First Light Read online

  Thea's aunt took the platter, which was glazed a bright amber with a design of dark red leaves, and began shifting dishes around the cluttered tabletop.

  “I'll finish this. You should change.”

  Thea looked down at the fur she wore. “Change? Why? I put this on when I got home this morning.”

  “I'm not going to answer that. Please be sure that it's a robe without stains.”

  Thea started to argue, but turned and went off, determined not to take her feelings out on Lana. She had come home from the breeding grounds at first light, elated and ravenous. Her aunt glowed as Thea told her about Cassie's litter. Then Thea had tried to rest, her thoughts straying to Rowen before she finally dozed off. She woke in a sour mood.

  Thea opened her trunk and took out three folded robes. Her favorite, the violet, was still stained despite her aunt's repeated reminders to clean it. A blue one had a frayed hem. The last robe Lana had embroidered with broad colorful flowers: Thea had always loved it. But tonight the robe looked childish to her.

  At the bottom of Thea's trunk rested a few of her mother's robes. When she was little, Thea had tried them on from time to time, trailing them on the floor while Lana admired her as she circled the greatroom. Now one of them caught her eye, an ivory robe with an intricate pattern of winding vines in pale green.

  Thea lifted it to her shoulders. She threw off her fur and slipped into the robe, cinching it tightly around her waist with a bright-red sash.

  When Thea stepped into the greatroom, Lana gazed at her for a long moment. “A good thing you thought of it,” her aunt said briskly. She piled slices of bread into a basket. “In another twelvemonth that will be short in the arm.”

  “Can you help me with this?” Thea held out her mother's bone locket, suspended by a length of red ribbon. Lana crossed to her and took the ends of the ribbon carefully, then gestured for Thea to turn and hold up her hair.

  When the locket was settled at her throat, Thea felt she could face the evening in front of her. She smiled at her aunt. “What can I do to help?”

  Lana smiled back. “Turn around again so that I can sash you properly.”

  She had just finished when everyone began to arrive, Sela, Ezra, and Mattias coming in through the dock door just as Thea's grandmother, Rowen, called from the Mainway entrance.

  “Help!” Sela cried, staggering in from her sleigh with a lidded basket. She flushed at the sight of Thea in Mai's robe, but her voice was light. “That's a sevennight's fruit rations. Losh, it's heavy.”

  Thea took the load and settled it on the basin counter. Mattias came through the door with two more bundles.

  “Those are for you, Thea,” Sela said. “The furs I spoke of yesterday.”

  Thea took them from Mattias and started toward her bedchamber. “You shouldn't have, Sela. But thank you.”

  She left the furs in a heap on her bed and returned to the greatroom, where Lana cast her a meaningful look.

  Thea sighed. There was no way to avoid her grandmother without looking childish. She lifted two of the tall drinks from Lana's tray and crossed the room to where Rowen and Sela stood together.

  Rowen smiled as she accepted her glass and then beckoned Thea closer and fingered the embroidery on her robe. “I would swear upon my line that this is my work. I remember your mother wearing it. But she was no younger than ten and six. It couldn't be the same robe.”

  Lana stepped up next to Thea. “I was surprised myself to see her in it. The embroidery is beautifully preserved, don't you think, Mother? Your work always lasts. And it suits her so.”

  “Indeed it does,” Rowen said thoughtfully. “And is that your mother's locket, Thea? I haven't seen it in a dozen years. Are the portraits still inside? I would like to see them again.”

  No one spoke as Thea opened the locket and held it up between finger and thumb. Rowen peered down at the pictures. “Very nice. Thea! Look at those fingernails.”

  Thea let the locket fall and curled her fingers into herpalms. She chewed her nails, particularly when her lump of ambergris was not at hand, and her grandmother always gave her trouble about it.

  Lana changed the subject. “I've two new dyes I'm working on, a deep orange-red and a bright purple. I had hoped to have the fine opinions of our chief weaver and master artist,” she said as she steered Rowen and Sela toward her worktable.

  Thea found Mattias stacking the fruit from his mother's basket.

  “Let's go settle the dogs,” he said. “I have to give Ham some water.”

  “Mattias! Don't you know enough to water your dogs before coming in? The poor things are probably desperate.”

  The Chikchu were resting comfortably next to Sela's docked sleigh. Thea greeted the dogs and gave each of them a long drink from the dock pump before freeing them from their sleigh traces.

  “Let's take them in to the others,” she said to Mattias. “I know Peg would love to see Ham. They can visit until you go home.”

  “Is it safe?” he asked, a little embarrassed. “What if Peg is nearing her … her time?” Unlike Cassie and the rest of her littermates, Peg had not yet mated.

  Thea laughed as she ducked into the low companion chamber next to the sled dock. “She's not ready. I would know, Mattias.”

  Ham and Peg were indeed happy to see each other, frolicking briefly until they woke the older dogs, including Lana's companion, Aries, and Rowen's Lynx. Many Chikchu lived as long as their human companions, but the oldest dogs slept through most of their last years.

  Ham dug himself a depression in the sand next to Peg's well-worn bed. There was something solid and protective about Ham that reminded Thea of Mattias.

  “He's not signaling to you, is he?” Mattias asked anxiously.

  “No,” Thea said, smiling at her cousin. “I was just thinking how well he looks.”

  “Good,” said Mattias. He was a generous soul, but Thea knew he wasn't happy that she could hear Ham's signals when he could not. She'd explained a hundred times that Chikchu didn't signal often, and that when they did it was usually only a word or two. But Mattias still seemed to imagine that she and Ham gossiped regularly in secret.

  When they returned to the greatroom, the family was seated at the table, and Thea and Mattias separated. They were forbidden to sit together at these events. Rowen disliked what she called their “private exchanges.”

  When all were settled, Rowen raised her glass. Her fingernails were perfect.

  The first-line suppers always began with the same three words. Thea despised them.

  “To Thea's daughters,” Rowen said gravely.

  Thea stared at her plate. She could never make it through one of these evenings without being reminded that the survival of the first bloodline now depended on her. What if she had sons, like Sela? What if she couldn't have children at all, like Lana? Or what if she didn't want to have children, like Peg?

  Everyone but Thea responded—“Thea's daughters”— and they began to eat.

  “And happy birthday to me!” Ezra shouted.

  Thea grinned. “Yes,” she said. “Happy birthday to Ezra!”

  The dock door burst open. “Sorry to be late again,” Dolan said, taking the seat next to his sister, Sela. “A messenger arrived just as I was leaving, and I had to make a call.”

  “What was it?” Thea asked.

  Dolan was loading his plate with food. “A stone wedged in a forepaw. Easy enough to fix.”

  Sela passed her brother the bread. “You'll be able to send Thea on those errands soon.”

  But Dolan acted as if he hadn't heard. “Thea, have you given any thought to names for Cassie's pups?”

  Thea flushed happily. She hadn't been sure she would be allowed to name them.

  “Libra, Fornax, Pyxis, Polaris, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.” The names tumbled out on top of one another in a single breath.

  Dolan burst out laughing, setting off the others as well.

  “Well, it seems you have given the subject a bi
t of thought,” Dolan said when things had quieted.

  “Dolan!” Sela interrupted. “You've just reminded me. Why ever didn't you tell us about the pup bearing the legend's mark? Is it true? The legend pup! Birthed by my own line, and I hear of it through ninth-line gossip!”

  Thea thought she saw Rowen stiffen, and she wondered whether her grandmother had heard as well. Thea herself had told no one but Mattias, early that morning on her way home, and she was sure that he hadn't breathed a word of it.

  Dolan scowled. “It's just a child's story, Sela.” He glanced at Ezra, who was busy rolling a pea around the edge of his plate.

  “Not to some it isn't,” Sela said.

  Dolan swallowed. “He's a runt, born small and slow to breathe. Thea and I agreed that it might be better not to speak of him yet, just in case. In fact, I'd like to know how word of it got out … ”

  “It wasn't Thea,” Mattias said quickly.

  “No, I hadn't suspected Thea,” Dolan said with an amused look. “It was probably one of the messengers, though I've no doubt you knew about the pup, Mattias.”

  Mattias was suddenly preoccupied with his napkin. Thea looked guiltily at her lap.

  “So I am the last to know!” Sela said, throwing up her hands.

  Thea's grandmother patted Sela's shoulder. “Hardly, my dear. Hardly the last.”

  When everyone had eaten, Lana stood up and began to clear the long table, nodding to Thea that it was time to ready the fruit. Mattias joined her at the counter and helped her cut the heavy rounds into wedges.

  “That was about as much fun as usual,” he murmured. Thea grinned at him.

  Lana brought them a small candle for Ezra's plate. “And remember to set some fruit aside for your grandmother, Mattias,” she said quietly.

  Mattias's grandmother Dexna was Rowen's older sister, and a respected healer. But Dexna couldn't speak: not a word. She rarely joined the first-line suppers, and Thea saw her only when she visited Rowen, who lived with Dexna next door. Dexna was invariably reading in the greatroom, her silver hair tied in a thick shining knot. Dexna disliked lightslates, and insisted upon reading bound paper books from the ancient collection that sat in the archive, a borrowing privilege bestowed upon her alone, as far as Thea knew.

  She passed Mattias a bowl and watched him fill it with sweet orange fruit.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  When the guests had gone, Lana waved away Thea's offers to clean. “Sela and Mattias helped. And you didn't have any real sleep last night.”

  Thea didn't argue. She longed to get out of her robe and its tight sash. She began to unclasp her bracelets as she crossed the greatroom.

  Sela's furs lay piled on her bed: nestled on top of them was a paper scroll tied with a bright red ribbon.

  Thea stared at it. Then she lifted it gently and slipped off the ribbon. The tightly rolled paper jumped to life in her hand. She unrolled it, afraid at first that the paper would crack. But the document was not as old as it appeared: It unfurled quickly, almost without a sound.

  It was a map.

  Peter's parents reminded him of things: He wasn't to start the cooking stove. There were snacks on the counter. He shouldn't touch the heating stove. The dogs shouldn't need anything, so there would be no need to cross the camp.

  “Why don't you just say ‘stay inside the tent’ and be done with it?” Peter murmured.

  “Don't exaggerate,” his father said. “You are perfectly free to leave the tent. But every one of these things is a matter of survival, Peter.” He shouldered a heavy pack jammed with equipment for the afternoon's fieldwork.No gun, this time—they were headed east, away from the coast and the bears.

  “Are you sure you don't want to come with us?” Peter's mother was stuffing a plastic bag of dried fruit into her already bulging backpack. He was relieved that she was going. She'd been hunched over her red notebook for nearly the whole time his father and Jonas had been away in Qaanaaq, writing and writing with a glazed look on her face. Sometimes he'd had to call her three or four times before she looked up.

  “No thanks,” Peter said. “I'm still numb from yesterday. I'm going to read in bed under all of my covers.” He also intended to finish off the pan of brownies left over from lunch.

  Peter's father and Jonas had come back from Qaanaaq with new tubing for the steam drill and a lot of onions and carrots, which was all there was at the grocery store in town (“I guess we can make stir-fry,” Peter's mother had said sadly). Then the four of them had set out with a dogsled to make fieldwork rounds together. The sledding was wonderful. They swept across the ice in the sunlight, the dogs barking with joy.

  But then they stopped to work. It had been freezing, and the fieldwork itself was not very interesting: His father adjusted his equipment and mumbled things to himself, Jonas dug a deep hole and wrote numbers down in a notebook, and there was a lot of staring at little pinsstuck into the ice. His mother spent the whole time scanning the horizon with a pair of binoculars. She said she was looking for musk oxen or arctic fox. Peter saw his father raise his eyebrows at her a couple of times, but she just shook her head and said, “Nothing.” Meanwhile, Peter jogged in circles to keep warm.

  He'd be just fine staying alone at camp today.

  Jonas popped his head into the tent through the door flaps, his cheeks deep pink with cold. “Sled's all set.” Dr. Solemn passed him the last two packs before turning back to Peter.

  “We'll be gone about four hours. Satellite weather says it'll remain fair, but winds come up quickly here. Just maintaining the camp for a few hours is a big responsibility, Peter.”

  “Right. Don't worry, Dad.”

  Three hours later, Peter was wishing he had asked a few more questions. It had been snowing for two hours. There was at least three feet of fresh snow on the ground, and the storm showed no sign of letting up. So much for the satellite weather service.

  His parents were safe, he told himself. His father had probably been in fifty storms as bad as this one, and they always took all of their bad-weather equipment with them, just in case. They must be waiting out the storm somewhere, holed up in their hard-weather pods. At least he hoped they were.

  He knew he would be fine inside the geebee geebee, but what about Sasha and the other dogs his parents had left behind? Their little shed was low, and it had a flat roof. What if they were buried? Or worse, what if the thing collapsed under the weight of the snow that was piling up on it? They could be suffocating already! Why hadn't he taken them into the geebee geebee as soon as the storm started?

  There was nothing but whipping snow to be seen through the window next to his bed. He imagined Sasha and the other dogs trapped in the airless shed, or crushed beneath its roof.

  He threw his covers back and stood up. He'd wasted a whole hour staring at the blue ceiling and waiting for his parents to come back. His heart beat quickly as he pulled on his warmest jacket and took a long storm rod from the gearbox. His father had told him never to go out in even the lightest snow without one. If things got windy, he was to jab the sharp end into the ground as hard as he could and hang on until the gust passed. It sounded good in theory. Now he wished he'd had a little practice.

  He zipped the tent's inner door closed behind him and stood in the tiny space between the geebee geebee's two sets of door flaps. The family had dubbed it “the lobby.” At his feet were the colored ropes that led to the camp's other buildings.

  He bent down and grabbed hold of the blue line, theother end of which, he fervently hoped, was secured to the wall of the dogs' shed. Peter unzipped the outer door flaps and stopped.

  The wind was moaning, with a little high-pitched scream thrown in every few seconds. He stayed just inside the doorway, listening and watching the heavy snow jump every which way. Then, feeling like he was stepping off the end of the earth, he pushed out into the storm, holding on to the blue rope with one gloved hand while he jerked the tent's zipper closed with the other.

  One step from the tent, Pe
ter was blind and deaf with snow. And very cold. His first instinct was to turn back.

  He doubled over to hold on to the rope, lifting it out of the snow with effort as he went. He made slow progress, counting his paces. Every one of them was hard won. Half his energy was spent trying to pry the blue rope from the deep snow so that he could keep his grip on it. The little bits of him directly exposed to the elements— the skin around his eyes and mouth that his mask didn't completely cover—felt as if they were being lightly pricked by a thousand small needles. No, a thousand icicles.

  After step nineteen, he convinced himself that it would be easier to let go of the rope and make a run for it, now that he knew which direction to go. He'd dressed in a hurry, and the snow had found its way into his clothes-down one boot, inside his gloves, up both sleeves, andsomehow down his back. His legs throbbed from walking in a crouch. But just as he began to straighten up, a screaming gust of wind burned his face and threatened to blow him across camp. Right. No letting go of the rope.

  Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. On thirty, his right foot seemed to sink a little deeper into the snow than it had on step twenty-nine. And when it came up again, his boot didn't come with it. Peter was balancing on one leg in the middle of an arctic blizzard, looking at his sock. There was no sign of the boot. Holding the blue rope with one hand, he began to plunge his arm into the snow. After five or six tries, he got lucky. The boot had a fair amount of snow in it now, but he jammed his foot right in on top of it.

  By the time he got to step number fifty, his progress had become truly painful. On step eighty-two, his face hit the door of the dog's shed.

  The snow had drifted up against the small building and the door was covered nearly to Peter's shoulder. It opened in, he remembered gratefully. His father always saw to that kind of detail. He felt for the simple latch and fell into the small shelter on a heap of snow, pushing the door closed behind him and leaning against it for a few moments. If he had had an ounce of energy left, Peter would have started to cry. The room was completely black, its few plastic windows blocked by snow.He had not thought to bring a flashlight. And his right foot was very cold, and wet.