The Northern Girl by Elizabeth A Lynn

Author:Elizabeth A Lynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Ismenin house was even grander than the Hok house.

The walkway to the front gate of the big white house was lined with kava fruit trees. As Sorren came up the path, with her drums under one arm and her fine new clothes in the other, a butterfly spiraled from a tree branch to cling, for a moment, to her hair. She shook it gently off. The air was filled with kava scent and cooking smells, as the Ismenin kitchens prepared for the party. The guard at the iron fence surrounding the courtyard had, flatteringly, recognized Sorren and let her through, with the instruction that she should go around to the side entrance. But it was obvious that the guard at the steps did not know her. He glared at her suspiciously as she approached him.

“I’m drumming at the party,” she said, showing her drums.

He jerked his thumb at a path that headed off at an angle from the courtyard. “Kitchen door.” He was wearing armor: a helmet, a leather and metal breastplate, and his sandal straps were wide and studded on the outside with metal. He looked very uncomfortable.

The kitchen at the Ismenin house was not much different than at the Med house, only bigger. The chief cook was a thin dark woman. Almost as tall as Sorren, darker even than Paxe, she spoke in choppy ferocious sentences to the six or seven assistants and apprentices who whirled about her. Slabs of raw fish sat on the boards, their odor overwhelming any other smells.

It was the chief cook who noticed Sorren first. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m drumming at the party,” Sorren said. “The guard told me to come here.”

The cook raised her voice. “Tokki!”

“Yo!” called a voice outside the kitchen, and a second person entered the kitchen. Sorren blinked. This person was tall and thin and black-skinned—and a man, she realized, staring at Tokki’s hips and hands and at his dark brown curly beard.

He beckoned to her. “Are you going to stand there forever, girl? Come on.” Sorren picked her way across the kitchen to him, feeling hostile. She hated being called girl. As she reached him, he said, “What’s your name?”

“Sorren.”

“Sorren. Well, you can stop wondering. We’re twins, Tekka and I. She’s cook and I’m steward. You’re Isak Med’s drummer, aren’t you? He said you’d be here early.” He was hurrying her quickly down a hallway; he took even longer steps then she did, and it was a new sensation to have to lengthen and not shorten her steps to someone else’s. “Whoa, stop.” She had started to outpace him. “Put your sandals here.”

“Here” was a big alcove, almost a room, off the corridor. Sorren slipped off her sandals and put them on a shelf, wondering if she was going to have to go barefoot through the house. So far she had seen no mats on the stone floor.

Tokki pointed to a box. “There are shoes in there. Find a pair that fits you.”

Sorren looked into the box: it was filled with all sizes of shoes.

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