Read Online Forged by Fire by Janine Cross - Free Book Online Page B

She lowered her eyes, bit her lip, then hesitantly looked up at me.
“You won’t tell anyone I said that, hey-o? About my mother being myazedo?”
I didn’t have a clue what the word meant. But I smiled reassuringly. “We’re foremost friends, Savga. I won’t say a thing.”
With a tremulous sigh, Savga nodded. “Foremost friends.”
“Sit beside me.” I patted the ground. “Tell me another of your stories, hey.”
Slowly she nodded. But she didn’t resume shelling cora nuts. She stared at the ground, silent.
“I forget sometimes,” she whispered.
“Forget what?”
She looked lost, drained, devitalized. “That Mama hates me.”
My response was grounded in nothing but reactionary denial. “Your mother doesn’t hate you!”
She shrugged apathetically. “She does every time the lords come trolling. I’m a senemei, hey.”
I didn’t know what the word meant.
“Three bayen lords took Mama one day, when she was returning from the river, before I was born. That’s how she got that scar, fighting them, and that’s why Fwipi-granna’s claimer was killed, for Mama’s defiance. I’m a senemei. Tiwana-auntie says so. Keau claimed Mama afterward, to spare Mama some of the shame of having me.”
I glanced at Tiwana-auntie. Her puckered face was a mask.
I thought senemei must be the Djimbi word for bastard . Keau must have been the man who’d stormed into a hut last night, when I’d informed Fwipi that Tansan had been taken.
“That’s why Mama loves Agawan better than me,” Savga continued hoarsely.
“Agawan?”
“My baby brother.” A tear escaped an eye. “She hates me each time the lords come trolling. ’Cause I remind her of . . . them.”
My heart ached for the child before me, and I suddenly understood why she’d been so delighted when I’d prom ised to be her foremost friend, why she’d been so deter mined to stay resolutely by my side since. My entry into the arbiyesku had supplied Savga with a childless woman her mother’s age, and she’d fiercely—and desperately— adopted me as her own.
I awkwardly pulled the child onto my lap and held her, reliving the ache I’d too often felt when my mother had turned from me to favor my sister. She felt small and frail within my arms. I was comforting not just her, understand; I was comforting a mirror image of a younger me.
After a moment, she leaned her small head against my collarbone and wept.
The next day was my first in the fields, and it was an inglori ous one.
    Squint-eyed and in pain, I shambled down row after row of blighted oilseed stalks, snapping off the wizened clus ters between thumb and forefinger and placing them in the worn sack I carried upon my back by means of a wide strap across my forehead. I felt gelatinous on the outside, my in terior scraped hollow and raw by the rake of my fractured ribs. Every now and then a creaking sound issued from them, accompanied by a nasty, bubbling pain. Not that I let the pain prevent me from working the fields, not after what Tansan had suffered. For the love of the Dragon, I’d work the damn fields.
    Savga couldn’t understand my lethargy and fragility— she was impatient with my mutterings about fractured ribs—and by noon, she worked several rows ahead of me with two other girls her age, their small fingers expertly de capitating clusters of oilseeds from stalks.
    While picking, I could have reflected upon what had hap pened to Tansan. Could have. Maybe should have. Didn’t. I worked with the mindless determination to get through the day and collapse upon my sleeping mat come dusk.
    But come dusk, I was not permitted to. It was Naso Yobet Offering Eve; I had to join my new clan in their humble observances. There were flatcakes to share, however hard and thin, and there was the hair of elders to wash. For the first time, my hair was washed by another during Naso Yobet: Savga. She worked at my head with a vigor that left my ears ringing and scalp throbbing.
    I remembered washing the hair of