Page 10 of Warrior of the Wild
At the top of my jewelry box is a sapphire necklace, the centerpiece the size of the pad of my thumb. Salvanya, my eldest sister, gave it to me as a gift for my last birthday. Beneath it is a bracelet rimmed with rubies. That’s from Tormosa. Alara and Ashari made me matching ruby earrings.
I’ve never worn anything in this box outside the confines of this room. If my father saw me dressing in such finery, he’d be ashamed. Warriors do not wear jewelry. Even Torrin gets reproach for the sentimental bracelet he wears, which is why he tries to keep it hidden under his armor at all times.
And if my mother saw me, she’d laugh and probably make some comment about how gems could never hide how ugly and unfeminine I am.
I wade through more items: a turquoise choker, a topaz anklet, an emerald-dressed headpiece.
At the very bottom are two plain items, but they’re my favorite. I pull them out, even dare to put them on.
Black earrings. My ears were pierced by the time I turned six, but before that, I longed to wear beautiful earrings like my older sisters. Mother knew this, so she made me earrings out of special plain black rocks. She called them lodestones. Some naturalreaction between the two ends draws them together, holding up the pieces with my ear suspended between.
I remember what she told me, how I was one end of the earring while she was the other, held together by a powerful force.
That was before I declared myself a warrior. Before my mother hated me. I wouldn’t dare wear them in front of her now. She might demand them back.
But I dream of wearing them in front of her, of her seeing them and remembering the words she once spoke.
I know it’s foolish thinking—nothing could sway her now. She wears her hatred like an armor fused to her skin, never to come off. It is the only thing that protects her from my father’s constant rejection.
She doesn’t realize I would give up his praise in an instant if it meant I could have a real mother. One like Torrin’s, who grieves every day for the child she never even knew.
A door slams, and I hurry to throw everything back in the box, pulling the stones from my ears and chucking them inside, closing the lid, and shoving it under the bed.
My door opens not even a second after the box slides out of sight.
“What did I miss?” Irrenia asks. She is only one year my senior and the sister I cherish the most.
“I snuck out of the house. Father blamed Mother for it.”
She opens her mouth, likely about to demand more details, but then she sees my face. “There’s a cut on your cheek, and what happened to your eye? Mother didn’t—”
“No. It wasn’t Mother.” She is not foolish enough to actually strike me. Not when I am warrior trained.
Irrenia enters the room fully, gets behind me, and steers me down the hall. “Tell me everything.”
I do so as she plunks me into a chair in her room and digs in one of her drawers for some sort of salve. She rubs it onto my swollen eye, and it begins to twitch from the stinging sensation caused by the salve.
“Ow,” I say.
“Oh hush. It’ll feel better in a moment.”
I close my other eye and take in the rich scent of Irrenia’s room. She does not work at the jewelers with everyone else. Irrenia trained to become a healer. She passed her trial just last year, but she’s already the best with medicine in the village. Her room is filled with her own concoctions, and it smells of soothing herbs. Lately she’s been experimenting with ziken venom, trying to find a way to make the warriors immune to their paralyzing bite.
Irrenia has the kindest spirit of anyone I know, which is why she is always home so late. She can’t bear to turn away those who are sick or injured. She continues to work each day until she has no more patients or until she drops from exhaustion.
Though I still cannot open my injured eye, the stinging sensation abates, replaced by a soothing numbness.
She rubs more salve onto the wound, and I finish telling her everything that happened tonight, leaving out no details.
“Sneaking out was stupid,” she says when I’m finished. “There are a hundred different ways you could have been injured or killed. I’m just relieved a punch to the face is the worst of your injuries. What if you’d run into the ziken in the wild? We wouldn’t have even recognized your remains in the morning! And what would happen to Father then?”
“Oh yes, poor Father. Whatever would he do without an heir to carry on his legacy?”
“He loves you, Rasmira. It would break him to see you go.”
Because of his own investment in me. It has nothing to do with me as a person.
“At least Mother would be happy then,” I say.
