The Water, chapter 1, part 1

Etin squinted against the glaring autumn sun. Newly fallen snow glittered white over house and barn and trees at Apple hill farm, and shone on the high peaks surrounding the mountain farm. An icy wind tugged at her brown curls, and she tied her woolen shawl tightly around her head. Against the snow and blue sky she noticed the contour of a bird of prey circling, but it was far off and she could hear the chickens clucking down in the coop. She hoped the bird would stay away and took the broom leaning against the wall of their main house.

"And the basket, Etin," Mum called from the inside.

Etin grabbed the woven willow basket from the hook inside the door. "I have it, mum. What do you think of me?"

She heard a grunting laughter. That was probably old Gran waking up on the kitchen bench.

Etin trotted down to the chicken coop to start her daily chores. She let the creatures out into yard for them to feed while she swept, but they flocked around her legs and puffed their feathers. It was a cold morning for both people and animals.

A shadow passed in front of the sun. Etin looked up. A Tsik-bird! The predator with the humanoid face perched on an apple branch and grinned down at her with sharp teeth. The Tsiks weren't rare, but they were bad news for any who had lambs or chickens or rabbits. The body was as large as a small eagle, but the head was just like the real Kindreds - humans, elves and dwarves.

Etin shuddered. She would never get used to that face. Black eyed, narrow and sharp, and yet undoubtedly humanish.

The chickens ran to their coop again, but Etin had to finish her job. There was straw to be changed, dirt to be swept and food and water needed to be refilled. The Tsik wasn't so stupid as to attack while she was there, was it?

The work made her hot and sweaty. She stopped for a moment to stretch and loosen the shawl, and wondered if she should have waited with the underskirt until later.

It was that moment the Tsik needed. It shot like an arrow into the flock of chickens, claws first.

Etin gasped and struck at it with her broom. The Tsik fluttered in one direction, and a chicken in the other. The rest of the flock clucked and cooed and ran all over the yard.

Etin hit it again. Once, twice. She had to get it away.

The large Tsik-bird flew more lightly than she expected, and with a couple of strong wing beats it was back up in the apple tree.

Etin looked around. The chickens ran around wildly, except one. It stood shivering with blood dripping from its side.

What would Mum say? It was Etin's responsibility to watch them. No wonder Mum kept ordering her around!

She picked up a fallen apple her little brothers had overlooked, and lobbed it at the Tsik. It missed and the bird glanced at her, before starting to clean its feathers. The apple landed instead back in the snow with a soft thud, and rolled down towards the food loft. Etin glared at the Tsik. She wished it would leave.

She herded the hens back into the cozy chicken coop. First she gathered the eggs, then she used her apron to wrap up the wounded bird. She felt for it, but still had a small hope of fresh sunday dinner. The lambs were already slaughtered and salted and hung in the loft for winter, and Dad wouldn't be taking the pig before another couple of weeks. Fresh meat was rare at Apple Hill, and her mouth watered.

Etin brought the chicken with her outside. It stirred in her apron, but she had to show Mum. It was she who made decisions about the food at Apple Hill. Etin kept the eggbasket in her other hand. There was an icy wind down the mountain side, but worse was the Tsik which might take eggs if it didn't get chicken. Etin decided to clean the eggs indoors for once.

The bird of prey was still in the apple tree. Etin picked up another apple and threw at it. Again she missed, and the Tsik let out a hoarse screech that eerily resembled human laughter. Etin mumbled a few words she was glad Mum didn't hear, and went up the stone steps to the main house of the farm.

Behind her, she heard the heavy beating of strong wings, and she turned to see the Tsik fly back to the mountain peaks. For a moment she thought she saw smoke up there, but it was perhaps just a cloud.

The Water, chapter 1, part 2

Apple Hill was a prosperous farm, with thick stone walls and coarse dwarven glass covering the windows. The fields produced willingly so they always had enough to sell to the neighbours, the dwarves dwelling deep in the northern mountains. Roots and rye, barley and oats, as well as salted meats, were swapped with all that the dwarves created in their mines. The dwarves made good tools, such as knives and axes for the farm, as well as pure iron for nails and horseshoes. They shaped clay and stone to plates and crockery, and they had Gifted; magicians who could enchant coal to glow through the night and baskets to keep food fresh longer.

Mum’s favourites were still the blue and purple minerals she used to colour her weaving yarn. She had set ten year old Ansil to wash the porridge pot, while she sat concentrated and bent over a tapestry she was planning to sell at the great autumn feast. Birds and beasts in brown and red and black frolicked among vines of green leaves and blue berries, and around them she wove a frame of purple decked in small yellow stars.

“Mum,” said Etin.

The tight grey-brown hairknot rose from the loom. “You got all of it?”

“Yes, but there was a Tsik.” She held up the chicken which writhed in her arms. “Can we have it for dinner?” Please?

Mum stroked it with a finger, lifted the wing. The hen pecked after her and she grabbed it across the back. “No, this one is still lively enough.”

Grandma had managed to putter over from the bench to the rocking chair by the fireplace. She was gobbling porridge with a spoon and few teeth. “Don’t you wish to treat us to a nice chicken soup, Emerie?” She said with her mouth full of porridge.

“I wish you all the best in the world, but the winter has barely started and it’s a long time until we get new chicks.”

Grandma growled. “And if it dies on its own? Then you’ve wasted a good meal!”

Mum checked over the chicken again, but shook her head. “It will be fine. Look, the rift is small and no longer bleeding.”

Etin looked more closely. It wasn’t as bad as she had first thought. Maybe it had just had a shock from the attacking Tsik. “OK,” she said, a bit disappointed. “I’ll take it down to the coop again.”

“Can you water the glass house too?” Mum’s glass house was a tiny dwarven building along the south wall. It contained a rare and tender Ekne-bush from the mild valleys in the far south.

Etin bowed her head, embarrassed. Always something she forgot or missed, something that showed she wasn’t an adult yet. “Sorry, I forgot in the middle of everything. I was so worried about the Tsik-bird. I’ll go water now. They weren’t very ripe yesterday, so we can probably wait a few days with picking them.”

“All right. As long as they are jarred by the autumn feast. I have to sell them then.” She gave her daughter a serious look. “And no eating. They are far too valuable. The dwarves will buy them.”

“Scrooges,” grandma muttered into her breakfast. “They’ll never pay you what you put into the bushes.”

Mum rolled her eyes. “Etin. The berries. And we get better paid by the dwarves than any others at the feast.”

Etin took the small bucket of water that had warmed up from being inside.

When she got back, Ansil had finished cleaning the pot and gran’s bowl and spoon. He had scraped the leftovers into a bowl for Etin, and she gratefully ate while cleaning the eggs. One by one, she took them out, checked for cracks, wiped the dirt, and then put them back in the basket for the midday meal. Then she quickly cleaned her bowl - before mum said anything - and found her belt-loom to make ribbons for belts and edgings. Some for sale, some for her own future bridal chest. Ansil had brought their smallest brother - seven year old Nerath - to the best place before the fire to play a game of stones, so Etin found the other chair instead.

“Did you kill the pest,” asked grandma.

Etin looked at her. She was crooked, wrinkled and grey, but still spun the pile of wool in her lap into beautiful, thin yarn. Yarn that mum later would dye and weave or knit. “No,” said Etin. “I threw a couple of old apples at it. It flew away.”

“Bah,” said grandma. “They don’t scare that easy. No, I remember a story from the Swiftstream farms. A girl there they found torn apart below the Swift Cliffs. Swear it was the birds that got her.”

Mum sighed and shook her head. “A Tsik can’t carry a whole child. Maybe a tiny infant, but nothing bigger. I’m sure she climbed and fell, and they came to eat on the dead body.”

With her loom tied around her waist, Etin let her fingers do their familiar dance. Through, turn, beat, through, turn, beat. It let her thoughts wander and she was reminded of something her eldest brother had whispered to her one late evening. “Grandma, Anbar said you’d told him of someone who was hanged for killing a Tsik-bird.”

“Mother in Law!” Mum sat up straight and looked angrily at them both. “What sort of stories are you feeding the children? Noone here gets hanged, Etin, and certainly not for that. Maybe fined a cow.”

Nerath stared at them with big, round eyes. “Brookstone has Tsik-wings over their door,” he said with awe. “Did they have to pay a whole cow?”

Mum bent over the loom again. “No, just a ewe. The judge said it was self defence.”

Grandma grinned. “The critter tore apart the fencing he’d built. Mister Brookstone emptied a dwarfish Repairwand to fix it. Those wands be expensive - your dad can’t afford one. Brookstone got fed up and grabbed his axe.” She chuckled and continued. “Don’t think Brookstone can afford another one either.”

Etin could see Ansil think carefully. He was so adult for his age, and loved all creatures. “The priest at the winter school says the Tsik are People,” he said. “We aren’t allowed to kill them.”

Grandma spat into the flames. “Bah. If one starts on our coop or the lambs, your dad will find his axe too. You’ll see.”

Mum frowned. “I don’t know…”

“Yes, he would, girl. And you’d happily pay a pregnant ewe to get rid of those pests.”

The Water, chapter 1, part 3

The arguments continued through the day, until mother ordered them to start the evening meal. Ansil and Nerath set the table, while Etin went down to the food loft for flour and parsnips. She couldn't see the Tsik anymore, but what she had thought was smoke, looked like fog descending from the distant peaks.

Inside again, mother had started the cooking. Grandma stretched her fingers towards the heat of the fireplace. "I'll take mine by the warmth today," she said.

"You always do," said Nerath.

"How are your hands today," asked Ansil.

Grandma was happy for the opportunity to complain about stiff knees, hurting joints, bad weather and chilled fingers, and entertained the little ones while mother stirred the pot.

"Etin," said mother, "could you get another couple of buckets of water, for the dishes afterwards."

Etin obediently picked up the buckets and the yoke. She stomped up past the sheep barn and put down the buckets by the little stream that provided Apple Hill with fresh, clear water. It sprang from high up where the snow melted above the cliffs, where it was white all year round, and jumped from rock to rock, and gurgled from pond to pond between heather and moss, down the long slopes to Plainsdale, where it finally became one with the long and broad Plainsriver.

Etin let her gaze run along Plainsdale. First south, where heather and birch had become pasture sprinkled with juniper and other shrubs. She followed the Plainsriver with her eyes until it disappeared between hills and mist, long before it watered the broad fields in sunny and strange Ainrand and burst forth into the bay between the Twin Cities.

Then she turned northwards, beyond the cliff, above the ice-sheared mountainsides, and to the top of the valley between Plainsridge and Bluemountain Ridge. Where the two ridges gathered, together with the ends of the Gray Mountains and Isenridge, the Vengvet Heights and the Tamospar-ridge, stood Mount Zanubegil, the "Hand of God". At the dawn of time, it was said, Saylars - god of smiths, maker of the dwarves, He who Shapes - stretched out his hand and drew Earth from Sea. Where he held became the highest point the Five People knew of. Zanubegil, home and capital of the dwarves, which although it had gates and roads in most of the nearby valleys, had its main entrance towards Plainsdale and the 'river.

Occasionally Etin saw small figures up by the gate, but outside marketdays, the dwarves usually kept to themselves.

Her eyes travelled south again, towards the other farmsteads along the west side of the Bluemountain Ridge - Swiftstream, Brookstone and a handful of others. On the other side of the valley the Plainsridge lay like a straight row of hilltops for many, many miles, and west of that, said some there were swamps, and others said there was a desert and others said there was the ocean and the Westhavens.

Etin was happy that wasn't here. She stepped out on the flat rock a distant ancestor had laid out in the pond and carefully lowered the first bucket into the water.

The ground shook gently. Low and murmuring like the sound of a distant animal herd. Rings spread in the pond, tiny waves broke on the banks, and a small, round pebble dislodged from its place among many. Etin pulled up the bucket and placed it beside herself. A rock as large as her fist rolled down and bumped softly against the bucket. She looked up towards Mount Zanubegil, the Hand of God.

Normally it was covered in snow and the gate closed. Now it was licked by small tongues of flame like a crown, and black smoke poured out of the open main gate.