Maven & the Border Lord by Eleanor Konik

Behemoths live primarily among the stars, but like frogs and water, their young need soil to gestate and grow. Humankind discovered the behemoth when a seed slammed to ground and destroyed a sacred grove back on our home planet. After a war or two, our two species entered into symbiosis with one another. Humans protected the seeds, learned to commune with the juvenile, and joined the youngling in the stars. For thousands of years, we have journeyed from star to star with the behemoth spawn they have succored, and in the process, colonized unknowable planets.

My great, great, great grandmother bred dogs in the belly of such a beast. I’ll never see one.

When a Behemoth launches itself into the stars, it takes with it a breeding population of humans, which live inside the belly of the beast, getting all their nutrients and air from inside the cavern, until it finds a mate. Then, the male Behemoth carves a nest in the soil while the female feeds on the nearby star. She plants the seed, the male fertilizes it, and each disgorges a portion of their human population to serve as caretakers for the seed, leaving them free to roam the stars once more.

Then, the humans spend long years scouting, and building, and negotiating a new hierarchy and social order. Often, there are external threats that need to be dealt with — just the thing for forging a united population.

On the tallest mountain on the planet known as Pieran, there stands a small observation tower built of wood, and from it, one can see...

...dogs — which are, frankly, obviously necessary to human flourishing. They came along too, of course — alongside the potato, the goat, and the lemon... and countless other nice-to-haves from the ancestral homeland. Horses were too big and too fractious, and were sadly lost somewhere along the way.

The nice thing about dogs is that their genetic structure allows for fast changes to their physical morphology, which is to say they can be adapted fast to a variety of needs. A single breeding population can swiftly be split into mousers, cart-pullers, large hunters, trackers, companions, rescuers, and more.

The best dog in all of Pieran is named Osman. He is, of course, mine.

I grew up on the shores of Lake Lanara. Most of my neighbors are fishermen, but my father is a trader. My mother, may the stars guide her soul, died when I was young. But her father owned six boats, and my grandmother was widely considered the best net-weaver in a day’s hard run. Even without her, I was never poor. I had dresses and books and plenty to do.

I was only fourteen when I took over my father’s books for the Lanara leg of his business. Sixteen when I started managing the warehouses. Twenty when he summoned me to the capitol to celebrate his Renunciation.

Not all men join the priesthood when their heirs reach adulthood; I was surprised my father wanted to. I suppose I shouldn’t have been — he had always been a trader obsessed with making money for its own sake more than for what it could earn him. The church controls the census, the quotas, and in the end, the flow of currency... for all that tehomite comes from the nobles of the wall.

To prepare for the ceremony, he set me loose across his warehouses with the instruction to sew myself a dress suitable to wear to a capitol ball.

It was a beautiful dress, and as rich with portable wealth as I could manage without embarrassing myself. If I walked away from my father’s Renunciation with only the clothes on my back, I would have the pearls and gems and swan feathers I needed to start a small trading house of my own, as long as I changed my name and did it somewhere far from my half-brothers.

If he didn’t emancipate me before he gave over the reins of the house to his senior wife’s eldest son, there was a chance I’d spend the rest of my life managing nothing more complex than a small waystation halfway between Lanara and Qinṭrun.

Or worse, married off to some half-competent vassal as a reward for good behavior.

Father’s Renunciation was a bigger deal than I realized. I knew he was wealthy — no man can have six wives without being wealthy — but I hadn’t realized that there would be so many aristos present. Most were at the capitol for the annual tithe negotiations, and wouldn’t have come just to see my father off into the next stage of his life, but I had never been in the same room as an aristocrat before. Not even the lesser knights and ladies stationed along the length of the wall, instead of serving in the great towers that the elite soldier bands sallied forth from to fight monsters and create tehomite.

Most looked no different from any other woman, but one — he had to be a Marchion; no one less powerful would place something so grotesque on display — wore the horns of some monstrous beast instead of the more traditional steel crown.

Judicious eavesdropping revealed that his name was Adam.

My mother used to say that poverty was the first step on the path to understanding power. I never quite believed her, but I’m enough my father’s daughter to understand that although Renunciation is a sacred thing, a way to embody charity and generosity and alms-giving, it is also a status game.

Dressing me up in silks and swan feathers and sea-shined pearls was just one of the many ways my father signaled his cleverness and skills to the people he most wanted to impress: the Bishop and his vicars.

He also enumerated every barrel of barleywine and bolt of helm, gifting some to his factors and most to his sons. He glossed over the credits in his temple coffers, though he pledged fully half to the behemoth growing in its egg beneath us; I had no doubt it was a staggering sum, and since money is fungible, it would free the Church up to do other things with its funds.

Doubtless my father expected to be able to direct some of those projects, but church politics was far beyond anything I had ever dared to dabble in.

I understood trade. Bureaucrats devoted to the care and feeding of a delicate alien beastling were harder to manipulate.

My father gave me away like a well-bred lapdog. I was a province-born daughter of a dead secondary wife; I hadn’t dared to hope for gifts beyond the dress I wore. But I had expected to be treated like a person, not — not cast off without a word of warning or discussion.

Sending me to the border wall to be a seamstress in an aristo harem was worse than anything I’d expected my brothers to dare; I’d planned to make myself useful in some small corner of the family’s trading consortium once everything was divided between the primary sons.

Trader girls don’t marry aristos. There are gifts in those bloodlines that are too precious to dilute; the marchions were chosen in large part based on their wives’ connection to their Towers, which only aristas can heal when breached. Aristos fight, and mend, and marry well so that primordial monsters don’t kill us all in our beds.

But when my new Marchion suggested we dance, I wasn’t in a position to deny him.

He didn’t look at me as we danced. “You’ll come to my rooms tonight. Bring all your things. Jewelry, clothes, dogs. Whatever you value that you can carry. The rest may be sent along, but we won’t be here to supervise the packing, and I can’t guarantee your family won’t find ways to keep it here.”

It occurred to me, later than I was proud of, that my father was neither capricious nor forgetful; he not only loved me, he valued my skills. It would be just like him to send me away with a Marchion if he thought it would protect me.

“Am I in danger?” I asked when he pulled me in to avoid a careening attempt at a drunken pop turn.

His smile was crooked, wry, and surprisingly handsome. “The two most dangerous places for a human to live are the center of a powerful nation, and along its border.”

The song ended before I could push for more details. He pressed a small bundle of fabric into my hand. It felt like cashmere, finer than anything I’d ever touched. “Put this on before you leave this room,” he said.

I looked down at the scarlet scarf of a senior wife. The ends were slightly tattered — I wondered what it meant — but he had come prepared.

“You’re doing my father a very large favor considering this is supposed to be a Renunciation.” I’m sure I didn’t keep the shock from my tone.

“You should give yourself more credit,” he said, and went to talk to an aristo I didn’t recognize.

Unmarried women wear their hair uncovered. When we move into a man’s household for a betrothal, he gives us cloth to symbolize a future in his care; they’re often warm, and large enough to serve as a blanket in extremis.

Most women wear it around the neck as a sort of collar; other men know we are claimed, but they might have a chance in a year and a day. When we marry, we cover our hair so that other men know we are committed. If we don’t marry, it’s typically returned.

A woman who is happy in the betrothal and certain she wants to marry will often decorate the cloth as a sign of her mood. Some embroider the edges, or bleach a careful lace-like pattern onto the fabric, or whatever else. After the wedding, most add stories of joyful moments. It creates a personal tapestry of a woman’s life; my mother’s was half-finished when she died, and we buried it with her as a shroud.

If a husband dies before his wife, she stores her marriage scarf and dons the grey — some join a daughter’s household, others find an abbey to serve. There are far more nuns than priests, though the church is ruled by men like my father. Old widows have less taste for power, I suppose.

The capital lies between two rivers, which run north and south in parallel until they reach the mountains that protect the Basin of Civilization from the primordial chaos beyond. The lowest, least-protected point in those mountains is Vera Pass¹, about a day’s walk northwest beyond my home in Laketown. The region is very wet, with several mountain lakes and a riotous network of rivers.

Osman and I, following Adam, ran south along the river, and stopped for nothing, because Adam healed us as we ran. We passed farm after farm, first wheat then sheep². My chest heaved as I gasped in air, but my lungs never hurt. My legs pumped until the muscles were limber, but never ached. He ran just behind me on the church road, saying nothing even at town crossroads, and sometimes — as long as I didn’t slow down to gawk at a village or shop or admire a particularly cute baby or strong dog — I forgot he was there.

South, ever southward, farther south. We covered the distance of a four-day’s walk in one brutal run.