care so little for the end of their own life? What person could look into the face of certain death and laugh?


I could, I thought dreamily, already half asleep. I will, when the time comes… Threefold are the blessings of the Threefold Land… And if our land is an anvil and the experiences we endure the hammer…


But what point does a hammer have, save how the hand wielding it directs? For thousands of years, the Aiel have been hammered on the anvil, softened with exhaustion, and tempered with pain… Tempered to a point like the hardest steel… But why…?


The harder the steel, a voice much like Salin's murmured in my ear, the more brittle the blade. Mix soft iron to improve flexibility, lest the blade snap as soon as it touches bone.


But what mineral must be mixed with a people, to soften them before they should break…?


To that, Salin had no answer.


Perhaps, I thought, because that knowledge, like Ji'e'toh, must come from within…


6 Adar, 997 NE
Cold Rocks Hold, Taardad Aiel, Aiel Waste


Compared to the spear around which so much of the Aiel identity revolved, the humble buckler suffered from obscurity.


It was easy to understand why the small shield was so little remarked. The spear occupied a central place in Aiel culture as the killing weapon, the physical embodiment of the defiance of the Aiel against all enemies, be they Shadowspawn or Treekillers, Borderlanders or the next clan over. This despite the fact that the recurve bows equally common to all Aiel clans were at least as deadly as our spears, if not considerably moreso for both their range and their ability to punch an arrow clear through a Trolloc breastplate. The shield by contrast was not a defining piece of the Aiel self-image, but rather just a tool to keep the Spear alive for long enough to close with the enemy and shove three hands' length of steel through his throat.


Even among blacksmiths, who never lifted a weapon against any save for the Shadowspawn or while hunting, this disinterest persisted. The forging of an Aiel smith's first spear was a seminal moment in his career second only to the presentation of his finished toolset to his master as the proof of his apprenticeship's culmination. No such ceremony accompanied the finishing of a smith's first buckler, though. It might as well have been a different variety of hammer or mattock to the Aiel; a useful tool, undeniably, but far from sacred.


But still, useful nonetheless. Which was why I was finishing off my fifth buckler of the day. Or, rather, finishing my part of the fifth shield of the day. In an hour or so, a boy or two would show up to gather the newly forged shields up and would take them over to the cluster of leatherworkers and tanners who worked where the prevailing winds blew away from the rest of Cold Rocks Hold.


There, the leatherworkers would soak thick, pre-cut rings of leather and stretch them out over the surface of the shield, force the central boss of the shield through the narrow hole, and slip the hide beneath the curled metal lip of the shield's outer rim. They would take a second piece of hide, larger than the first, and do much the same thing on the shield's other side before crimping the lip down to pin the two pieces of hide in place. When the leather dried, it would contract tightly against both sides of the shield, pinned in place by the lip biting down into the edge. Finally, a piece of rawhide would be tightly wound around the handle I had riveted to the boss's bowl-like depression.


It was almost as simple of a process as the one I used to make the lightweight shields themselves.


The day before yesterday, I had spent several hours hammering away at several steel ingots still stocked in Jhoran's forge until the cherry-red metal was flattened into sheets roughly half a finger thick. From these, I carefully cut discs about three hands in diameter, using my snips to rough out the cuts and my file to par any rough edges or irregular points away. Then, I hammered the life out of the center of the disc, trapping the sheet metal over the top of a shallow old pot with my vice and pounding the disc until the center was bowled out to roughly the dimensions of the pot's interior. Tapping any irregularities out from the new boss, I rolled the disc around and tapped the edge over, rolling it slightly to create the necessary exterior lip with the help of my peen hammer.


Finally, I took a strip of steel cut from another sheet and beat it into a nice curving arch, and then peened its sides over to create a more substantial grip. After a bit more work to overlap the edges to reduce the chances of accidentally cutting the wielder's fingers open, I punched holes through the bases of the handles and the sides of the shield boss, threaded some narrow bar iron through the holes, and put the whole assembly back into the cooler portion of the forge, closer to the edge. When the more malleable iron softened, I hammered both sides until the handle was fixed firmly in place, crudely riveting the two shield components together.


All told, the process took just a bit less than an hour on average, including the prep time necessary to produce the sheet steel to begin with.


…I understand why this process is not celebrated by the smiths, I realized as I set my newly finished shield aside to cool and reached for my water gourd. A good spear takes time and effort. Enough time for the smith to grow invested in his project, to feel for the iron beneath his hammer. By comparison, with the shields, there is no artistry, no investment.


I could add some artistry, I knew. It would take only short work to assemble some etching tools, and combined with my peen hammer and thin chisels I could decorate the steel surfaces of the shields passing below my hands.


But, what would be the point? The leather would cover whatever decorations my hands left, front and back, and nobody would see the craftsmanship. Besides, since the shields were going from the leatherworkers' hands into the hold's own stock, to be distributed to the sept's warriors to replace gear lost during raids or damaged during training, I would never know which Spear or Maiden carried my shields on their off-hand. The connection wouldn't be there.


A tool, I concluded, concurring with the accepted wisdom of my trade. A useful one, but nothing more.


"I see you, Taric."


Lowering the gourd from my lips, I turned to face the smithy's open door. Like most of the structures built within my newly adopted hold, Jhoran's old forge was oriented towards the central oasis and towards the cleft of the mesa's encircling arms, where the rock never fully forgot the cool touch of night.


Framed between the jambs stood Lea, daughter of the clan chief Rhuarc and Amys, his Wise One wife. The sun, just past true noon, burnt above and behind her where she stood just outside the threshold to the smithy. Viewed from the shadowy swelter of the smithy, framed by its bricks and haloed in the eye-searing light, she looked like the sun itself, her hair like freshly-cut copper catching mirror-like a piece of the heat that ceaselessly battered the Threefold Land.


"I see you, Lea," I replied, using the familiar address just as she had done for me, setting aside her status as her parents' daughter. I spoke instead to the girl standing before me, her hair loose save for the braided leather bound tightly across her forehead, holding at bay the long bangs that threatened to sweep across pale green eyes. Pale green eyes that, I noted, were peering curiously around the smithy, darting from vice-mounted workbench to stolid anvil to baskets heaped with coal. "What brings you to my forge? Come," I invited, setting my gourd aside and beckoning her forwards, "step under my roof and share my shade."


"Your roof?" The embers smoldering in her hair spread to her eyes, lighting a challenging fire. Her brow wrinkled into a nest of tiny furrows between her eyebrows, coincidentally crinkling the bridge of her nose up ever so slightly. Combined with the way said eyebrows thickened as they marched away from her temples and towards her face's interior, proceeding from near invisibility to gingery storm clouds, her mounting frown brought to mind the way the forge's flame swelled as the bellows blew. "How marvelous the Chareen must be, if two years pass for them in a tenday less two!"


"By the oath I swore to my forge-brother's wife, I stand for Jhoran; though the Hold may own the structure, only a smith may own his forge," I retorted, having somewhat anticipated a challenge from Lea when next I saw her. For one reason or another, she had all but picked up her skirts and fled from our last interaction. That she would burn to return the favor was unquestionable: she was Aiel, after all, and to be Aiel was to spend your life seeking out and overcoming challenges, dancing until the Day ended at last. And so I spread my arms in slight acquiescence, not backing down from her half-joking challenge that was both a light-hearted frolic and an entirely serious bid for social dominance. I would not back down, but I would keep my own blade all but fully sheathed in our dance.


I was, after all, a smith. My role was to create and to maintain, to heat and hammer and mold together again that which had grown dull, broken, and frail.


"So," I replied, tilting my head at just the angle necessary to convey my welcome even as I kept my hands wide open and out to assert dominance over my space, "this roof is both of ours, and yet belongs to neither of us fully. You are not your mother's near-sister, and I work a forge still warm with the fire my forge-brother lit."


"Truly, I am not Lian," Lea acknowledged, looking almost pained for a moment by the concession before letting her grimacing mask fall away, a smirk slipping onto her lips to accompany the tumult upon her brow. "As to your forge work, I can say nothing. Garlvan vouched for you, as…" and this time, the pain looked almost sincere, "as does the work of your hands. So far, nobody has complained about the quality of your work."


"You sound as if you have checked," I commented mildly, slowly smiling as she blushed and failed to deny the allegation immediately. "I had no idea that Jhoran occupied such a treasured corner of your heart, that you would worry so about his successor!"


"All of the Nine Valleys Sept are dear to me," Lea said seriously, for a moment a chief's daughter again, and I saw why, beyond her heritage, she had been marked out by the Wise Ones as an apprentice to be.


"Which is," she continued, her challenging levity returning, "why I have come to check up on you, Taric of the Jarra Sept of the Chareen Aiel! You are not," Lea added, lifting a hand from the handle of the basket that I suddenly realized she had been carrying to jab a finger at me, "not yet of the Nine Valleys, nor of the Taardad! My eye is upon you!"


I smiled at Lea, enjoying how her frown by turns subsided and reformed as she remembered her playacted anger. The effect was like heated coals that spluttered and glowed with renewed life as the bellows breathed over them. "In that case, would you care to step inside my smithy and out of the sun's harsh glare to better keep an eye on me? I have just finished the hours allotted to the hold and its projects, but your sept has given me no shortage of work. Surely then, after I labor under your keen eye, you can join Garlvan in vouching for my prowess."


"Oh?" The smirk sharpened with interest as Lea looked me up and down, her eyes wandering across my shoulders and lingering on my chest, where the jacket of my cadin'sor hung open in the vain hope for a cooling breeze. "I doubt it. After all, I know very little about hammering… metal."


Still, she took my invitation at last, stepping across the threshold and into the one-room brick structure I had inherited from Jhoran.


"Not all are so fortunate to be called to the forge," I gravely replied as I stepped back out of her way, permitting her access to the interior of the smithy. It was gratifying to watch her eye, vibrant with curiosity, roam across my workshop, seeming to inventory each rasp and every awl. "Some must settle to be the daughters of chiefs instead."


"Settle?" Lea turned on her heel to glare up at me, her hair glimmering like fresh embers in the intersection of sunbeams and forgelight. "And what exactly do you claim to know about clan chief's daughters, Taric?"


"That they carry the honor of their sept around their necks, and that they hold ji in the eyes of all who have mentioned them in conversation," I easily replied with a careless shrug, relishing the momentary flash of unguarded pleased surprise that crossed Lea's face. "Then again, you are the only one that I have met, so perhaps I have been misled."


Before the fury kindling in her sky-blue eyes could gain sufficient air to explode, I added, "but in truth, I know little about you, Lea. When I was sent away from Shende Hold, all my honored ancestor gave me was your name and the knowledge that you had yet to lay a wreath at any man's feet."


I shrugged again, but this time not with mocking carelessness. I had no problem sympathizing with the weight Lea carried, the burden of which became abruptly visible in her stance.


"But," I continued, feeling bonds of social obligations tug against something deeper, "it is none of my business who lays wreaths where; my business with your sept is solely that of hammer and anvil."


That could have been enough, but just as with Gharadin, I wanted there to be no room for misunderstandings between us.


I had obligations, that much was true; I had discharged my responsibility in the most literal interpretation of my ancestor's words during my first meeting with Lea. Stepping back from the schemes of Wise Ones now would incur toh, as goading Lea forwards down the path clearly marked by my ancestor and hers would, at least by my own understanding of honorable conduct.


"I am content to forge for the Taardad Aiel, and for the daughter of Amys the Wise One," I stated plainly, emphasizing my professional role and her social status, demarcating the break between those roles and the people called Taric and Lea. "Should you desire, only that bond will lie between us, and nothing more."


"You were sent to Cold Rocks Hold to be pursued," Lea said plainly, a statement of fact rather than an insult or question. "Does that not offend you, Taric, to be used in such a manner?"


There was no reason to turn the question back around on Lea; the answer was written clearly across her face and her history. By the unspoken but clear words Sorilea had shared back at Shende Hold and Lian's blunter comments during my first hour among the Nine Valleys Sept, it was clear that Lea had pushed back against her mother's desire to bind her to the Wise Ones. She had equally clearly resisted the pressure to start courting, despite being of the age where first romances were expected. And unlike most young Aiel women in her position, Lea had not run to the Maidens to marry a spear rather than a man.


All of this marked Lea out as willful even by Aiel standards, determined to cling to… what, exactly? She was no idle dilettante – there were no idle hands in an Aiel hold – so it wasn't just some refusal to conform to social expectations that motivated her defiance.


"We all have our obligations," I replied, "and meeting you is one of the lightest burdens I have ever had the pleasure to carry. Besides, no matter the desires of others, it would still ultimately be your decision to weave a wreath and mine to pick it up. Even in duty, the freedom to choose our dream remains ours only."


"So long as shade remains, so long as water lasts," Lea remarked, almost whimsically.


So long as we are still alive.


"So long as shade remains," I agreed, and smiled at her.


Hesitantly, she returned my smile.


We had at last found a measure of common ground.


Our detente accomplished, Lea opened her basket to reveal a clay pot, tightly lidded and swaddled in rags, bundled together with two bowls and a couple of spoons.


Before I could protest that Neiralla had sent me off to work with a packed lunch of cold beans and yesterday's bread, Lea was peeling away the wax layer that fixed the pot's lid in place. Within the earthen vessel, revealed when she lifted up the lid, was a crust of rough cornbread as thick as two fingers together, freshly baked and steaming slightly even in the warm air of the forge. My mouth was already watering as she plunged a long spoon down through the crust, but when she turned it over to crack the layer of coarsely milled corn flour and kernels open, my stomach released a growl like a hammerblow.


The smell of onions and chilies flooded the workshop, drowning the tangs of iron and coal beneath an aromatic flood. Beneath the onion and the peppers, I detected something rich and savory, meat stewed in bone stock for hours, if I was any judge.


"Don't just stand there!" Lea snapped, waking me from my hunger-addled reverie. "Clear the floor and find something for us to lay on! Or does your hammer do all your thinking for you?" Her pleased smile pulled the sting from her bark, though.


I considered firing back, reigniting the playful argument we had shared on the threshold; another sniff of the meal Lea had brought made me reconsider.


"I will fetch my broom," I announced, as if the idea had simply dawned on me, unrelated to her imperious demand. "So many clinkers upon a forge's floor is unsightly."


I carefully ignored what could only have been a snort of poorly concealed laughter as I retrieved my broom from the corner where it stood. Thankfully, by the time I had deposited the sweepings in the wicker bin a gai'shain would haul to the communal dump pit sometime this evening, Lea had already dished up two bowls and had stretched herself across the broadest expanse of floor available in the smithy where she waited, head propped up on her hands and watching me closely.


"Thank you for the meal, Lea," I said as I slowly lowered myself to the coolness of the stone floor, leaning forward until I was laying on my side, head propped up on one arm. This was the preferred posture for shared meals among the Aiel; while hasty meals could be eaten on foot, as during a march, and solitary meals could be eaten sitting on the floor, shared meals were always lateral affairs. Diners ate face to face, and the smithy's cramped confines meant I was almost cheek to cheek with Lea. "Nothing is more welcome after a day's hard work."


"Save your thanks," Lea sniffed disdainfully. "You have somehow succeeded in impressing many among the sept with the speed and quality of your work; feeding you a meal or two is a small enough price to maintain the strength of your arm."


"And what have you brought me, oh Rhuarc's daughter, to maintain my strength?"


I dipped my spoon in and from the bowl lifted a heavy load of pale meat, chopped into cubes and drowned in a savory red sauce glinting with rendered fat glinting oily gold below cornbread impregnated with the stew. Pale yellow discs of squash studded the stew like treasure, while two varieties of beans – one large and dark red, the other small and black – bulked out the stew.


"Goat stew with chilis," Lea proudly replied. "Made according to my own recipe… though the bread is Lian's work. I just dropped a few slices into the pot before I left her roof."


"Please pass on my thanks," I said absently and took a bite.


Almost immediately I took another, and then another. It was gorgeous, the medley of fiery spice and greasy savor, slashed by the sweetness of the cornbread. Neiralla was far from a bad cook, having fed a husband and children for decades, but…


But this is easily the best meal I have had since I left Shende Hold, I decided, practically inhaling the goat chili. Perhaps one of the best meals I have had in this life! What did she do to achieve such flavor? Such tenderness?


A giggle reminded me that I was not alone and I slowed, suddenly acutely, painfully aware that I had begun to pig out in front of a very pretty girl. Involuntarily, heat began to spread across my cheeks.


Damn these teenage hormones! How many times must you vex me?


"So even the unflappable Taric is not without weakness," Lea teased from less than an armspan away. "By all means, eat away. Keep your energy up; Garlvan needs all the help he can get, seeing to the needs of our hold."


"Our" hold now, is it?


"There is no end to work," I agreed, not in this life or the next, I fear. "But the work will wait for now. Tell me more about yourself, Lea. Who else are you, besides Rhuarc and Amys's daughter?"


"Hmm…" the glib reply I'd halfway expected did not come. Instead, Lea took a moment, clearly considering the question as she nibbled on a chunk of cornbread, absentmindedly licking the traces of broth from her fingers as she mulled over her answer.


At last, just as I was reaching the end of my bowl, she spoke. "You speak strangely, Taric. How can you separate a person from who they are? If I removed the beans from the soup you enjoyed, surely the soup would be changed."


"Less filling," I interjected with a smile that Lea returned. "But you can also identify the beans – and the meat and the vegetables – as their own things within the soup without referring to all the rest every time."


"Perhaps you should be the Wise One," Lea grumbled, shaking her head disdainfully. "But, so be it. I have two brothers and several sisters, all of whom are older than I am save for Ronam, my younger brother. Koram, my older brother, followed our father into the Aethan Dor, the Red Shields."


"What about your sisters?" I asked after a moment's pause. "Did any of them become Wise Ones, like your mother?"


"Why do you think she is so determined that I follow in her footsteps?" Lea rhetorically replied, snorting dismissively. "No, Aviellin and Garna both married their spears, and Far Dareis Mai were happy to welcome them below their roof. Suarda laid her wreath at the feet of Dolan, chief of the Miadi Sept."


"No reason she couldn't be a Wise One," I said meditatively. "Amys is married, and to a chief as well. How did your sister escape?"


"Would that I knew," Lea muttered, partway between wonderment and annoyance. "Somehow, she just evaded their notice, crouching in the bush until their eyes had passed. Actually," she cocked her head, looking away from me and towards the carved stone of the forge's wall, "perhaps that truly was all that it was. Suarda always had a talent for fading away, simply performing her chores and tending to the herds… It was quite a surprise when she picked Dolan to be hers, and an even bigger surprise when he consented. If anybody had known they were courting, the word never reached me."


Perhaps that's the reason she was never really considered, I thought, playing idly with my soup spoon. The Wise Ones represent a check on the power of chiefs and societies, actingas moral arbitrators, sometimes even as a judiciary. Someone who outwardly goes with the flow while keeping their own affairs concealed would be difficult to trust with the authority the Wise Ones wield.


In that case, I wondered, climbing back to my feet, meal finished, why are the Wise Ones seemingly so insistent on Lea joining their number? And not just the Wise Ones – Lian identified Lea as a Wise One to be almost as soon as I met her.


As Lea rose to her feet and began packing her bowls and pot back into her basket, I took another look at her, trying to see my verbal sparring partner again through fresh eyes.


Her eyes, blue as the noon-hour sky, gleamed with quicksilver emotion; I had already found their emotive qualities amazing, just from our short acquaintanceship, how they danced from laughter to mortification to anger to humor once again in her otherwise immobile face. Her lips, pink as cactus flowers, perked to a slight smile when she was amused and flattened to spear-shaft straightness when she was cross, adorned a slightly freckled face. Her long hair, a light red that split the difference between the russet her father supposedly sported as a young man and the remarkable white that her mother Amys was widely known for, was held back from her face by an intricately beaded headband, all turquoise and umber. Treekiller gold dangled from her neck and her wrist, and below the jewelry muscles stood out on her well-developed forearms and neck.


Above and throughout her appearance, lines of determination showed. Something about the set of her face, the angle of her thin, notched brow, proclaimed a sort of stubborn immovability. It wasn't pride, so much as it was a certainty in her own understanding of what was right and true.


Very Aiel, I thought approvingly. Where else can strength truly spring from, if not from the certainty in one's own self and one's own understanding? If I had lacked confidence in myself and in my skills, I could never have risen up the ladder in either of my prior lives. If I had lacked certainty in my desire to set a new course for myself, Salin would never have taken me under his wing.


"Why do you stand against your mother's wishes, Lea?" I asked, stooping to help her gather up the remains of our lunch. "What is it about being a Wise One that drives you into defiance?"


She glanced up at me, her eyes searching my face for signs of chastisement or mockery. I tried my best to convey sincere curiosity and interest. For a moment, I thought I hadn't passed her test, for instead of speaking Lea sighed and straightened, rolling her shoulders and stretching her back, lips pursing with annoyance.


"You too are the descendent of Wise Ones, Taric," she said, slamming her basket shut with more force than was strictly necessary. "Tell me then, what do you think of your Greatmother? I already know that you did not shy away at her use of you."


"I had my own reasons to obey, aside from respect for my ancestor's office," I replied, waving a hand towards the worktable and the forge, and the anvil sitting between them atop a large stone block. "Salin, my master, is in no hurry to retire and Shende Hold is too small to really require two smiths. Coming to Cold Rocks Hold represented both a chance to contribute to our People and an opportunity to practice my craft as a journeyman."


"Another Wise One's answer," Lea noted, her voice neutral, its usual emotion banked by that layer of reserve common to interactions with strangers or distant and not well-liked acquaintances. She was guarding her reactions, and it was really only now that I realized just how strangely effusive she had been with me before. "Truly, Taric, you speak as they do. You answer my question while not answering it at the same time."


Already I could almost see her recede before me, the distance between us lengthening for all that we both stood feet firmly planted on stone. That abrupt gulf upset me more than I had expected; since I had come to Cold Rocks Hold, I had enjoyed substantive conversations with only three people – Garlvan, Neiralla, and Lea. Of the three, I had interacted with Lea the least – this was only our second conversation, after all, for all that it had reached an unexpected dimension.


Thinking about it, though…


Garlvan was a brother at the forge and speaking with him was always easy, for we both spoke the same language of coal and steel, but that also gave our interactions a peculiar tone of obligation; we were comrades in our craft, and so amicable relations were expected between us. I had talked with Garlvan for hours over the week since my arrival, exchanging tidbits about our shared craft over bread and dried meat, but we had said almost nothing to one another about who we were once we put our hammers and tinsnips down.


My interactions with Neiralla likewise bore the hallmarks of social obligation. She was the widow of the man whose place I had filled, and I had taken over her husband's role of supporting her and her children. At the same time, because she was so much older than me, enough that I was almost the age her sons, Leiden and Feiden, had been when they woke from the Dream, she had taken on a mother's role in my life, filling the space left by Ayesha, my own mother. Ours was a relationship built of nothing but duty and obligation, interwoven and intermingled, leaving little room for the personal in the tightly knotted cord.


As should be my relationship with Lea, I reflected, watching the flatness of an Algai'd'siswai, a Spear, sizing up a potential threat smooth her personality away and out of my sight. I was sent to Cold Rocks to smith and to court, and so my relationship with her should be as impersonal as my relationship with Garlvan is now.


But perhaps because of my sense of isolation, so far from home in a world so far from those I had known before, or perhaps because of the excellently cooked goat stew I had just eaten, or perhaps because I was curious to learn more about this peer of mine who had likewise sought to find her own place among the Aiel independent of her parents' track, I did not want the distance between Lea and I to grow.


"My answer was not yet finished," I firmly stated, lifting a stilling hand. "You seek some understanding of me, I suspect, just as I seek to know you more closely, Lea of the Nine Valleys Sept. So," I continued, ignoring how flushed her fair skin had grown, how I could almost see her naturally spirited brows striving to break her mask of cool restraint, "I will say this: When I was a boy, I feared Sorilea, my ancestor, not because of who she is but because I feared how I saw my entire life mapped out in her eyes. She has seen eight generations be born into the Dream, live, dance, love, and ultimately wake. When she taught me as a child, I wondered if she had already seen all that the Wheel had woven out before me, if my feet would be fixed to that path, and if the last thing I would see before I woke was her eyes, seeing another generation out."


By the time I was finished, I was breathing hard, something very much like real fear clawing at my innards. When I had begun the second half of my answer to Lea's question, I had not been entirely certain of what I would say; some observation of how I respected Sorilea but still chafed against the way she had directed my future. But when I had tried to express that thought, I had tapped into some well of feeling I had not even recognized lay within me.


It is because I escaped to the smithy, I realized, away from the course she had spoken of when I was a boy learning the ways of our people as I combed cotton. She had spoken of a war, of wars fought to harden us for war, all so that a remnant of the Aiel would live. I chose to step away from the course that would have led me down the tracks of my second life, and thus the fear had been rendered impotent. Now that she has intervened in my life once more, and once more reasserted control…


The smithy is no refuge from duty.


I have toh, I decided. When I spoke to Salin those years ago, I did not lie, but nor was I fully honest. I seek creation rather than destruction, I would better my sept and clan with the works of my hands, and I did not come to learn the ways of the smith out of a fear of battle… But determinism, the knowledge that someone greater than yourself has set your feet in motion… Yes, that I fear.


"...So you do understand after all," Lea said almost breathlessly, and I realized that she had stepped closer, her face softening with sympathy. "To be guided like an animal, from childhood on, by elders who see your entire life mapped out before you… And I say elders to include both my father and the Wise Ones, and Lian as well. My father is a clan chief and so listens to the Wise Ones, and he is always a clan chief, even when he is a father, and so he listened always to my mother. Lian agrees with them both. All of them see a track stretching out before me… Is it any wonder that I strive instead to find my own?"


"None at all," I had to admit, not retreating before her slow advance, though I felt the first touches of a sweat that had nothing to do with the forge break out on my back. "Why did you not follow your sisters in taking up a spear?"


"What do you think my mother was, before she became a Wise One?" Lea laughed, a bitter sound. "And even more than that, I am told that my mother did not want to be a Wise One when she was chosen, no more than I want to be a Wise One. They say she tried to escape many times, tried over and over to flee back to the Maidens… And each time her former sisters delivered her back to the Wise Ones, until she at last submitted."


"The urge to put oneself over sept and clan" stems from Sightblinder, I thought, remembering my ancestor's lecture from so long ago. So where does the urge for the society and the clan to suppress the individual rise from, honored Wise One?


"You would think that would make her more sympathetic to your own desires," I ventured, "though maybe not… Perhaps she thinks that she was willful too once, before she 'learned better,' and that is why she is so certain that you would also forget your obligations after some time."


"Yes," Lea agreed, shuddering. Basket dangling from one hand, she wrapped her other arm around herself, a rare show of vulnerability and outward expression for an Aiel. "Do not mistake me, Taric; I know my duty, the duty that comes with being the daughter of a chief and a member of a sept, of a clan. I want to help my people thrive, to ensure that they are fed and clothed, that the spears are honed and arrows fletched, that our children are taught and the dirges for our fallen sung. But… Is this also my duty? To be forced down along the same road my mother was forced along, until I eventually pull my own daughter along behind me as I was pulled?"


I know what Amys would say, should she be asked that question, and I suspect I know how Sorilea would answer as well. But that is not the way of Ji'e'toh. Ji and toh can only truly rise from a recognition of one's own successes and failures, according to one's own understanding of honor and of duty.


"I cannot answer that question for you," I acknowledged. "Only you can determine where the limits of your duty extend. But, I would advise you to find a concrete way to demonstrate your understanding of your duty and your desire to fulfill that duty while not following the path your mother has set at your feet."


"Perhaps I could petition Far Dareis Mai for admission," Lea ventured half-heartedly. "I have confidence in my skills with both spear and bow."


"That would play straight into the Wise One's hands," I said immediately, knowing with certainty that I was correct. "Just by hearing you say it, I can tell that you know your duty to be something other than that of a Maiden. I am sure that the mistress of the Maidens' Roof here in your hold would recognize as much as well, and would send you back to your mother. Taking up a spear would be a flight from your duty, not an embrace."


"...You are correct, Taric," Lea mumbled, looking shamefacedly down at the toes of her boots. "I have toh."


"Only to yourself," I replied firmly. "I asked for you to speak, and you spoke. You owe me nothing. However, you owe yourself further thought – further time to temper, if you will. Lea," I said, reaching out to set my hands lightly on her shoulders, lowering myself so I could look straight into her eyes, "do not despair. I will not say what you should do, but I know that there is a path forwards that will lead you to a place where you can be content in your duty. Do not let them break you, either by forcing you down the path you abhor or by flinching away from your duty and fleeing. The Threefold Land is a trial, and this is your test. Stand firm and let your edge be honed."


And prove to me that the chains of fate are not unbreakable, that the Wheel's path is not immutable, and that we can find a road forward that is not just an endless cycle of blood and death and teeth breaking defiance.


And perhaps, in your struggles, you will give me some hint of the additive our people will need to bend and not break, the alloy needed so our people, so hardened and so hardy, will not shiver into splinters when our final test comes at last.

 

[Readhead]

Artist link: https://www.deviantart.com/minttsky