Confidante, Blade, Hammer

The Minaali Family Court stands alone on the edge of the precipice of a realm, a solitary and striking remnant of a once regal palace. Its premises sprawls out facing the bank of a lake, barracks and squat watchtowers and stables and other various outbuildings unmanned and empty. The stone steps leading up to the main house echo with the footsteps of household servants, the house rising up a story higher than its next tallest companion. Its tiled hip-and-gable roof is yet shadowed by the claw-like spires shooting like geysers out of the ground and stretching a mile towards the purple-stained sky until their tips disappear in the clouds. Grass runs down their jagged spines, spilling out into the small field surrounding the backside of the court below until the earth drops away in sheets of cliff falling down towards a sea of mist. The sky and the sea here are of another realm, one that does not belong to the likes of lively beings. Here the Minaali Court continues to stand alone, wearied and worn by centuries but still dutiful, the loyal servant to the spirits and the dead that swim in the sky above them and fly through the sea beneath its foundation.

Nailah stood half-folded over the side of the bridge, long black hair dangling down over the soft blue water and the silver metal of her earrings hanging cool against her cheeks. The perch and carp and minnows wallowed about like silver blotts, the green and browning leaves of the knotted and bent lakeside trees floating as motionless as a painting on the still surface. She wanted to reach down and brush the scales of one of the fatter fish, or wade ankle-deep into the lapping water.

“Nai!” Someone was tugging at the fabric of her skirts.

She clutched the smooth wood railing, pulling herself back upright. Her little sister’s small hand was obdurately clutching her skirts, her hair tied back in two simple tails and her own dress a simple child’s wrap.

“Nova,” Nailah exhaled, a small smile playing on her lips. “What is it?”

“Mama told me to tell you to go back to the big house.” The girl returned Nailah’s slight smile with a wide, gap-toothed grin of her own. “But can we play first?”

“Oh,” Nailah crouched down to be at eye-level with Nova. “Shall we play later? I want to do as Mama says.”

Nova gave her sister’s skirts a firm tug. She gazed lovingly at Nailah, mouth parted and eyes shining. “Just for a bit, then. Mama’s busy anyhow with her papers. She barely looked up when she sent me off to get you.” She leaned to the side to peer around Nailah, twisting the skirts around her sister’s legs as she stood up on slippered toes to see over the side of the bridge. “We can go play in the water if you want. Even though it’s cold. And mucky. And the fish are slimy.”

Nailah hesitated, wringing her hands. “I am going to see what Mama wants first. Then I promise I’ll come back and play with you in the lake. Maybe you can take that time to put on more appropriate water-wear? You’ll ruin your silks.”

With a harrumph, Nova dropped her skirts. “Okay, fine. Come out back and tell me when you’ll be ready to play.” The girl quickly pivoted on her heel, the stone bridge sounding muffled thumps as she shot off and away, fast as a fox on the hunt. Nailah watched her go, one tail of hair coming undone and twisting behind her like a ribbon on the wind. The breeze sent her own hair fluttering over her shoulders, the chill of early spring just enough to raise gooseflesh on her thinly sleeved arms. She took the span of the arching bridge slowly, her fingertips catching on a weathered bit of the railing. The stone walkways of the court were starting to show through with bits of moss and unswept debris with the fresh growth of the season.

The bridge leveled out into a boardwalk hovering above the lake’s surface. A small pavilion sat in the center of the square walk, curtains drawn closed for the end of winter. A plume of sweet-smelling smoke was wafting out through the gaps in its rafters. She took a short pause to breathe in the umami flavors of the cooking dinner, before continuing onwards to where the stone once again curved up in a narrow staircase. She climbed as it twisted back and forth on itself in a switchback before mounting the crest and stepping out into the courtyard.

Panels of well-cut stone were interspersed with strips of cultivated bushes and flower pots. A few statues of various animals and miniature pagodas were scattered among the gardens. The courtyard stretched out in a rectangle, the two short sides bookended by small stables, servant housing, and warehouses. The third side was where she had mounted the steps, a squat wall curving around the rest of the unused space, trees and vines that had grown up and into its firm plane. In front of Nailah, on the fourth side of the courtyard, stood the big house. Three stories, stacked upon each other like the layers of a cake, cast a shadow over the courtyard in the late morning sun. She made her way up to the front doors, sliding the panel open with a splayed hand.

The first floor mainly consisted of a single large room, wood and stone lined with warm tapestries and gold ornaments. A woven silk rug covered the floor. A fire burned bright in the hearth, its crackling warmth and dancing sparks adding a bit of liveliness to the silent household. A few of the sliding doors to the side rooms were cracked open, and the low whispers of servants could be heard through the wood. She heard the footsteps of a young maid before the girl arrived down the winding staircase, barely acknowledging Nailah as she brushed past and pushed her way outside.

Mama sat among a pile of cushions on the rug, the long hairs of a knotting project laid out across her lap in an orderly fashion. With her hands she was deftly passing one string over another in an elaborate pattern, but her eyes were instead focused on the many ledgers splayed out on the square table before her. An ink pot and horsehair brush had been set off to the side as she squinted down at the tiny numbers and characters drawn in her own neat hand.

Nailah coughed, and her mother immediately dropped her project to gesture her daughter forward. “Come, Nailah, I’ve been waiting for you for quite a bit now.” She frowned. “Where’s Nova?”

“Off with her flowers.” Nailah skimmed over the lines beneath her mother’s eyes, and the stressed creases of her forehead. “Do you need any help with the bookkeeping?”

“I’m handling it, thank you.” The older woman trailed off as her eyes drifted back to the ledgers, unfocusing briefly as she smudged the ink with a fingertip.

Nailah approached her mother’s table, her gaze shifting between the woman and the ledgers. She subconsciously took a lock of her hair and began twirling it around a finger, watching her mother’s eyes shift into space and out again.

“Oh, stop that!” Mama lightly slapped Nailah’s hand out of her hair. “Don’t fidget,” she said, returning her attention to the ledgers, feverishly dragging her finger along the margin to keep her place.

Nailah brought her hands down from her hair and folded them neatly behind her back. She looked down at her feet. “Mama?”

Her mother grunted in acknowledgement.

“Are you sure you have got all of this under control?” Nailah instantly regretted asking and clenched her fists behind her back, her nails digging into her palms.

“Of course I have,” was all her mother replied with, before taking a deep breath and bringing her hands to her head to massage her temples.

“Oh— Okay,” Nailah looked down at her feet again. “What did you need me for?” She could not help but feel a small ache of concern for her mother. She was the sort that would take everyone’s issues under her wing and try to mend all of them. Even so, Nailah could not recall seeing her this worked up in recent memory.

“You have been shirking your duties lately.” Mama’s voice was hard.

Nailah paused. “My duties?” She had been carrying her own weight, as far as she knew. She helped the servants make dinner when they called for extra hands, mended her own clothes, and aided with managing the lesser aspects of their household.

The older woman’s eyes narrowed. “Your duties, Nailah. I am not speaking of your running about like an infirm, getting underfoot in all the areas you measure to be the most quick and effortless to lend a hand in.” Upon meeting Nailah’s eyes, she groaned, her shoulders slumping under an invisible weight. She waved a hand at the scattered papers. Nailah noticed a few scrolls written with different hands than that of her mother’s, the broken wax at their heads of a different color and seal. “From Gwanil. The reaping is behind schedule. Winter’s end harvest has barely sprung, and the coming heat will soon kill them off prematurely. They’re thinking of cutting their losses and clearing the fields to make room to sow next season’s crop.” “A disease?” Nailah wondered, still confused. A disaster of the harvest was not common, but it also was not entirely unheard of. She doubted it would lead to anything near famine. Trade with other cities would make up for their loss.

“They are not certain. If it is a disease, it is a unique branch that we have not seen before. According to the farmers, nothing looks to be wrong with their roots, and the weather this winter was none different than that of the one before. The crop just refused to spring.” Her mother’s shoulders rose and fell once more. “I fear it might not be anything earthly at all.”

“And by that—”

“I mean that I am anxious for the state of the Intan realm.” Nailah was shocked by the bluntness of her mother’s words. “The spirits have been more agitated lately. I feel their trepidation echoing in my soul when I reach out, but none have been able to gather themselves enough to tell me what the threat is.”

“The threat?” Nailah asked, stricken.

Mama carried on. “The Intan spirits are responsible for blessing our earth, making our crops spring and grow fast and healthy. Without them, the winter’s harvest could never grow in the cold as it is now. Right now they are. . . occupied. And I cannot comprehend what could make them act so, save for a danger that I cannot grasp.”

Nailah opened her mouth to interject, perhaps to provide an additional, far more tangible probability for the failed harvest, but the woman carried swiftly onward, this time her gaze fixated on just Nailah. When she next spoke, her tone was unyielding and unquestionable. “Your duties, Nailah.” She repeated. “When was the last time you reached out to the spirits? We are the Minaali family, child, it is our familial oath to stand as the spirits’ anchor to the human realm. We must not let them think we are abandoning them to their hardship. We will stand strong as their confidante, blade, and hammer, to aid them in whatever way we can.”

Nailah winced. She admitted that she had indeed been neglecting convening with the spirits, if not purposefully. It was not the most rewarding of tasks. Almost always when she reached out she felt nothing in return. She had always been told by her parents that the connection would come in time, but she felt that there was a distinct and unshakable dissonance between her and the Intan realm that years could not bridge. Despite the futility that the gesture would hold, she nodded her head respectfully towards her mother in acceptance of the task. “I apologize for my neglect.” She responded formally.

Mama hesitated, her expression softening. “You’re right.” She relented. “It’s most likely something mundane. Disease, harsh wind, dry earth.” She recited the list as if she was trying to convince herself of the matter. Her lips widened in a forced smile. “Go to your chores, Nailah.” She waved her hand like she was dismissing a servant, and just like that her attention was back on the papers before her. Nailah stood silently by for a few moments more, waiting for her mother to say something else. When the woman made no more acknowledgement of her, she slowly turned to make her way back out of the big house.

The main pagoda of the Minaali Court was back behind the house, past Nova’s flowers following a short stepping-stone paved path out to the base of the largest spire. The spire stretched up and outwards into the sea of mist just beyond the field, until the green grass dissolved in the purple clouds. When Nailah was little, she had always yearned to race up the grass spine until it got too steep to sprint, imagining herself an adventurer as she picked her way up the rocks and cracks and forged a path to the tip of the spire, until she too got swallowed in the mist and discovered a whole new world. Now, as she crouched down at the base of the spire, a small bowl of fresh groundwater in her hands, she only looked up in wary veneration. What beings lived up there, where they were so powerful her mother felt they could control the order of every human’s life? It made her shiver to wonder about it.

In front of her stood the little pagoda, surrounded on all sides by flowering bushes, growing a bit wild and ungroomed with new growth, their edges peeking through the columned supports of the structure and crawling up towards the ceiling. The six evenly-spaced columns held up a tiled roof with six ornately curved and tipped corners. Small mosaics of faded colors were hidden among the more uniform green tiling, too high up for Nailah to see the stories they told. As she stepped deeper into the shadow of the pagoda, she placed the bowl of water in the center of the empty floor, amidst a spiraling pattern of dusty red squares. She crouched before the bowl for some time, staring at its clear surface as bits of dirt and moss drifted around the bottom of the bowl. She found herself following those bits around, tracing their paths with a finger in the air.

That spire. Where might it lead? To the Intan realm, her grandmother had told her. That their ancestor Misan had long ago climbed up to the heavens upon the spine of the tallest of them all, touching the spirit realm and forging the Minaali family’s connection to the spirits that would carry their family’s purpose for centuries to follow. What happened afterwards? She remembered asking. “He fell to his death.” Laolao had replied. “No man can touch the spirit realms and leave without losing something.” Then why did he do it? “Because he wanted to forge a relation to the Intan realm that would lead his family to prosperity.”

Nailah did not agree. Where was their family’s prosperity, living secluded in this forgotten corner of the world? The connection their ancestors had forged with the spirits seemed to have forsaken her generation. If the Minaali family was supposed to be their confidantes, where was their trust to tell her family what was troubling them? There were too many conflicting factors for her to place full faith in everything her mother and her family’s legends tried to convince her were truths. More likely, Misan Minaali had been seeking glory, a vice of man to go where no other man had ever journeyed before.

She blinked herself back to the present, catching her drifting mind. Her finger was brushing the water, leaving a wake that ripped outwards and shook the settled dirt in the basin back up into motion. She pulled her hand away, shaking her finger dry. Pushing herself to her feet, she dusted the grime off her skirts. She wondered not for the first time what her mother must see when she refilled the basin for the spirits. Did she feel a connection, scry some sort of message in the water’s wake? Dismayed, she squeezed and uncurled her hands in and out of tight fists. She had seen nothing but water and dirt.

“Nai!” A harsh whisper sounded from behind her.

Nailah swiveled. Her sister stood just outside the pagoda, clasping her hands in front of her as she swayed back and forth. Catching the unspoken question floating in the air, she stepped away from the spiraling pattern and descended the single step back out onto the grass. “I’m done. Are you ready to play?”

Nova’s hands and wrap were brown-stained, a few stray petals caught in her untidy hair. “No.” She pouted. Her voice rose back to its regular resonating volume now that it was confirmed Nailah had finished convening with the spirits. “Laolao wants you. She found me out with my flowers and I thought she was going to stick me at some chore, but she just sent me running for you.” She peered up at Nailah curiously. “She seemed pretty hurried — usually she would just track down a runner. Do you know what this is about?”

Nailah shrugged dispassionately, but in actuality she was just as curious as her sister. Her grandmother barely ever called upon any of the family. She was always corralled up in her study or out in one of the spires’ pagodas. The only time they ever really talked was during mealtimes, and even then it was nothing more than casual space-filling chatter. When she and Nova were younger, she hazily remembered Laolao observing them from a distance as they played, but she never joined in on their games. That was all she ever did. Watch.

“I suppose I should best run back up to the big house to see what she needs. Our playtime will have to be pushed back a bit further.” She frowned down at Nova’s rumpled clothes. “Why don’t you go get washed up while I am at it?”

“Washed up?” The girl wrinkled her nose. “We were just going to get in the mucky water anyways.”

Taking a wide berth around her sister and her dirt, Nailah raced back down the path towards the big house. When she entered the first floor, she caught a glimpse of her mother, frozen in the same spot on the carpet, studying the papers with a weary determination. Instead of approaching her mother, Nailah climbed up the spiraling staircase, up and past the second floor’s sectioned-off bedrooms.

Her grandmother’s study took up the entirety of the big house’s third and topmost floor, a wide space made smaller by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and assorted clutter pressed into corners and scattered about the unkept floor. For the span of her life, one of the strictest rules of the house was to not enter the study without the permission of her grandmother. Nailah herself had never disobeyed, but when Nova had the girl had been sequestered in her room and deprived of half meals for one day, and a day more added on top of that baseline for each repeated offense. The secrets of the study had been a common topic of speculation for the siblings. In reality, the study was not as complete a mysteriously forbidden place as their whispers had made it out to be. They had taken all their lessons from Laolao up in the study, from practicing their strokes and learning their numbers to the more traditional aspects of being a Minaali. Histories, spiritual practices, scriptures, all they had learned curled up in the cushions of the study. Yet, looking at the tapestried walls and thick layers of books, the place still felt strangely foreign to Nailah. Her heart twinged every time she climbed the steps to the third floor, like she was a small disobedient child who had never before stepped foot in the forbidden level.

Laolao was sitting on a cushioned mat, propped up against a bookshelf near the far wall. Her black hair was streaked with nothing more than thin strands of silver, and her face, though weathered, had an eerie absence of the lines from smiles and stresses that Nailah had noticed appearing on her mother’s face as of late. Dodging the littered paraphernalia on the soft blue carpet, Nailah made her way over to the far wall.

“Laolao told me we were waiting for someone.” Nailah startled, spinning to see a tall boy dressed head-to-toe in blue silks. He wore his long black hair tied back, a small strand escaping from the knot to accent his smile.

“Niram.” She returned the smile awkwardly. She had not expected him to be here.

“Finally, you have all arrived.” Laolao’s gravelly voice pierced the silence with disgruntled annoyance as if Nailah had been hours late. The old woman did not stir from her seat, but held a command over the room that beckoned Nailah to walk closer and sit down beside her. Niram did the same.

“I have called the two of you here today to talk.” Her black stare cut smoothly through Nailah’s mask, leaving her feeling exposed. She composed herself, trying to match her grandmother with confidence, but still felt her gaze wandering. Niram did not look much more comfortable. “Talk about your duty to each other, as brother and sister.”

Nailah caught Niram glancing at her. She did not meet his eyes. Neither of them spoke.

“I am certain Nymane has said something to you about the unsettlement of the Intan realm.” The two siblings nodded tersely. “Then I am also certain that you have both given some thought towards the potential causes? Niram, you believe it has something to do with the spirits, perhaps due to a disregard of your duties to them, as Nymane has told you. And Nailah, I assume you have remained more undecided in the matter. You are still half-convinced all this is due to more mundane factors.” Another set of nods, this time more hesitant. Their grandmother huffed. “I have no time for this timidness. The truth is that both Nymane and Nailah are wrong. Do not follow so religiously everything your mother tells you.” She directed the quip at Niram.

“I have decided the two of you do not spend nearly enough time around one another.” She transitioned smoothly. “Always off doing your own things. When you are together, it is never by pure choice. I think it is long past the time to remedy that. It is ridiculous, I would hope you know, with our household already being as small as it is, and you two always being off on opposite ends of it. Back in my day, we had nine siblings apiece and spent our personal hours alone with each of them. Niram, when Nailah was a toddler you were always chasing after her with dolls and storybooks. Whatever happened to that?

“Regardless of whatever stubborn reasoning you may think to conjure up, I believe I have come up with a solution. Niram, child, fetch the box behind that shelf over there.” Niram came lumbering back, burdened by a large gold-accented wooden chest. He set it down with a thump, and at Laolao’s gesture, flicked the latch and pushed it open. “Well, there you go, boy.” She crowed triumphantly. “A nice selection of swords for you, all there. Pick whatever. Gem-encrusted hilt, for a bit of that prince-child showmanship? It might justify your flimsiness with the blade. Or a sturdier shortsword, if you like getting up close and personal. I have no preference.”

Niram gawked, stooping down and sifting through the chest piled high with the gleaming metal weapons, selecting them one at a time and pulling them out of the chest to admire them in the light of the morning sky. He set a few off to the side in a growing pile. Nailah thought she must be missing something. Her older brother had never before trained with a sword, or any sort of weapon for that matter.

“And you, girl. I have already picked a well-bred selection of brutes to instruct your brother in the ways of the blade. As for you. . .” She swept her hand in an arc, gesturing at the rest of the room. “I want you to spend half of your every day, after the midday meal, studying here. No matter what you choose. You can read a saga on pagan myths, for all I care. All I request is that you stay here until your brother starts his training in the mid-afternoon, at which you will go down to join him and his instructors in the courtyard and watch them train until dinner. That is all.”

Shaking herself out of a stupor, Nailah’s throat closed up as she locked her knees and squeezed her palms. Niram was still sorting through his swords, apparently heedless of anything else that had transpired. The seeds of resentment took root in her stomach. So she got to sit up here and read, and then go down to watch as her brother learned to fight? Her grandmother appeared to have no rhyme or reason for any of this, or if she did, she was not sharing. “I am to sit up here and read for hours and hours, then?” She was worried her voice would come out accusative, but it was as even-tempered as ever.

“Yes, child. You are to read, and your brother is to train. Boy! Stop wiling away at those swords and pick one before the sky caves in on us! You can choose a different one whenever you wish if the first one does not please you.” Niram blushed. “That’s all, then. Nailah, be back here after midday for your reading. Away with the two of you. I need to think.”

Nailah headed down and out of the big house with all the casualness of a normal day, but inside she was broiling. She held herself from trembling or her smile from twitching away, the only betrayal of her anger in the nail-marks on her palms. It was not that she had an abhorrence for books. Under any other circumstance, she would have loved the opportunity to spend hours up in the study, knowledge piled high all around her. That was not the issue. What ruffled her was that she had to sit up there. She had to sit up there and then she had to come back down and then she had to watch her brother train. And there was no ground for any of it.

Nova was waiting for her outside the big house. “That was quicker than I thought it would be,” she remarked. “What happened?”

“Nothing important.” She cracked her grin a fraction wider. “Ready to play?”

Her little sister held up her dirty silks with a matching smirk. “I’ve been ready all morning long.”

The sisters made their way back down to the bank before the bridge, Nova dashing straight into the river. Nailah pulled her skirts over her head, hastily stripping down to her underclothes before wrapping herself with a more modest and disposable wrap and belting it with a string. Setting her silks off to the side, she waded into the river with a reserved tentativeness.

Immediately, the light current swept and tugged at her ankles, grit and sediment clouding up from the submerged bank and sinking her feet down further into the slimy mud. The water had not yet warmed with the coming of spring, still holding all the shocking iciness of the dark season. A tremor rose up from her ankles and all throughout the rest of her body, pushing a laugh up and out of her throat as she shivered. She waded in further, the numbness spreading past her ankles and up to her shins, her thighs. She dithered a moment longer once the waterline reached just below her hips, before letting her locked knees go limp and surrendering the rest of her body to the cold as she submerged herself in the shallow river.

She closed her eyes to the water, instantly succumbing to the current. The darkness sharpened her other senses. Her long hair came loose, the pressure of the tight tail dissipating as it floated free around her, brushing up against her cheek like feathers. Her body was ethereal in its numbness, like a stone shell that her soul inhabited. The hum of the river was woven with the muffled pitter-patter of stones crashing against each other and the soft buzz of disturbed dirt rising up and tickling her bare skin with a scratchy touch. The water was sucked up and under her clothes, running all over her all at once.

She wanted to sink down further, to lay at the basin of the river and sit there, but she yielded to the burning of her lungs, turning belly-up and spreading her limbs, letting the natural buoyancy of her body lift her. As she broke the surface, the cool wind cut across her face like a dagger of sandpaper, cleaning away the grime from her face. The wet fabric of her clothes clung to her, their waterlogged weight wanting to tug her back down to the basin.

The dim sunlight shining through her closed eyelids was suddenly obscured by a dark shadow. She felt a tremor of fear, the serenity broken as she scrambled to right herself and find a foothold in the mud and slippery riverstones that evaded her bare toes. She opened her eyes, blinking away the water on her lashes to find that she had drifted under the bridge. Taking deep breaths, she steadied herself before forging back towards where Nova was still splashing around upstream. If she were to kick her feet up and submerge herself in the now-warm water to swim forward it would be much easier, but she found herself instead forging forward against the chest-high current, struggling to keep her footing, her heart lurching with every near-slip.

“Nailah?” Her sister called out. Did she sound concerned, or was that annoyance?

“Coming.” She called back, her voice shaky.

“Nailah!” Her sister was suddenly pressed up by her side, her skin both hot with the warmth of blood and cold as the river all at once. “Are you alright?”

“Why would I not be?” She did not know what she was.

“Let’s get out of here. It is too cold.” Nova shivered, yanking Nailah towards the bank.

Nailah suddenly found her feet beneath her, and the shock of the cold broke through the numbness of her extremities. Wriggling her toes to try and circulate them, she clutched Nova’s hand as they emerged from the river into the unrelenting wind catching every bead of water on their skin and amplifying its crisp frigidity tenfold. Spring did not seem so near anymore.

The sun shone down on them from its peak in the sky. “Mealtime,” Nova announced.

“Yum.” The smile would not find its way back to her lips, but she managed to keep her clammy grip on Nova as her sister yanked her towards the small structure on the boardwalk.

She closed her eyes once more against the sun. Why was it so blinding all of a sudden? Drawing her breaths slow and constant, she secured herself once more against the world. Picking up her pace, she clutched Nova’s hand tighter as blood rushed back into her tingling fingertips. She beamed down at her sister with a giggle. “I’m positively starving!”