Song of Ashes

4: Thirst

Three days later, Sarka was sucking on a bone thimble to stave off her desperate thirst. She stood in front of a tall, narrow chest of drawers. Unfocused, she turned fuzzy memories of her mother over in her mind. In the haze of her exhaustion, no thought, no memory seemed to catch. Everything floated by in fragments.

The wooden chest gleamed in the firelight. It was the one pretty thing in the house. Within it were spools of thread in a rainbow of shades from crimson to emerald to indigo-even gold, even silver.

Sarka's mother, Lerna, had been a dazzling seamstress in her day. Highest among her talents was the rich embroidery unique to the women of Kogoren. Kogorian embroidery had been used to embellish everything a needle could prick: curtains, shoes, dolls, ceremonial vestments for priests and trappings for the temple of the goddess...all sorts of pretty things. Things people didn't need any more.

Lerna had been taught by her mother, who had learned it from hers, all the way back into time immemorial. Even as the art had become rarer and rarer among the women of Kogoren, Sarka's foremothers had kept it alive.

Sarka had learned it, too, by firelight, as she and her mother worked late into the night. Lerna had put her treasured silken threads away by then and had taken up plain sewing and mending, working in exchange for moldy bread or handfuls of rice, but as she worked, she taught Sarka everything she knew.

Lerna would tell stories on those nights about what the world had been like before the end: the green things, the painted houses, the people. There had been so many people. She'd tell stories about Sarka's father, Artor, and how he had died in the Cataclysm when Sarka was yet unborn. Lerna had had no family; she had left her home in the north, where she'd met Sarka's father, and had make her way in the ruined world alone.

As her mother patched a stranger's trousers, Sarka would sit at her side and listen, squinting over the delicate scalloped stitches of a fish's scales or some other such frivolously beautiful thing. Flowers. Leaves. Waves. Waves...the waves of a river, a lake, an ocean.

Sarka licked her lips. She remembered picking out scenes of water with plain brown thread, using the same spool as her mother. She had not been permitted to use the shining rainbow of colors Lerna kept in her precious sewing chest. Those materials were too costly.

Remembering, Sarka reached for the handle of one of the drawers, wanting to look in at all that remained of her mother's life. Just then, she heard it: the scream.

Sarka's heart leapt in her chest and began to race. She spat her thimble out and clutched it in bony fingers, staring at the window. She could sense the wildcat outside, pacing, staring at the same window from the other side.

We are kindred, Sarka thought. We are both desperate. We are both dying.

Sarka took a step. Her head spun. The hunger and the thirst had weakened her. She stumbled, braced herself against the chest of drawers, and continued on toward the window.

When she looked out, she saw nothing except the gray, dusty ground stretching on to where it met the gray, dusty sky. The only interruption in the landscape was the stone wall of the well, beckoning her.

She must resist.