The Inheritance Trilogy

by N.K. Jemisin

“There’s no evidence that they’re building an army at all,” said Nemmer. There was, but it was subtle. I thought of Usein Darr’s pregnancy and that of her guardswoman, and the woman in Sar-enna-nem who’d had two babies with her, both too young to be eating solid food yet. I thought of the children I’d seen there—belligerent, xenophobic, barely multilingual, and every one of them four or five years old at the most. Darr was famous for its contraceptive arts. Even before scrivening, the women there had long ago learned to time childbearing to suit their constant raiding and intertribal wars. Their war crop, they called it, making a joke of other lands’ reliance on agriculture. In the years preceding a war, every woman under thirty tried her best to make a child or two. The warriors would nurse the babes for a few days, then hand them over to the nonwarriors in the family—who, having also recently borne children, would simply nurse two or three, until all the children could be weaned and handed over to grandmothers or menfolk. Thus the warriors could go off to fight knowing that their replacements were growing up safe, should they fall in battle. It was a bad sign to see so many Darre breeding. It was a worse sign that the children hated foreigners and weren’t even trying to ape Senmite customs. They certainly weren’t preparing those children for peace.