The Silences of Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

not. Instead, he creeps out of his hut and into the sunlight.
    He stands up, blinking. The river, he soon sees, is blue—bright, dazzling blue—and he has to look away from it. The black flatboats are drawn up on the shore, dry and still. Beside them, the wise ones’ stones are empty. He trembles beneath the searing blue sky. Fat white clouds pattern the ground, which is a painful gold. There are sparkles in it as well, like Queensfolk jewels. Nellyn sees his own small feet on the sand with a sudden shivering clarity.
    He cannot immediately focus on the lynanyn trees that line the opposite bank of the river; their silver leaves burn, and the black bark beneath is melting. He has seen sunrise and sunset on the leaves and thought them bright. Now he rubs tears away with the palms of his hands and strains to find the shapes of branches and trunks and dangling fruit.
    He hears sounds then, the hum of heat and the insects that hover above the water or skitter over the sand. Muffled voices from the tents: the Queensfolk awake, talking, laughing, as all the shonyn sleep. Nellyn hears a few words he understands; the others seem warped or broken. He stands looking from his feet to the three tents, which are bright green and blue. His eyes and skin hurt.
    Go back inside. Go back
.
    He walks slowly among the round red huts, watching the lynanyn-dyed cloth doors billowing. He knows the path up to the tents, but it is different now—new and terribly bright, like everything else. The teaching tent’s door flap is closed, but another’s, beside it, is open. Nellyn draws close, until the voices are quite loud and he can smell food. He does not look behind him at the river and the village; he does not even think to do so. He edges his head around the tent’s opening and peers inside.
    Soral, his Queensman teacher, is bending over a table; a lynanyn trader sits across from him. They are tossing wooden blocks and laughing and eating something—not lynanyn—from a silver platter. A raised bed stands in one corner, and a small table beside it, covered in scrolls that Nellyn sees are dark with the odd marks Queensfolk make with slender sticks and call “writing.” A carpet like the one in the teaching tent covers the sand: it is red, green, blue, woven into shapes he cannot quite see. The sunlight shining through the tent walls shifts in the air like water.
    Nellyn does not make a sound, and he moves only slightly in the doorway, but suddenly both faces turn to him. “Nellyn?” Soral says, his voice and brows rising together. The trader—a large woman, older than Soral—frowns. “Nellyn, what are you doing awake at this hour?” Nellyn cannot answer. His throat feels thick, filled with sand.
    Soral smiles, says, “Come in,” and Nellyn does.
    Soral sets him on a tall stool at the table and introduces him to the trader, who is smiling now as well, but Nellyn scarcely hears him. He is alone with Queensfolk, in their tent. None of his friends are beside him. The sun is high, not slipping below the horizon. He swallows and clenches his fists under the tabletop.
    They show him how to play their game, speaking slowly so that he will understand—but he does not. He tosses the wooden blocks several times, then sits and simply watches. When Soral offers him food from the tray, he shakes his head, he tries not to even look at it. The smell makes him dizzy. Once or twice the two Queensfolk speak quickly and glance at each other over his head, and Nellyn knows they are talking about him. At last Soral says, “Nellyn, you should go back and try to sleep. You mustn’t be tired at sundown.” Nellyn nods and slips off the stool to the carpet, with its images (he now sees) of flowers and rivers and sky. He hesitates by the door flap. Soral says, gently, “Go on, small one.”
    Nellyn goes, his feet carrying him quickly, as they never have before. He slithers down the slope. Near the bottom he falls, and his breath rasps as he struggles to