Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

“I don’t want you to see him,” Fareis says bluntly. We’re sitting in her cabin. The stern windows and the view beyond of the harbour are arrayed behind her.

“Satthei, with respect, I’m not asking for permission,” I say, and get a sharp gaze back for it, but she doesn’t immediately dispute it. “I’m grateful to you for helping me, but I haven’t accepted your suits for me to join this ship,” I remind her. I’m trying to be very proper and calm and grown-up, and just hope it doesn’t make me seem even more ridiculous. I sit prim and upright across from her in the smartest day dress I own – a gift from her of course. It took me an age to get it on with bandaged and hurting hands, but I wanted to prove I could do it by myself. “I wanted to talk about this with you because it seems only polite to do so, and because I value your counsel, but my mind is made up.”

I’ve made her eyebrow lift. Not a bad reaction to get from someone who’s been witness to the rise and fall of empires.

“What counsel?” she asks.

“I understand Reki did something horrible a long time ago,” I say. “I’m afraid my memory isn’t intact; if I was ever taught it, I’ve forgotten. Something involving human children? Would you please tell me what they did that makes people hate them so much?”

“Ah.” She nods slowly and then she tells me what happened seven centuries earlier, halfway across the world. And I have no difficulty agreeing with her that it was terrible, hateful, pitiful. And yet, nothing I hear is beyond what I know humans have committed against their own children, in my world, except perhaps in the use of magic.

I say nothing of this. I think it might be beyond imagining in this world that humans could do such things. Instead I say, “What part did Kerilas play in that?”

“None, surely. That nest was exterminated.”

“All of them?”

“Down to the last infant,” she says, without even a flicker of irony. “I know what you’re thinking. No Reki alive today can justly be held responsible for that crime, even by ancestry. That is precisely why every last infant was destroyed. Now? Six hundred and thirty eight Reki live freely in Jeodin and have caused no trouble that’s come to my attention.”

“Six hundred and thirty eight? That’s… precise.”

Fareis smiles thinly. “They are observed. For the most part they are orphans of the Jeodine Founding War and raised by a Neri Satthei, or the descendants of those orphans, and have never had contact with what passes for Reki society. I know your Satthei raised a Reki female many years ago, long before you were born.” She smiles again, a little more warmly.

“It’s an experiment,” I realise aloud. They want to know if the Reki’s propensity for evil is inherent or cultural.

She nods. “And so far we are encouraged. You must learn to be a little less quick to to judge, Taniel. As for Kerilas… He would have made six hundred and thirty nine. Don’t forget, he did turn himself in and confess to Jalese’s murder.”

“Satthei, I haven’t forgotten; that’s precisely why I have to speak to him. I know he didn’t do it. I must learn from him why he confessed. Aren’t you curious about that yourself? Surely it matters to you if the wrong person is punished and the one who really did it gets away with it?”

“I have nothing to do with shoreside justice.”

“Satthei, you can’t avoid it,” I say. “If you dropped Port Denhall from your trading route it would fall to destitution. That makes everyone who lives here eager to make sure you get what you want as long as you’re here. And you want me. There are people who saw the gifts Deidas brought for me. And there are people who heard me say I wouldn’t go with you if it would mean leaving my friends. Now one of them’s dead, another’s facing execution, the third ran away and the fourth’s gone after him and neither of them have been seen since, and suddenly I’m alone, aren’t I?”

I’ve truly managed to surprise her, I think. “I wouldn’t penalise Denhall if you refused,” she says, sounding shocked. “There’s no logic to that.”

I shrug. “Humans are foolish,” I say.

Fareis thinks for a long moment.

“I will send Deidas with you,” she says, and I know I’ve won.

“All right,” I agree, reminding her I have a choice about that.

“And while you’re there, you can deliver your own apology to the harbourmaster for your conduct last night,” she adds. She had to put that in.

“Yes, I’ll do that,” I say.

“It sits ill with me to allow this,” she says. “I don’t like the thought of you in his presence.”

“That’s because you think he induced me,” I challenge.

She nods.

“Why do you think it was him and not someone else?”

“Because you are Bound to him.”

“He’s my friend,” I say. “That’s all. We escaped from the slavers together. There’s no Binding.”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t believe it.