Thirty minutes later, when I was about ready to fall over in exhaustion, my whole back screaming in itchy pain, the first signs of Carnith came into view.
Most of the villages and cities I’d passed had oases or rivers, low as they may be, and Carnith was no different. It was a quaint village curled around a tiny oasis, date palms propagated around the water.
Milly’s house was right in the middle of the cluster of buildings. They were all nestled between sand dunes, a mountain far off in the shadowed landscape. Each home was curved and short, looking like it was molded from clay and left to bake in the sun. Hers was set a bit further back than the rest, a short clay fence surrounding it. The slightly angled tin roof shone silver as she led the mule through the gate and then to a small stable whose ground was littered with straw, while a trough and stall were visible through the archway.
Still leery, I waited at the front of the building, watching as she clumped down the cart’s steps. “Well, don’t just gawk, girl. Come over here. You’re going to learn how to unhitch Sal and to feed and water and brush him. Tomorrow, when I go do my deliveries, you’ll learn to hitch him back up.” She eyed me, one brow raised higher than the other. “You’ll learn to ride him too.”
All I could do was stare wide-eyed at this strange woman until both she and the mule seemed to tsk at me.
So, I learned how to unhitch Sal. And how to brush him. Feed him. Water him.
When I was done, Milly gave me fresh, cool water from her well that tasted earthy and crisp. I could’ve drunk forever, except she knocked me with her cane again and told me that was enough because she didn’t want me vomiting all over her front yard.
Then I helped her polish off the rabbit that had been drying over her fireplace, and my mouth watered the entire time I ate it. She squinted over at me from across the fire as I ate and said, “Huh. You’re shiny.”
And that was that. She didn’t seem to mind that I was gold, didn’t even seem that surprised by it, as if she’d seen so much in her old age that nothing fazed her much anymore.
After I’d eaten my fill, she shoved aside a drape hanging from a doorway and showed me a room with a small straw bed with a small square window, and told me to get some rest.
I didn’t sleep at all that night because I was too wary, too nervous. I was still wondering what she was going to do, because in my experience, people didn’t help or give anything away for free.
But Milly did.
So I stayed that night, and the next, and the next, until I started to actually sleep, and my wariness turned into gratitude.
Despite her advanced age and being blind in one eye, I quickly realized that Milly was hard to keep up with. She worked from dawn until dusk, and sometimes even later when she had deliveries to make or markets to go to.
The back of her house was cultivated with desert wildflowers and pallets of wood flush with beehives. She taught me how to gather honeycombs from them. How to make jelly from prickly pears. How to sew my own clothing, lay snares for small game, build a fire, ride Sal.
Over time, my gratefulness merged into warmth. Milly was tough as nails and quick of tongue, but she was kind. She taught me to be self-sufficient, and she gave me a roof over my head and food and water in my stomach, and in return, I threw myself into helping her as much as I could.
For a time, everything was great. We lived together in this small clay bungalow, and I was content. Milly was the first person I loved in Orea. She was like the grandmother I never knew. Brisk and weathered and exacting when it came to how to do things and do them right.
Yet there was a softer side to her too. Like when, that first morning, she took one look at the dark circles under my eyes and said we were having a down day. How, with knobby knuckles and arthritic hands, she brushed out my wet and hopelessly tangled hair. How, when she was combing and noticed me flinch, she demanded to know what was wrong with my back.
She found me sleeping outside and took me home. She saw my gold skin and shrugged it off. And then, as she tended to my raw, peeling back, she discovered my ribbons sprouting out of it, and she didn’t even bat an eye.
“Got ribbons growing out of you,” she’d said. So matter-of-fact there wasn’t even a note of inflection.
I was panicked.
She was pragmatic.
“Best not pluck them out. I think they’re meant to be there.”
Practical as always, she tended to the sore skin every night and told me to leave them be, told me not to fuss my head about it. Because people grow hair all over their bodies, so it wasn’t that strange to grow this. Said she had chin hairs longer than what was growing from my back, though that wasn’t true for very long.
It was her deadpan, unruffled attitude that kept me from having a breakdown. It was her quiet care as she tended to them every night that had me crying with the acceptance she showed me.
So I kept working alongside her in the garden or scrubbing the bricks in the well or taking care of Sal or helping to mend or wash or cook, and I was content, yes, but I was also safe. It felt like living out there with Milly, at the edge of a small village, in the middle of a desert, I was finally safe.
Until one night, everything changed.
I fell asleep the way I usually did. Curled on my side, watching the thin fabric of the curtained doorway as it ruffled from the breeze through the open window. Moonlight streamed in, the same soft, milky color as Milly’s eye, and I listened to her rasping, dried-up tenor as she sang while she sewed.
Her singing reminded me of my mother.
It wasn’t until hours later, when dawn had just barely crested, that I jerked awake. I think it must’ve been the sound of the front door shutting or maybe just a disturbance in the air. I sat up in bed with a start, heart already pounding before my mind could catch up with the danger my body was warning me of.
But then I heard it. Footsteps. Steps far too heavy and steady to be Milly’s limping hitch. There was the sound of something landing on the floor, a loud sniff, a shuffle, a cough. And that’s when I froze on the bed. Because that was a man. A man who must’ve broken in—a man who was going to hurt Milly, hurt me, steal what wasn’t his and abuse us because he could.
Because that’s what men did. They took and they hurt and no one ever stopped them.
My back itched. My fingertips ached. My heart continued to hammer.
I couldn’t let anything happen to Milly. She was too old, too frail, and that wicked tongue of hers would only make things worse.
It had to be me. She protected me, so I had to protect her. This surging need to keep her safe was all-consuming. I looked around the sparse room for anything that I could use as a weapon, creeping off to grab my boot from the floor.
As I crouched against the wall, watching the flapping drapery on the doorway, my adrenaline surged. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Milly. I wasn’t going to let anyone hurt me.
But as the heavy footsteps started to make their way closer, my fingertips prickled. Pricked. As if little needles were suddenly pressing into them and threatening to splinter.
As soon as the curtain was moved aside with a callous shove, I leapt forward and slammed my boot across his face. He cried out with a curse, whirling on me, an enraged, weathered expression lit up by the moonlight. He shoved me so hard that my sore back hit the wall with a crack, stars bursting in front of my eyes, and this time it was me crying out, the sound magnified in the dim lighting.
“You want to try and attack me?” the man shouted, enraged, spittle landing on my cheek. His breath reeked of alcohol. “I’ll show you what happens, girl.”
He didn’t even hit me with his hands. Instead, he yanked off the heavy sack from his back and swung it at me. Hard. I don’t know what he had in there, but it felt like an anvil crashing right into my head. My shoulder. My ribs. Tucked against the wall, as if I could sink right through it, I tried to raise my arms to protect my head as the man snarled and swung.