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Authors: Caragh M. O'Brien

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BOOK: Prized
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She squeezed hard around her knees, gulping in big, impossible, ragged gasps of air. Blind grief wracked through her, and she wished, she just wished she could have her mother back. She didn't care at all about getting burned for her scar. She just wished she could take all of the last months back, erase them
all, and be back in her old home with the comforting rattle of her father's treadle sewing machine and her mother kissing her good night.
But she would never see either of them again.
She moaned over a little ache in her throat.
I hope they at least buried Mom beside Dad.
The door behind her bumped into her back as it was pushed partly open, letting out a crack of light.
“Mlass Gaia? Are you all right?” Dinah asked.
Gaia sniffed in hard and wiped her nose on her wet sleeve.
“What are you doing out here?” Dinah said.
“I'm sorry. Is Josephine okay?”
“She's fine. But what about you?”
Gaia dragged herself to her feet. She couldn't meet Dinah's gaze. She could feel it coming again, and she was ashamed to cry in front of anyone else. Then she did, anyway.
“You poor kid,” Dinah said. “Come on in here. Let's see if we can't warm you up.”
“It's just so unfair,” Gaia sobbed.
Dinah hugged her hard, and then picked up the lantern and guided her back inside again. She held the curtain aside for her and nudged her toward the fire.
“Is she okay?” Josephine said.
Gaia dropped off the big loafers and pulled her feet up on the chair. She had to stop crying. Just had to. She hid her face and felt a big soft towel settling around her shoulders. A shudder rippled through her, and then a hiccup. She clutched at the edge of the towel until finally the worst of it passed.
When she peeked out again, a bowl of soup was waiting for her. She reached wearily for it and slowly spooned bits of chicken and black rice from the hot broth. To her left, Dinah was softly talking with Josephine, and the baby snuggled in to nurse for
the first time. When Dinah came to take the bowl out of her fingers, Gaia stirred enough to thank her.
“You hardly ate anything,” Dinah said. “Better? A little?”
Gaia nodded.
“You've come far, haven't you?” Josephine said.
Gaia closed her eyes to slits, making the fire blur. “From another world,” she murmured.
Dinah sat on the end of Josephine's bed, and as she leaned forward, resting her slender forearms on the knees of her trousers, her braid slipped over her shoulder. Her wide gray eyes caught the firelight as she spoke.
“I wish I could do more for you,” Dinah said. “But I'm afraid you might be in even more trouble for coming here.”
“How so?”
Dinah picked a bit of lint off her trousers. “I'm guessing you didn't exactly have permission to come down. We're libbies, outcasts from the cuzines. The mlasses of the lodge don't normally mingle with us. Since this was a medical situation, I'm hoping the Matrarc will overlook it.”
Gaia frowned. “What's a libby?”
“You're my new hero,” Josephine said, then spoke to Dinah in a hushed squeal. “She's never heard of a libby!”
Dinah regarded Gaia curiously. “Where you're from, what do they call the women who don't marry?”
“I don't know. ‘Single'?” Gaia said.
Josephine laughed again. “I love that. ‘Single.' I want to be single.”
Dinah's expression remained somber. “Okay. You need to understand something,” she said to Gaia. “It's very important here for women to marry and have children. Ten children is the goal. Even after they have ten, most mladies keep on having children. They consider it a duty and an honor.”
Ten children. “That sounds just insane,” Gaia said.
“Not if you think of it this way. We have roughly two thousand people here in Sylum,” Dinah said. “Nine out of ten are men, and that proportion is getting worse each generation. The men, of course, can't have children. That means, for our population just to stay the same, each of our two hundred women needs to bear ten children.”
“And if they don't?”
“We'll die off. We've
been
dying off for generations,” Dinah said, but there was something in her voice that Gaia didn't understand, as if Dinah was reconciled to this extinction.
“What does that have to do with you and Josephine?” Gaia said.
Dinah dovetailed her fingers before her. “Mx. Josephine and I have broken the rules. We're not getting married. We've opted out.”
“
You
opted out,” Josephine corrected her. “Some of us got kicked out.”
“If it mattered to
some
of us to stay in the cuzines,
some
of us shouldn't have been sleeping around with men in the pool,” Dinah said.
Josephine pouted, reminding Gaia of a cornered, petulant kitten. “Xave is not any ‘man in the pool',” she said.
“No. He's the biggest, handsomest, meanest one of them all,” Dinah said dryly. “Good choice.”
“I take it you're not going to marry him,” Gaia said, still watching Josephine.
Dinah laughed. “It's too late for that now. Besides, he won't have anything to do with her.”
“He might feel differently once he meets his daughter,” Josephine said stubbornly. “We had a
girl
.” She pushed her black curls back and tucked them behind her ear.
Dinah clunked her hand against her forehead. “Walker Xavier is not coming back to you now, not after all he went through insisting he was innocent. He's not going to forget hours in the stocks and a month with the crims.”
“You don't know Xave,” Josephine said.
“I don't have to know him!” Dinah said. “He's ignored you utterly for what, seven months now? You think that's an accident?”
Josephine's face closed. “I really don't need this right now.”
Dinah smoothed the blanket around the girl's feet, and as she did so, Dinah's expression softened. “I don't mean to pick on you. It's him I'm mad at when I think of the hardships ahead of you.”
Gaia glanced up. “What do you mean?”
Dinah flicked her gaze to Gaia's. “We're practically men, with no rights and no vote. Second-class citizens at best. Mx. Josephine will keep her daughter as long as she nurses her, up to a year, and then she'll give her over to one of the regular families with a mother in the cuzines. It won't be fun.”
“But why?” Gaia asked.
“Libby mothers are unfit to be parents,” Dinah said mockingly. “We don't demonstrate the proper family values.”
“Just because you don't want to marry?” Gaia asked, surprised.
“It's the whole thing,” Dinah said. She retucked her blouse where it was a little loose at the back. “Remember what I said about the ten children? The cuzines are devoted to sustaining the population, and they need every girl to take up her duties of motherhood. The costs are very high for a girl who doesn't. After all, we libbies are accelerating the extinction. That's hardly patriotic.”
Gaia looked again at Josephine's little baby and thought of
her own sister. No wonder the Matrarc had been so implacable about taking Maya away, considering that she was accustomed to reassigning libby babies to new parents.
“You don't seem to have any illusions about it,” Gaia said.
Dinah laughed. “I've never been one to delude myself.”
“Do you have any children yourself?” Gaia asked.
“I have Mikey,” Dinah said. “He's seven now.”
“And who's raising him?” Gaia asked.
Dinah picked up a blanket from the end of the bed and refolded it carefully. “My brother and his wife. They're one of the Munsch families, down by the marsh. They dote on him, and he's happy there now. I visit him often. He calls me his Aunt Dinah.”
Gaia didn't understand how she could be so calm about it. Either Dinah had an incredibly thick skin, or her nonchalance was a façade. “Why didn't you just marry the father of your child?”
Dinah smiled with amusement. “I wasn't going to shackle my life to a man's just to keep my child and then be bound to have nine more children by him. Besides, I was already a libby by then.”
“But you must have loved him, at least for a time,” Gaia pressed.
“I don't love anyone,” Dinah said. “I'd rather have my books.”
“Don't believe her,” Josephine said. “She was chosen as the prize in the thirty-two games five times before she became a libby, and she's had plenty of expool boyfriends since then. She has to beat them away.”
“Enough of that,” Dinah said, smiling. “That's none of your business, or Mlass Gaia's. We're not supposed to be corrupting her.”
Gaia was impressed, and curious. “What are the thirty-two games?”
“They're a competition where the men try to win a chance to live with a woman in the winner's cabin for a month. It's ridiculous,” Dinah said.
“It's fun,” Josephine argued, smiling. “You'll see.”
“Maybe I should be a libby,” Gaia said.
“Don't you start thinking like that,” Dinah said. “This isn't the life for you. I can tell already.”
“Why not?”
“You're smart. You'll want to do things with your life, and for that, you have to be in the cuzines,” Dinah said. “You have to stay on the Matrarc's good side.”
Gaia had her doubts about how likely that was. “She thinks I'm a criminal for endangering my sister.”
“I know. I'm not sure what she'll do to you if the baby dies,” Dinah said. “Sorry. I didn't mean for that to sound so blunt. I'm just trying to think ahead. For lesser crimes, a woman's confined to the lodge, but we've never had a woman convicted of murder before.” She straightened slightly. “I guess she could exile you, and then the gateway sickness would kill you. Did you say you saw a corpse at the oasis?”
“The Matrarc said he escaped from prison.”
“It's what will happen to you if you get dropped out there. She's exiled traitors before, men and women, but I don't know what she'd do in your case. You're a pretty valuable person.”
“Because I'm a girl?” Gaia asked.
Dinah smiled. “Don't underestimate how much that matters, and you're a midwife, too. To be fair, I should add that the Matrarc is unfailingly decent to her loyal followers, and that's pretty much everyone except the crims and a handful of libbies.”
Gaia could hear the admiration in Dinah's voice. “You respect her?”
“Of course I do,” Dinah said, laughing. “I'd be a fool not to.”
“No, I mean you really do, don't you? You sound like you admire her, as a person,” Gaia said.
Dinah gave her an odd look. Then she turned to a dresser and began opening drawers. “The Matrarc's a curious person. She's strong and smart, of course, but it's more than that,” she said, her voice thoughtful. “I can't explain.”
Gaia was surprised. Puzzled, she glanced over at Josephine.
“It's true,” Josephine said sadly. “When the Matrarc trusts you, you want to tell her things. You can feel how she cares about you, so then if you disappoint her, you feel awful.”
Dinah turned from the dresser with a shawl and held it out to Gaia. “Here. Take this. You really should go. You can bring it back with the shoes another day. If the shoes fit, I'd say you should keep them, but they're obviously boats on you.”
“Thanks,” Gaia said. She stood stiffly. A bit of light was coming in the window now, and the rain was barely a drizzle. She didn't want to leave. “What will you name your daughter, Mx. Josephine?”
The new mother smiled. “I'm naming her after me. Fitch Josephine, Junie. I'll call her ‘Junie.'”
Dinah touched a hand to her heart, and then to the baby's head in a gentle, motherly gesture. “You do that,” she said.
The cabin was quiet, with only the sound of the fire crackling and the soft drum of rain on the roof. As Gaia took a last look at the fire, the warmth penetrated the scar on her left check, almost like pressure. For a moment, she was able to imagine an invisible kiss from her own lost mother, a gift of quiet approval, and Gaia held on to it.
a deal
T
HE SLATS had been hammered back on.
Even though she could see that they were secure, she tried the wood anyway, fruitlessly hoping. It wouldn't give. She looked to her left along the log wall, toward where there was light in the windows of a kitchen. Gaia's pulse elevated as she quietly crept nearer, climbing the two steps to the door. She tried the knob, but it was locked.
She peeked in the window screen and saw the back of a man's head and shoulders. She knocked softly.
“Back so soon?” came a terse voice.
“Please. Let me in,” she said quietly.
There was a thumping noise, then a click, and the door opened to reveal a thickset, gray-haired man with a peg leg. He kept his swarthy arm on the door, barring her way, and lowered his bushy white eyebrows into a stern line.
“Hi.” She tried a little smile. “I'm Gaia. The new girl. Sneaking back in.”
The man gave her a once-over, and she could just imagine the picture she made, half wet, carrying her dirty socks, standing awkwardly in the too-large, muddy loafers.
He backed up with a grunt. “You're wanted in the atrium.”
The kitchen smelled of warm oatmeal, and on a rocker near the hearth, a black cat lifted its chin to inspect her, revealing a long patch of white on its chest. Herbs hung from the rafters, and a row of three copper-bottomed tubs hung over the windows. Gaia closed the door and slipped out of her muddy shoes.
“Is there news about my sister? Who wants me?” she asked.
“Who else? The Matrarc. Don't leave those there,” he said. “There's a boot tray behind the door.”
“Is she mad?”
He stepped over to his stove, the peg making a hollow noise on the floor as he strode. “She doesn't get mad. She makes decisions,” he said, and smacked a pan onto the stove.
For all Gaia knew, this man was this grumpy always, but she didn't have a good feeling about it. She set the shoes and dirty socks in the tray beside a tall, solitary left-footed boot. She spotted a row of pegs behind the door and hung Dinah's shawl there.
“What do you think the Matrarc will do?” Gaia asked, turning again to the cook. “She won't send me back out to the wasteland, will she? Just for sneaking out?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you did while you were out,” he said.
A laugh escaped her, and the man glanced up, frowning. “You weren't with a boy, were you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Nothing so romantic. Should I take time to change?”
“I wouldn't. She's been here half an hour already. Here. Bring her this.” He poured steaming tea from a ceramic pot into a teacup and set it on a little tray.
“May I have some, too?” Gaia asked.
He looked at her briefly, morosely, but then he took another cup off the shelf, added it to the tray, and poured again.
“You don't have any honey, do you?” she asked.
He reached for a brown honey pot and dropped a dollop into her tea, spinning off the last strand of gold on the edge of the cup.
“Thank you,” she said.
He added a spoon to the tray and waved her off. “Take it. Go.”
“I don't even know your name,” she said, picking up the tray. “Or your cat's.”
His bushy eyebrows lifted, then lowered again. “I'm Norris. The cat there is Una. Now run along. I've got work to do.”
From the kitchen, she turned left down the hallway until she came to a large, open room. The ceiling rose three stories to a clerestory of windows, just lightening with rosy, fresh-washed dawn. Tiers of balconies bordered three of the walls, creating an atrium with the fourth wall, which was dominated by a great stone fireplace. Before this, in a high-backed chair, the Matrarc sat with her cane and a ball of white yarn, knitting. Her red skirt glowed in the firelight, and her feet looked tidy in black, beaded moccasins. She stretched out a length of yarn and lifted her face.
“I thought I heard voices. Is that you, Mlass Gaia?” she asked.
“Yes. How's my sister doing?”
“She's better. I came from there to tell you so. Imagine my surprise when I found you gone. Have you brought tea?”
“Yes. From Norris.”
“Set it here, please.” She lightly tapped the round little table on her left, and then gestured to the chair opposite hers. “Take a seat.”
Gaia glanced down at the cushion. “I'm afraid I'm too wet still.”
“Is that so? Let me feel your skirt.”
Gaia set down the tray and stepped nearer, holding up a bit of the cloth until it touched against the Matrarc's fingers. The older woman fingered it thoughtfully before she dropped it. “Why don't you pull up one of the other chairs then, or sit on the hearth?” the Matrarc said.
Gaia glanced over to where a dozen straight-backed wooden chairs were drawn up around a table. Beyond were other groupings of tables and chairs, some in cozy combinations by the windows where sunlight would touch soon, others arranged more like a dining hall or a school. With a glance at the oval braided rug at her feet, she dropped to the hearth, bringing her cup of tea and the spoon with her, and huddled her back toward the warmth.
“Is Maya really better?” Gaia asked.
“She started nursing. I wouldn't say she's out of the woods yet, but she can be roused and her pulse is strong.”
She had turned a corner, then. Gaia was so relieved. For a moment she didn't care about anything else, or anything that could happen to her. As long as her sister lived, that was all that mattered.
“Save us both some time and tell me where you've been,” the Matrarc said, her voice as melodious as ever.
Gaia glanced down into her teacup and realized the Matrarc would know soon anyway. Babies weren't exactly top secret news. “I went to Mx. Dinah's. I heard a girl there in labor, so I went in and delivered the baby.”
“Mx. Josephine's?” the Matrarc asked. “She was due about now.”
“Yes. She had a girl. A healthy one, and Mx. Josephine is fine, too.”
“Wonderful news,” the Matrarc said, looking pleased. “You seem so young to be a doctor.”
“I'm a midwife,” Gaia said. She considered adding that she had experience assisting doctors in the Enclave, but decided against it. “I assisted my mother for five years, and I started delivering babies on my own this past summer.”
“This makes a difference,” the Matrarc said. “A very big difference. We need you here more than you know. In the two years since the last midwife died, we've had half a dozen babies die in childbirth, and three mothers as well. Why didn't you tell me at first?”
Gaia gave her tea a slow swirl with the spoon, disturbing the honey at the bottom. “I wasn't sure I could do it anymore,” she answered.
A slow clicking came from the Matrarc's lap as she knit a few stitches. “There's much about you that I don't understand,” she said. “But the grief in you I sense clearly. For your parents, I assume. I think you've come to us for a reason, and maybe you need us as much as we need you. What brought you north? Why didn't you go in some other direction?”
Gaia lifted the steamy cup to her lips and took a sip. “My mother told me to come here. I've wondered about it. My grandmother left when I was only a baby, years ago, but only a month ago my mother told me to come find my grandmother here, as if she thought my grandmother was still alive. Could they have corresponded somehow?”
“It's remotely possible, but not likely. I know Mlady Danni tried to send messages to the Enclave with nomads who passed through, but that was, as you say, a decade ago. I don't know
that she ever received any letter back but I doubt it. Such news would have been enormously exciting to all of us and she never said anything.”
“It could have taken the nomads a long time to deliver a message or letter to my parents,” Gaia mused. “My grandmother didn't leave any papers behind when she died, did she?”
The Matrarc looked thoughtful. “Come to think of it, she had a sketchbook. I'll see if I can have my husband Dominic find it.” She tilted her face slightly and pressed her knitting needle idly against her chin. “I think we need to work out a deal.”
“You'll give me my sister back?”
She shook her head. “Please face the truth, Mlass Gaia. You're sixteen. You're still weak from crossing the wasteland. You're in no condition to watch over an infant who needs constant care and nursing. I have a mother here who will love her and care for her as her own.”
“You just don't think I'm fit to raise a baby.”
The Matrarc smiled. “You've been talking to Mx. Dinah. You'll be perfectly fit to raise your own baby in a loving home someday. I'm certain of that.”
“Unlike Mx. Josephine,” Gaia said, with an edge.
The Matrarc took a sip of her tea. “You liked them, didn't you? Mx. Dinah and Mx. Josephine are wonderful women. They've just made different choices, and trust me when I say they made them with their eyes wide open. But I don't care to go into the matter of the libbies at the moment. We have things to work out between us.”
“Like when I can see my sister? Where is she?”
“You broke out of the lodge to try to find her, obviously,” the Matrarc said.
Gaia drank another swallow of her tea. “I'll do it again, as soon as I can. You might as well just let me see her.”
The Matrarc's eyebrows arched slightly. “You sound so much like your grandmother sometimes. Come here. Kneel before me.” She set down her teacup and held out her hands. “I want to touch your face, child. Don't resist me this time.”
Gaia's gut instinct was to back away as fast as possible, but the Matrarc merely waited. Gaia eyed the woman's slender fingers, her pensive face, the rich red color of her skirt draping around her pregnant shape, and gradually her wariness yielded to the Matrarc's wordless patience. She set her cup lightly on the hearth with a faint clink, then she shifted nearer so that she could gently lean her face up against the Matrarc's waiting fingers.
She closed her eyes as a trembling coolness rippled through her. Ten impossibly light fingertips touched along her face, instantly sensitizing every millimeter of her skin. Her eyebrows were traced in simultaneous curves, and then her cheeks. She could feel her scar respond as the Matrarc's touch returned across the mottled skin of her left cheek a second time, examining, smoothing, and then the touch glided tenderly down her nose, and lips, and chin. The touch came to pause at her jawline, holding her, memorizing her. Gaia could hardly breathe.
Gaia opened her eyes to see a question in the Matrarc's expression. No matter how many times people had stared, no stranger had ever touched her this way before, and the intimacy unglued Gaia. The Matrarc's inspection went deep into her marrow, a cross between suffocation and a kiss.
The Matrarc's own face was a study of concentration, and her clear, sightless eyes flickered with prisms of firelight.
Confused, Gaia knew it was time to shift away, but somehow she couldn't. Nor could she speak. The Matrarc's hands slid lightly over her hair and down to her shoulders, meeting the chain of her necklace.
“What's this?” the Matrarc asked. As she lifted the locket, the ticking became audible.
As if released from a spell, Gaia could breathe again. She leaned back slightly. “My locket watch. My parents gave it to me.”
The Matrarc lowered it carefully. A belated shiver lifted along Gaia's skin, and she crouched back to her old place beside the fire, hugging her arms around her.
What did you do to me?
she wondered.
“I didn't realize things were so complicated,” the Matrarc said finally.
Gaia felt the heat of a blush start up her neck. “Don't pretend to know me just because you've felt my scar.”
The Matrarc laughed gently. “You think that's all I saw?”
“I don't know what you mean.”
“You need so badly, Mlass Gaia. Every part of you is reaching for someone to care for you.” The Matrarc's eyebrows arched, and she turned her lips in a contemplative expression. “The men will be drawn to you. They'll want to protect you. You're young and full of promise, of course, but it's the longing inside you that will intrigue them.”
Gaia hardly knew what to think. She didn't want be the vulnerable girl the Matrarc was describing.
“How do I manage this?” the Matrarc added softly.
“You don't have to manage this at all. I'll take care of myself.”
BOOK: Prized
2.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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