10. Where the River Runs

10

WHERE THE RIVER RUNS

TIME CONTINUED ON ITS WAY and in its way, passing for everyone at the same speed, swift and unstoppable as the River Wild itself. Alexi became a common sight in Inna’s kitchen; they might not be able to feed every hungry child in the city, or force every parent to become a better person than they were, but they could feed him, and that was better than nothing by such a measure as to be immeasurable. Nadya’s arm of River-water remained, as flexible and dexterous as any other human arm, and she accordingly spent more time on the fishing boats, no longer needing sticks to help her tie her knots.

She learned to catch small fish inside her palm and let them swim through the substance of her arm through the days, before releasing them back into the river. She found a tadpole, once, of the sort of frog that never grew larger than a grown man’s hand, and she kept it cradled in her arm as it grew, watching its slow metamorphosis until the day it pulled itself free and hopped away, needing her no longer. She learned.

She watched the way people reacted to her River-arm, the ones who saw it as a useful tool and the ones who saw it as some sort of repair to the substance of her self, and she cleaved closer to the former and let the latter drift away. There was nothing wrong with using useful tools, or with having only a single hand to your name. She was herself, either way. It was just that now she was the version of herself who carried a river’s love close against her skin, who could be a home to fish and frogs.

And then came the morning when Burian came to her window, sticking his head inside before the rest of the house was awake. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Nadya, hey.”

“What?” She rolled over in her hammock and sat up, wiping sleep from her eyes with both hands, a gesture that had developed so quickly and so naturally that anyone who hadn’t known her before her fall would never have guessed that her water arm was a recent development. She used it as naturally as she used her arm of flesh, and rarely seemed to mark the difference at all.

“I’ve just been to see Anna.”

Nadya sat up straighter. Anna saw to the health and care of all the turtles who chose to live within the city—and some of those who didn’t, who would still come to seek her out when they were hurt or sick or gravid and egg-bound. Even wild things can need care, and when lucky, they can seek it. Due to the damage to Burian’s shell, Anna had been leery of letting him leave the creche in the first place, and had monitored his growth ever since. “What did she say?”

“She says I’m strong enough to go to the surface,” he said, and then added, voice dipping so that it was almost shy, “She says I’m strong enough to ride.”

Nadya slid out of her hammock and rushed to the window, putting her hands on the edge and leaning out so that she and Burian were face-to-face. “Truly?”

“Truly. They’ll fit me for a saddle this afternoon, if you want them to.”

Nadya squealed and boosted herself out the window so she could wrap her arms around her friend’s neck and squeeze him to her. She would never have been able to embrace a normal turtle that way, but Burian was intelligent; he could speak, he could tell her if she was hurting him, and he quite enjoyed the attention.

When she let go, he ducked his head and said, “I’m sorry it’s taken so long. I’m sorry I can’t pull a boat like Vasyl can. I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be sorry about any of those things,” she said, cutting him off. “Who wants to spend their life on a fishing boat? The river called me, and that means the river wants me to see more than just the common currents. Riders get to explore and find things we don’t know about yet. You and I can go all the way to the Winsome if we want to, or to the Whimsy, or even to the Widdershins! We can see the whole world, and that’s better than a boat. I’d rather you than the strongest turtle in the whole world.”

“Really?”

“Really-really. You and me, Burian, we’re going to swim all the way to the sky.”

They went to Anna that afternoon to get Burian fitted with his saddle, which was braided rope and leather and stretched across his shell, tied at his belly. Only turtles who truly trusted their human companions to have their safety in mind agreed to be ridden; once the saddle was secured, the turtle couldn’t remove it on their own. It would have to be refitted as he grew, and he still had quite a bit of growing to do; river turtles could be so large that even the tallest man in the world couldn’t touch both sides of their shell at once, although it took them many, many years to reach that point. Burian would be small enough to be quick and agile for decades yet.

Most of the truly epic turtles swam away from the city, vanishing into the distant depths of Belyyreka, where their smaller relations couldn’t go. They lived so long that they saw the companions of their youth age and die while they went ever on, as enduring as the river. It ate at them, to be left so alone, and isolation seemed to be the best response.

Nadya found it all very sad. More than once, she had hugged Burian by the neck and whispered, “I won’t ever go away. I won’t ever leave you. We’ll find a way for me to live with you forever, and even when you get as big as a boat, I’ll still be bringing you biscuits and scolding you for sneaking up on me.”

“Lots of turtles get as big as boats,” said Burian.

“Big as an island, then! Big as a whole house !” She wasn’t actually sure which of those two things was bigger, but it seemed to be the right thing to say, every time she said it. Here and now, standing back and watching as Burian was fitted, she half-listened to the lecture Anna was delivering on the responsibility attendant with being a turtle-rider, how important it was that she never go anywhere without telling Inna and the harbormaster where they were going to be and when they were going to be back. Things could happen to riders. Bad things, even, when no one knew how to find and help them.

Nadya bristled at the implication that she and Burian wouldn’t be able to handle anything that came their way. She was brave and clever and almost grown! She had been in Belyyreka for so long that no traces of the world she’d come from remained, her clothes long since gone to rot and dissolution, her shoes replaced a dozen times, even her body changed by the passing of time and the pressures of puberty. She might not be an adult yet, even as the river measured such things, but she was closer than she was distant, and she could handle herself and her companion when she needed to. But she smiled and thanked Anna for the advice all the same, and Anna, who had seen hundreds of hopeful riders come through, reins in their hands and dreams of adventure in their eyes, knew full well that not all of them came back.

And some of those who did didn’t come back complete. They lost their steeds or they lost pieces of themselves, and the river didn’t always see fit to gift them with replacements as it had Nadya. She could lose more than she imagined if she wasn’t careful, and Anna wanted to spare her and Burian both the pain of that, if she could.

But she couldn’t, of course, and she knew that even as she lectured and Nadya’s eyes shone with the thrill of her impending freedom. No one can warn the eager and excited away from their own future. A future is a monster of its own breed, different for everyone, and ever inescapable.

Nadya and Burian left the city together the minute they were cleared, not even stopping by the house to get sandwiches from Inna.

They had a world to see.

NADYA HELD HER brEATH as they broke the surface of the River Wild, an old reflex that always seemed to take over when she approached a transition between the types of water. Burian gasped, taking a breath of the thinner water above, and looked down at the river’s surface, which seemed suddenly so much thicker than it had been from below.

“Nadya, your arm?” he asked, turning his head to look at her.

She smiled and held up her right hand, wiggling her fingers at him. “It always stays. The river gave it to me, and it’s mine now.” She had been worried, the first time she rode the boats up into the above-river to fish, that it would stay below. It was an easy thing, to grow accustomed to having an arm, even after spending so much time without one. She would do fine without it, but if she could keep it, that was her preference. Like a knife or a fisher’s hook, it was an easy tool that made things easier.

“Ah,” said Burian, who never accompanied the fishing boat. That was Vasyl’s territory. He looked around, to the endless river in one direction and the towering wood in the other. “Where shall we go?”

The fishing boats rarely went ashore. The farming boats did, to plant and tend and harvest, but Inna’s house was a fishing house, and so Nadya had rarely been entirely outside the River Wild since coming to Belyyreka. “The wood,” she said. “The flooded forest. I had… I had a friend there once. I wonder if he might still be around.”

She didn’t know how long foxes lived, but with everything else in Belyyreka being the way it was, it might be a long, long time. Maybe they were like turtles and simply got larger as they aged, and when she approached the forest’s edge, a fox the size of a horse would come trotting out to meet her. Burian nodded and turned against the current, swimming toward the shore.

He was no tortoise, to spend his days on dry land and walk everywhere, but neither was he a sea turtle, with wide paddles for legs and no real grace on land. As they reached the shallows, his swimming became walking, until finally he was standing and stepping up onto the shore, clawed feet digging into the mud. His belly skirted the ground, and Nadya shifted uncomfortably atop him, feeling the weight of the thin-water world settle on her shoulders. They weren’t dry here—what she had taken for dryness on her first arrival was simply a different form of damp, delicate and so all-encompassing it was almost imperceptible—but she felt dry by comparison. She felt like she was edging back toward the world of her birth, and she never wanted to return there. Not today, not ever. She was sure.

Burian stopped near the edge of the wood, looking dubiously at the trees. “They seem very close together,” he said. “I’m not sure I can go in there.”

Nadya slid off his back. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to go into the woods. If we want to see the River Winsome, we’ll have to find a way around, but that can happen later, when everyone’s more used to us coming and going.” She gave his shell a pat, then took a few steps toward the tree line, pausing a decent distance back to cup her hands around her mouth and call, “Artyom! Artyom the fox!”

She waited until the echoes of her shout had faded before she turned back to Burian, trying not to look as disappointed as she felt. “I suppose it was silly to hope he’d still be here, it’s been so long,” she said. “I just thought this part of the wood might be his home.”

“It was,” said a voice behind her. She turned again, and there was a fox sitting at the edge of the wood, fur a rosy gold, tail wrapped around its feet. It was watching her with sharp, clever eyes, body tensed in a way that told her it would bolt and disappear if she took so much as a step in its direction. “He’s not here anymore.”

“Did he move elsewhere in the wood?”

“No.” The fox continued to watch her with sharp, sharp eyes. “A frog came out of the River Winsome ages ago and ate him up with a snap. He was my grandfather.”

It didn’t ease the sting to know that while time might be different for foxes, her friend the fox had died by other means. Nadya grimaced. “I’m so sorry.”

“Did you know him?”

“He helped me cross the flooded forest when I was just a little girl.”

The fox looked at her. “You’re the human child he found on the banks of the Winsome. Nadezhda.”

No one called Nadya by the full form of her name anymore, but it made something in her chest feel warm to know that Artyom had remembered her. She had never forgotten him, exactly, but somehow time had gotten away from her down beneath the river, and she’d been able to convince herself, time and again, that one day soon she would go to the surface with the intent to go back into the flooded forest, one day soon she would let him know she was all right. One day.

And somewhere in the middle of all those unkept promises, a terrible thing had come out of another river and swallowed him down, quick as anything. It wasn’t fair. It was still true.

“My name is Artem,” said the fox. “He spoke well of you, my grandfather did. Said you were quick and clever and willing to listen when he told you what to do. He rarely spoke that well of humans.”

“I was very lost and he helped me find my home,” said Nadya, voice small. “I was grateful. I still am.”

“Then go home,” said Artem. “Get back on your turtle and go back beneath the surface of the river and be happy, human child. Never come here again. The flooded forest is not for you.”

Nadya blinked. Of all the welcomes she could have expected, this was the least expected. “I’m a rider now,” she said. “We scout for the city, to find good fishing and good farmland. It’s my duty to be here.”

“Do you really think there’s anything left along the river’s length that your people haven’t already seen and studied and learned to understand?” asked Artem. “Humans are curious things. They want to know. They want the answers to questions that had no business ever being asked, and so they’re never truly sure of anything, not even their own desires. They’re too busy chasing their tails to see the rabbits. There are no wonders for you here, Nadezhda. No mysteries to solve, no monsters to fight. Only a place you need not be, like so many other places you need not be. Only a danger.”

Nadya blinked at him, then blinked again as Burian’s great head pushed its way under her right hand, lifting it up.

“The river chose her, fox,” he said. “The world chose her and then the river chose her, and she’ll go where she wishes to go, and I’ll go with her, as I am her companion and you are not.”

Artem slitted his eyes in what could have been amusement and could have been annoyance, regarding Burian for a long, silent moment before he leapt to his feet and went bounding off, stopping at the edge of both the wood and Nadya’s hearing to look back at her and say ominously, “Go back below, where you’ve already drowned, and leave the dry world to its own devices.”

Then he was gone, darting off into the trees. Burian walked ponderously forward, nudging the brush at the edge of the wood with his nose.

“What are you doing?” Nadya asked.

“We have to cross the wood somehow,” said Burian.

“I thought you didn’t think you’d fit between the trees.”

“I didn’t. I still don’t, but if that fox wants to tell you that we can’t be here, we’re going to be here all the more.” Burian twisted his neck, looking back at her. “The river chose you. I chose you. No one else gets to tell you where you’re meant to be.”

Nadya frowned, not quite sure of the logic, but she allowed Burian to lead her along the forest’s edge until the sky started to darken with a coming storm. Then she coaxed him back to the river, and they returned to the depths, following the fleet of fishing boats that also raced ahead of the rain. Perhaps the forest would be easier to travel when it was actually flooded, and not simply haunted by the ghosts of past rainfall.

Burian grumbled during the first part of their descent, but by the time they leveled out into their final approach to the city, he was happy again, proud of the journey they had taken together. He came to a stop in front of Inna’s house, and Nadya slid down from his back onto the dock. “Do you want me to remove the saddle?” she asked.

“Anna will do it,” he replied, nudging her with his head. “She prefers to remove the saddles herself, to be sure there’s no tangle in the cords or breakage in the knots.”

“I’ll have to learn to do it eventually.”

“Not today. Today is for celebrating what we’ve done.” Burian bumped her with his head again. “I’ll have my saddle off and be given the finest greens and fish, and it will be a beautiful night. Your family will be ready to feast with you. I know Inna will have asked Alexi to join you, and if you’re not there, he won’t be able to enjoy the splendor of a welcome feast. So go. Go, and tomorrow, we’ll go up to the surface again. We’ll find our way through that wood, and we’ll see the Winsome.”

“All right,” said Nadya, and kissed the top of his head before turning and going into the house, which was low and bright and filled with laughter. Inna met her in the front room, grabbing her by the waist and spinning her around before leading her to the table, where Galina and her husband and their children were waiting. Places had been set for Nadya and another for Alexi. She looked at the empty chair and blinked.

“Inna?”

“He’s coming,” said Inna warmly. “He’ll be here soon, I’m sure of that if nothing else.”

“I’m glad,” said Nadya.

“How did you enjoy the surface?”

Nadya hesitated before saying, “It was very… dry. I know everything of Belyyreka is under the great lake, and the water extends above the river’s surface, but it felt so much like the air from the world where we were born. It was thin and dry and I didn’t like it.”

“The different forms of water can seem very strange when you move between them,” said Inna kindly. “If you touch your arm, does it feel wet?”

“Yes,” said Nadya hesitantly, and pressed her fingers against the surface of her right arm, letting them dip just below the surface. And it did feel wet, in a way the world around her didn’t. She pulled her hand back. “I know we’re under the river, and everything around us is water, but my arm still feels like water. It’s wet, like the world isn’t.”

“The water of your arm is from the bottom of the river,” said Galina’s husband, a broad, amiable man who worked the farms downriver during the days, gathering greens and fresh fruit for the city below. His boat went up with the fishermen, and came down at the same time, delivering their wares to market along with the fish and crabs. Many things would grow above the river but not below.

“The water there is heavier,” said Nadya hesitantly. “That’s why it sinks to the bottom.”

“The water above the river is lighter, which is why it stays there,” said Galina’s husband. “And the lighter water becomes, the drier it seems against the skin.”

Nadya frowned. “We went to the edge of the forest where you found me, Inna. The fox who led me through wasn’t there. He died. But his grandson was there, and he told us to stay away, that the forest wasn’t for humans. Can he do that? Can a fox tell us to stay out of a whole forest?”

“Of course he can,” said Inna. “He did, didn’t he? Whether he has any authority to make saying it mean anything more than sounds is another question.”

“Well, does he?”

“Foxes do not control the forests, but there are other things than foxes in the trees. Burian is a fine, strong young turtle, but he would be unable to defend you from a bear, if one took a liking to the smell of you, or a wolf, if it hungered.”

Nadya swallowed. She was about to ask how many wolves and bears there were in the forest, and whether it was really a good idea for her and Burian to go scouting alone—not that she wanted to give up her newfound freedom, but she was even less eager to be eaten by a bear—when Alexi came rushing in.

“I was at the market,” he said. He had been working one of the stalls there for the past year, selling vegetables during shopping times, sweeping and helping with the inventory when crowds were thin. He might, if he liked, take an apprenticeship with one of the farming boats in the next year, to begin heading above-river to the fields. They had discussed it, in the halting, awkward way teens talked about the future when they didn’t want to face it directly, out of fear that it would come swooping down and gobble them up; he had no interest in fishing and, with no turtle of his own, couldn’t be a scout. He did well enough at the market, and might choose to be a merchant instead of a farmer.

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 say exactly. 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 hunting or 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’t want us 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, before Alexi 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.

It was a day-by-day economy, sustained by the environment’s passive interference with any form of hoarding or resource complication, and Nadya loved it. No one was wealthy. No one who had the ability to work and chose to actually do so was poor. They all had enough.

“Tables and market stalls,” Alexi agreed. “I’m decent enough at it, and I could be good if I do it for a while. Good enough to grow fruit and herbs and other nice things for a table to have.”

Nadya had been in Belyyreka long enough to recognize the shape of this conversation. She bit her lip in thought as they continued on. The docks had long since become familiar territory to her. Most of the city had, and the ebb and flow of its days was something she understood down to the bottom of her bones. One day, those bones would be a part of the city’s foundations, and she would rest easily. But until then, there were things to do, choices to be made, a life to be led.

“I won’t be able to stay at home and raise children as Galina has done,” she said. “I’m far too fond of Burian and I like scouting. It’s what I want to do.”

“I’ve always liked staying home,” said Alexi. “It’s very possible to farm and also do the majority of the work of raising children.”

Nadya, who had done her share of childrearing at the orphanage and had not discovered an urge to do more of the same in her time under the river, made a noncommittal noise.

“It’s also possible to have a home with no children,” said Alexi. “My father’s line comes from a fallen city, my mother’s has been carried on by two sisters. If I choose not to have children of my own, but to call a swept-away or two my sons and daughters, it will cost the river nothing, and I can still be happy with my contributions.”

“Scouting carries dangers,” warned Nadya. “There might be a day when I don’t come back.”

“Boats sink when storms come in too quickly for the turtles to take them below the surface, and if the transition isn’t made smoothly, people can drown,” said Alexi. “Frogs come out of the forest and attack the farmers. I would be expected to do my share of standing guard, if I went to the fields. There might be a day when I don’t come back, either.”

Nadya looked deep into her heart and found no further objections. She stopped walking, still holding Alexi’s hand, and turned to face him.

“I think I would like to have a home with you,” she said.

He smiled, bright as anything. “Really?” He pulled his hand from hers and used it to move the hair away from her face.

“Really,” she replied, and kissed him.