She glanced down at herself and almost shrieked out loud. The soft candlelight illuminated pools of crimson everywhere. She was covered in an enormous amount of blood.
She fought to still her panic, to force her drowsy mind to think rationally. She felt no acute pain, only a deep discomfort and great irritation. She hadn’t been stabbed. She hadn’t somehow ejected all of her inner organs. A fresh flow of blood trickled down her leg that moment, and she traced it to the source with soaked fingers.
Then she was just confused.
Going back to sleep was out of the question. She wiped herself off with the parts of the sheet that weren’t soaked in blood, jammed a piece of cloth between her legs, and ran out of the dormitory to get to the infirmary before the rest of the campus woke.
Rin reached the infirmary in a sweaty, bloody mess, halfway to a nervous breakdown. The physician on call took one look at her and called his female assistant over. “One of those situations,” he said.
“Of course.” The assistant looked like she was trying hard not to laugh. Rin did not see anything remotely funny about the situation.
The assistant took Rin behind a curtain, handed her a change of clothes and a towel, and then sat her down with a detailed diagram of the female body.
It was a testament, perhaps, to the lack of sexual education in Tikany that Rin didn’t learn about menstruation until that morning. Over the next fifteen minutes, the physician’s assistant explained in detail the changes going on in Rin’s body, pointing to various places on the diagram and making some very vivid gestures with her hands.
“So you’re not dying, sweetheart, your body is just shedding your uterine lining.”
Rin’s jaw had been hanging open for a solid minute.
“What the fuck?”
She returned to the bunks with a deeply uncomfortable girdle strapped under her pants and a sock filled with heated uncooked rice grains. She placed the sock on her lower torso to dull the aching pain, but the cramping was so bad that she couldn’t crawl out of bed before classes started.
“Do you want me to get someone?” Niang asked.
“No,” Rin mumbled. “I’m fine. Just go.”
She lay in bed for the entire day, despairing at all the class she was missing.
I’ll be all right. She chanted it over and over to herself so that she wouldn’t panic. One missed day couldn’t hurt. Pupils got sick all the time. Kitay would lend her his notes if she asked. Surely she could catch up.
But this was going to happen every month. Every gods-damned month her uterus would tear itself to pieces, send flashes of rage through her entire body, and make her bloated, clumsy, light-headed, and worst of all, weak. No wonder women rarely remained at Sinegard.
She needed to fix this problem.
If only it weren’t so deeply embarrassing. She needed help. Venka seemed like someone who would have already begun menstruating. But Rin would have died rather than ask her how she’d managed it. Instead, she mumbled her questions to Kureel one night after she was sure Niang and Venka had gone to sleep.
Kureel laughed out loud in the darkness. “Just wear the girdle to class. You’ll be fine. You get used to the cramping.”
“But how often do I have to change it? What if it leaks in class? What if it gets on my uniform? What if someone sees?”
“Calm down,” said Kureel. “The first time is hard, but you’ll adapt to it. Keep track of your cycle, then you’ll know when it’s coming on.”
This wasn’t what Rin wanted to hear. “There’s no way to just stop it forever?”
“Not unless you cut out your womb,” Kureel scoffed, then paused at the look on Rin’s face. “I was kidding. That’s not actually possible.”
“It’s possible.” Arda, who was a Medicine apprentice, interrupted them quietly. “There’s a procedure they offer at the infirmary. At your age, it wouldn’t even require open surgery. They’ll give you a concoction. It’ll stop the process pretty much indefinitely.”
“Seriously?” Hope flared in Rin’s chest. She looked between the two apprentices. “Well, what’s stopping you from taking it?”
They both looked at her incredulously.
“It destroys your womb,” Arda said finally. “Basically kills one of your inner organs. You won’t be able to have children after.”
“And it hurts like a bitch,” Kureel said. “It’s not worth it.”
But I don’t want children, Rin thought. I want to stay here.
If that procedure could stop her menstruating, if it could help her remain at Sinegard, it was worth it.
Once her bleeding stopped, Rin went back to the infirmary and told the physician what she wanted. He did not argue with her; in fact, he seemed pleased.
“I’ve been trying to convince the girls here to do this for years,” he said. “None of them listen. Small wonder so few of you make it past your first year. They should make this mandatory.”
He made her wait while he disappeared into the back room, mixing together the requisite medicines. Ten minutes later he returned with a steaming cup.
“Drink this.”
Rin took the cup. It was dark porcelain, so she couldn’t tell the color of the liquid inside. She wondered if she should feel anything. This was significant, wasn’t it? There would be no children for her. No one would agree to marry her after this. Shouldn’t that matter?
No. No, of course not. If she’d wanted to grow fat with squealing brats, she would have stayed in Tikany. She had come to Sinegard to escape that future. Why hesitate now?
She searched herself for any twinge of regret. Nothing. She felt absolutely nothing, just as she had felt nothing the day she left Tikany, watching the dusty town recede forever into the distance.
“It’ll hurt,” the physician warned. “Much worse than it hurt when you were menstruating. Your womb will self-destruct over the next few hours. After this, it will stop fulfilling its function. When your body has matured fully, you can get a surgery to have your womb removed altogether, but this should solve your problem in the interim. You’ll be out of class for at least a week after this. But afterward, you’ll be free forever. Now, I’m required to ask you one more time if you’re certain this is what you want.”
“I’m certain.” Rin didn’t want to think it over any more. She held her breath and lifted the mug to her mouth, wincing at the taste.
The physician had added honey to mask the bitterness, but the sweetness only made it more horrible. It tasted the way that opium smelled. She had to swallow many times before she drained the entire mug. When she finished, her stomach felt numb and weirdly sated, bloated and rubbery. After a few minutes an odd prickling feeling tingled at the base of her torso, like someone was poking her with tiny needles from inside.
“Get back to your room before it starts to hurt,” the physician advised. “I’ll tell the masters you’re ill. The nurse will check on you tonight. You won’t want to eat, but I’ll have one of your classmates bring you some food just in case.”
Rin thanked him and ran with a wobbling gait back to her quarters, clutching her abdomen. The prickling had turned into an acute pain spreading across her lower stomach. She felt as if she had swallowed a knife and it was twisting in a slow circle inside her.
Somehow she made it back to her bed.
Pain is just a message, she told herself. She could choose to ignore it. She could . . . she could . . .
It was terrible. She whimpered aloud.
She did not sleep so much as lie in a fevered daze. She turned deliriously on the sheets, dreaming of unborn, misshapen infants, of Tobi digging his five claws into her stomach.
“Rin. Rin?”
Someone hovered over her. It was Niang, bearing a wooden bowl.
“I brought you some winter melon soup.” Niang knelt down beside Rin and held the bowl to her face.
Rin took one whiff of the soup. Her stomach seized painfully.
“I’m good,” she said weakly.