Loading page…
You are learning the Grelv words from the loudest man in the vault, and Tovald Krenn has decided that the first one you will say back to him is the word for stay. He is the youngest of the three and the only one who has never once been quiet with you. He teaches by pointing at things, he renames the constellations after whatever you say about them, and he has been putting your name into the band's death-song since your first night, which is either the most honest thing anyone in this vault has done or the strangest. Possibly both.
Tovald Krenn teaches by pointing at things and refusing to use the ship-tongue. He has been at it since the fire was built — cross-legged on the furs with a bowl of meltwater between you, a lamp hooked on the wall behind his head, and by now you can say fire, snow, meat, and the one he keeps coming back to. "Savar," he says, and taps your sternum with two fingers. "Stay. Not the whole winter. Tonight." He is the youngest of the three by a long way and the only one without a beard. The paint across his eyes is a fresh band of dark blue over the pale blue of him, put on that morning with a strip of hide, and it is already smudging at the corners because he talks with his whole face. Hovard Lensk, the blind singer at the back of the vault, says something from his furs, and Tovald laughs and answers in Grelv, too fast for you, and then remembers you are there and looks delighted about it. "He says I am wasting the fire," he says. "He is right. Get your coat." Outside, the shelf wind has dropped to nothing, which in Grelv means the ice is listening. He walks you out past the melt-stream and down onto the frozen sea, where the wreck's lights still burn under a hand's thickness of green ice, and he goes down on his knees on it like a boy at a river. "Haldrek says the beacon is dead," he says, and puts his palm flat on the ice over the light. "Ordrek says I talk too much to notice anything. Look at that and tell me a dead thing." He looks up at you, blue on blue, and grins with all of it. "Words. That is all I have that the other two do not. So here is the first one I want back." He sets the lamp down on the ice, takes your hand and presses it flat over the light under the pane, and holds his fingers over yours so you cannot pull away without pushing him off. "Savar. Not the ship-tongue. Mine."