Becoming Excerpt

The bedchamber was more spacious than the room he had occupied in the gatehouse. Beeswax polish pervaded the air, and a soft blue coverlet draped a bed piled with cushions. As soon as he felt the mattress under him, the young man sat up, blinking his eyes to dispel his vertigo. Once the dizziness passed, he reached to undo the cords that held back the curtains.

A large hand circled his wrist to stop him. "Why do you want to hide?" asked Olenwë. "You should pull your hair out of your eyes and stop being so shy. Nobody's going to hurt you."

All he could do was shake his head. While reassuring at first, Olenwë's solicitousness was not altogether proper, and the young man could not help but notice that neither Olveru nor the priests had followed them into the room.

"All right," said Olenwë, "if you aren't going to show yourself, and since Olveru says you don't have a name, I'm going to call you Ninion. It means hidden one in Danasi. There are statues of their gods everywhere on the island where I was born. They all have blank faces, because it's forbidden to look at the divine. We call them ninoni."

The Danasi dwelled in the islands and coastal highlands west of Sirilon. They were secretive and rough, worshipping their own pantheon of nameless gods. "You are not a Shivarian?" the young man asked. Chancing only the slightest look at Olenwë's face, he saw someone tall and broad-shouldered, with a firm jaw. Aside from the accent, Olenwë did not seem like a foreigner. "I thought only Shivarians could become talevé."

"I'm mixed blood," said Olenwë. "Most of the people of the Seaward Islands are, but we worship the Lady of the Waters as well as anybody. Here, I'll show you." He quickly rolled up his sleeve to reveal a firmly muscled bicep bearing the triple wave of the Water rune. "I got my tat at fifteen. All islanders honor the Lady like this, and the men on the ship that brought me here had them as well."

The tattoo rippled as Olenwë flexed his arm; the young man could not stop looking at it. "So do you like the name? Shivarian names don't mean anything, but Danasi ones do."

"Ninion," he murmured, trying the name on his lips. It sounded all right. He nodded.