Guardian of Dawn

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Azariyah, Royal City of Maween

Isika sat at the pottery wheel, wrapping both hands around the wet lump of clay in front of her. She pressed down on the clay to make a platform, moving the wheel's pedal with her foot to keep it spinning.

"Perfect," said Tomas, the master potter. "Now pull your elbows in to center it."

She did as he told her, anchoring her elbows beside her to bring greater stability to her arms. The clay followed her wish and became a perfectly centered cone on the wheel. She felt a flash of satisfaction as she watched her hands, black against the light clay, which felt almost alive as she worked with it.

"Make your indent," Tomas said. He was about the same age as Isika's Auntie Teru, gray hair showing at his temples. One day she had asked him how many pots he had made. He snorted. "Enough," he had said.

"Thousands," one of the other apprentices had mouthed at her when he turned his back.

Isika kept her hands on the cone of clay and placed her thumb on the top center, pushing it down to make a deep hole, then, before Tomas could give her further instructions, she dipped her fingers in the water and put her hand into the hole she had made. It felt like she had been waiting forever to actually make something with clay.

She was fifteen years old, well into her apprenticeship in her new home; Azariyah, the city of the Maweel. For six months, she had done the grunt work in the workshop. She had kneaded stacks of clay, driving out the bubbles so the other apprentices could use it. She had mixed glazes for the master potter and swept the floors of the workshop every day. She cleaned baked clay from the kiln, she built up the fires every firing morning. But today was the first time Tomas had allowed her to sit at the foot-powered wheel.

The other potters had already gone home for the day and Isika had been sweeping, as usual, when Tomas asked if she wanted to try the wheel, his voice light, as though it was merely a passing thought. Isika leapt at the chance, dropping her broom and practically running to the wheel.

Now she leaned in without being told, delicately molding the shape she was making, pulling the edge of the bowl up and thinning it so that it flared into a shape like a flower just opening. She hummed to herself as she did it, Tomas silent beside her. She did what she had seen the potters do many times before, and she did what seemed right, what felt natural. When she was done, a perfect bowl sat on the wheel before her. It was beautiful, she thought, as she sat back to look at it. The angle was delicate, the arch of the clay gentle and graceful.

She looked up at Tomas and he stared back at her for a moment, his face slack with shock, finally breaking into a huge laugh that filled the workshop.

"I had a hunch," he said. "And Ivram warned me. So I waited until the other potters were gone. Apparently being World Whisperer gives you many talents, young one."

Isika scowled. She still didn't feel like the term World Whisperer belonged to her, so when people called her that, it was as though they were talking about someone else, not her, Isika, the girl who had just thrown her first pot on the wheel.

World Whisperer was the title of the person who had the direct connection between the Shaper and the Maweel people, the one who protected them, went before them, and healed them. Isika didn't feel like that, even if she could make a pot on the first try.

"It's just clay," she said.

"It takes months," Tomas said, his voice thoughtful. "Years, sometimes, before apprentices can make a bowl like that. But never mind. Let's get it off the wheel and into the drying room. I'll try to stamp my jealousy down and you still have to finish sweeping. Teru will have my head if I keep you too much later."

Isika cut the bowl off the wheel and set it on a tray, which she carefully carried to the drying room to add to the other pieces that had been made that day. She allowed herself to feel proud of finally making her first wheel pot. The feeling spread into her arms and legs, so that she was nearly dancing as she finished sweeping the dusty workplace.

She hung up her apron before she left, calling out a farewell to Tomas as she stepped out into the early evening light, drawing in a breath. Tomas's workshop sat at the bottom of a valley clustered with trees and houses, now glowing in the beautiful light. The green and golden light streamed through the leaves of the trees. It was soothing to Isika's eyes after the hours she had spent in the studio, and she walked home in a kind of reverie, letting her eyes rest on the lovely earth walls of the homes, the patterns the owners had painted on the outsides, the climbing flowers that spilled over the arbors and rooftops. She stood for a moment under her favorite tree; a giant, sprawling, gnarled thing with ridged leaves. It spread its branches over the marketplace she passed on her way home, bustling at this time of day. Isika lay her hand on the trunk and felt the tree's life rush through her, causing her to stand a bit straighter for the last climb up the hill to Auntie's house, her home now, for five months.

Isika had grown up as a black-skinned outsider in the Worker village after her mother died. She, her brother, Benayeem, and her sister, Ibba, had fled the village by boat, to rescue Isika's youngest brother, Kital, who had been sent out as a sacrifice to the four goddesses the Workers served. When they met Jabari and Gavi, two boys from the Maween, they discovered that all the sacrificed children had been rescued from the waves by the Maweel: a dark-skinned people now scattered with pale-skinned rescued ones, who were adopted into families.

They had journeyed together to Azariyah, only to make the discovery that their younger sister, Aria, was alive, and that Isika and her siblings were direct descendants of Maween's stolen queen, which made Isika heir. They also found that Kital and his rescuers had been imprisoned by the sea people, leading to a struggle where Isika fought, retrieving Kital and the rescuers, revealing herself as World Whisperer when she went head to head with one of the Worker goddesses, Fate. When they came back to the city, the elders decreed that she would live in Azariyah for a year, and at the end of that year, they would discuss the future again.

Living in Azariyah, Isika and her siblings had been transformed by a new life. They lived with Auntie Teru and Uncle Dawit—the new parents who had adopted them—learning to be a family in a place that filled her heart with light. Growing up in the harsh Worker village, she hadn't known life could be so beautiful. Teru's home was built on trust and care. Isika had learned so many new things: the six gifts of magic, the singing of stories—which Ben excelled at—more about how to use numbers, reading and writing. Auntie was teaching them gathering magic, which she said everyone possessed in some small degree. They grew food and took care of the gardens.

They were slowly getting to know their sister, Aria, who had been given over to the goddesses as a sacrifice when she was nearly eight years old, rescued by the Maweel, and raised here ever since. When Isika had first arrived, four years after Aria, she had asked Aria to move in with them, fully expecting that her sister would be happy to be reunited. She was stunned when Aria, now twelve years old, laughed at her and told her she had a new family, one she wasn't going to leave.

Isika had hidden her hurt. She was Aria's family. She crept away and cried about it to Auntie, but Auntie had seen it the same way Aria did.

"Give her time," she said. "It's a lot of change for her. She had a place here. She found a way to relate with herself as an outcast, a rescued one, and then you four walked in. Her world is shaken."

Isika saw it differently. Aria was their sister. Their sister should be with them, restored to them. But it seemed that reunions were much more complicated in real life than in dreams. Life, even in a nearly perfect place like Azariyah, was full of complications, like the sorrow she still felt over her mother, or guilt she fought every day.

She woke up with a start sometimes, in the middle of a bad dream about Jerutha, her stepmother, left behind in the Worker village. Sometimes it felt to Isika that she wouldn't be able to enjoy her life here at all, if Jerutha couldn't be here. And then there were days when she didn't think about Jerutha, but lived as though she had been one of the Maweel all her life, as though she had never come from a barren, dusty place on the edge of the desert. And when she eventually remembered that she had a stepfather and stepmother somewhere, it was like a pail of cold water on her head. She wanted to shrug it off, to not think about it anymore, to be free of her past. But she loved her stepmother and she often missed her, often thought of how much she would like Auntie and Uncle, or how she would love the food here, the flowers that spilled from every surface. Isika and Jerutha had fought so hard for every blossom in their garden in the Worker village.

On her way up the hill, many people met Isika's eyes and nodded as she passed, but she knew they discussed her when she was gone. People were interested in her, confused by her, overwhelmed by her abilities. Somehow she found herself in the center of the tapestry of this beautiful city, occasionally attending meals at the palace, taught personally by Ivram, the second elder: a rare privilege. She was in the center, but she was also on the outside, as she had been all her life. She was a newcomer who was the heir of their stolen queen. They had become used to having regents, and knowing that Isika could become their queen unbalanced their world.

Isika knew she wouldn't become queen if she could help it. She had no interest in ruling over anything, wearing fancy robes at the palace, or presiding over dinners. She wanted to make thousands of cups and bowls, as many as Tomas had made, to learn how to use her bow, to learn to run as fast as Jabari could. These were the things she wanted.

She shrugged the thoughts away and looked up at the sky, the clouds that were edged in fire as the sun prepared for its descent. Adjusting to life here wasn't easy. But, she thought, as she walked up the final steps to get to Auntie's house at the top of the hill, it was life. She felt more alive than she had ever felt before, brimming with life; sadness and joy and pain and longing. And it hurt sometimes but it was good. It was better than her previous life in the Worker village—work that never ended, work without joy.