Free The Silences of Home by Caitlin Sweet Page A

carefully and groaned again, and his eyes opened.
    “Don’t move,” she said between her teeth. “We’ve done a foolish thing, and we can never move again.”
    “What is wrong?” he asked, and she snorted.
    “Isn’t it obvious? Look at my skin. I’m sunburned.” As soon as the words were spoken, she thought,
Lanara, you fool
.
    Nellyn said, “I do not know about this, since shonyn do not go out in day sun.” He smiled. “But your skin is very red, on that side. Like a kind of fish.”
    She gave an incredulous laugh. “Indeed?”
    He nodded and reached for one of the lynanyn he had piled on the flatboat during the night. “Yes. But I will help you.”
    “Ah, yes—the miraculous lynanyn,” she said as he made a hole in one end with his thumbnail.
    “Put your arm like this,” he told her, and squeezed the fruit until juice dribbled, then flowed.
    She gasped. It was very cool and stung a bit before it numbed. “You aren’t burned,” she said as he held the lynanyn over her leg. “Maybe because you’re darker skinned than I am. Quite unfair.” She wriggled as juice fell on her neck. “Wait, Nellyn, that tickles. . . .”
    Her voice died when she saw his face. He was very still. The green river lifted them once, twice, before she said, “Let’s go back now.” He smiled, and she looked away from its gentleness and its pain. She thought,
Don’t touch him. Don’t make things more difficult
. She rose and took up her pole. She knew his eyes were on her, and she felt light with strength and the certainty of desire.
    Nellyn felt as if he had been shaking since dawn, from too much strangeness and too much sun, and a light sleep riddled with dreams he could not remember. Her skin, also, streaked with blue and sweat. And then the effort of their journey back to the village, both of them straining against the current.
    “I’d like to lie down here,” Lanara said when they were standing on the bank he knew, near the red huts. “But I probably wouldn’t be able to get up again. And I don’t want to burn any more than I already have.”
    “Yes,” he said, the word forced from a jaw that was locked and sore. He saw that his pole was trembling and tried to hold it more tightly.
    “See you this evening,” she said, “if we manage to wake up.”
    He watched her make her slow way up the ridge and remembered when he had first seen her.
She looks shonyn again
, he thought, and was amazed that he had ever truly thought this.
    He groaned as he crawled into his hut. He drank cold water from a jug and ate five lynanyn seeds. Then he slept and dreamed the sounds of sails and oars and anchor. He dreamed her voice as well, and her fingertips on the nape of his neck.
    “Nellyn. Nellyn—please wake up.”
    He struggled to lean on his elbows. She was above him, dark against the amber light outside. “What?” he mumbled, dragging himself out of sleep as if he were walking through water.
    “There is a Queensboat here. I must go now, and I had to come to you to tell you. To say goodbye.”
    He could see her now. She was crying, or perhaps she had been. He lifted his hand to her face. He could do this, somehow, now that she had said these words to him. She turned her head briefly, so that her cheek rested on his hand, then she backed out beneath the curtain.
    “Come with me. Please—walk with me to the boat.”
    “Explain,” he said, when they were both standing by the hut. She slung her bow over her shoulder and picked up a brown leather bag.
    “While we walk,” she said, and he followed her toward the wise ones’ stones and the boat that waited in the river. It was not as large as the Queensships he had seen before. It had only two sails and three pairs of oars, and it was lower in the water.
    “This boat brought me messages from Luhr,” Lanara said. “From the Queen, and Ladhra. There’s a Queensman on board who’ll take my place here until I come back. If I come back.”
    “Lanara,” he said,