Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
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Steam surrounded her, warm as fingers. Even the plank Poss a'ltic sat on was
warm. Kascin stroked the soap across her back and splashed water to rinse. Her
feet were already soaking; the black had gotten in around the toenails. She
slipped into the water as he finished, turning as she did, floating backwards to
see him, her braid ends trailing free. Soaked and ruined but they had been
already.
Kascin watched her, a towel in his hand the same as he had held the cloak. He
would be seeing the scars from the burning, she knew. The knife that had killed
her had been left, caught on bone and no effort made to remove it. High Zimmer,
the Net spin had said. Clan a'Genn by the shapes made by the flower markings on
the blade. He might have known that as well. “Did you,” she asked.
He frowned, deep set brown eyes shaded by his hair. “What?”
She shook her head at his question. The Clan worlds were far from where she
had found him, the ideas might have surfaced there, a journey of thought alone,
but not a knife. “Come in with me,” she said. He swam awkwardly but was
usually happy in the water, changing a ritual into fun.
He waded in slowly this time, forgetting the towel was in his hand until the
ends were wet. “Doesn't it bother you?” he said, looking away.
The bathhouse was empty but for them. Sounding reeds dripped water in a
chorus of tongues at one end. Hot water from the spring, steaming drop by drop
as it joined the pool. A single reed for the bainta drum stone, a slow solemn
sound like a heartbeat. Stone sides held the sound in, rising half way up between
huge beams of fitted pine. Open to the daylight above the stone, a third the
distance from floor to ceiling. The roof was thatch. A blue slipper had been lost
under the bench by the screened entrance. A child's, you couldn't see it except
from the water.
Besides her own guard, more from South Bay Temple were outside, a full
compliment where usually two stood honor. Her morning walk hadn't gone
unnoticed. The ranking Ri-priest of South Bay Temple wouldn't ask what she had
been doing but his actions would beg the question of her. That she had chosen
the lesser bath rather than the toubi cleansing would also not go unnoticed.
“I bathed for my Initiation here,” she said, moving her fingers in the water,
easy for floating fingers. Not quite here, a little further up, the toubi site. A more
austere ritual. He came closer as she asked. His hair was curling in the steam.
The Poultat man in the pull had died differently than she had. Drowned in the
waters there, but alive when she had already been dead. He had held her a long
time; he had died holding her.
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca