The Destined Path of Water Chapter 14: Chapter 14: Slow Days

Read chapter 14 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae We did not talk about the necklaces that day on the flat stones. We sat there until the light went and then we walked back separately and I went home and ate dinner and answered my mother's questions about school and went to my room and lay on my bed looking at the ceiling for a long time. Thinking about the colour of her necklace in the afternoon light. Thinking about how long. Since I was nine. I was ten. We had been carrying the same thing. In different villages, in different lives, for seven years. I did not know what to do with that except hold it carefully and not look at it too directly, the way you don't look directly at something bright. We started meeting at the river. Not formally. Not with plans. It happened the way things happen between people who have found each other in a place they both already go she would be there when I arrived or I would be there when she arrived and neither of us made a thing of it. We just sat. Or walked the path along the water. Or stood at the bank watching the river move between the stones with the attentiveness of people who had been watching rivers for years and knew how to read what they saw. The first time she told me something it was not about the necklace. We were walking the lower path, the one that followed the river for a stretch, and she said out of nowhere, "I used to draw it. Without knowing I was drawing it." I looked at her. "Scales," she said. "In the margins of things. I would look down and there they were and I had not noticed making them." I thought about the five years I had spent going back to the hill temple outside festival season, sitting on the flat stone, looking at the waterfall. "I kept going back," I said. "To the temple. Looking for I did not know what I was looking for exactly." She nodded like that made complete sense. Because it did. Because she was the only person I had ever spoken to for whom it made complete sense. We walked for a while without talking. "Did you ever think you imagined it," she said. "Yes," I said. "For about three days. Then I stopped because the necklace was real and I could not explain the necklace." The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something smaller and more private than a smile. "Three days," she said. "I was ten," I said. "I gave myself three days and then I moved on." This time it was a smile. Brief, turned away, but there. Rika He made me laugh more than I expected. Not loudly. Not the performed kind of laughing that happens in groups when everyone is deciding together what is funny. Just the small involuntary kind, the kind that arrives before you decide to let it, usually because he said something that was true in a way that was also slightly absurd and he delivered it with the complete seriousness of someone who did not know it was funny until he heard it land. We did not talk about the necklaces directly. Not yet. We talked around them the way you talk around something large in a small room acknowledging it with the way you moved, the way you chose where to stand, without naming it. I told him about the library books. The old ones in the back of the school library with the thin accounts of the dragon, more feeling than fact. He said he had looked for books too and found almost nothing useful. I said useful was a high bar for legend. He said that was fair. We were sitting on the flat stones that afternoon, the ones where the necklace moment had happened, and the sun was doing the thing it did in this season, going low early, the light coming in sideways and turning everything it touched a particular gold. He was talking about the dam proposal, something he had read the night before, and I was listening with my knees pulled up and my back against the larger stone behind me and somewhere in the middle of his sentence about downstream flow calculations I stopped hearing the words. Not because they weren't interesting. Because the afternoon was warm and I had not slept well and the river