“That I’m already home.”
12
COMPROMISE
Her mother came to Whitesun the next day. Having been notified by the caste house of her impending visit, Rahel was glad to put off cargo loading in favor of relaxing in their usual shannel shop over a cup of rajalta.
But when her mother sailed through the door with thunder on her face, she knew this would be anything but relaxing. The argument began immediately, without even a nod to normal greetings.
“How dare you. You insult your home, you insult your father and me. You lied to us for a cycle!”
“Because you gave me no choice!”
“No choice!” Noticing the stares they were garnering, her mother lowered her voice. “We gave you everything you wanted. We pulled you out of the streets, we let you stay here instead of taking you home—which in hindsight was obviously a mistake—we gave you a job—”
“You did not give me a job! I found that myself!”
“With a permit from us!”
Rahel slumped back in her seat, glowering.
“It wasn’t just a single lie, Rahel. We read those reports and thought we had done the right thing. You seemed to be doing so well. And now we find that you deliberately went against what you knew we would say and covered it up with lies. Yet all the time you knew it would come crumbling down in the end. What was the point? Did you think we would appreciate that you made fools of us?” She leaned forward, her anger buffeting Rahel’s senses. “I came here every single moon to check on you and make sure you were all right. And every time, you looked me in the face and lied to me. Time after time after time! I’m so disappointed in you.”
That hurt. The anger she could handle, but this . . .
“I’m sorry I had to do that,” she began.
“No, you don’t apologize for having to lie. You apologize for lying. And then you’re coming home with me.”
All hurt vanished beneath a toxic flood of fear and fury. “I meant what I said in that message. This is my home. I lied because it was the only way you would let me live my own life!”
“We let you live it so you could grow up! Look at you, sixteen cycles and you still think the whole world is about you. It’s not. The most important thing in the world is family. I won’t let you turn your back on yours. Not anymore. It’s over.”
“You turned your back on me first!” Rahel shouted. Ignoring both the stares of other patrons and the tears pricking the backs of her eyes, she matched her mother’s posture. “You think I wanted to leave everything I knew? I had to! You took away my classes when you knew they meant everything to me. You stood by while Father threw away my library books and made me pay for them.”
“What? When did he do that?”
“When I was fourteen and a half. You didn’t know?”
With a long exhale, her mother sat back. “No, I didn’t.”
Rahel’s anger deflated, leaving a painful grief behind. “I would have stayed home if you’d just let me train. I did everything I was supposed to and all I ever asked for was one thing, but you couldn’t even let me have that.”
“We did let you have that, but you lost yourself in it—”
“No, I found myself. And I was happy!” She choked on the memory of that last birth anniversary. “I was happy, Mother. And you took it away.”
“I know it must seem that way. But you have to trust that we were doing what was best for you and our family. I never wanted you to fly so high into dreams you couldn’t have. I never wanted to see you fall.”
“You’re the ones who made me fall!”
“Better to fall a short distance than a long one. We hoped you would recover quickly. Once you had inscribed and settled in, we were going to offer your classes again. We just needed you to remember your place first.”
Her stomach felt as if she had eaten bad fish. “So you were going to trap me and then let me see what I could have had?”
“Fahla grant me patience! I keep hoping you’ll grow out of this drama stage, but it’s only getting worse. It’s not a trap, Rahel. It’s a compromise. That’s what makes families strong. Bonds, too. Someday you’ll find someone you want to bond with, but if you haven’t learned how to compromise by then, you’ll be unhappier than you are now.”
“How is everyone else compromising? Who else is being told they have to give up what they want?”
“Your brother is taking time away from his craft to help run the shop. Your sister is working on her craft and in the shop while juggling school as well. Everyone is pitching in, except you.”
Rahel gave a bitter laugh. It was the same story, every time. “So your idea of compromise is that I give up everything so they can focus on their crafts. It must be nice to have dreams that you and Father actually support.”
“Stop thinking about yourself! Think about your family! You’re looking a nineday, a moon, at most a cycle ahead. We’re looking ahead to the ends of your lives. Your brother and sister are very skilled. Their crafts will give you a comfortable life. They can support you and your family, if you ever manage to grow up enough to make one. Your father and I have worked hard and saved and built that shop from nothing, and all you have to do is keep running it the way it is. You have your whole life taken care of! Don’t you see that’s all we want for you? To keep you safe, to know that you’ll be all right when we’re not here any longer? We want you all to be safe, but we need you working together.” She sat back, the anger fizzling into an aching sadness. “I hate this. I hate that I can’t seem to make you understand that we love you and we’re trying to protect you. All you see is monsters and traps. I’m not a monster.”
Horrified by a pain she had never sensed before, Rahel tried to reassure her. “I know that. I never thought you were.”
“Well, at least that’s a start.” Her mother sniffed and looked around the shop. “I haven’t even ordered my rajalta.”
“I’ll get it for you.” Without waiting for an answer, she shoved back her chair and sprinted to the service counter. Unfortunately, there was no line and she had a rajalta in hand within two ticks, not nearly enough time to recover from her mother’s grief. She slid the cup across the table and retook her seat. “I’m sorry, Mother. I really am.”
Her mother’s hand shook as she picked up the steaming drink. “Thank you. That does help.”
Rahel considered her next words carefully. “I never wanted to lie to you. And it meant—it means a lot that you’ve been coming to check on me and make sure I’m safe. I’ve always loved our days together.”
A silent nod was her only answer. She stared into her rajalta and spun the cup in a slow circle, trying to marshal her thoughts.
“I understand that you have a vision for our family. But your vision means that two of us live our dreams, and one of us gives them up. You say I need to compromise, but I don’t see a compromise between flying and crawling on the ground.” Fidgeting made her look like a child. She flattened her hands on the table and lifted her head. “I’ll be miserable as a merchant. Is it a compromise when two of your children are happy and the third feels like a moonbird with broken wings?”
Her mother visibly held back her first response, then spoke with equal care. “No, that doesn’t sound like a compromise. But can you accept that how you feel at sixteen might not be the same as how you’ll feel at twenty?”
“I . . . might,” Rahel allowed. “But how I feel right now is the same as how I felt at thirteen. No, I feel more certain now. At thirteen, I didn’t know anything about warriors except the stories. Now I’ve had two cycles of training, and I’ve read half the books on the fourth floor of the library. And I’ve already been a warrior, even if it wasn’t official. I’ve been protecting Mouse and once I went to the healing center for it, but I kept him safe.”
Too late, she realized what she had just said. Her mother’s distress was palpable.
“You went to the healing center. Why didn’t you tell me? Was it serious?”
&
nbsp; “It could have been. It was one against three, and one of them was, um, big. Really big. But I’m all right,” she hastened to add. “I only had a concussion and some bruising.” As well as an eye that was swelling shut, a jaw the healer had said was this close to being fractured, and deeply bruised muscles in her back, but she didn’t think that level of detail was necessary.
“And this is the life you want? Getting hurt to protect others?”
“I don’t really want the getting hurt part,” Rahel tried to joke. It didn’t work. “What I would love is to be an explorer. But that’s more of a fantasy. What I want is . . .” She thought about Mouse and Hasil, and how she felt while protecting one and learning from the other. “To feel useful. And strong. Like I’m doing what I’m meant to be doing. I’m really good at it, Mother. It’s natural for me.”
“Two cycles of training,” her mother said suddenly. “You said you’ve had two cycles of training. How did you—that man trained you without our permission?”
“No! He didn’t; I just watched his classes whenever I could. And then I practiced on my own.”
Her mother looked skyward with a sigh. “You do have a way of getting people to do what you want.”
She wished that were true.
“All right, Rahel. I can see how important those classes are to you. And your father will disagree with my decision, but here’s my compromise. You come home with me, go back to work in the shop, and I guarantee your training with Brasdo. For as long as you want it.”
She had been drinking her rajalta, and took a too-large gulp involuntarily. Coughing and spluttering, she held up a hand to indicate that she was all right while she grabbed for a napkin. The tears in her eyes were not just from the choking.
One cycle ago, she would have given anything to hear those words. One cycle ago, they would have changed her life.
But Whitesun was her home now. Mouse was her family. She had made friends here: swimming with Jacon, sparring with Hasil, discussing wave physics with Deme Isanelle. All of them accepted her. None of them asked her to be someone else.
She imagined giving that up to return to a town that now seemed tiny and prosaic, working in a shop she didn’t care about, and watching her siblings gleefully dump the shop work on her while they focused on their crafts. She would be a shadow of herself, living in a shadow of Whitesun. She wouldn’t see Wildwind Bay ferociously beating against the seawall, or hear the sonorous calls of ships coming in to harbor. Her mother would say she could come back to visit, but it wouldn’t be the same. She wouldn’t be the same.
“Thank you for the offer,” she said at last. “If you had said that on my fifteenth birth anniversary, I would never have left home. But—”
“Don’t,” her mother warned. “Think about what you’re saying.”
“It’s not home anymore.” Rahel’s voice was husky as she held back the tears. “I almost wish it could be, but it’s too late. It’s too late, Mother. I know who I am, and it’s not who you want me to be. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, Rahel.” Her mother dropped her head back and closed her eyes. After a weighted pause, she leaned forward again and said, “I can’t help you if you do this. We will not support you.”
“I know.”
“Do you realize what that means? Would you really prefer an outcaste life to your home and family?”
“I have a home.” She almost said and a family, but stopped herself in time.
“A home where you’ll have no resources.”
“I’ll make it work.”
“For how long?”
She shrugged. “As long as I have to. If you won’t help me challenge the warrior caste, I’ll do it when I’m eighteen.”
Her mother pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and then rose from her chair. “My offer stands. When the life you’re choosing turns into the trap you accuse us of setting, remember that. Come home, Rahel.”
She left her half-drunk rajalta steaming on the table.
13
FIFTEEN PERCENT
Going back to dock work was exactly as awful as Rahel had known it would be. The days were long, the work backbreaking, and the pay a fraction of what she had made before. For the first nineday, she barely had the energy to stumble home, eat what Mouse had prepared, and fall into bed.
Once her body adapted to the physical demands, it became somewhat easier. But she was still too tired to perform well in the training center, frustrating herself with missed blocks and mistakes. It was fortunate that the two big dockworkers who thought she and Mouse were easy targets for robbery were such stumbling idiots. Had either of them been any kind of a fighter, she would have been in trouble. She did discover that her stave was an excellent substitute for missing energy, however. It kept her at a comfortable distance from their long arms and added a great deal of force to her strikes. Two hits each and they were down, groaning in pain.
“We should take their wallets,” Mouse said.
“We’re not thieves.” She retracted her stave and put it back in her jacket pocket.
“No, but they are. It’s only fair.”
She tugged him away. “Come on, you know the City Guards won’t be far. And I’m not going to see Deme Isanelle tomorrow with theft on my conscience.”
“Your warrior honor is getting to be an inconvenience,” he grumbled as they left the prone women behind.
Her sliding proficiency in the training house was alarming. Added to that was the fact that her meetings with Deme Isanelle, already down to just one per nineday, were frequently interrupted by her yawns and loss of attention. Once, when Deme Isanelle had to leave for a few ticks to take care of a library issue, Rahel put her head down on the desk and woke up a hantick later. She was mortified to find Deme Isanelle smiling at her from the opposite side of the desk, where she had spent the prior hantick quietly working while Rahel slept.
“I can’t keep doing this,” she told Mouse that night. “I’m running as fast as I can and still going backward. And it’s not paying enough.”
“There aren’t many other options,” he said. “Now, if you’d stolen those dockworkers’ wallets like I suggested . . .”
“Shut up, Mouse.”
She had to admit, the temptation was there. She was good enough to knock someone out before they even heard her coming. Over on Star Dock, where the wealthy lived on their yachts, she could probably steal one wallet and have enough to live on for a moon. Those people wouldn’t miss their cinteks.
As tempting as it was, two things held her back. Or two people, in truth: she could not imagine facing either Hasil or Deme Isanelle knowing that she had become a common thief. On the rare occasions when she had enough energy to be introspective, she thought it probably wasn’t a good sign that she depended on others to keep her honest.
Two and a half moons after her permit expired, she found a job loading cargo for a crew that was behind schedule and in such a hurry that they were offering double pay. Rahel put her back into it, thinking about the day off she was earning herself tomorrow. She could sleep half the day, then go visit Deme Isanelle, and still have enough time and energy left to spar with Hasil that evening.
The job was a long one, ending well after dark. They were loading two decks, and spent the last hantick working on the open top deck. Rahel hated these kinds of jobs, where they were either in darkness or the brilliant spotlights of the ship. The constant shifting from light to dark and back again left her with a headache.
She rubbed her forehead ridges as she stood in line on the top deck, waiting to pick up her envelope. When it was slapped into her hand, she stepped to the side of the pay table and emptied the pile of colored rectangular chips into her palm. Counting her cinteks was a habit she had never broken from her days of working in her father’s shop.
With her forefinger, she flicked the three red chips to one side of her palm and quickly tallied the blue and golden ones.
The amount was wrong. She frowned and counted again. Then she
stepped back to the table, where the hulking crew chief was handing out another envelope, and said, “Excuse me. There’s been a mistake.”
“No mistake,” he grunted, waving away the man in front of him. A thin woman stepped into his place.
“Yes, there is. This is fifteen percent short.”
He slapped an envelope into the woman’s hand and turned with a glare. “There is no mistake,” he said, emphasizing each word.
She lowered her head, not giving a finger’s width. “I can count,” she said with equal emphasis.
“Then count your blessings from Fahla that I don’t throw you off my ship right now. Get out.”
She stuffed the envelope in her vest pocket and zipped it shut, not wanting to lose her pay if this turned ugly. Turning to the thin woman, she asked, “Sorry to bother you. Can you tell me how much is in your envelope?”
“That is not your business!” The crew chief shoved his chair back and stood, knuckles pressed down on the table.
“We’re all making the same pay, aren’t we?”
The thin woman looked between them, then emptied her envelope and counted her cinteks.
It was the same amount.
“Hoi, everyone!” Rahel shouted to the crowd. “They’re trying to cheat us! They’re cutting our pay by fifteen percent because they think we’re too stupid to notice!”
“What the shek?” roared a heavy man near the front of the line. He pushed his way forward while several others shouted curses and began pushing as well.
“She’s right!” the thin woman called out. “My envelope is short!”
That was all it took. The table was overturned and people were scrabbling for envelopes as the entire deck turned into a heaving mass of angry dockworkers.
Rahel had time to scoop up a second envelope and zip it into her vest before the crew chief shoved past the dockworkers, roaring in fury. She dodged his swinging fist and ran for the stairs, only to find them blocked by two more crew members with murder in their eyes.
She was fourteen decks above the waterline, with a riot behind her and no easy way out. Quickly changing direction, she raced past the stairs and across to the starboard rail, looking for the lifeboats that hung below. If she could jump into one and then lower it into the water—