Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Wasn’t there another daughter?”

“Oh. Sure there was. Prender. She’s staying at the house the old woman had. Now how did I forget Prender?”

Prender was stiff and cold, angry at being questioned. “She’s gone, that’s all I know. A servant came from the Tower. I couldn’t see her face for the veils, but her voice was hard. Then a Laugher to question me about it, sent from somewhere else. He was stone in his face, and mean. His words were like threats. He said they’d find her no matter where she’s gone. They don’t know where she went, except she went early one morning. She was supposed to take workers to the forest for wood. Very early. All the workers were gone.”

She started to shut the door against him, her face creased deep with all the bitterness of the years, opening it just far enough to spit a few more words at him through the crack. “He wanted to know what she had said to me about Delia. About Delia going east. As though she would have said anything to me. This is all her fault, Pamra’s. She and her mother both. Neither of them could ever be sensible about anything.”

“When did she disappear?”

“I said. Early in the morning.”

“No. I mean when! How long ago?”

“Not long. Twenty, thirty days, perhaps.”

As he turned to leave, she called after him, “She only did it to get even with us, you know. That’s what I told him, that Laugher. She only did it to hurt us.”

Thrasne didn’t turn. He was too busy feeling ashamed of himself. He had blamed Pamra, blamed her, when all she had really done was flee from voices like the one behind him.

What would he tell Suspirra now?

He told her nothing. When he entered the owner-house, she was turned toward him. He saw her lips, her teeth, the lower teeth touching her upper lip. He copied it with his own, breathing out. “Ffff.” He did not need to wait to know what she would say.

‘‘Find her!’’

“How can I find her, Suspirra? No one knows where she went.”

“Find her!”

“She will have gone west, probably. Why? Why did she go at all?” And even as he asked the question, he knew the answer. He could see it as clearly as the pictures he had drawn of Suspirra. The barber had said Delia went east. He saw Delia leaving. She was old, too old. She died there, east of Baristown. He visualized her returning in the pit, Raima’s arrival there, early in the morning. He assumed the Awakeners looked at faces: So, she would have seen the face, seen, known, and all at once known everything she had not wanted to know. That stubborn rebellion, that rigid naivet, breached, overcome. Suspirra had said, “She had to believe hi love of some kind.”

And having seen, having known, where would she go? Not to the River, not at once. No. West. For a time.

He took the Gift west, stopping at every town, no matter how small. He searched everywhere, talking to Rivermen, patronizing barbers.

And he found her, as much because she had not had time to go far nor strength to go fast as for any other reason. She was serving drinks in a tavern, hair loose as any market-woman’s, silent as a wraith with haunted eyes, and yet more beautiful in her fear than she had been in her complacency at the Tower. There were men drinking in the place only to look at her, but she was blind to all their looks.

“Do you want drink?” she asked, her haughtiness gone and only a haunted, terrible conviction of danger remaining.

“Pamra, I’ve been looking for you.”

She started with fear, thinking he might be someone the Awakeners had sent after her, but he put a hand upon her arm as she trembled.

“It’s all right. Your mother wants to see you.”

“My mother is dead,” she said, eyes wide with horror. “She’s dead.”

“Yes. But no. Will you come with me?”

“She went in the River. You’re mad!”

“Say I am mad. But I will not harm you in my madness. I swear by all that is good and holy … “