Free The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander

That’s why you won’t even think about leaving baya- Dan here. We aren’t from Chirinaa. We are… we are from Linh-an. We aren’t home after all, mother. We aren’t home yet.”
     

Six
     
    On such small things do fates turn.
     
    There were three sons on the small farm in the fertile hills of the province of Syai known as Hian. Tradition said that one son would be educated to take care of the ledgers and the accounting, one son would work the land, and one son would be responsible for the household and his aging parents.
     
    Tradition sent the eldest of the three sons, Iloh, into the tiny school in the village below, trudging down the hillside and joining a handful of other small boys in a classroom barely big enough to hold their growing bodies and way too small to confine their boisterous spirits. Every boy, inevitably, had his own interests and concerns—and in some of the pupils the enthusiasm was simply for doing the minimum expected of them and then escaping back into the glories of the real world, hiking into the hills to pick the sweet berries or trap small animals out in the woods. Iloh was one of the few whose passions were kindled for a different thing—for the power of the word.
     
    The boys were taught simple, basic things—how to count, and enough of the hacha-ashu script to be able to produce a coherent sentence in clumsy calligraphy and to read at the very least the simple folk renditions of tales and songs that had been copied out onto scrolls and parchments and notebooks. But Iloh saw more, wanted more, and he was one of the few to whom the teacher showed the school’s real treasures—a couple of scrolls of parchment with classical poetry inscribed on them, works of art in themselves, the calligraphy flowing and perfect and the ink unfaded over the years. Those, and a handful of books, mostly novels, printed on cheap paper with ink that sometimes smudged if you ran your finger over the page too fast. But to Iloh, both the magnificent scrolls and the cheaply bound books were equally valuable. Perhaps the latter even more so, because the novels were written in a language closer to the contemporary vernacular and were easier to understand.
     
    “You might want to continue your education,” Iloh’s teacher had told him when he was eight years old. “There are other schools, better schools, bigger schools.”
     
    “Perhaps Father might allow me,” Iloh said, but without conviction. His father was a patriarch of the ancient kind, autocratic, indifferent to all except his own will. Iloh knew that his education was not for his own sake, but the farm’s and the family’s, and that there would be no indulgences.
     
    But even that small hope had vanished when Iloh turned nine. A widowed sister of his father’s had returned to her family home from a neighboring province in the spring of that year with her own small son after the her husband’s death. Iloh’s father had taken them in, no questions asked—they were family. But the three-year-old boy, Iloh’s little cousin, arrived sallow, sickly, and coughing a lot. Before his fourth birthday came around, he was dead. Less than six months after that, his mother died. And before her body was cold, it became obvious that she had left a deadly legacy behind. She and her son had not died of a broken heart. They had died of a disease.
     
    The disease, however, had not died with them.
     
    In the autumn , Iloh’s middle brother, Guan, began to cough and then to waste away. His mother removed him from the rest of the family and stuffed up the gaps in the windows and doors of his room with rags, so that the evil disease could not come out and claim anybody else. Guan fought valiantly for months, isolated and lonely in his convalescent cell, but even his mother’s devoted nursing did not save him. He was just over six years old when the final stages of the illness set in, starting to cough blood into the handkerchiefs his mother left by his