There are eight guest bedrooms, and it takes Jalese and I the rest of the afternoon to clean them all and make them ready for occupation. Jalese’s surprised at how much she has to show me what to do, but I think I’m a net contributor to the effort by the time we hit the second room. By the time we’ve done all eight I feel exhausted and all I want to do is go down to the basement where we’d set up sleeping pallets for myself, and just sleep. But on the way down Hethan calls us into the back room. Someone in the bar has been asking after us. Jalese pokes her head around the corner briefly and confirms that it’s the others of our group and declares that they can wait. We need to get clean. We’re filthy and sweaty from doing the rooms so Jalese pulls me down to the basement.

Oh, and they do have soap in Jeodin. It’s made out of whale oil. So are the candles and the lamp oil and Goddess-knows what else. I try to relax and not have a hissy fit about this. Presumably whales aren’t endangered here; the hunting techiques would be too primitive, I hope, to do that kind of damage. Unless they use magic, but maybe the Goddess would have a thing or two to say about that. I wonder. I try to tell myself that nevertheless it’s going to be a major part of the economy for an island chain like this, and there really aren’t any alternatives. It still feels wrong to me.

And yet, it’s good to have soap, even though it does smell odd. And light when the sun goes down. Even though that smells a bit odd too.

I decide to ask something that’s been increasingly bothering me. “Do you know if it’s all right for me to, er, take these charms out so I can wash my hair?” I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be done with all the charms and braids in place so I don’t end up with soap and stuff trapped in there as well; but what with the dust and sweat from the cleaning work, and several days in sea air and spray before that, and whatever and how long before that, I can feel it needs a wash, badly.

“Yes, I think so. Wait a moment.” She goes into a storeroom. I follow to the door. It turns out the store room holds a number of clothes. “These were left by accident by guests,” Jalese explains, looking for something in a pile on the table in the centre of the room. “They’re kept in case the people who left them come back and want them back, but we can borrow them if we like, and get out of these horrible things. At least until we can buy something at Market.”

“Oh, that sounds like such a good idea.” I must have said it with a lot of feeling because she looks back at me with a grin. Then she finds what she’s looking for and comes back out, handing it to me. It’s a small silk handkerchief; so small I might imagine it belonging to a child.

“From what I’ve heard, it’s all right to take them out and wrap them in silk,” Jalese explains. “I don’t think you even have to wear them in your hair like you do. A lot of younger Neriae do it but I’ve never seen the elders doing it.”

“Oh. all right. I’ll get them out then. It’s been running me like a nut for days.” ‘Driving me nuts’, as an idiom, doesn’t translate to Jeodine very elegantly, and Jalese gives me a very odd look. I shrug and take the handkerchief, with a look of thanks, and stand at the counter to start unravelling my hair. “It’s probably supposed to be a fashion statement or something,” I mutter.

“I’ll help you do that,” she says.

“Oh…” Suddenly I’m blushing. “I… Yes please, okay, if that’s… If that’s appropriate.”

“Why shouldn’t it be?” she queries innocently. “Come and sit here.”

She indicates the bench next to the rough old table. I obey, bringing the handkerchief with me and laying it on the table. “I don’t know,” I say, as she starts. She remains standing so my head is at a comfortable height for her to work with. “I wasn’t sure.”

“It’s not safe for you to remove them yourself unless you’re going to cast,” she explains. “They will attempt to couple. Like you saw before?”

I nod, remembering the weirdness of the shell apparently growing in my flesh.

The first charm comes out, and she drops it quickly onto the handkerchief, and continues unravelling and separating the braid it was in. “You’ve forgotten so much, haven’t you teya?” Teya. I recognise the word. It’s a term of endearment, like ‘dear’ I suppose. “How old are you? Do you know?”

I shake my head. ~Twenty two,~ I could say, but something in me warns me not to. “I don’t know. How old do you think I am?”

Another charm comes out. “It’s always hard with Neri. Hm. Ninety–”

“What?” I exclaim, in English at it turns out. I turn to stare at her. “You think I’m ninety years old?”

“Maybe eighty.” She shrugs. “I can’t tell. You seem short for your age, but you can’t be in your fifties, you’re–” She stops herself and indicates with a gentle hand I should turn back around so she can concentrate on my hair.

Whatever it was she didn’t want to say it. I subside. “I don’t feel that old,” I say.

She liberates another charm and strokes my hair down. I sit with my thoughts, and soon realise there are tears in my eyes again.

“Did your mother do this for you as well?” Jalese asks.

“I suppose so. I… I think so.” Yes, there’s a familiarity to this scene, to the hands of a woman gently moving over my hair. But might that not have been my real mother, when I was a small child? “I can’t see her face,” I say aloud. “When I remember her, I can never see her face.”

Jalese rests her hand against my head for a moment, a gesture I recognise as commisseration. But I seriously don’t know whether the fact I can’t see my — Taniel’s mother’s face upsets me more than it would if I could. If I could turn around in a lucid memory and look on the face of an elven woman and know her to be my mother. I have a mother already.

But these flashbacks are getting — worse? More frequent anyway. I don’t know if I want to call them worse. Or why am I not trying to deny them? Why aren’t I avoiding reawakening these memories?

What is there in them that I’m craving?

And I know Kerilas and Samila and Lotan — rather, James, Lee and Dave, I forcibly remind myself — are upstairs in the bar waiting for us, and I don’t feel in the slightest bit like I want to hurry to meet them. Partly I really am just very tired. And we were all stuck on that tiny boat for days until this afternoon anyway and it’s just nice to have a little more space, and Jalese is such easy company.

She finishes getting the charms out of my hair. I survey them briefly on the handkerchief. There are shells and pebbles and bits of bone and teeth and tiny carvings in ivory and wood. Goddess knows what I must have looked like with them in my hair. Hell of a fashion statement. Jalese is still unravelling and untangling the braids. I tie together the corners of the handkerchief to make a simple pouch and Jalese finds a leather thong for me to tie it to and put around my neck.

How one bathes in Jeodin — at least if one is poor and living under an inn — is by crouching or kneeling naked with a sponge in one’s hand in in a wide, shallow tray of soapy water in front of the stove. For a moment I think of my bath and electric shower at home, but then I get on with it before the water gets cold. There’s even shampoo, of a sort, which I suspect also has more than a touch of whale-oil about it, but I use it nonetheless. It feels so good to get clean.

I think this is the first time since those quiet hours before dawn the day we arrived that I have been left entirely on my own. Jalese had bathed first, and has gone back to the store room to find some clothes we can borrow. Besides a little furtive exploring under the furs in my bunk, this is the first opportunity I have to really examine this body; this miraculous body that’s slim and smooth and agile and long-limbed without being gangly. And female, female, female.

It seems ironic, perhaps even farcical, that even with all the impossible things that have happened I still have to hide. I have to hide this joy I feel. My chest aches with it. My breasts — aren’t much to get excited about compared to, say, Samila’s; unless you’re me. I love the way they move. I love the sensitivity of them, even if it hurts if I hit them on something. I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all. I’m fascinated by my waist, and the new configuration of my hips; standing next to the tray on the slatted wooden mat, just exploring the shape of my pelvis. My hips aren’t especially wide, but I have a definite figure. Just not quite so definite as Samila’s. I have to remind myself that would be a pointless comparison, and I don’t envy her the discomfort she must be having from her larger breasts.

And below, between my legs, of course. Smooth flesh (I suppose being hairless down there as well as everywhere else except my head is another Elf thing) and a slit. I probe, gently. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe I was expecting the touch to arouse me more, but it mostly just feels strange and right at the same time. I don’t have anything I can relate this to; nothing in my old body which could be compared to this, so it’s confusing and maybe a little frustrating. I don’t even know if or how different I am from a human female, down there.

This body is everything I might have wished for. The best I could have realistically expected if I ever got around to starting to fix it back home couldn’t have compared to this. But now I think, at least it would have been mine. I don’t know what I feel about this body. I love it. I feel already like I inhabit it more perfectly than I have ever known. And yet, Taniel’s memories keep surfacing, flashing at the slightest stimuli. I know she was a real person, she had her own life, full of joy and love, and then full of pain and loss and enslavement and Goddess knows what happened to her in that camp. And I start to feel a little like an intruder and a thief. And maybe I had no right to explore the way I just did.

I squat quickly to rinse my hands off a final time in the soapy water and empty the tray carefully down the drain.

(They have sewers and drains, even in a little market town like this! Go Jeodin!)