I couldn’t sleep. Every time I turned over, I felt the suffocating darkness. A forest should be alive with sound, but the abandoned bandit camp was soundless, as if the vanished bandits had stolen the forest noises. Eventually I sat up and peered about in the gloom. I sensed as much as saw that Vaenahma was also awake, sitting with their back against one of the buildings. I went to sit beside them. The wall planks felt strangely smooth and warm. They seemed to have captured some essence of daylight, absorbing the sun’s heat as it fell reluctantly into the valley. Vaenahma greeted me by handing me a flask.

  “I don’t like this place,” I murmured.

  “No,” they said. “You’re meant not to like it.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  A subtle movement, as if they were shrugging. “We came upon places like this, when I was with the Prince of Kemestmahlae. Spoilt places. The scenes of massacres. And horrors.”

  “This is the scene of a massacre?”

  “Perhaps not. But something evil happened here. Some kind of sasturi meddling.”

  We were murmuring, our voices barely distinguishable to each other, but I still glanced nervously towards where the others were sleeping. “You don’t like the Sasturi,” I whispered.

  “No.”

  “But aren’t the Flow descended from the Sasturi? Aren’t you a sasturi’s child, or grandchild?”

  They didn’t like that I had asked that. They were silent for a moment. That was one of Vaenahma’s traits. They expressed anger or annoyance with a pause. As if they were trying to regather their graciousness by reminding themselves that they liked you. “Generations ago, perhaps,” they said. “That’s the story that gets told. How at the outset the Sasturi were so foolish that they allowed their pregnant women to carry ghosts. And the ghosts bonded to children in their wombs. When the babies were born, they had many voices in their heads. They carried many lives. It was a curse, but now, after so many centuries, it has become a gift.”

  “Do you have many voices in your head?”

  “No. Too many generations have passed. The ghosts have dissipated among all of the descendants of those unwise mothers. But like all flow, I have a loose sense of who I am.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “No, Captain, and you have never asked me before this. At first I wondered if you were simply an incurious man. Then I thought that you were being kind. One gets tired of explaining oneself.”

  “I apologize,” I said. The wall behind me was really too hot. Its heat seemed to radiate through to my face.

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  Vaenahma was silent for awhile. Then they said, “Not many people do apologize. Not many think that they should.”

  I asked the question that had been preying on my mind since our flight down the river. “Lieutenant, why are you staying with us?”

  They didn’t pretend to be surprised by the question, or to misunderstand it. “You mean that I could wander off again. Go back to being an adventurer. Sleeping on the ground. Only eating when I could afford it.”

  I grunted. “You’re sleeping on the ground now. And we haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “Captain,” Vaenahma said softly, “I stay because of you.” Then they gave a little laugh. “You are not pretty, like the Prince was. You do not have golden hair, and you cannot charm people with your wit, or your exciting plans. But I am used to being the hunting fly. I need a flower to hide in.”

  I laughed out loud, and regretted it, worrying that I had woken the sleepers. Vaenahma was referencing the shiekahdodo flower, which had been the emblem of the doomed Prince of Kemestmahlae. “Doesn’t the fly turn into a petal when it’s hiding in the flower’s mouth?” I asked.

  “Yes. And I have turned into a member of your guard.”

  “Doesn’t the fly wait for its prey to come and sup on the flower’s nectar?”

  “It does.”

  I didn’t ask who their prey was. I was silent for a moment, and then I said, “No one has ever compared me to a flower before.”

  “You’re not very fragrant,” Vaenahma allowed.

  “Vaenahma,” I said, “it might be foolish to stay with me. As foolish as it was to follow the prince. We might all be outlaws soon.”

  Another movement of their shoulders, felt against the boards rather than seen. “My prince was flow himself, you know. Only he had to suppress his nature, if he were to be a prince. He couldn’t choose to remain flow. He had to pretend that one day he would marry a princess, or a duchess, or some other convenient person. He could have chosen to be a princess himself, and he might have defeated Daas Muhkat with little seductions, made himself queen. He would have given legitimacy to Daas Muhkat’s reign. And then, at some convenient moment, he might have struck. Like the hunting fly. It all would have been different, if he had chosen to be female. But a woman is never thought to be chivalrous, in the way that a man is. A woman is never thought to move the heart in the way that a golden-haired warrior can, standing in his stirrups and raising his sword.”

  “There have been women warriors,” I said. “There are women who serve in the guard.”

  “Yes,” Vaenahma allowed. “But my prince didn’t want to be a woman warrior. He wanted to be a legend, like the Nomad Kings of old. There were no women among the calvary who trampled the wheat to dust and slaughtered the agorabehn herds. His ancestors had been mounted kings, killers under a banner that they said justified their killing. His dreams were full of charges, of lances, of horseflesh and trampled fields. He could have been anything, but he chose to be a man, and a man whose time has passed.”

  “I didn’t know that you were so poetic,” I murmured, but I shouldn’t have been jesting.

  “Don’t turn away from my compliment,” Vaenahma said.

  “Were you complimenting me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I failed to detect it.”

  Another sigh, another shivering of the warm boards. “I follow you, Captain Haendil, because you have no dreams of glory.”

  When Might a Hero Find His Rest. If you want to read the little world-building stories I'm writing as I go along, go to my Patreon page.

  Copyright KPB Stevens, 2025

  The Shiekahdodo

  from The Earliest Histories, Collected and Compiled by Vaetraht Dunandee