Strange Noises Fiction by Rachel Greenham

So it turns out that now Beni’s had her baby, the father has persuaded her to go with him when Market ships out, and she’s decided to go, with her newborn baby. This is apparently a rational thing to do, which I can’t argue with, I suppose, having seen the marketeer kids playing earlier. He’s quite wealthy by shore standards, and he’s been pretty much plying her with gifts ever since Market got into port, which she’s been happy to recite to me. Sam indicates with a gesture she’s already heard all this. Gifts which, in the Jeodine fashion it seems, are largely of a practical nature and seem almost calculated to make it easy for her to say no: A house, for the Goddess’s sake! So she could move out of her parents’ place. Money, clothes, furniture, all imported from elsewhere in Jeodin.

“Why would he give you a house if he wants you to go away with him?” I ask. It doesn’t seem logical.

Beni just looks at me as if I’m the crazy one. Jalese has to explain. There’s no ‘seems’ about it. Apparently in Jeodin it’s extremely bad form to ask someone to live with you if the circumstances of the person being asked make it hard for them to refuse. In Jeodine logic, it seems, a ‘yes’ is meaningless unless it’s at least equally easy for the person to say ‘no,’ and it’s evolved into quite a courtly tradition, it seems, of ostentatiously wooing the prospective new family member.

I can go with that, and I say so.

“Well of course,” Beni points out. “It’s a Neri custom, isn’t it?” With that tone, as if wondering why I don’t already know that. “She said you’d forgotten everything,” Beni says sympathetically.

So it turns out this isn’t just for romantic couples, but any time one family offers to take in a member of another, for whatever reason. ‘Family’ itself seems to have a looser definition than I’m used to – either they don’t have marriage at all or they do, but its equivalent is pathologically applied to any kind of committed relationship, whether or not they’re blood-related or want to procreate or whatever. Older children often go to be fostered by another family for a few years, usually locally, in the same community, and for this to happen they are wooed in this fashion, and apparently given every incentive to say no, in the hope that they’ll say yes out of genuine enthusiasm. Naturally, good well-liked kids can expect lots of offers; and the others… It seems very strange to me, and I’m not sure I go with that.

Anyway, the upshot is that Hethan needs to take someone on permanently, and Jalese’s got first-refusal, and she’s considering taking it; and if she can settle long enough maybe a local family will make an offer.

I guess the luck is still playing out.

“You probably should take it,” I admit. “I don’t know what we’re doing. We’re just trying to make enough money to get supplies and pay the harbourmaster fees and move on, but I don’t know where. We haven’t got any big plans.” I still want to try to find Gyrefalcon, despite what Kerilas said. But I don’t say that. I don’t say either how I think I’m hungering to be at sea again, to be a speck tossed on its vastness, to feel the deck moving beneath my feet.