Page 22 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

It would be better than following in the footsteps of his parents, who were scavengers and thieves, and had never sought a job in service of the city. Not everyone could work; some were too sick or too old or, as they had been until recently, too young. And they were cared for as much as possible. In Alexi’s case, the assumption had been that his parents would provide for him, and when they had failed to do so, his stomach had gone empty and his resentments had grown wild.

A few hot meals and the care of a family, even if it wasn’t entirely his own, had done a great deal to prune those resentments away. He rushed to settle next to Nadya, asking, “Am I late?”

“No, we haven’t started yet,” said Inna reassuringly. She smiled at the two of them. Alexi might not be family now, but she felt sure he would be in the not-too-distant future. He and Nadya were growing up so quickly, settling into their places within the city, the roles they were going to play in their adult lives. She couldn’t imagine they weren’t going to spend those lives together. Nadya had plenty of friends, scuffling, roiling urchins who spilled in and out of the house like hatchling turtles, but none of them had become family the way Alexi was beginning to.

None of them had near-permanent places at the table or watched Nadya with the same burgeoning awe. And so Inna kept smiling at Alexi as she placed rolls on his plate and waved for Galina’s daughter to pass the tray of roast rabbit down the table. Each of the people at the table served and was served in turn, until their plates were piled high with delicacies, and Inna clapped her hands for their attention.

“We have come together over this bread and this bone to celebrate the passage of one of our own into the halls of adulthood,” she said. “Our Nadya and her Burian have become scouts on this day, traveling to the lands above the river to enhance the glory of our city!”

Cheers erupted around the table. Nadya’s cheeks reddened as she ducked her head in pleased embarrassment, staring at her plate like it might hold the secrets of her life as yet to come.

“Nadya is the first scout of our household, and so we applaud her bravery and quickness, to go where so few have gone before her, into the waters and the wilds. She will bring much honor to our house, until she leaves us to open a house of her own.” More applause.

Nadya’s cheeks grew redder. It was understood that although she was the oldest of the three children of the house, she was also the most recently arrived; she wouldn’t be the one to inherit, but would one day be the one to strike out and open a house of her own. This house belonged to Inna, who had been adopted before Galina arrived to her parents, and Galina’s husband had come along still later. Galina’s son would be the owner of the household one day, and while he would never turn Nadya out, he would most likely take a spouse of his own, or his sister would, and they would fill all the available space. It was thus expected that Nadya would be the one to find another place.

It was a fair and reasonable means of doing things. Nadya still didn’t like to think about it more than she had to. She no longer knew how old she was, not really; she knew she had been almost eleven when she’d fallen into the pond, and that based on her height and… other factors… she was probably somewhere around nineteen by now, but she couldn’t sayexactly. There were no seasons in the River Wild, aside from “storm” and “not storm,” and sometimes they were long seasons and sometimes they were short seasons, and no one really knew how to predict which was going to be which. Time seemed to matter less, at the bottom of the river.

“Bears,” said Nadya, looking to Inna. “You mentioned bears. How concerned do I need to be about bears?”

None of the conversations she had had about scouting had mentioned bears, or wolves. They hadn’t dwelt on the flooded forest, either, but on the farmlands and what might be beyond them, distant and drowning. The expectation had always seemed to be that she would strike out downriver or upriver, not take Burian and go overland.

Had she been river-born, or landed first in the Wild and not the Winsome, that might have been a reasonable expectation. Children who were born to the Wild seemed to think “Wild” was another word for “world,” and that anything beyond the river’s banks was not meant for them to know. Only the swept-away scouts went any farther, and she hadn’t heard of anyone going to the Winsome in years.

“The bears are only in the forests,” said Alexi. “The elders teach us about them when we ask about farming, because sometimes they’ll come out of the wood to try and steal what we’re growing. Ivan was a baker before he became harbormaster, and he says they used to set the burnt loaves out for the bears to come and take, because if they shared, the bears didn’t raid them and knock over their ovens. The bears are as smart as the foxes, and they can be reasoned with, if there’s no other choice.”

“Still, bears,” said Galina, and shivered exaggeratedly. “You’ll never find me scouting or farming or baking or huntingor anything else that means being above-river and off the boats long enough to have to deal with them!”

“Wolves are smarter,” said Galina’s husband, in his ponderous way. “They make plans and carry grudges, sometimes for generations. Best never to truck with wolves.”

Nadya made a noncommittal sound and poked her dinner with her fork, suddenly feeling less like she was celebrating than being condemned. None of the lectures she’d received about the dangers of scouting had mentioned wolves or bears. She and Burian might have set their hearts on something else if they’d known, baking or hunting or another profession that was easier with personal transport but didn’t require her companion to tow a boat as he swam. It seemed like a cheat, somehow, to allow her to commit herself to filling a role for the city that carried dangers she didn’t fully understand along with it.

It felt like the sort of unkindness that had driven Alexi to challenge and fight her on the dock, people not sharing things that other people needed to know, and it tarnished her joy, making it hard to enjoy a meal that contained so many of her favorite things, or the company of so many of her favorite people.

After dinner was done and the dishes cleared, Nadya and Alexis walked along the docks hand in hand, her watery fingers tangled through his fleshy ones. “It’s like they don’twantus to know what’s above before we get there and it’s too late for us to say no,” she complained.

“There used to be another city, in the Winsome,” he said. “My father used to talk about it, when he’d been drinking and wanted something to be angry about that wasn’t me or my mother.”

Nadya focused on him. “Oh?”

“He lived there when he was a boy. I think half the stories he tells about it are remembering something he can’t have anymore as better than anything he could possibly have now to make himself feel better about how badly he’s done since the city fell. But he said it was as big and beautiful as our own, and the people who lived there didn’t have turtles.”

“So how did they get anything done?”

“They had river otters instead, big as boats, who pulled them up and down as was needed. And they harvested oysters more than fish. The Winsome feeds into a vast estuary of salted water.”

“An ocean?” asked Nadya, wonderingly. She had never heard of an ocean in Belyyreka before.

“That’s not the word he used, but I suppose, if it’s something you know.” Alexi sighed. “Frogs overran them. They swallowed up the children and the smallest of the otters, and the otters who remained abandoned them, and so they were forced to flee the river and travel overland until they reached the River Wild. It’s why he never let me go to take care of the hatchlings when I was young enough that one of them might have decided to choose me for their companion. He said companions can’t be trusted, because they’ll always leave you when you need them the most.”

“That’s just silly,” said Nadya. “Otters and turtles aren’t the same, and even if they were, running away when something is eating your babies isn’t abandoning, it’s being smart.” She knew enough to know that Galina would never leave her children, but if something ate them, she would probably leave everything that remained behind rather than stay where they had been but weren’t any longer.

“I guess.” They walked a little farther in silence, beforeAlexi said, “I’m talking to Kristof about taking a seat on one of the farming boats with the next growing season. I like plants. I think I could do well in the fields.”

“Then it sounds like a good thing for you.”

“I know it’s not very exciting, farming, but it’s good work, and it fills tables.”

“Tables, and market stalls.” Galina’s husband brought home produce to feed the family, sometimes more than they could eat, and still had enough to sell and bring back a reasonable amount of coin. The city didn’t depend on money as much as it did on barter, but sometimes money was needed for the things that didn’t keep long enough to be reliably traded. The water in the river was breathable, but it made it difficult to keep baked goods or meat for long before they would grow a thick coat of mildew and become something that wasn’t any good for eating. And money was less awkward than charging dried fish to charge for painting a house or potatoes for a trip to the doctor.

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