Oracle (Book I)

The Deep Onri

Caprice and Nezzle crossed The Wilds to the shady edge of Onri's Forest and found a path inside.

"I'm not looking forward to seek assignments about trees," she grunted as she wrested her robes out of the grasp of something rough and prickly. "There's got be a thousand of them in here." Onri's Forest covered much of the grounds. Now that she was inside, Caprice was a little nervous. The forest was bigger than the school after all.

"It's certainly an adventure. They're probably easier to spot than the plants hidden among them," Nezzle said. She stopped and stooped down. A dancing blue light circled the bulbous, green and violet herb she was studying. She touched it and the circle of light vanished. Smoothly pulling out her assignment from her overstuffed bag, she watched as a very lifelike drawing of the herb listed on her seek list was marked with a red check.

Nodding, she said, "Looks like we picked a good route. None of my classmates have been this way if I found that one so close to the way we came in. I doubt your classmates have come this way either. What's on your list?"

Taking it out and studying the pictures, she said, "Hairy mary, scary mary, and marycure."

"Ah, the days of Basics and intermediate Herbology," Nezzle sighed.

Caprice found the three marys a few feet away circled in dancing pink light. She touched each of them, glancing at her list and making sure they were checked off as she and Nezzle moved along.

The serenity of the forest was almost enough to dispel her unease after seeing Po's statue. Even so, it didn't improve her disquiet that the further they walked, the denser the trees and undergrowth, the less light there was. It reminded her too much of the time she lost Thierry in the village woods when they were hiding from vampires and how it took him an entire day to find her. Still, she slumped along after Nezzle

"Fair warning: We'll have to go a ways in to get some of the things I need for my assignment," Nezzle said over her shoulder, "if you don't mind coming along."

"No, I'll come with you." Caprice's own assignment was all checked off now.

They stopped as they passed a glade. A big tree dominated the clearing, flowering in brown blossoms of every hue from glori to seo to tahl.

"I've passed through here many times. I think I'd remember something like that."

Caprice gasped silently at the sight of it. "Those are hallibel blossoms," she breathed. Climbing over a patch of tangled brier, she approached slowly as if it would disappear if she moved too fast. "In the village...in the village, there's a haorbelle tree, too. The only one growing there. When kin girls turn thirteen, their families take them to the tree and they..." She frowned. "I don't know what they do. We don't get days off and the tree is too far from the Whitehare house for us to leave unnoticed... But on my thirteenth birthday, they let me sleep, my parents and my grandmother and brothers. They were already gone from our rut in the morning when I woke up in a fright, scared because I was late. But next to my cheek where I lay on my cot there was a single hallibel blossom. They had gotten it for me somehow. They did that for me because they knew I wouldn't be seeing the tree that day and there would be no celebration. Not like Whitehare's grand celebrations or their children's coming of age parties. A single blossom...the same color as the back of my hand...."

"Tradition," Nezzle said quietly. "A very old one."

"Tell me about it." Caprice wanted to sit underneath the haorbelle tree, resting against it's elegant, strong trunk and sitting on its deep roots, and inhaling that beautiful fragrance. As she had always fantasized about doing since she was little. "Can we stay a moment?"

Without a word, Nezzle found a patch of grass, and whipped out her book. Caprice sat down under the tree and stared up, up, up through branches. From the darker umber to lightest creamy beige, she counted each shade of brown on every petal of the blossoms.

***

Author's Note: I am really frustrated with the limitations of describing brown or non-white skin in English so I started coming up with my set of words for shades of brown so I don't have to use words that are related to food, animals, and dirt or nature in general. Not that nature is bad, it's good, but the connotations/denotations attached to it are not always good when applied to people. I chose these words because I like the way they sound. Essentially, glori is very dark brown to literally black (I have more words for different shades), seo ("sey-oh") is your typical brown, tahl ("tall") is close to your typical cafe au lait but I hate using that phrase so I didn't use it.