Chapter Text
Spring has come again. Sohla is not sure what she would’ve done if it hadn’t.
She emerges from the tent with the winter still stuck in the corners of her eyes. It still clings to her joints. The new season is tentative underfoot. The ground is barely thawed. By the time summer rolls around - may it come, may it bless the land and her own two thumbs - she will be one of the first to rise everyday. Winter just has a way of slowing her down. A whole season of shivering and sweating by the hearth. Sohla would never dare question Pacha, but after such a long winter, she almost wonders what the ancient spirit had in mind, putting the clan through such a dreary season. Almost.
Vor’s youthful laughter bursts across the morning, shaking her out of her thoughts. It springs through the whole clearing where the clan has set up after coming down from the mountain, and it makes Sohla smile. A real smile, that creases her eyelids and reveals the gap between her front teeth. The first smile of the season, in a valley where children’s laughter rings true. Yes, they did well to follow Pacha’s guidance here. And now, with spring here, there is much to do.
Sohla sets forth into the morning. Every year, Igrork takes longer to thaw than Sohla even, and she promised him she would get started on the field today. She takes her duties seriously, of course. But she’s also plainly eager to make something grow again. She’s had enough of the slumber and of the hunger. And then, once she’s found some seeds, then she’ll allow herself to prod at the knot in her stomach that squirms at the thought of the Rite of Passage. But not yet.
“I don’t want to just make the same offering Jelrod made,” Ibon sighs. She digs into the dirt mindlessly with a stick as she speaks, crouched down. “It’s just that nothing else feels right.”
“I’m sure if you feel it in your heart, Pacha will know you mean it,” Sohla tells her closest friend. “It’s a better offering than something you’d give just for the sake of not copying your brother.”
Ibon smiles. “That’s gotta be right. What are you going to give?”
Something tenses in Sohla’s shoulders. The sun is well high up in the sky and she still hasn’t chosen her offering.
Ibon reaches out of squeeze her arm.”I’m sure you’ll find something.”
“Let’s just hope I find it in time,” Sohla replies. She meant to say it cheerfully, but it turned bitter the moment it left her tongue. She feels an urge to spit, but doesn’t.
Ibon doesn’t seem to hear the sour tone in her voice. Her eyes crinkle with complicity instead as she speaks next. “This time tomorrow, we’ll have our totems,” she says. “After our Rite of Passage, we’ll get to do anything we want, and no one will be able to stop us because we’re too young anymore.”
Sohla chuckles. Ever since Jelrod and Jukk completed their Rites of Passage, Ibon and her have spent countless evenings looking at the starry sky, speculating.
“It’ll be nice not to be kids anymore,” Sohla smiles.
She is walking around the small patch of field she managed to clear for planting, making sure every seed has been watered when Maeri steps out of the hut, calling her name.
“Sohla, come inside a moment.”
She heeds the call, casting a last look at her seeds before she goes. A small portion of them have been set aside in a cloth tied with twine, kept in her belt. She thinks they should make a fine offering.
In the hut, Maeri sits by a lazy fire, a pile of beet-dyed cloth and leather in her lap.
“I got Jukk to make these for you,” Maeri hands her the clothes. “You’re a woman now, you deserve a new skin.”
“Well, not quite a woman yet,” Sohla contradicts her.
Maeri dismisses it with a wave of the hand. “The rite is a confirmation of something that has already come to pass, not the threshold itself.”
Sohla chooses not to argue further and holds out the wraps with a quiet reverence. All of her clothes so far had been made by Jizu, passed down through the clan’s children as they were outgrown. The shift she is wearing now was first made for Mana, who had traded it out after her own Rite of Passage. In these new wraps — women’s wraps, more shapely than the loose children’s shirts she usually wore — Sohla recognizes Jukk’s attention to detail and harmony.
“Thank you,” she speaks in hushed wonder.
Maeri’s face wrinkles with a benevolent, satisfied smile. “Well go on, then. Try them on.”
Sohla doesn’t need to be told twice. When she is done changing, she feels a surge of vanity, wishing the river wasn’t gushing so much today so she could look at her reflection in it.
“One last thing,” Maeri says. She holds out a piece of leather whose color matches Sohla’s new wraps. “Why don’t we put your hair up?”
Sohla could do it herself, but she sits down to let Maeri gather her hair up from her usual low braids into a single one, high up on the back of her head. She feels Maeri’s fingers, still so deft despite her grey hair, wrap the piece of leather into a bow.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” Maeri says softly when she is finished. “Like braiding strands of sunshine.”
Sohla is not used to such fussing over her appearance. Usually, her attempts at making herself look pretty the way Ibon shows her how to are met with Igrork telling her it will all get undone in the field anyways.
“You’re wondering why go through all this trouble,” Maeri guesses correctly. She always has been good at understanding her moods. “The time of Passage is an exciting one, but it can also be confusing when half the clan treats you like the adult you’ve become, and the other half takes a bit longer to get used to it. Changing the way you look, as silly as it seems, can help the transition feel more real.”
Sohla nods. It makes sense.
“And besides,” Maeri goes on, a mischievous twinkle in her eye, “it can’t hurt in finding you a union.”
Blood flushes Sohla’s cheeks promptly. “It’s way too early for that.”
Maeri gives a knowing smile. “I’ve seen more springs than you, little sun. Once you set your mind on finding yourself a union, you’ll be grateful if you don’t have to convince the one you set your sights on that you’re no longer a child, on top of everything else.”
Before Sohla can reply anything, Igrork walks into the hut. It is time for the Rite.
As Sohla steps between the massive roots of the tree, trading places with Nokk, she catches Ibon’s excited grin. As soon as Vuak announced her totem was the cave lion, Sohla knew her friend would be extatic. Now she frets, second guessing whether her offering of seeds is good enough. The inscrutable look beneath Vuak’s mask gives little indication as she places the pouch in the hole that was dug into the earth for this ceremony.
“For generations, we’ve been guided by the spirits of animals,” Vuak begins after a pause. Sohla hangs onto his every words, as strange sensation taking hold of her. “But long ago,” he continues, “when Pacha first plucked humanity from the stars, it was her ancient spirit that advised us.
Vuak pauses again, yet Sohla barely notices. She can feel the tree behind her pull towards her, as though it was trying to embrace her.
“Sohla, that same spirit protects you now… the Tree of Pacha.”
Gasps arise within the crowd formed by the clan before Sohla can even make sense of what Vuak just said. The sensation builds and builds within her, from heel to the top of her head, before settling somewhere beneath her ribs. The feeling is both deeply familiar and unlike anything she has ever felt before. When she raises her eyes again towards the clan, she no longer feels like its dependent. The certainty that she must provide and ensure they thrive has taken root inside of her as firmly as it would in soil.
At the feast after the ceremony, Sohla is the subject of attention unlike any she has known before. Though Gin doesn’t make a big deal of her totem, she can tell there is a new consideration in his eyes as he looks at her. He used to look at her the way he did Nokk; now, she thinks, he almost looks at her the way he does Mana.
Jelrod also grants her new attention; ever since his own Rite of Passage two springs prior, he had stopped spending much time with Ibon and Sohla.
“That was quite the sight. Jukk did a good job with your new wraps,” he tells her almost in passage, as though he has forgotten that she knows him well enough to know he never really says anything just in passage. “And your totem is impressive. You might just inspire my next song,” he adds. He winks before leaving her, beckoned by his mother.
Ibon walks up to her, wrinkling her nose. “What was that all about?”
Sohla can’t help the flush that spread over her face. “I think your brother just flirted with me.”
“Yuck,” Ibon groans. “You can do much better than him. You have a Pachan tree totem,” she adds excitedly, squeezing her arm.
“And yours is the cave lion!” Sohla grins back.
“That’s absolutely right,” Ibon nods, and tilts her head to the moon as she roars, making Sohla laugh.
When the feast is over and the clan trickles back from the forest to the valley, Sohla hangs back to help Tare clean up after sending her grandparents on their way. The night is hanging its cloak over the forest, submerging it in a cold quiet.
A familiar, regular thud breaks the evening peace. Sohla sees Jag hack away at a fallen tree, off the path that leads back to the clan’s settlement as she walks home. She debates approaching him, before the stirring beneath her breast bone incites her to do so.
He sees her approach and lets his axe rest against the ground. “I know, I know, I’ll be heading home soon,” he preempts an admonishment she has no intention to utter. “It just seemed a waste not to take the wood back.”
“I was just going to ask if you needed help carrying all of this back to the fire,” she replies.
He seems surprised, surprised enough to take a second look at her. Not for the first time, she thinks to herself that he might have one of the most intense gazes in the clan. Must be from spending so much time with Vuak, she thinks.
His eyes shift to the pile of wood he’s worked up. “I guess I maybe got a bit carried away,” he hesitates. “Sure, if you’re offering.”
She draws closer and starts to pick up the logs. Besides her, he works quietly to strap branches into his back pack. He works faster than her; this is his work, after all. She just didn’t expect for him to wait for her before setting off. She feels queasy, being watched as she balances the logs in her arms. Pine sap gets caught on her new wraps, but that’s to be expected.
They walk back in silence as soon as she is ready. He walks a bit ahead of her, and she can’t help but stare at the width of his shoulders, from behind. Spending so much time looking at him reminds her of the days when he first joined the clan, gaunt and sullen and something irresistible to him. No one else was taken in by the clan the way she was, not until him, and not since. She felt drawn to him, in those early days, and tried to explain to him with all of her eleven-springs-old wisdom that they were the same, in a way. He had not been very interested in hearing her out.
“He’s like a wounded animal, Sohla,” Okka tried to console her after he’d abruptly told her to leave him alone, back then. “You need to give him time so he can lick his wounds.”
Just like Okka said, Jag had eventually settled down, though even in the first years he never really fell in with the children. He still keeps to himself, now, though he has long grown out of his old sullen ways. Nevertheless, part of her can’t help but still think of him as that brusque older boy, out of her reach.
When they reach the fire, Jag heads straight for the fire. She is careful not to disturb his carefully constructed pile, off to the side. She drops her logs on a clear patch of grass and starts to add them to the pile, one by one. When he returns from the fire with the logs he didn’t throw in, she is just finishing.
He gives her that surprised look again, appraising the tidiness of her work. “Thanks, Sohla.”
She smiles at him. “Anytime. I’m just happy to help.”
He nods, and looks back at the fire, as though to make sure it hasn’t stopped burning while he wasn’t looking. “I meant to say, by the way. Congratulations on getting your totem,” he says, still looking away from her. “It’s quite the honour.”
She can’t help but glance down to her feet, suddenly bashful. “I just hope I can live up to it.”
When she glances back up, his eyes are on her, gauging her like he usually does the fire. She understands from the look in his eyes that he is not about to resort to a platitude to reassure her.
“Well, I should get going,” she says, glancing away herself. “Maeri and Igrork will wonder what’s taking me so long.”
He nods. “Goodnight, Sohla.”
“Goodnight, Jag.”
Later, when she slips into her furs for the night, she thinks of the way shadows danced on his face, standing there by the fire.