“Why?” Mouse would demand. “It is beautiful and warm.”
“It’ll take you away from me and our mountain,” Granna always replied. “It took your mother, and your fool father followed after her, besotted swain that he was. I don’t want it to take you too.”
“Maybe Mother was right?” Mouse would say quietly to herself later, sitting upon a rocky outcrop that afforded the best view of the low country and that far-off light. “Maybe it is better to look to distant things and seek a better life? Surely it is wrong for me to stay on this mountain among goats all my days.”
But Granna always caught her and pinched her ear. “Silly girl,” she would scold. “Don’t waste your time looking that way. Look up there instead.”
Mouse always shivered at this, turning to where Granna’s old hand indicated. Farther up the mountain, in a place inaccessible but plain to see, was a cave. A hideous cave that, when one looked at it cross-eyed, resembled the shape of a wolf’s head. Mouse could have believed it was the gate to Death’s own realm, it was so awful.
“One day,” Granna would say then, her eyes fearful but determined, “the Silent Lady will return to us. She will step out of that cave, and she will see that we are delivered from evil again. Even as she did a hundred years ago. Even as she saved us from the Wolf Lord.”
“The Silent Lady,” Mouse repeated, but still she turned away from the cave mouth to gaze across to the distant light. “She must be dead long ago. While the Fire lives and burns.”
“It burns all right,” Granna would mutter. “And I suppose you could say that it lives.”
Then she would pat Mouse’s head, clucking to herself, and her faded old eyes would fill with tears. “Don’t follow the path of your mother. If you go down to the temple, child, no one will ever know your true name, and you yourself will forget it.”
Mouse sat now before her fire, clad in the stinking clothes of a slave boy, her stomach churning with disgust and dread. The brazier burned sweet incense, but it couldn’t clear Mouse’s nostrils of the stench of slavery.
Her next task was more heinous still, but she dared not shirk it. Taking up a knife, she grasped the long waves of her hair, pulled tight, and cut.
She nearly dropped the knife. She had not expected it to tear and hurt as it did! And across her hand lay a hank of black softness, her one great pride. Her glorious hair.
“Fire burn,” she whispered, tears in her eyes. “Fire purify.”
After all, pride was a sin. All pride must be purged from the body, through pain if necessary.
She adjusted her grip on the knife and resumed the task.
Her hair had been her great treasure from the time she was twelve years old. It had been difficult, of course, to keep neat, free of burs and bugs. But she hoped it might be beautiful, so she’d washed it carefully in a mountain stream and combed her fingers through it every night, freeing it of tangles and leaving it soft and shining.
“Your hair is like hers,” Granna would say, watching across their humble fire.
“Like whose?” Mouse would ask.
Granna never responded. Mouse believed she must mean her mother; the mother who ran away, luring her father after. She liked to think she shared this one small link to that woman she had never known. And she would continue combing her hair.
Her hair that caught the eye of the temple women.
The summer of her twelfth year, women from the Citadel journeyed to Mouse’s village to collect the temple tax. It was a hard journey, one not made every year. Four years had lapsed since the last time three red-clad women, tall, strong, and elegant, had climbed the mountain, flanked by silent bodyguards. Great woven wigs set with gold and uncut gems crowned their heads. Mouse, peering from the door of Granna’s hut, thought them a wondrous sight.
“What are you looking at?” Granna had demanded and creaked up behind Mouse to see. Swearing, “Beasts and devils!” she gripped Mouse’s shoulders with both hands. “You must go at once!” she said. “Take the goats up the mountain, and don’t return until nightfall. Do you hear me?”
But though she pulled with all her strength, Granna was an old woman. Mouse twisted free with hardly a thought and, ignoring her grandmother’s cries, darted into the village square to better see the beautiful women.
One of them spotted her. Dark kohl-rimmed eyes fixed upon Mouse with the intensity of a wildcat’s. She pointed, speaking to her two equally beautiful sisters. “There,” she said. “Look at that one with the fine hair.”
“She is lovely indeed,” one of the sisters agreed. “The Speaker said to look for a child of her likeness.”
“She could not be better pleased with another,” the third sister said.
They swooped down, surrounding Mouse in all their red-robed glory. “Would you like to journey to the Citadel of the Living Fire as your village’s tax?” the first of the sisters asked her.
Mouse nodded, struck dumb with wonder.