Founder

Jenna’s lamp lit her face with an antique parchment glow as her fingers drifted on the keyboard, tracing a line through her past. I was content to witness her patient search from the doorway of the room I built last year. Still in her genealogy trance, she said, “Mason, I’m black.” Her angelic lisp reshaped my name.

The house was quiet. I said, “You have black ancestors?”

“Uh huh.” She avoided saying, “Yesth,” except to rouse my adoration.

“You like that, don’t you.”

She smiled. “I’m thrilled. I have never been interesting. I found Ezzie on my matriarchal line; she was from the Turner plantation in Georgia--she was property. But now I have to find her parents.”

“Maybe the plantation has records?”



I worked until 9:00 at night on Friday. Jenna met me at the door, clenching me, saying, “They wrote. After three months. Ezzie was born in Haiti. To Erzulie and Petro. The Turner heirs have the dates. Ezzie was illegally taken after the Haitian Revolution.”

I lifted her off her feet. “Jenna peels another layer of the onion,” I said, as always.
When she kissed me I saw she was crying. I asked, “You feel close to her?”

“I’m elated that I found her, but then it came home to me; she must have lived such pain. Without the Latham Bible, she would still be lost to me--do any others love her?”

“I know you’ll find them all.” She let me wipe a tear.

“I put it all online--can’t face responses, yet. Such pain.”


On Sunday we played chess, the force that brought us together in college, watching water stream down the window and rain fill the street. Jenna played black, we laughed about that. We did not expect the knock at the door.

He was small and bald and black as any man I’d seen. His smile was joyous; his eyes, glittering stars. “Mason and Jenna Owen?” he asked.

“How can we help you?” I said; Jenna stood behind.

“I am Lucien Boucher,” he said. “I am Jenna’s cousin.”

The reality of ancestry dazed me. It had all been so abstract. Jenna stepped beside me, arms wavered toward embrace, then back. Lucien Boucher enfolded her; “So beautiful,” she said. My stomach turned with unease, as my wife hugged this stranger.

Bryton Wyld (Excerpt)

Ragal Tak stood so close that Bryton’s nose was poking into the big man’s scarred, dirty breastplate. Bryton looked up at Tak’s paralyzed half-sneer that pulled his mouth down as he caustically blustered, “I said no! You must have my permit to use a handcart on Godsway. This going to cost you five copper drop, sailor.”

Bryton wondered if in another twenty years he would be as sour as Tak. Bry took a step back, pushed the two handcart handles down onto the cobbled surface of the road, stood on a handle so that the tapestry in the cart would not touch the street, and dug in his pockets for something. A horse had relieved himself somewhere a few paces back and Bryton had barely seen it in time to avoid it. Tak smelled worse than the horse apples, though.

As the foot traffic on Godsway parted for the halted cart, Tak held out his hand for the copper. Bryton, instead, handed him a vine-covered disc of the goddess, Aerin. A vine from the disk instantly grew up around Tak’s little finger and sprouted leaves. Bryton said, “Sir Tak, I already got a permit for today. Of course, I’m grateful that one of Baron Navee’s men is here to keep the streets safe.”

Tak’s face screwed up more than usual. “We gonna’ see if this is real, sailor. We gonna’ go to Aerin’s house and see.”

Bryton wasn’t a sailor, but Tak called everybody sailor. Tak crowded him with his chest plate as he started berating him again. Bryton warned quietly, “Whoa, whoa, Sir Tak.”

Tak crowded him more. “You know you show me this permit before you go onto Godsway. Godsway is my . . .” Tak bullied Bryton a step back—a step off the handcart handle. The handle swung up and caught Tak solidly in his crotch.

Tak yelled, “Aiieee!” and fell over in shock and pain, dropping the house of Aerin’s disk on the cobblestones.

Bryton grabbed for the handcart handle, hoping that the tapestry would not splat in a pile of horse dung on Godsway; but an instant before Bryton could grab the handle, the handcart’s rear end bumped down onto the cobblestones. He shoved the handles down, stepping back away from the groaning Tak, hoping that the tapestry had missed the pile. He scooped up Aerin’s token, but did not know what to do next.

A young male incense vendor with two smoking splinters of lanawood sticking up from his hat put his hand to his mouth at the sight of the groaning baron’s man and a woman cried happily, “Someone’s killed Tak!”

Bryton’s mind raced for just a heartbeat. Tak might kill him on the spot. Tak might throw him into one of Navee’s Cliffwall Cells. Maybe Tak would be too embarrassed to do either? Not likely. Run? It might be worse. Assist the growling baron’s man? How?

Aerin’s house was just down the street. Bryton shouldered aside a black-and-white garbed Adept of Rovish, who had a trail of novices following behind, and shoved through traffic as quickly as he could, mechanically repeating over and over, “Pardon, sir, pardon, apologies, ma’am,” only once pausing in his apologies to mutter to himself, “Don’t baron’s men have protection ‘down there?’”

He heard Tak yelling and glanced behind to see the crowds being jostled around in his wake. But Bryton was already under the Mother Oak’s branches. He turned the cart onto the path to Aerin’s grove archway and saw two women standing in his way.

The Mother Oak’s limbs would not allow him to take the cart around the women and he dared not leave the handcart with the valuable tapestry for Tak to expropriate. One of the women was elegant, tall with white gold curls spilling onto the shoulders of her grey sheath dress. The other woman was dressed as one of Tistrin’s nobility, bearing a gentle smile—but she was no noble. She was Jemmin Well. And that was good. Bryton made a note to flip a coin to Rovish, the God of Luck, if he survived the next minute.

Bryton reached up with one hand and doffed his floppy black hat to the women, thinking, “Manners, manners.” He half-bowed and said hurriedly, “Good day, fair ladies of Tistrin. I have an urgent appointment with Elsa Lesenstock, the Priestess of Aerin.”

He expected them to move out of the way, but the lithe woman in grey only turned to him and coolly said, “I am a priestess of Aatar, tradesman.” Jemmin, still playing the part of a noblewoman, scoffed and fluttered a peacock-eye fan.

Bryton heard Tak scream from too close behind, “Out of the way, you holy idiot!”
Bryton stepped closer to the women, straining to smile more widely as he grew more desperate. “I am delivering this to the House of Aerin, kind ladies, may I have the path?”

Jemmin heaved a sigh and they began to stroll back to where the path led through the grove entrance. Bryton looked back and saw Tak was only a dozen steps behind, his armor clanking above the hum of voices on Godway. Bryton looked to the lackadaisical women who casually strolled on. His frustration boiled at Jemmin and he said, suggestively, “You might make haste. I have heard there are pickpockets about on Godsway today.” Jemmin threw an acidic sneer over her shoulder at Bryton.

He knew he was not going to make it to the grove before Tak caught him. Bryton turned around, reversing his grip on the handcart handles and swung it to one side, blocking Tak’s path. Tak smacked into the side of the cart, and staggered, but did not fall. Behind Bryton, Jemmin screamed. Bryton knew that there was no chance that she was really frightened; she was probably providing a distraction so that she could pick the lithe woman’s pocket. Bryton trotted backward on the path, pulling the cart toward the women, hoping that Tak was stunned.

Tak scrambled around the path, crawling under the canopy of the Mother Oak as he huffed and growled. Bryton yelled frantically, “Sir Tak, this is Aerin’s House. The Goddess won’t like it if you kill me here and neither will Elsa Lesenstock.”

But Tak was not listening. He bulled onto the path, short sword in hand and stabbed at Bryton, who jumped back, turning the cart to parry Tak’s sword with the cart’s handle. The sword slid along the handle, slicing into Bryton’s hand. He yelped, dropping the cart and lurching backward holding his hand, which stung as if on fire. Tak pursued him as Bryton fell back onto one of the women. In a horrifying instant, Bryton realized that in his uninjured hand, he held two fingers of the other hand, severed or nearly so. And that was when Tak’s sword stabbed just above Bry’s hands into his abdomen. He hunched forward, his hands now pressed against the wound in his gut. He moaned, “Oh, I’m gonna’ die. I truly hate this.”

Nirvana Cat (Excerpt)

I leaned on my manure shovel and wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my habit so that I could better see the gleaming spider making its way down the street with the Mogul slouching behind on his too-short horse. He parted the pedestrians, carts, and horses on Brünn’s streets as if he were Our Lord, entering Jerusalem on an ass. I was so in love with his spider that it was some time before I realized that Father Gregor Mendel, leaning on his shovel, was in love with the Mogul’s horse.

An ornate carriage crossed the spider’s path, obscuring our view. As the carriage passed the spider, the horses spooked, dancing sideways. The carriage balanced on two wheels for an impossibly long time. Father Gregor nervously said, “Ach, du leiber."

I exhaled as the carriage’s wheels clanked back down onto the street. But then the rigging yanked the horses backward and they screamed in surprise. The terrified horses twisted the carriage the other way. A policeman on horseback shied away from the careening carriage. The Mogul, who continued to ride toward us, looked back over his shoulder at the chaos and adjusted his turban. All the while, the brass bodied spider clicked and buzzed toward us, leading the Mogul horseman along by a rope.

The carriage fell on its side, crashing down onto the policeman’s horse’s legs, knocking the policeman off the horse and into the shop nearest to our abbey. Pedestrians stepped back from the accident, staring dumbly. The horses screamed as they struggled.

The shoulder-high spider stopped just before it reached us. The Mogul said in clipped, accented English. “This is very bad.”

On the edge of frightened immobility, I stared at the last of autumn’s dead brown leaves that the spider’s legs had skewered as it walked. When I looked up, workmen in their filthy clothes, students in uniform, and even a banker in his suit and top hat rushed by our open stable door, toward the accident.

Father Gregor, who did not speak English, urged in German, “Once those in the street recover from the shock, they might harm this man. He is a foreigner and cannot defend himself from an enraged crowd.”

A policeman on foot stopped suddenly in front of the Mogul’s spider, glanced at us, then hurried toward the chaos. I opened my mouth and tried to speak. Finally I motioned to the Mogul and found my voice. “Come quickly. You will be safe with us.”

Someone in the crowd screamed, “Dame Gelderhaus!” I could hear a woman and some children crying. I feared that the crowd would rush our way at any moment. The Mogul, horse, and spider, entered the stable; I closed and barred the doors.

Gregor spoke calmly. “We must act quickly. There is nothing to fear, Brother Vincent.”

Nonetheless, I feared. Horses backed in their stalls as the brass spider’s buzzing and clacking hulk ponderously crept forward. I rushed to open the door to the abbey yard. The spider’s wondrous brass body gleamed in the morning light, the initials “J. C.” calling Our Lord, Jesus Christ, to my mind. Confused and frightened, I teetered at the door, on the verge of one of my episodes of emotional incapacitation.

As I stood, rooted, the Mogul loosened the leather straps that held the tarp that covered the spider’s head. An ornate wooden cage sat on top of a conglomeration of boxes and sacks, bound by a system of straps. The dark haired man waggled a finger between the bars of the cage and two grey-white muzzles appeared and nuzzled him. He murmured to them in his language, detached the cage, and reattached the straps.

Because I was not responding, Gregor put an arm around my shoulder and said, “Vincent, I need you. You must hold your composure. Take him into the abbey and feed him. I will see if the accident caused serious injuries, then I will inform the abbot. We can inform the police later.”

Gregor had seen my mental paralysis before. He gave me a gentle shove to move my feet out the door. The shove set me in motion, perhaps because the danger was out of sight and because I had not fully frozen.

I led the Mogul into the abbey as Father Gregor went out into the streets. Holding back tears of embarrassment at my inadequacy, I set a table in the refectory with bread, cheese, pickled shallots, and wine and left him there to eat. I brought a tub to my own cell and heated water for his bath with Brother Wojciech’s help. When I returned to the Mogul, he was sleeping at the table, leaned back in his chair with one hand dangling down so that his fingers curled into the little cage.

Knickknack (Excerpt)

“What is a Son of Rovish?” Jane asked her father as she climbed out of the traveling bag he had packed her in. He took a few belongings out of the other bag and arranged them on the bed. He grimaced, looking between the bed and his bag. He lifted his bag, turning it upside down over the bed. Nothing fell out.

Jane wiped her hair from her eyes and tried to rub the sweat from her face with her damp tunic sleeve. She stretched her thin body and looked up at the big man as he shook his hands to the heavens in frustration. Then her father looked down at her and said in his deliberately calm voice, “Where is the case? It had the scrolls that I will trade.”

Jane reached into the bag that she had spent the last hour in and handed the thin wooden case to her father. He eyed her suspiciously. “Why was it there?”

Jane shrugged. “You put it there before I got in. Don’ think I wanted it all poking against me.”

Stefan Geist took a deep breath, shook his head, and corrected her speech. “It made me uncomfortable. I did not wish it there.”

Jane repeated the phrase, knowing that she was probably giving him “that look” again.

Stefan nodded. “Better. Keep in mind that eight year olds should show respect.”

She put her hands on her hips. “I’m nine.”

Stefan scoffed. “I’m sure that makes all the difference. I correct your speech because you must be able to associate with important people if you are to be of any use in the world.”

Jane muttered, “That’s the way we talk. We’re useful.”

Stefan plopped down on the cot. “We? You mean that your mother’s family speaks that way? First of all, your mother does not speak that way. Second, if you continue to follow the example of your worthless uncle, Asil, you will be a vagabond, like him. I have let you spend entirely too much time with him.”

She had heard it before. “What is a Son of Rovish? You said you’d tell me.” She wanted to hear what he would say, even if it was a lie.

“Rovish was created by Silas. Rovish had the gift of making things. When he fathers a child with a human woman, a son or daughter of Rovish is born. They have Rovish’s gift. I am searching for a scroll that this Son of Rovish made. I think he still has one and I wish to trade him some very valuable things for it.”

“What does the scroll say?” She lay back on the cot beside where he sat and dried her sweaty face and hair on the sheets.

Stefan contorted. “Ach! Do not! Revolting.”

She sat up. “What does it say?”

He sighed heavily. “It is not a scroll that says anything interesting, you disgusting little rat; it is a scroll that does things.”

She leaned back against the wall, bonking her head softly. “What does it do?”

He just sat there looking out the open shutters at the darkening red sky for a time. Finally he said, “Maybe I will tell you after I have the scroll.”

The knock at the door startled Stefan. He muttered, “So soon.”

Jane whispered, “Is that him?”

Stefan stood up, his eyes locked on the door. He whispered intensely, “The Son of Rovish? Of course not. It must be Lord Chappell. But I did not tell Lord Chappell where I was staying because I was supposed to contact him before we meet tomorrow.” He looked around the room. “Quick! Back into the bag.”

Jane almost obeyed him without thinking. She decided she would rather use the bed, so she put the bag on the far corner of the bed before climbing in, while Stefan urged, “Hurry, hurry.”

Jane tried to quiet her breathing so that she could hear every word they said. The door creaked open, then after just a murmur or two, it closed.

“The maid,” said Stefan.

Jane climbed out. Stefan held a pitcher and rag, which he laid on the washbasin. He grumbled, “I am so tired.”

First he sat on the cot. Then he lay on it. Then he slept.

He was good at sleeping when he needed and waking up when he needed. Jane quietly closed the shutters so that the light would not disturb him. She washed up, then combed her hair with her fingers. Jane’s hair was cut short because she was a boy on this trip--a boy that had never heard of Stefan Geist.

If only.

She examined the latch, and then remembered to grab her pouch from the bag she had traveled in and put it on her belt. She removed a thin, pliant, copper bar, unlatched and opened the door quietly, then shut the door on the bar, bending it just right. She stepped out and closed the door, then slid the bent copper back through the space and twisted it until she relatched the door. The key lock on the door only worked from the outside--Asil would have told her that the innkeeper wanted guests to be safe, but not to lock themselves inside so that he could not get at them.

Jane was not going to doze in the room when she had a chance to see Morrow--a real city! Her mother had not wanted Jane to visit Morrow without her. Jane certainly did not enjoy being alone with Stefan, but when she had overheard her mother saying, “Stefan, he is a Son of Rovish! A little girl cannot help you with him,” Jane was dying to go.

She looked down the hallway. Something good was cooking in the kitchen. She had to return before Stefan woke or there would be trouble. But she first had to get out of the inn without attracting attention.

She was a boy for this visit, so she concentrated on the way that her brother and the other boys at their people’s camp acted. If she were a boy she would run screaming down the stairs and out through the door, but she might be stopped for misbehavior. She must be a well behaved boy. She thought that surely there were well behaved boys somewhere, though she had never seen any. What was the difference between a well behaved boy and a normal girl? She remembered the time her brother brought the baby rabbit that he had found back into the camp. She pasted on a grin and strutted down the stairs, past the innkeeper’s wife.

Killing Words (Excerpt)

Many were faint yellow, a few were black, some were green, but the dark blue ones were the freshest. After she shed her nightclothes, Riva inspected her bruises in the dawning light of her cell. This morning there was a scrape where her breasts were beginning to form. Soon her second winter in the Order of Jair would begin and the cold would hurt when she opened the shutters to examine her wounds.

A fist pounded on the door and Lehr said, “Riva, bring steel today. You’re battling another apprentice.”

A blade of fear ran though her stomach. “I’m near ready.” She was nowhere near ready.

She dressed quickly, barely remembering to loop the thick chain over her head and center the iron key on her chainmail tunic, where she had once worn the doll made from rabbit skin on the tether that her father made.When she opened the door Lehr must have sensed something wrong. He said, “Guardian Zan said you’ve used steel all week.”

“Just against him, and he won’t cut me.”

“Don’t worry.” That was what Lehr always said; fourteen year-olds thought they knew everything.

She whispered, “Please, you have to tell how not to get hurt.”“You know I can’t. Guardian Zan and the other priests won’t let me. There is a reason.”

“Lehr, please.” Riva hated to beg.

Lehr lowered his voice so the apprentices in the hallway would not hear. “Little sister, it’s just like I’ve told you with wooden swords; land more blows and you won’t take many. Think about cutting, not about being cut.”

When he called her “little sister” it made her heart ache--in a good way because she wished he was her brother, but in a bad way because he was not really her brother. But Lehr did not have a family anywhere, so she would never tell him to stop calling her “sister.”

Riva trudged along with Lehr on the way to breakfast and morning prayers.


Riva’s knees shook inside her chain mail leggings as she looked across the training room at the grinning apprentice. This room was too bright, though only lamps illuminated the plain square chamber, ten steps for a girl, corner to corner. Were the brown rust floor and lower walls dyed by blood? Tears formed in her eyes as she told Lehr, “I can’t do it.” Lehr looked at Riva just like Ma used to when Ma said stuff like, “I’m so proud of ya’ girl.” Wanting Ma made Riva feel even more like a baby.

Lehr said calmly, “You will do it. You’re twelve. You’re ready for steel. You’ve trained with steel against Zan.”

Riva whispered, “It was just practice. This is real. I’m going to bleed.”

“Training, Riva. Cut! You’re just an apprentice, but you have more of the God’s strength than any adept I’ve fought.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It’s true! Focus.”

“Oh, my prayers,” she said, ashamed that she had forgot. When she breathed deeply, gripped her key, and said the prayer to call the God’s strength, she felt the warmth flow through her fingers and hands, tingle up her wrists and arms, and then spread across her chest and down to every part of her, enlivening muscle, bone, and sinew. Jair’s strength would not keep her from getting cut, though, so her knees kept shaking.

She blessed her sword and fumbled it back into the scabbard. Last of all, she prayed for focus, but focus did not come. She would have to be calm--neither angry, nor heartbroken, nor laughing--for the God to give her the focus which would make her sword as quick as her thoughts. She would die here and it would hurt.

Her opponent, Bartol, and his adept mentor stood at Guardian Zan’s feet and listened to the tall priest, giving short answers.

She was the only girl in the Temple of Jair. Boys were never afraid. They were too confident, like Lehr was now. Riva knew that the other adepts taunted Lehr because his trainee was a girl, but he did not seem to care. He bumped his fist against her shoulder and said, “Finish him quickly, little sister, so we can go hear the minstrel that arrived during prayers.”

Guardian Zan finished with the two boys and stepped over to Riva and Lehr. Riva tried to slow her breathing. She did not want to sob like a baby; she wanted Zan to like her. He was the kindest priest to her since he brought her to the temple two years ago. He was her father’s friend; but unlike her father, he would not tell her stories about when he was a tanner’s son or joke with her about how many children she would one day have or tickle her.

Zan put his mailed glove on her shoulder. “Are you prepared, Apprentice Riva?” His old voice sounded sweet as always.

“I’m not ready,” she whispered.

Lehr murmured, “She’s ready, Guardian.”

Riva shook her head and said, “I’m scared. I don’t have the focus.”

Zan knelt in front of her. She really wanted a hug. The priest said, “What would help you prepare?”

“I don’t know. Nothing would.”

Zan said, “If nothing would help you prepare, then you are as prepared as you will ever be. This is a lesson in combat. This is a lesson in pain. This is a lesson in death.”

Cool tears dried on her face. “If I die, how can I serve the God?”Zan smiled. “That lesson will come later.”

She clenched her jaw so that her face would not contort into hopeless crying. “You don’t care. The God doesn’t care.” Her opponent had probably heard her that time.

Zan stood and said, “Jair guard you.”

“And you,” she squeaked back automatically.

Zan walked to an empty corner and stood against the stone wall. He chided, “Adepts. We will stand here.”

She barely heard Lehr say, “Sorry,” as they walked over to Zan. She swallowed and looked over at Bartol, the boy she would battle. He was in ready stance with his glove resting on the hilt of his sword. Her knees shook less than before. It would happen. She closed her eyes and repeated the prayer of focus. She felt a little of the God’s influence meld her mind to her body; but she did not feel the certainty that came from true focus. When she opened her eyes Bartol grinned at her. He was laughing inside. A tickle of anger started in the back of her skull. But no. She must not give in to anger and lose whatever focus the God had given her.

She hoped that Guardian Zan would take some time to teach them a lesson before the battle, but he just said, “Begin.”