Fire Country

“Why not, Mother? Isn’t this what you wanted me to do? To stand up for myself? To be my own woman? To be everything that you’re not?”

“Oh-ho! So you’ve been having secret mother/daughter talks, have you?” my father scoffs. “Women—all talk and no action. It’s no wonder you only have a single purpose.”

Breeding breeding breeding BREEDING! The unspoken words rampage through my mind, stirring me to life, roaring inside of me. I’m ’bout to let all my anger, all my pent up frustration out when—

My mother whirls on him. She’s no longer the timid woman I grew up with. There’s a spark in her as she steps into my father’s circle, gets into his personal space. “You know nothing!” she says.

My father seems as shocked as I am. He actually leans away from her, as if scared of her rage, of what she might do to him. But his recovery is swift. Rocking on his heel, he launches himself forward and pushes my mother with both hands. She looks like one of my old dolls as she flies across the hut. So small. So weak. So full of nothing but bits of scrubgrass and tug hair. She reminds me of myself.

Her body doesn’t stop moving until it slams into the wall, back first, a sickening crack of spine and shoulder blades against wood. Eyes widening in pain and surprise, she slides down the wall, slumping in a pile on the floor, nothing more’n a doll, tossed aside, leaching every last bit of my anger out of me.

My heart is in my throat, for despite my anger toward my mother, I love her. She’s the only one who’s stuck up for me against my father. “Sun goddess, Father. What’ve you done?”

He just frowns at me, his mouth contorted in rage. “This is the end of it. Now we get on with our lives,” he says ’fore storming out of the hut, slamming the door behind him.

I go to my mother, kneel by her, cradle her head in my arms. She can barely hold herself up, so I do it for her. She cries, and I do, too, more tears for a day that seems built on them. We don’t talk about it, but I know we’re both crying for Circ, and for my lost sisters, Skye and Jade, and for each other. We don’t stop for a long time.

No one returns home that night.

Chapter Twenty-One

It don’t seem right the way life goes on. Someone that matters to you more’n life itself dies, and yet you go on existing, as if nothing’s changed. You still have duties, responsibilities, routines. Things to do, like getting my arm unwrapped ’cause it’s healed now. All these things that used to seem so searin’ important, that you worried so much about, are meaningless. And yet—yet you go on doing them ’cause you must. Or people’ll talk, people’ll worry. They’ll say, “I’m worried about Siena, I don’t think she’s ever gotten over Circ’s death.” Don’t they understand? Don’t they get it? There’s no getting over the death of someone like that, someone who you lived for, laughed for, cared for. No. The most you can hope to do is carry on, get through a day, a full moon, a year, and eventually a lifetime without them. In your every act you hafta try to make them proud just in case they’re looking down from somewhere, watching you, a new star in the sky, shining brighter’n t’others.

Circ’s definitely a star. When I look at the night sky now I see him, bright and beautiful. I thought I’d memorized the heavens, but when I look up now I always see at least one new star. Someone else good has died. Either from our village or from somewhere else. But I know the brightest new star is Circ.

I went to his fire ceremony, watched as his body, covered by a black shroud, was lit atop a pyre and sent back to the land of the gods. I felt like I was being burned too.

Winter is getting on, is almost over, and I still cry some nights when I look at the stars, but with each passing day I’m feeling better, stronger, ready to do what I hafta in this life to make Circ proud. There’s a great weight on my shoulders ’cause I live for the both of us now.

When I think about the end of winter and the approach of spring, burrow mice squirm in my stomach. ’Cause this year spring means so much more’n the rains, the Growing, the return of the tug hurds to our area. It means I turn sixteen. It means the Call.

Burrow mice squirm.

Vultures peck.

Pricklers prickle.

All in my gut, squirming and pecking and prickling all at once.

So I try not to think ’bout it. I try to think about other things. I think ’bout how the wind seems to build every day, sometimes raging into horrendous winter windstorms so powerful all we can do is huddle in our huts and tents and wait for it to pass, hoping we don’t get blown away. But the wind, no matter how strong, can’t seem to pick up enough sand to create the first sandstorm of the waning season. Everyone’s talking ’bout it. How we’ve never had a winter without at least a half dozen major sandstorms. How the sun goddess is blessing us, giving us a break this year ’cause we desperately need it. I don’t know if I believe all that. It seems to me the wind is just saving itself for a time when we least expect it.

No one really talks to me anymore. In Learning I’m the same ol’ outcast, but it don’t really bother me. I don’t want to talk to them either. Hawk and his goons pretty much leave me alone now, although I do catch them staring and laughing sometimes. Lara talks to me sometimes, but not the way she used to, ’bout doing things differently and thinking ’bout things. Our chats are much more boring, ’bout the weather, ’bout Learning assignments, that kinda thing. I feel like, in time, we might actually be real friends.

At home things are weird. Sari avoids me like the plague, and I think she’s told Rafi and Fauna not to talk to me either, as if she thinks all my bad luck’ll rub off on her kids. I’ve never really liked her anyway. My father keeps up his drivel about duty and the Law, but I’ve learned not to get so angry about it. I just ignore him. I try not to look at him either, ’cause when I do, I see the bones of the dead lifers from Confinement. Any notions I had of being able to help them went out the window when Circ died. Sorry, Raja. I failed you ’fore I ever really got started helping.

The nice thing is that Mother and I talk more. We’ve found a common enemy in my father, and it’s brought us so much closer. We go for long walks, like the one we’re on now, talking about the past, the present, and the future. Mostly it’s talk about the goings on in the village, but every once in a while, I’ll hear something in her voice, a catch, that makes me think she wants to say something else. But she never does. Maybe I can draw it outta her, I think as we circle the village for the third time.

“Mother?” I say.

“Siena?” she says, matching my serious tone and making me laugh.

“Why…” I let the word hang, the anticipation of a question. Should I ask it?

It drops to the durt and I hang my head a little. ’Fraidy tug, I think.

“Why what, Siena?” she nudges.

“I, uh, just been thinking...”

“Dangerous, that,” she says with a wink.

“How come we never really stand up to Father?” I blurt out, right away wishing I’d held it back, never thought to say it.

She stops suddenly, her face going whiter than my Call dress, grabs my arm. I think she’s mad until she says, “We do, Siena. In our own way. Never think he owns you, you hear me?”

Shaken, I nod slowly. “But when he’s hurting me, when he’s snapping me, you always walk away.”

Mother closes her eyes and she looks sad, so sad, sadder’n she looked when Skye disappeared, sadder’n when Jade died so young. Too sad for what I just said.

“I—I can’t stop him,” she says. “Not now. I’m so sorry, Siena. I want to—all I want to do is protect you—but we have to wait. We just have to wait for the right time.”