Work Text:
The woman who had once been Akaren stayed inside her house for several days, changing.
On the surface, she went on as she had for many months. She drank stale water from a barrel in the cellar, mixed stale flour with the water, and cooked tasteless hearthcakes over a smoky, sputtering fire. She sat and stared at the walls, or lay and stared at the ceiling. But instead of drifting wordlessly in numb despair or weeping in hopeless fury at her inability to die, she kept herself still and let the words come back to her.
The first word was the name the mage had given her, Irreni. For a while, that was enough. She didn’t know its meaning but she could feel its living presence, like the cocoon of an unknown moth. If you cut the cocoon open to see the caterpillar transforming, it will die, no matter how carefully you wield the blade. So she had ruined her old name by screaming it out for all to hear, and ruined herself with it. But that name had been taken from her, and her new name, Irreni, was untouched, secret, wrapped in unblemished silk.
The second word was i. It came to her mind unbidden as she lay in bed. I, a home.
Irreni looked around her room. Grey dust lay thick on the floor. When she sat up, she saw the dark imprint of her unwashed body on the pallet, and grey dust surrounding it. Whatever color the room had once had was hidden beneath dirt and dust.
To other people of the Archipelago, Lorbanery was known for its dyed silk. To the people of Lorbanery, it was known for colors.
There were the colors of the island itself: the translucent blue-green of the ocean surrounding it, the glossy green of the hurbah leaves and the matte red-brown of the hurbah bark, the delicate amber of the beach sand, the rich black of the earth, the striated grey of the stones, the velvety grey of the bats, the mottled green-white of the silkworm bodies and the gemstone brown of their heads, and the soft cream and grey of the adult moths.
And there were the colors the people made. The silk dyes, of course, the famous azure and the dragon’s fire crimson, and many more. But the earths that made silk dye also made dye for humbler fabrics, and paint as well. Beneath the green and brown hurbah-twig roof, even the humblest fisher folks’ home was painted with contrasting colors on the door and outlining the windows. Inside, their furniture would be painted in many colors, and their rough clothes would be dyed in their favorite shades.
The people of Lorbanery were thrifty, and wore their clothes until they fell to rags. But every year, and for some every season, they would dye them anew. A shirt that was green as grass in spring might be sunflower yellow in summer, only to deepen to a rich dark red in autumn.
A ray of pale morning sun made a bright spot on Irreni’s dusty floor. She got up, dragged the filthy pallet outside, and left it in a sunny spot. Perhaps the sun would cleanse it, or perhaps she could strip it down and save whatever of it could be saved. But she would do that later. Now, she wanted to bathe.
Irreni walked behind her house, shed her garments, and knelt in the stream. The water was cold and clear, coming up to mid-thigh, and the pebbles glistened like wet paint. She scrubbed herself, shivering, and ducked down to wash her hair. The streaky tint of innumerable dyes that had permanently stained her arms up to the shoulders had always remained visible, no matter how dirty she got, but once she was clean, it became brighter, the individual colors more easily distinguishable. She traced a swirl of crimson around her thumb until it vanished into a tiny lake of sky blue spattered with bronze.
When she emerged, the reek of her stiffened clothes disgusted her. She hated to touch them, but she made herself scrub them in the stream, beating them against wet stones to get out the dirt, and left them hanging on branches to dry.
She returned to her house naked but for her shoes, and stood before it in dismay. The house itself stank of rot and long uncleanliness, and so did the orchards. Once they had trimmed the trees and collected the cocoons and raked up any dead moths or caterpillars, just as they had cleaned the house and made their dyes and dyed their silks.
They?
Another word came to her, a name. Her son Aisaleth, whose use-name was Sopli. He was dead. She knew it, not with a mother’s intuition, but with the power she had once had, the power she had thought was gone from her and gone from the world.
She sat down where she was and wept for him, for his death and for all that he had lost before he died. Irreni knew how she might look to anyone who came upon her, a naked old woman sobbing on her dirty step, but she didn’t care. He was her son and she had loved him, and he was gone.
He had come back to her after the mage had named her. She was as lost in wonder as he was in madness, and they had not understood each other. Confused, she had fallen back on the one thing that had always been true, and had told him that she loved him. But now she understood what he had said to her: that he would go with the mage, go to show him the hole where the light and the names and the colors were running out of the world.
And so he had gone, and died on the search. But he had remembered his name, his true name, before he had died. Aisaleth had faced the thing he feared most in the hope of closing that hole. All that she knew, and it gave her some comfort. So did the knowing itself. It had been a very long time since she had known anything but despair.
Irreni walked into her house, dressed in musty but clean clothes she found in a trunk, and got to work. Aisaleth had always done the heavier work, chopping wood and carrying barrels of water and dye and earth. But Irreni could do it. The barrels might be half-full and she would start with smaller pieces of wood, but the work would still be done in the end.
She was old but she was strong from years of digging the dye-earths and stirring the dyes, and the magnitude of her task did not daunt her. She was glad of it. It would take days, weeks, maybe months to put her home in order, and while her body worked, her mind could pay attention or drift, as she willed it.
Irreni began in the cellar, dragging out a two-thirds empty barrel of stale water, rinsing it, refilling it halfway with clean water from the creek, and dragging it down the stairs. Fish and crabs and time had been at their net-trap, so she repaired it and set it in place. She washed a few pans and dishes, enough for the night, and swept and scrubbed her bedroom.
When she finally stopped, her back and knees and neck ached, and her muscles trembled with weariness. But her room was clean. The window panes gleamed, and through them she could see the slate blue sky flecked with brilliant orange-pink. The fiery sunset light changed the colors in her room, giving a warmer, darker cast to the swirled brown of the floor, the deep green of the walls, the lighter green of the window pane dividers, and the furniture and blankets in a hundred shades of brown and green and blue.
I, she thought, savoring the word. Home.
Irreni returned to the stream, where she removed three fish and a crab from the net-trap. One of the fish and the crab she released, as they weren’t big enough to eat, but the others she cleaned for her supper, tossing the guts and scales and bones back into the stream. Eat a fish, feed a fish, she thought, the old proverb coming easily to her mind.
As she cooked them, watching the streaming orange flames, another word came to her. Ren, a fire. That had been a part of her old name, her ruined name. Aka, upward motion; ren, fire. Akaren: sunrise.
She ate the white-fleshed fish, trying to understand her new name. Use-names were in Hardic but true names were in the Old Speech. Roke wasn’t the only place you could learn the Old Speech, and though Irreni was no mage, she knew enough to try to puzzle it out.
Ren, fire. I, home. Reni, a hearthfire.
Irreni couldn’t recall the meaning of ir. But as she watched the flames, she remembered more words in the Old Speech. Ser, blue. Alhan, red. Ila, translucent.
They were the words of her art and craft and power, passed down along the line of the Dyers of Lorbanery. She knew ren because fire-red is different from blood-red. She knew i because the brown of the wood floor of your home is not the same as the brown of the road that stretches ahead as you embark on a journey.
When she slept, she dreamed of the words for colors, the color of words. She awoke suddenly, and knew the meaning and color of her name.
Ir, to wait. Irreni, a banked fire. A fire waiting to either go out or flare back to life.
Irreni got up. The pearly gray light that comes just before dawn made her room paler, more delicate, cooler. Today, she thought, she would clean her workroom. Tomorrow, she would walk to the village and buy fresh flour.
She could guess at what she would find in the village. The despair had come upon all of Lorbanery, maybe all of the world. The quest to lift it, the quest her son had died for, had not yet succeeded; she could feel that much. Whether it would succeed or not, she had not the power to foresee, nor ever had. But despite her grief and losses and the despair all around her, despite the work that she had barely begun to do, she intended to do that work. The mage had given her a spark, and she had fed it and nurtured it until it had flared to life. A fire, once caught, could spread.
So she would tell the villagers that she was cleaning her house and tending her orchard. She would request help trimming the branches and raking up the dead moths and watering her mossy roof. She would tell them she was mixing dyes and paints again, and ask them what colors they wanted and if they had any clothes they wished to dye for the season.
They would sit in their drab and faded clothes, and sneer and ask her what was the point. Why tend to silkworms when no one cared about the true silk any more? Why bring back color to a dying world?
Irreni might tell them the world was sick, not dying; that it might yet recover. She might remind them that in Lorbanery, dying people were dressed in their favorite colors. She might say nothing, and let the people she hired see what she was doing, and choose themselves to follow her or not.
But that was for tomorrow. Today, she walked to the beach. The rising sun cast sparkling light over the translucent blue-green water. Irreni shed her clothes, stepped into the water, and swam. It was cold and clear, so clear that she could see the amber sand and white shells and yellow-brown kelp on the bottom. Her hands pushed aside the water like rainbow-scaled fish.