Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

He went shamefaced to Suspirra with this.

“She talked just to hear a voice. A woman’s voice,” confirmed Suspirra.

Which didn’t make Thrasne feel any better about it. Blint-wife had given him all Blint’s books, and he was feeling he’d been ungrateful for all her care over the years. He wrote her a letter, saying so, which he had no means to deliver. It was not to his liking, so he wrote another. And as the days passed, he wrote still others, to Blint-wife, to Blint, to himself. In time, he began to keep them in a book, which he called, to himself and very secretly, “Thrasne’s book.” He was sure the things he wrote there would mean nothing to anyone but him.

From Shfor to Baris was only a few days’ float, if one did it without stopping. Suspirra had asked once more, “My baby?” and it had been seven years since Thrasne had seen Pamra. So they came to Baris, and owner Thrasne went ashore, leaving the boat in the” good hands of first man Birk. In the same shop he found a new barber, who might well have been the old barber for all the difference between them.

“Fulder Don’s youngest daughter? Why, boatman, she surprised all her kin and became an Awakener. Been at the Tower four or five years now. Seems someone told me just the other day they’d seen her with an older one herding a bunch of workers out on the piers.”

Sick at heart, Thrasne took himself off to the house he remembered from before.

“Pamra?” Delia asked, surprised. “Why, boatman, why would you come looking for Pamra?”

Thrasne mumbled something about having known her mother.

“Oh, sad, sad. Pamra’s mama was the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen. Like a flower. Like a flame-bird, bright and graceful, and like a flame-bird gone too soon. Ah. Well, Pamra’s an Awakener now. Did it out of rebellion, I think. To get even with her grandma and her half sisters. They were always at her. It was because she looked like her mother, don’t you know?” She wiped the nose of the infant she was juggling and called a quick set of instructions to two toddlers who were picking herbs, explaining, “Their mama died, too, and they needed a place for a few days until their papa could make arrangements. Well. You didn’t come to talk about my kiddies.”

Which he hadn’t. He left her with words of thanks, taking himself off to the vicinity of the Tower, far enough away not to be questioned by the Awakeners but close enough to see her if she came. When she did, he knew her at once.

“Pamra,” he called, not certain it was allowed to speak to her, but needing to do something more than merely look and go away.

She turned to him, that expression he so well remembered intensified, if anything, into a stubborn, blind naiveté, a face that said, “I will do what I will do!”

“Do I know you?” she asked, a little haughtily, as all the Awakeners were.

“I knew your mother,” he said.

“She went in the River.” Her voice was forbidding. Cold. “She was a coward, a heretic.”

“That’s very harsh,” he said, shocked at her tone.

“No more than she deserves. Did you have something to say to me?”

“Nothing,” he said. What could he say to her? “Nothing.” He turned away, confused, not liking her and yet not wanting to leave. “You look like her,” he called over his shoulder. “Exactly like her. And she loved you.” There, he thought. Let her make what she will of that.

He went back to the boat downcast and miserable to write a new sign for Suspirra. “PAMRA IS WELL.” She was well. So beautiful it put his heart into his throat, half longing and half anger at her, at what she’d done. About sixteen or seventeen now, and the perfect copy of the drowned woman except that Pamra was slim where this woman had a rounded figure, gently swelling.

“How could she?” he whispered.

“She believes,” Suspirra said. “Truly believes. Not in my love, for I abandoned her. Not in her father’s love, for he left her, too, in his way. But in the love of Potipur, for she must believe in love-of some kind.”