She wished then that her final words had been better. She wanted to sing of her own life. Her battles and her babies. She wanted to tell the last person she was to ever see the journey that brought her to this world, and how terribly hers was broken. She wanted to spin long about the horrors this sanisi would encounter in the coming months. Words of anger and warning. Portent.

Her vision blurred. The sanisi’s face was unreadable.

“A peculiar game,” the sanisi said. “I wonder. Are you saving her life to ensure your world survives or ours?”

Kalinda felt the darkness coming. Her stomach began to clench. Pain radiated through her torso. But she had been told there would be no pain.

Chapter 13

13

When Anavha Hasaria – then Anavha Lasinyna – was five years old, he hit his sister on the mouth. She had called him something – a name, an insult – he couldn’t remember. She bawled and punched him back, in the throat, and told him he was unnatural.

Then she told his mother.

His mother took him by the ear and brought him out to the chopping block outside the kitchen, scattering the dajians. She took one of the big, bloody knives left there from the gutting of chickens, and pushed up his skirt. Her big hand covered most of his thigh. She cut him, there on the inside of his thigh, a cut that surprised him more than it hurt. He screamed as the blood welled.

“This is the way Rhea rewards violence in boys,” she told him. “Commit enough of it, and she will bleed you dry. You touch any of your sisters again, and I will cut you piece by piece and feed you to the dogs.”

The wound had healed slowly but completely and did not even leave a scar. It taught him how deeply he could cut.

Anavha did not understand, at first, his difference. He looked like his sisters, longhaired and thin. One could not tell them apart unless they were dressed up to go somewhere and his mother made him wear a girdle and coat, and belled trousers, usually white. He hated the color, because he always got it dirty. It did not matter when his sisters got their own clothes dirty. That was natural, his mother told him. Girls did such things. They spoke with loud voices.

When Anavha turned ten, his mother brought him to the religious quarter, and the priests said Rhea had spared him for her service. He was to be owned by a woman and her kin, to bring them pleasure, and children, for the good of Dorinah, the will of Rhea.