Tarin Salma stood in the muddy street, looking downriver toward where the Rhizel overflowed its levees, depositing silt and filth among the tenements near the southern wall of Citara. This year’s flood wasn’t even particularly severe, he knew. But the temple’s remaining hydrologists were too busy beautifying the priests’ manors upstream, near the Grove, and they hardly ever came to this part of the city anyway. When the stench finally began to drift into the Temple Quarter, however, some priestly functionary had remembered that the disgraced Salma clan had a son with the proper training. And so here he was: escorted by a temple proctor, wearing novice greys despite having earned his journeyman’s robe before his family’s fall from grace.
Even before they set out, Tarin knew what he would find: the riverbed here hadn’t been properly dredged in at least two years. The Guild didn’t even bother to send the maintenance teams any more, but the Chief Hydrologist still signed off on the reports each month, and everyone just went on with their busy schedule of feasts and elaborate rituals. Tarin had seen all of it during his time in the Guild, and he’d known it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Still, he welcomed the opportunity to leave his house—even under the watchful eye of a temple proctor.
He heard the man squelch up behind him and caught the sharp citrine scent of his expensively laundered uniform.
“Well?” the proctor asked peremptorily.
“It is possible that the embankment has shifted,” Tarin lied smoothly. “I’ll need to take measurements. I’ll also require a slate for calculations, and access to the Guild’s plans for this section of the river.”
The proctor snorted derisively. “All the guilds are closed for the Chief Arborer’s daughter’s birthday celebration. I should be there too.” He glared around at their surroundings. “You can take it up with them tomorrow. This place reeks of outlander shit.”
Tarin gazed at the man coolly, considering the sort of person that the priesthood selected as proctors—and exactly whose sewage was washing downstream to pool at their feet. “There will still be guards at the Guild. Take me there and have them watch over me while I gather my supplies. Then you can go pay your respects to the Chief Arborer’s daughter. It’ll reflect well on you if I can get the river flowing properly again.”
The proctor pretended to think it over, then finally shrugged and began clumping back up the East Bank Road toward the Guilds Quarter. Tarin took a moment to glance around at the “outlanders” pulling their belongings from flooded shacks. Most had likely been born right here, or else were refugees from villages no more than a few hundred yards outside Citara’s walls—left homeless when the river shifted and swallowed their homes. Outlander was just an epithet the upstream elite used for anyone they considered unworthy of living in the City of the Grove. An absurdity, on an island so small that the farthest “outside” one could get was a day’s brisk walk away.
As he started after the proctor, Tarin caught the eye of a woman standing a few paces off, her hands resting on the shoulders of a young girl who was clearly her daughter. Both watching him—not unfriendly, but intently, as though they saw something in him that marked him out from the other drab figures on the street. He smiled faintly and raised a hand to wave, but the proctor made an impatient sound and Tarin quickened his pace, pushing the pair from his mind. Soon his thoughts turned to the Guild archives. With only an indifferent guard to watch over him, he might be able to access far more than the standard maintenance records.
Tarin intended to make the most out of today’s excursion.
Iris Dareth watched the strange young man in guild novice robes as he walked away. He didn’t carry himself like a novice—he had the calm precision of a senior apprentice, someone used to being listened to. But unlike most initiates on the rise, there was none of the usual arrogance in his bearing. That, combined with the presence of a temple proctor trailing him like a shadow, made him very interesting indeed. If he had useful connections in the guilds, Iris might be able to make use of them later.
But for now, she had errands to finish. Kael was back at the farm overseeing the crews dredging the terraces, and while he was a steady hand and knew the land well, he wasn’t built for pushing workers to keep pace. Warden Senvar, to whom their family was bonded to work the Second Southeast Terraces, was already reluctant to grant her leave to come in to town, and he would take it badly if their work was not finished by the time the rains started in earnest. He had only been convinced when Iris reminded him of the temple-sealed letter calling Liora up to service.
The thought of Liora being summoned still sat like a stone in Iris’s gut. Her only daughter, given over to temple service: just another bright soul dulled into silent obedience by ritual and doctrine. Iris had tried, quietly and carefully, to find a way out for her—but nothing had worked yet. She was not sure she would be able to let it happen when the time came, and yet here she was, about to barter her family’s last lemon from the month’s allocation for her daughter’s hateful new robes.
Iris had been worried that the tailor would demand more than the slightly shriveled and grayish lemon she offered him, but he took it with hardly more than a grunt. Soon she and Liora were on their way back out of the city. Just past the wall, they stopped by the shed the Inako family had turned into a makeshift home after their village downriver was swept away by the flood several years ago.
She heard quiet voices from within, and when she knocked, they fell silent. After a moment the door creaked open a crack.
“Oh, it’s you, Iris!” Niko Inako opened the door fully and welcomed her in with a weary smile. She quickly saw why he’d been cautious: Vela was seated inside with their two boys and a third child Iris didn’t recognize, patiently guiding them through reading exercises on scraps of parchment. Temple priests had recently begun cracking down on “unsanctioned teaching,” which hit communities like this—without access to temple schools—particularly hard.
“Hi, Niko. Vela.” Iris stepped inside, ducking beneath the low lintel, and Liora followed close behind. As the door closed behind her, she noticed Niko favoring one leg again. “Leg acting up?”
“I manage,” Niko said, brushing it off, but the look Vela shot him said otherwise.
The injury had never healed properly. A splintered beam had caught Niko in the thigh the night they fled the rising waters, carrying their youngest, Oren. The boy had slipped from his arms into the muddy current. Iris, who had rushed downstream as soon as word of the flood reached her, had spotted the struggling child in the reeds and hauled him to safety. They’d kept in touch ever since.
“What brings you up here so close to the rains?” Niko asked. “Have the silt screens given out already?” This shed hid another secret: a concealed furnace Niko used to craft tools for the farm, in exchange for a share of the harvest—and in quiet thanks for Oren’s rescue.
“Oh, no, your screens are still solid, thanks,” Iris assured him. “We were just passing by. We had to…stop in the city,” she said, handing over the summons.
Niko paled as he scanned the letter, and he passed it to Vela, who had stood to move closer to them. He glanced reflexively at Liora, who had quickly gravitated toward the reading exercises, then back at Iris. “Oh…” He trailed off, at a loss for words.
Vela was never at a loss for words. “Those unutterable bastards,” she hissed, causing a ripple of incongruous amusement among the children to hear their teacher curse. She dropped her voice again. “As if you don’t need every hand on that farm! As if there aren’t enough soft-brained noble daughters doing nothing of use to anyone!”
Iris nodded once, slowly, scarcely keeping her own banked anger in check. “I can’t let them. At least we have until after the harvest to think of something, but what could we do, short of running away? Where would we go? What kind of a life would that be?”
Vela handed the summons back to Iris, looking like she’d rather be handling it with tongs. They all stood there, each running through a list of options Iris had already been over countless times since the Warden passed her the letter, each one ending in discovery and punishment. She’d seen what happened to families that resisted temple edicts—broken homes, fields reassigned, worse.
Across the room, Liora giggled at something Oren had whispered, her voice clear and bright in the dim space. Iris felt the sound lance straight through her, sweet and terrible.
“We’ll think of something,” Vela said, placing a hand on Iris’s shoulder. “You’re not alone in this.”
Iris and Liora returned home to find that Kael had helped the work teams finish dredging the terraces himself, pushing them by example rather than by command. She loved him for that—she only hoped that she could find a way for Liora to continue to benefit from his example.
As Tarin expected, the guards at the Hydrologists Guild forgot about him the moment the proctor left. Their orders were simple: keep him inside until the proctor returned. That left him with free rein of the archives until sundown.
First, though, he sat at a desk and drafted a letter to the Deputy Chief Hydrologist for the Southern City. In it, he attributed the flooding to “an unusually heavy silt deposit this season” and assured her that the river would recede once the buildup was cleared. He doubted a true accounting of the bureaucratic neglect behind the problem would make the work crews arrive any faster.
That would satisfy the proctor’s demand for results. Now he could get to the real reason he had wanted access to the archives.
He turned to the old surveys of the Rhizel, yellowed and carelessly updated, if at all. They were enough. He pored over the maps, scratching out rough calculations, and slowly the pattern emerged—one that had nagged at him ever since his first year with the Guild.
Beet yields from the city’s terraces—which made up all of Betaria’s cultivated land, since travel beyond the walls was tightly restricted by the Wardens—should have been more than enough to feed Citara’s population of a few hundred. Losses from floods and storage were normal, expected. But not enough to account for the shortfall that was apparent just from the few minutes he had spent today among the starving and destitute clustered near the South Gate.
It was obvious where the excess went: to the priests, the guild masters, the landowners. But the root of the problem was the Temple. They controlled the Grove and filled their sermons with reverence for the Sunborn Fruit, the sacred harvest that formed the basis of trade throughout the city. The Grove Stewards allocated their bounty to guild masters and landowners—like the Wardens of the farms—in exchange for services they oversaw. Precious little of it trickled down to the laborers who did the actual work. One lemon could be bartered for enough rations to feed one person for a week. Many scraped by on less, and some survived entirely outside the citrine economy.
For those fortunate enough to have a surplus after trading for essentials, there were luxuries: soap scented with lemon essence, dishes touched with that delicate tartness that spoke of true wealth, or even mere decorations. Among the nobility, a bowl of fresh lemons in the entryway was more than ornament—it was a statement. To be taken seriously, a noble was expected to display their bounty openly, and it was said one could track the tides of political favor by studying the freshness of the fruit on display. Indeed, though his family had tried to conceal their fall from favor for as long as possible, Tarin remembered the moment it became undeniable: he hadn’t smelled fresh lemons in the Salma house for days. The proctors came soon afterward, relocating them to a shabby apartment on the outskirts of the district. They were still there, under house arrest.
Tarin thought back to that day—and to the other ways the Temple exerted its power through its proctors. He knew none of the families with political influence would listen if he tried to explain what he was uncovering; they were all too wary of risking the same fate that had befallen the Salmas. And as for the more disenfranchised Citarans, the Temple maintained more than enough proctors to keep any resistance firmly suppressed. It seemed the only real option would be to escape, and to build something new beyond the Temple’s reach.
He returned to the shelves, scanning older scout reports from further upriver, back when the Guild still cared enough to survey the volcanic highlands that formed the source of the Rhizel. He could see why they stopped: the terrain became forbidding as the river ramified through the mountains. But then something caught his eye—a narrow valley just past the first cliffs. Too small for a city, and likely overlooked, but the reports suggested its branch of the Rhizel still swelled with the seasonal floods. It might just be enough to support a small, hidden settlement.
“Salma!” Tarin jumped despite himself, glad that the proctor’s voice was still distant, so his nervous reaction wasn’t observed. He had been so caught up in committing the route to memory, envisioning their first glimpse of that valley beyond the ridge, that he hadn’t marked the fading light outside the window. He forced himself to appear nonchalant as he picked up the reports and began sliding them back into their shelves.
“In the library,” he called. “I’ve just finished my recommendation for the Deputy Chief.”
“What about all that equipment you needed?” The proctor stood in the door, swaying slightly. Tarin barely suppressed a smile—apparently the Chief Arborer had kept the cintrelle flowing at his daughter’s party.
“I reviewed the records and an embankment shift seemed unlikely after all. However, other reports indicated that an unusual silt buildup could be working its way downstream, and backed up at the watergate. I put the details in the letter.” He handed over the folded parchment, which the proctor tucked away in his uniform without a glance. “Am I to return to my home?”
“Yes, you will return to custody,” the proctor sneered.
They walked in silence back toward the shabby edge of the district. Tarin kept going over the path to the hidden valley in his mind. Now he only had to find a way to start walking it.
Three days later, Iris was back in town, this time with a bundle of farm reports under her arm for the Chief Warden. As she picked her way up the silt-strewn street, she was surprised to see the Guild hydrologist again, this time up to his waist in the river channel and wrestling a wooden frame into place with a team of laborers. Glancing around, she saw his proctor shadow too—twenty yards away, chatting with some other proctors who were presumably in charge of the laborers.
She stood a ways off, watching him work, and confirming her earlier judgment. The self-assured way he directed the other laborers to help him lever the boards into place, then stood back to reevaluate the river’s flow—this was no mere apprentice; he must be a journeyman, or had been, and had fallen afoul of the Temple for whatever reason. The next time he climbed the levee, she checked that the proctors were still preoccupied, then fell in beside him.
“Your feet are pretty wet for a journeyman,” she said, and was gratified to see the stunned look that flickered across his face at the title. She had been right after all.
Tarin recovered quickly, turning to see if this was an old Guild acquaintance. He was surprised again to recognize her from the street the other day.
“Oh, I…I’m sorry, do I know you from the Guild?”
“No, we haven’t met,” Iris assured him. “I was merely curious why someone with so much Guild training was wearing those robes. My name is Iris Dareth.” She bowed slightly.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Tarin. Tarin Salma,” he said, returning the bow while watching to see if she recognized his tarnished family name. Seeing no response, he went on: “I’m here because I have…drawn the ire of the Deputy Chief Hydrologist.”
In fact, the Deputy Chief had personally shown up at the Salma residence that morning, interrupting another subdued breakfast in which Tarin and his parents, Ellar and Maelen, each quietly cast about for something to talk about—something that didn’t risk opening a vent to their mutual resentment of the Temple, and wasn’t just empty words. They hadn’t found it yet.
At the sound of the Guild guard’s heavy knocking on the door, Ellar’s face drained of color. He glanced at Maelen and Tarin in turn, clearly terrified that the Temple had decided to take them away after all. Then he steeled himself and went to open the door.
“Deputy Chief Dhalis!” his voice held a mix of relief that it wasn’t a squad of Temple proctors, and concern for why she would have come all the way herself. On hearing that name, it was Tarin’s turn to blanch.
“Salma.” The Deputy Chief pushed her way in, and her gaze immediately fixed on Tarin. “We need to talk. You two”—she gestured to his parents—“wait outside with the guards. We’ll only be a moment.”
His parents turned questioning looks on Tarin, clearly curious—and more than a little concerned. He had, of course, told them about the flood and that he’d submitted a recommendation to the Deputy Chief, but nothing about the hidden valley. Not yet. Not until he had a real plan. As they stepped out, Tarin tried not to visibly panic while his mind raced: had he left any of the maps out?
“I got your letter,” Dhalis said levelly once they were alone. “I also know that there’s no such thing as an unusual silt deposit.”
Tarin swallowed hard. At least it wasn’t the maps. But the Deputy Chief was not a fool like the proctor—he would have to tread carefully.
“That was merely one possible explanation,” Tarin said, choosing his words with care. “I didn’t mean to—”
“You didn’t mean to piss me off by pointing out that we haven’t dredged the river down there for three floods?” she cut in. “Please. I know the river, Salma. I know my people. I also know that if the Deacons don’t have water singing in their temple fountains, they start bothering the Chief. And the Chief doesn’t want to hear about how all of my crews are busy scooping silt downstream.”
Three floods! Tarin reeled inwardly. It was a miracle that the past few years had seen gentler rains.
He considered his options. He’d thought his mucking days were over the moment he left his apprentice robes behind. But if he wanted to lift his family out of their current straits, he needed a reason to be outside. To move freely. To find allies.
“Could…I be of any assistance in clearing the river?” he asked, hoping he came across as merely helpful, not desperate.
She studied him for a moment. Tarin couldn’t tell if she was suspicious, or simply surprised he’d volunteered.
“You will join the dredging crew, and ensure they finish before the rains. But don’t get me wrong—you are not a Guild member any more. You’re not leading anyone. You’re getting your feet wet, same as the rest. And your proctor friend reports directly to me if you start getting ideas above your station.”
She stood as she spoke, taking full advantage of the chance to loom over him.
“Is that clear?”
Tarin nodded quickly, no longer trusting himself to speak.
The crack of a laborer hammering the next plank into the shiftgate brought him out of the memory. He glanced around guiltily.
“Don’t worry, the proctors are still over there attending to their flask of rootshine,” Iris said with a smirk. “I take it the Deputy Chief isn’t the only one making your life difficult—what did you do to get a proctor shadowing you?”
Tarin was overcome with a desire to talk to someone, finally, but he was still wary. “My family was…associated with Tovan Marel.” He saw her eyes widen in recognition of the name; the Temple was not sparing in its denunciations. “We are still under house arrest; I am only here because none of the other Guild hydrologists were…available.”
Iris snorted. “None could be bothered, more like. I deliver reports to the Chief Warden”—she indicated the bundle in her arms—“I’ve seen what passes for work closer to the Grove.”
She watched his lip start curling, then freeze as he remembered he was talking to a stranger. Iris was aware that she was taking a risk speaking so frankly, but she had little time and she could see him hesitating. Liora was being taken in a matter of months; a Guild-trained hydrologist would be invaluable if they managed to escape.
“Why are you talking to me, Iris?” Tarin asked finally.
Now she lowered her voice. “My family, and other families I know, have also been mistreated by the Temple. We know how hard it is to find friends. How hard it is to feel alone. I know they would like to meet you.”
Tarin hesitated again, his eyes fixed on the churning brown water. But by now, he knew he would not be able to resist.
“Tomorrow, I could make an excuse to check the other side of the watergate,” he suggested. “There are some sheds…”
Now Iris gave him a smile that reached her eyes. “I know just the one.”
To Do:
- Tarin makes up a reason to check the other side of the wall as cover to meet the Dareths at the Inakos shack. They take to his plan immediately.
- They agree to gather trusted allies and set aside useful tools, rations, and seed stock. Niko knows a lapsed priest (Daya Vesh, future spymaster) that could pose as a counselor to Tarin, Iris, and the other conspirators—but in actuality he would be carrying their messages, and eventually use his temple connections to obtain permission for a pilgrimage
- They plan to leave before the harvest festival, when Liora would be officially inducted into temple service.
To Do:
- Iris gets word that the temple will be collecting Liora earlier than anticipated
- They rush to get the “pilgrimage” organized ahead of schedule, and leave the night before the Temple goons arrive
- With wagons and a party of 20 or so, they make slow progress in the dark with no developed roads. A trip that could have been done in one night by a single traveler spills into the next morning.
- Warden’s scouts come by; they have to hide the wagons (why would pilgrims have so many supplies?), a tense moment
- They rest and continue on the following night.
- After initial doubts, Tarin grows more confident in his ability to read the river and they make it to the valley as the next dawn breaks
- Redvale is founded!
To Do:
- Daya Vesh offers to return to the city and spread the news that his pilgrimage suffered tragedy: a landslide took out the entire party!
- This provides cover for the disappeared citizens, and allows him to start building a network back in Citara, sending fresh Redvalers with additional supplies to help them last the first few winters
- Brief look back at Redvale, where the first rough terraces were constructed over the difficult winter, and the first shoots are starting to break the soil.