“Oof! Heh!” He stumbled back a few steps. He chuckled at first, but then he frowned, and then he furrowed his brow, and then he called out in an annoyed tone.

The old woman appeared, mouth pressed tight.

“Yah yah yah,” he complained, gesturing and grimacing.

She grunted, went out past the curtain, and returned with a quirt in her hand. This she raised threateningly. For that first instant, Kirya was so greatly relieved that the headwoman of the tribe had come to teach this outrageously behaved man some manners. As if he could just walk in and demand her Flower Night, when it was hers to offer, not his to take!

The quirt whipped down onto her forearms. She yelped, more angry than hurt. Again, it slapped down, and this time she kicked out to defend herself. Her foot met flesh, and the old woman shrieked. The quirt thwacked into the side of Kirya’s head, staggering her. The man was scolding in a loud voice as shouts and questions flew from outside, and the quirt slapped into her calves so hard Kirya fell. She hit, hard, on her back, breath punched out of her lungs, dazed and dizzy and utterly confused.

He was taking his clothes off.

She struggled to sit, but the quirt slapped her down again, and this time she shouted with rage, coming up fighting. Attendants swarmed in, bound her raw and aching wrists and her ankles with rope, and tied her to the cot, and then they departed, not even angry about her kicking and punching, as if tying down a screaming, struggling girl who was about to be forced against her will was something they were accustomed to doing every day.

After that, there was nothing she could do to stop him. Or the next one. Or the next one. Or the next one.

26

The long night begins.

It is not night always. She counts the days and polishes her mirror. She accepts a name, Azalea, a white flower. She might laugh with Mima and Ebba and Noria over a joke as they are scrubbing floors, or during a song they are teaching her while they grind kernels to flour in big stone bowls, or when she makes a mistake speaking a word, saying “I comb my chair” instead of “I comb my hair.” She might sit on a bench with her friends in the shade of a tree and drowse in afternoon’s lazy heat. She might appreciate the melting sweetness of fruit in her mouth. She might close her eyes with the pleasure of perfumed soap and warmed water coursing down her skin.

But after the twilight bell she pretends her body does not exist. The customers don’t like her to close her eyes. She gets whipped for that. If her eyes are closed, then it’s like she is dead, a pale corpse, and while there are a few demons who might like to imagine they are rutting into the empty shell of a corpse, mostly they imagine other things and those other things mean she has to keep her eyes open to show she is alive.