Uprooted

“They forget how to live here...[they] remember to be afraid,” my father said. That was all.

Then they took their dowry-silver and left. Mostly they would go to Kralia and go to the University. Often as not they married some city man, and otherwise they became scholars or shopkeepers.

“They forget how to live here...[they] remember to be afraid,” my father said. That was all.

Then they took their dowry-silver and left. Mostly they would go to Kralia and go to the University. Often as not they married some city man, and otherwise they became scholars or shopkeepers.

He was irritated with me every time I came into his library, even on the few days that I managed to keep myself in good order: as though I were coming to annoy and interrupt him, instead of him tormenting and using me. And when he had finished working his magic through me and left me crumpled on the floor, he would scowl down at me and call me useless.

I whispered, “Kalikual.”
The power rushed out of me.

The Dragon didn’t always take the prettiest girl, but he always took the most special one, somehow.

At seventeen I was still a too-skinny colt of a girl with big feet and tangled dirt-brown hair, and my only gift, if you could call it that, was I would tear or stain or lose anything put on me between the hours of one day.

My strength welled up through my body and fountained out of my mouth, and where it left me, a trembling in the air began and went curling down around my body in a spiraling path.

I had hated him, but I wouldn't have reproached him, any more than I would have reproached a bolt of lightning for striking my house. He wasn't a person . . .

She kissed me again and held me once more, and let me go. It did hurt more. It did.

I had forgotten hours and days by then. My arms ached, my back ached, my legs ached. My head ached worst of all, some part of me tethered back to the valley, stretched out of recognizable shape and trying to make sense of myself when I was so far from anything I knew. Even the mountains, my constants, had disappeared. Of course I'd known there were parts of the country with no mountains, but I'd imagined I would still see them somewhere in the distance, like the moon. But every time I looked behind me, they were smaller and smaller, until finally they disappeared with one final gasp of rolling hills.

"I'm glad," I said, with an effort, refusing to let my mouth close up with jealousy. It wasn't that I wanted a husband and a baby; I didn't, or rather, I only wanted them the way I wanted to live to a hundred someday, far off, never thinking about the particulars. But they meant life: she was living, and I wasn't.

...This one doesn't.

"The dirtiest thing in this tower is you," he said - true but unkind anyway.

"'I do recall the girl neither horse-faced nor a slovenly mess.'"
'Then you needn't keep me!' I flared, angry and wounded - horse-faced stung."