Free The Silences of Home by Caitlin Sweet

Moments later he returned with another pole. As she lifted it from his hands, she said, “Are you sure?”
    He bent and pushed the flatboat out again into the current.
    At first neither of them used their poles. The river grasped the flatboat and turned it slowly around. As it drifted downstream, the mist burned away, and Lanara saw the banks on either side of them and the red houses of the village shrinking behind. The lynanyn trees too were dwindling, replaced by leafless bushes whose thorn-covered branches arched over the water.
    The river bent, and the flatboat began to angle toward the far bank. Before Nellyn could reach for his pole, Lanara stood up. She balanced at the front, holding her arms out. “Let me steer,” she said, and laughed as the river rocked her off her feet. “Really,” she added, picking up a pole and leaning on it, “I want to try. And I want you to be able to look around.”
    She swiftly found the rhythm of pole and water. It was almost like riding a horse: the clenching and easing of muscles, the motion of something wild and living. Dip, raise, turn, dip, raise, turn. She laughed again and shook the spray from her hair and face.
    She set her pole down when the river calmed, in a place between rock walls. Nellyn was staring at the rock, his eyes wide and nearly black. “I do not know this,” he said as she sat down facing him. “This kind of bank. This water.”
    “No, of course you don’t. But you must have expected it to be strange, away from your village.”
    He swallowed and turned his dark eyes on her. “How can I expect? This is another first time. I have never seen banks like this, that are not sand. And the lines in them—they sparkle, maybe like your towers in Luhr? And this water is dark green and still. How can it be that this is the river I know?”
    “It is part of your river. There are many parts to know. But it is all the same river, as you have said to me.”
    “I said this, yes, but I did not see. I had not seen.” His one hand was clenched white around his pole. The other was twitching, fingers opening and closing on nothing.
    “Nellyn.” She leaned forward and put her hands over his. “Don’t be afraid. You will become accustomed to these new things. And you are not alone—I am here to help.”
    He pressed her fingers until they were numb.
He needs me
, she thought, and felt a rush of warmth. He drew his hands away and held them to his cheeks. “Not alone? But I am not all shonyn now. And I never will be a Queensman. How can you say I am not alone?”
    She looked over his head at the red rock. There
were
bands in it: crystal, white and clear and light green. “Your shonyn friends are worried about you,” she said. “They want you to return to them.”
    “I do not know,” he said. “Maybe I cannot return.” He rolled his pole over. The wood beneath it was wet. “Help me, since you say you can. Tell me what I will do.”
    Lanara did not speak for a long time.
I am a Queenswoman
, she thought.
I have brought about this situation, and I must resolve it wisely. The queen sent me here for this
. She drew a deep breath. “You must make a choice. Sometime you will have to choose how to live, and with whom.”
    “Choose,” he repeated, as if he had never heard the word before. He lay slowly down on his side, facing away from her, and drew his legs up to his chest.
    When he did not move, she eased herself down behind him. She stared at the smooth place at the base of his skull and wondered suddenly what blue skin would feel like. She raised her fingers but did not touch him, though she was warm again with her own need. She fell asleep, curled in the shadow of the rock.
    When she woke, the shade was gone and the flatboat bobbed in blinding sun. Nellyn had turned toward her; his sleeping face swam into focus as she blinked herself fully awake. She moved her head and arm and leg and groaned. Her skin was burned, stretched too tightly over her bones. She sat up