Only the Worthy

The Ukanda did not change colors unless the person who touched it was with child.

Rea’s world reeled. She lost all sense of time and space as she stood there, her heart pounding in her ears, her hands trembling, and thought back to that fateful night three moons ago when her village had been pillaged, too many of her people killed to count. When he had taken her. She reached down and ran her hand over her stomach, feeling the slightest bump, feeling another wave of nausea, and finally, she understood why. She reached down and fingered the gold necklace she’d been hiding around her neck, deep beneath her clothes, of course, so that the others would not see it, and she wondered, for the millionth time, who that knight was.

Try as she did to block them out, his final words rang again and again in her head.

Send him to me.

There came a sudden rustling behind her and Rea turned, startled, to see the beady eyes of Prudence, her neighbor, staring back at her. A fourteen-year-old girl who lost her family in the attack, a busybody who had always been too eager to tattle on anyone, Prudence was the last person Rea wanted to see know her news. Rea watched with horror as Prudence’s eyes drifted from Rea’s hand to the changing leaf, then widened in recognition.

With a glare of disapproval, Prudence dropped her basket of sheets and turned and ran. Rea knew her running off could only mean one thing: she was going to inform the villagers.

Rea’s heart sank, and she felt her first wave of fear. The villagers would demand she kill her baby, of course. They wanted no reminder of the nobles’ attack. But why did that scare her? Did she really want to keep this child, the byproduct of that monster?

Rea’s fear surprised her, and as she dwelled on it, she realized it was a fear to keep her baby safe. That floored her. Intellectually, she did not want to have it; to do so would be a betrayal to her village and herself. It would only embolden the nobles who had raided. And it would be so easy to lose the baby; she could merely chew the Yukaba root, and with her next bathing, the child would pass.

Yet viscerally, she felt the child inside her, and her body was telling her something that her mind was not: she wanted to keep it. To protect it. It was a child, after all.

Rea, an only child who had never known her parents, who had suffered in this world with no one to love and no one to love her, had always desperately wanted someone to love, and someone to love her back. She was tired of being alone, of being quarantined in the poorest section of the village, of scrubbing others’ floors, doing hard labor from morning to night with no way out. She would never find a man, she knew, given her status. At least no man whom she didn’t despise. And she would likely never have a child.

Rea felt a sudden surge of longing. This might be her only chance, she realized. And now that she was pregnant, she realized she hadn’t known how badly she wanted this child. She wanted it more than anything.

Rea began the hike back to her village, on edge, caught up in a swirl of mixed emotions, hardly prepared to face the disapproval she knew would be awaiting her. The villagers would insist there be no surviving issue from the marauders of their town, from the men who had taken everything from them. Rea could hardly blame them; it was a common tactic for marauders to impregnate women in order to dominate and control the villages throughout the kingdom. Sometimes they would even send for the child. And having a child only fueled their cycle of violence.

Yet still, none of that could change how she felt. A life lived inside her. She could feel it with each step she took, and she felt stronger for it. She could feel it with each heartbeat, pulsing through her own.

Rea walked down the center of the village streets, heading back to her one-room cottage, feeling her world upside down, wondering what to think. Pregnant. She did not know how to be pregnant. She did not know how to give birth to a child. Or how to raise one. She could barely feed herself. How would she even afford it?

Yet somehow she felt a new strength rising up within her. She felt it pumping in her veins, a strength she had only been dimly conscious of these last three moons, but which now came into crystal clear focus. It was a strength beyond hers. A strength of the future, of hope. Of possibility. Of a life she could never lead.

It was a strength that demanded her to be bigger than she could ever be.

As Rea walked slowly down the dirt street, she became dimly aware of her surroundings, and of the eyes of the villagers watching her. She turned, and on either side of the street saw the curious and disapproving eyes of old and young women, of old men and boys, of the lone survivors, maimed men who bore the scars of that night. They all held great suffering in their faces. And they all stared at her, at her stomach, as if she were somehow to blame.

She saw women her age amongst them, faces haunted, staring back with no compassion. Many of them, Rea knew, had been impregnated, too, and had already taken the root. She could see the grief in their eyes, and she could sense that they wanted her to share it.

Rea felt the crowd thicken around her and when she looked up she was surprised to see a wall of people blocking her path. The entire village seemed to have come out, men and women, old and young. She saw the agony in their faces, an agony she had shared, and she stopped and stared back at them. She knew what they wanted. They wanted to kill her boy.

She felt a sudden rush of defiance – and she resolved at that moment that she never would.

“Rea,” came a tough voice.

Severn, a middle-aged man with dark hair and beard, a scar across his cheek from that night, stood in their center and glared down at her. He looked her up and down as if she were a piece of cattle, and the thought crossed her mind that he was little better than the nobles. All of them were the same: all thought they had the right to control her body.

“You will take the root,” he commanded darkly. “You will take the root, and tomorrow this shall all be behind you.”

At Severn’s side, a woman stepped forward. Luca. She had also been attacked that night, and had taken the root the week before. Rea had heard her groaning all the night long, her wails of grief for her lost child.

Luca held out a sack, its yellow powder visible inside, and Rea recoiled. She felt the entire village looking to her, expecting her to reach out and take it.

“Luca will accompany you to the river,” Severn added. “She will stay with you through the night.”

Rea stared back, feeling a foreign energy rising within her as she looked at them all coldly.

She said nothing.

Their faces hardened.

“Do not defy us, girl,” another man said, stepping forward, tightening his grip on his sickle until his knuckles turned white. “Do not dishonor the memory of the men and women we lost that night by giving life to their issue. Do what you are expected. Do what is your place.”

Rea took a deep breath, and was surprised at the strength in her own voice as she answered:

“I will not.”

Her voice sounded foreign to her, deeper and more mature than she had ever heard it. It was as if she had become a woman overnight.

Rea watched their faces flash with anger, like a storm cloud passing over a sunny day. One man, Kavo, frowned and stepped forward, an air of authority about him. She looked down and saw the flogger in his hand.

“There’s an easy way to do this,” he said, his voice full of steel. “And a hard way.”

Rea felt her heart pounding as she stared back, looking him right in the eyes. She recalled what her father had told her once when she was a young girl: never back down. Not to anyone. Always stand up for yourself, even if the odds were against you. Especially if the odds were against you. Always set your sights on the biggest bully. Attack first. Even if it means your life.

Rea burst into action. Without thinking, she reached over, snatched a staff from one of the men’s hands, stepped forward, and with all her might jabbed Kavo in the solar plexus.

Kavo gasped as he keeled over, and Rea, not giving him another chance, drew it back and jabbed him in the face. His nose cracked and he dropped the flogger and fell to the ground, clutching his nose and groaning into the mud.

Rea, still gripping the staff, looked up and saw the group of horrified, shocked faces staring back. They all looked a bit less certain.

“It is my boy,” she spat. “I am keeping it. If you come for me, the next time it won’t be a staff in your belly, but a sword.”

With that, she tightened her grip on the staff, turned, and slowly walked away, elbowing her way through the crowd. Not one of them, she knew, would dare follow her. Not now, at least.

She walked away, her hands shaking, her heart pounding, knowing it would be a long six months until her baby came.

And knowing that the next time they came for her, they would come to kill.

CHAPTER THREE

Six Moons Later

Rea lay on the pile of furs beside her small, roaring fireplace, entirely and utterly alone, and groaned and shrieked in agony as her labor pains came. Outside, the winter wind howled as fierce gales slammed the shutters against the sides of the house and snow burst in drifts into the cottage. The raging storm matched her mood.

Rea’s face was shiny with sweat as she sat beside the small fire, yet she could not get warm, despite the raging flames, despite the baby kicking and spinning in her stomach as if it were trying to leap out. She was wet and cold, shaking all over, and she felt certain that she would die on this night. Another labor pain came, and feeling the way she did, she wished the marauder had just killed her back then; it would have been more merciful. This slow prolonged torture, this night of sheer agony, was a thousand times worse than anything he could have ever done to her.

Suddenly, rising even over her shrieks, over the gales of wind, there came another sound – perhaps the only sound left that was capable of sending a jolt of fear up her spine.

It was the sound of a mob. An angry mob of villagers, coming, she knew, to kill her child.

Rea summoned every last ounce of strength, strength she did not even know she had left, and, shaking, somehow managed to lift herself up off the floor. Groaning and screaming, she landed on her knees, wobbling. She reached out for a wooden peg on the wall, and with everything she had, with one great shriek she rose to standing.