“By yourself? With no husband?” Florihn pressed.
“What use has Sinchon ever been in the raising of your family?” I asked my sister. She looked away. “I will come for her tomorrow, but you can tell the elders that you want to keep her. Make them talk about it. If they won’t change their minds—” I faltered, but only for a second. “—I will keep her. And if I can’t, there is always Pancaris.”
Florihn stared, her mind working, and Rahvey watched her, wary and unsure, like a cornered weancat.
“Tomorrow?” my sister repeated.
“Yes.”
Rahvey looked pale, uncertain, suspended between feelings, but when she felt Florihn’s eyes on her, she nodded.
“This requires a blood oath,” said the midwife, picking up the knife. “You must swear by all we hold true and precious. Hold out your hands.”
I stared at the knife, and the scale of what I was doing crowded in on me so that for a moment I couldn’t breathe. “Not my hands,” I said. “I have to be able to work.”
“Your face, then,” said Florihn, her eyes hard. “There may be scarring.”
I blinked but managed to shake my head fractionally. “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Very well,” said the midwife with a tiny, satisfied smile. “Kneel down.”
I did as I was told, feeling the quickening of my heart, as if the blood that was to be let were rising up in protest.
“Anglet Sutonga,” she intoned, “do you swear you will take this child, this fourth daughter, from your sister Rahvey and raise her as your own or, failing that, find suitable accommodation for her, so that she grows up in a manner seemly and fitting for a Lani child?”
I opened my mouth, but the words didn’t come out.
Florihn’s eyes narrowed. “You have to say it,” she said.
“Yes,” I managed. “I swear.”
And without further warning, Florihn slashed my cheeks with her knife, first the left, then the right.
The edge was scalpel sharp, and I felt the blood run before the pain sang out, bright and hot. With it came shock and a sudden terrible clarity.
What have I done?
Florihn methodically took up one of the towels she had brought and clamped it to my bleeding face, gripping my head tightly and staring searchingly into my eyes for a long minute.
There was a knock at the door.
“Can I come in?”
Sinchon.
“In a moment, sweet,” said Rahvey.
“Just tell me,” he demanded. “Boy or girl?”
The three of us exchanged bleak and knowing looks.
“A girl,” Rahvey answered heavily. “We will keep her for tonight, but Anglet will come for her tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
Sinchon said nothing—expressed no sorrow, no commiseration with his grief-stricken wife, nothing—and moments later, we heard the outside door of the hut slam closed as he left.
Florihn was still clamping the towel to my face, pressing hard to stanch the bleeding, and I felt a flare of rage that, for the moment, burned away any doubt that what I was doing was right.
CHAPTER
4
“WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR face?” asked Tanish, ashen.
“Nothing,” I said, flustered. “Come on. I need to get back to work.”
He looked injured by my evasion, so I hugged him matily and tousled his hair till he fought to get free. He watched me as we walked, not believing my playfulness, but I didn’t want to tell him what I had promised. Saying it outside the hot little hut would make it real, and I wasn’t ready to face that.
“Think you can get us back into the city without the Beacon to guide you?” I asked. A challenge usually took Tanish’s mind off whatever was bothering him.
“Easy,” he said, bounding ahead.
The city—which is to say the colonial city, the original native settlement having been co-opted and assimilated almost three centuries ago—sat on a hill above the ancient river crossing, its municipal buildings rising stately and imposing, pale stone tastefully trimmed and fluted. It had been built on the promise of prosperity and power derived from luxorite, the same luxorite Rahvey’s deluded husband still panned for in the Kalihm. That promise had long since faded and the city had sprawled in other directions, but it was luxorite that had brought the first white settlers.