“Ishtal! Come over here and help me with this.”
Ishtal looked up as she heard her neighbor calling. Agurne was a widow, and elderly, and often needed help around her house or with lifting heavy things. Everyone in the village had helped her from time to time, but Ishtal was the one she asked most often—both because she lived so nearby, and because her father was the village guardian. When she was grown up, it would be her job to help everyone, and Agurne saw herself as providing Ishtal opportunity to practice.
“I’m coming,” she called, and set aside her toys to go see what was wanted.
It wasn’t much, just fetching some water from the village well, and she was back in a few minutes, setting the buckets in a corner of Agurne’s kitchen. “Thank you, dear,” Agurne said, smiling and ruffling the top of Ishtal’s head. “Here, do you want some candied fish for your trouble?”
Ishtal very much did, and took it happily. It was only as she started to nibble at it on the way back to her own house that she noticed the sticky dried fish wasn’t the only thing in her hand. Somehow, she’d also ended up with a small gold ring - one that she recognized in another moment as Agurne’s wedding ring that she still wore even though her husband was gone.
How in the world had she gotten that? She would have noticed if she’d taken it…wouldn’t she?
As if on cue, Agurne poked her head out the front door of her house. “Ishtal, just a moment—have you seen my ring?”
Ishtal closed her hand reflexively, guilt rising up in her. She hadn’t meant to take it; she hadn’t even known! But she was sure that Agurne wouldn’t see it that way. Briefly, she considered lying, but she hadn’t lied since she was a baby and didn’t know any better…
“Help! Help me!” A pained cry cut off her panicked thoughts, and Ishtal spun around to see someone emerge, stumbling, from the forest surrounding the village. In another moment, she recognized him: it was Estebe, the guardian from Laugarren Herria, the next village over. He had passed through a few weeks ago, on his way to make an exploration trip to the world outside the forest, where all the Peoples who weren’t Onena lived. Only guardians ever went there, and they didn’t go very often. Father had always said it wasn’t safe.
And clearly, he’d been right, because Estebe was clutching his left arm, and there was blood seeping out and staining a big patch on his shirt.
Forgetting all about the dilemma of the ring, Ishtal started to run towards him, trying to think of how she could help. Surely, she should do something, or at least someone should. But before she could get very far, Father came bursting out of the chieftain Oroitz’s house, where he’d been having a meeting. He crossed the distance to Estebe much faster than Ishtal could have, and even as he reached him, called out, “We need a healer! Luken! Someone get Luken!”
The village healer, Luken, came running out of his own house within a moment; everyone in the village knew that when Father used that voice, it was an emergency and they needed to listen and do as he said right away. He reached Estebe and moved Father aside to look at the wound, hissing when he saw it.
“You’ll live,” Ishtal heard him say. “If we get you patched up quickly. Come on, Arkaitz, help me get him into the infirmary.”
Father did, putting Estebe’s arm over his shoulders to help him walk. As he did so, he spotted Ishtal, who’d been frozen to the spot, watching. She wasn’t the only one: most of the village was standing in their doorways trying to see the commotion. He put on a reassuring smile.
“Everything’s all right,” he said calmly. “Ishtal, go get your sister and tell her to start making some extra stew, so Luken doesn’t have to worry about feeding another person.”
Ishtal nodded rapidly, taking off for their house and shoving the last of the fish candy in her mouth and the ring in her pocket to get them out of the way. When she burst inside, she nearly ran into her sister Arancha, who’d been on her way out. “Look out!” she said, and then, “Is everything all right? I heard shouting, and Father calling for Luken.”
It was very difficult to not swell with importance at knowing something before her older sister just this once, but Ishtal did her best. “Estebe got hurt on the way back from his trip. Luken’s going to fix him, and Father told me to ask you to make some broth to take to him later.”
Arancha nodded and hurried off. Ishtal, looking for something to do, spotted her toys lying where she’d left them only a short time ago. Her doll, left sprawling carelessly, suddenly seemed very outnumbered by the ilegabeak outsiders Father had carved and painted for her—humans and elves and halflings and goblins, a grimacing dwarf, a huge slouching troll, a leering hornpate.
Later, when the stew was done, she hurried the covered clay bowl over to Luken’s house, crossing to the other side of the circle of houses on silent padding feet. No one answered her knock at the door, but she knew they were expecting her, so she slipped inside, heading for where she knew the infirmary to be.
Just before she reached the curtained doorway, she paused, hearing low voices.
“…they attacked when I had almost made it back to the tree line,” Estebe was saying. “There were three of them—humans, of course. Bandits, I think. I don’t know if they went for me specifically because I was Onena, or just because they wanted to rob me. It wasn’t as though I got a chance to ask, with them trying to kill me.”
“But they didn’t follow you?” Father asked.
“No,” Estebe said, with conviction. “I made very sure they would not be able to.”
There was a pause, and then Father called out, “Ishtal, I know you’re there. Come on in.”
Ishtal obeyed, ducking around the curtain, and set the bowl of stew on an uncluttered table off to the side. “I brought supper.”
“Good girl.” Father reached over and pulled her into a one-armed hug, and she rubbed her cheek against his shirt. He still smelled like Father, even amid the strange, sharp scents of the infirmary. “Go on back home and eat your dinner with Arancha and get ready for bed. I’ll be back as soon as I’m done talking to Estebe and tell you two a story before you have to go to sleep, all right?”
Ishtal nodded, and hurried to do as she was told.
“There was a time,” Father said, his face serious in the flickering yellow lamplight, “when our People were wanderers.
“In those days, the Onena had no fixed homeland, and didn’t care to have one. They had a passion for exploring, and were filled with curiosity. They made friends everywhere they went, and saw strange and beautiful lands, and collected trinkets and things that interested them. They were mapmakers and tinkers and entertainers and heroes-for-hire, and anything else they wished.”
“But how was it safe?” Arancha asked, green eyes wide and her gray tail twitching. She was perched in the middle of her nest of pillows, hugging her knees. “If they were out in the open with everyone else?”
Ishtal, curled up in her own pillow-nest, squinted at her older sister. If she already knew how this story went, just from listening to grown-ups talk, then Arancha definitely did. It had to be some kind of sucking-up thing.
“Back then, it was safe,” Father explained with an indulgent smile. “The world was different then, is all. But of course it couldn’t stay that way. All Peoples have it built into them to distrust whatever is different from them, and humans more so than any others. They got it into their heads that our ancestors, and some of the other Peoples, were no better than monsters and ought to be killed whenever they met us. The ezkatatsua, the Scaly Ones, had enclaves under the earth to hide in, and the goblins and trolls retreated to their own settlements, but our ancestors had nowhere to go. The humans slew many of them, often claiming it was self-defense, and sometimes they took their hides as trophies or to use in spells.”
Ishtal shivered despite herself, the fur along her spine prickling. She hadn’t been scared of the bogey-stories about trickster humans with their nets and long knives since she was practically a baby, but talk of magic always set her ears back, and... Well, people being skinned was just awful to think about no matter how old you were.
“Something had to be done,” Father continued. “The Onena didn’t have much in the way of leaders back then, but the ones that they had met together and agreed on a plan. For their own safety, they all had to hide, to give up wandering the world that they loved so much. So they gathered up families and clans and scattered survivors and brought everyone into the great pine forests, where no one lived back then. They had a hard time at first, because they were starting from nothing, and at first they missed their old way of life. But they worked hard and built villages for themselves—including this very one. And our people have lived here contentedly ever since.”
Ishtal wasn’t sure she wanted to ask, but somebody ought to, and it would probably have to be her. “But what about the ones who leave? When Guardian Erlantz visited last and he brought Ihintza, she said that her best friend’s cousin had left and everybody was all upset because he said he didn’t care if he never got to come back. And there are other people who do that, too, aren’t there?”
Father looked very serious. “There are a few who choose to leave the safety of our forests, who haven’t shaken off our ancestors’ wanderlust as much as the rest of us have. But they give up so much more than they gain—and I don’t just mean physical safety. The outside world is supposedly much safer than it once was, and they say there are cities where all Peoples live mixed up together and more or less get along. Perhaps there is a place for the wandering Onena out there. But they are cut off, and largely alone, without family or any of their own kind to turn to. It’s not a life I would wish on anyone—that’s why exile is one of the worst punishments we can give out.
“Not to mention,” he added, reaching to stroke Ishtal’s head, “that even if the rest of the world is less dangerous than it used to be, it’s still not necessarily safe for us. That’s why each village has guardians, like Erlantz and Estebe and me, and like you two and Ihintza will someday be.”
“If Ishtal doesn’t get in too much trouble for stealing all the time,” Arancha teased. Ishtal hissed slightly.
“It’s not like I do it on purpose!” she protested. They’d had this argument a lot, and Father clearly wasn’t about to let them have it again, as he rose from his stool and picked up the lamp.
“You should get to sleep now,” he said, leaning over to kiss each of them between the ears. “We have a full day of training tomorrow—and now perhaps you know a little more about why that’s so important.”
He slipped out, closing the bedroom door behind him. Ishtal waited a few moments, lying still. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see the little room clearly again, and Arancha curled up across from her, probably already half-asleep. When lit, the room would be cozy and cheerful, brightened by the colorful woven hangings and rugs lining the wooden walls and floor, but just now it was shadowy and full of shades of gray.
After a little while, she quietly rolled over, feeling under one of the pillows until she pulled out Agurne’s ring from where she’d hidden it.
She would have to see about sneaking it back to Agurne’s house in the morning. Nobody had thought to blame her yet for taking it, distracted by the commotion of Estebe’s return, and Ishtal wasn’t sure that she should really be blamed. She hadn’t meant to take it. She never meant to take any of the random, shiny bits and pieces she kept walking off with. It just somehow seemed to happen, and no matter how much she tried to explain, no one would ever believe she hadn’t done it on purpose.
That, she thought, was really why training was important. Not because of any stories, but because maybe, just maybe, if she could get to be a really good guardian, the rest of the village would like her, and forget that she kept taking things. They would like her as much as they did Arancha and Father, who never seemed to do anything wrong, and she would never, ever get in so much trouble that she would have to go away and live among strangers who would think she was just an animal.
With this determination in mind, she tucked the ring away, rolled over again, and went to sleep.
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