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Authors: Caragh M. O'Brien

BOOK: Prized
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The Matrarc's eyebrows raised. “And Vlatir?”
“Tell Leon—” Her voice broke, and her toughness evaporated. She wanted to see him so badly. A raw truth struck her: this place would destroy him. She pictured him again, chained to Malachai. It had already started. “Please, Mlady Matrarc. Give Leon a horse and some supplies and let him go, soon, before the acclimation sickness hits him. Tell him I'm sorry. Tell him he won't ever get out of prison here if he stays. He deserves to know.”
The Matrarc turned with her cane toward the door. “I'll give him the option of leaving,” she said. “Now take that box to the kitchen and tell Norris to have Sawyer bury it again where he found it.”
a period of reflection
G
AIA HEARD NOTHING of Leon, and thinking of him brought a kind of panicky buzz between her ears. She didn't even know if he had left Sylum, and she didn't see the Matrarc again to ask her. News of Will, Dinah, and Gaia's sister was minimal, and Gaia soon learned that the lack of information was another kind of wall, a silence to isolate her.
Otherwise, Gaia took small satisfaction in seeing that Peony was still circulating around the lodge in her normal way. Though a couple of times Gaia looked up to find Peony regarding her closely, they never spoke. Gaia started school in the atrium. The Matrarc's daughter, Taja, a tall blonde with an athletic figure and confident air, made a point of treating Gaia courteously, but the other mlasses avoided Gaia, and it was clear they understood she was in disgrace.
Reflection, nothing
, Gaia thought.
I'm grounded
.
After her studies, when the other mlasses left for archery practice and other activities, Gaia had nothing to do, and she considered it a mercy when Norris assigned her tasks to do in the kitchen. The teacher, Mlady Roxanne, set her to arrange
the books in the lodge's library, several shelves at the sunny end of the atrium. Mlady Maudie, the short-tempered blonde who ran the lodge, also put Gaia to work if ever she saw her sit for a moment, her hands unoccupied. Gaia focused on the work without complaint, whether it was shelling peas, spinning yarn, wiping down tables, or washing the clerestory windows, and while none of it was physically hard, there was a mind-numbing quality to the endless chores that gave her some relief from her worried preoccupation about Leon, at least sometimes. Gaia kept believing the Matrarc would realize she'd never give in.
She'd been in the lodge for several weeks when she woke early one morning to see, beyond the grid of her window bars, a diaphanous, ghostly fog misting the garden. She hadn't seen fog since she'd been in the Enclave, looking out at the obelisk in the Square of the Bastion, and it beckoned her with its shifting, cool shapes. She wondered if it was heavier down at the prison and if Leon was seeing it, too. Though she knew it would be better for him if he'd left, she couldn't help hoping he was still nearby.
When she stepped into the kitchen, the windows and door were closed up, and there was no sign yet of Norris. She touched a match to one oil lamp, then another. She pulled out the bread bowl and the yeast, but the room was so oppressively silent that even the smallest click of a spoon was magnified, so she opened one of the windows, swiveling it inward and up on its hinge to the hook above.
A gray, fog-enshrouded figure who had been stooping in the garden turned toward the sound. When the man straightened completely, she saw it was Chardo Will. She stepped back quickly against the farthest counter, and her heart began to thud in hard, slow beats.
She couldn't move. She was afraid to even acknowledge him in case he expected her to speak to him, but when he crouched down again, she stood on tiptoe, trying to see what he was doing. There was a soft, chinking noise of a blade in dirt, and then she realized he must be transplanting more herbs for her.
Unexpected gratitude filled her, just the way the quiet fog filled the garden. Until that moment, she hadn't realized how much it troubled her that they'd never spoken after the Matrarc confronted Gaia about the autopsy, but now she could interpret his presence in only one way: no matter how much he might have incurred the Matrarc's disapproval, he held nothing against Gaia. The morteur still counted her a friend.
When a noise came from beyond the fence, Gaia looked over to see Norris limping up the road. Will rose and dusted off his hands. She could hear the men's voices as a low murmur, and then Will moved away into the fog while Norris came up the garden path. She held the door wide for him as he stomped in.
He dropped a package on the counter. “What did you do to that boy?” Norris said, eyeing her suspiciously.
“Nothing. I didn't speak to him. You know I'm not supposed to. What did he say?”
He shook his head. “He wanted to know if you're well.”
Gaia looked back out to the fog. Norris made a grunting noise and began moving around the kitchen, getting his apron, starting the fire, giving Una a nudge with his peg leg.
“Mark my words,” he muttered in his gravelly voice. “The Matrarc's turned you into a mystery woman and a martyr all at once. What boy could resist you?”
“Will's hardly a boy.”
“Don't give me that. He's a boy playing a game,” Norris said. “The oldest game there is.”
Gaia opened the second window and the third, swiveling
the heavy sashes up to hook them open. “Have you heard anything about my friend Leon in prison yet? Vlatir? Anything at all?”
“He didn't take the horse.”
Gaia turned sharply. “What else have you heard? How is he?”
“He's causing the guards some grief. They had him in solitary last week. My cousin mentioned it last night.”
She returned to the table. “Solitary. You mean, like in an isolated cell?”
Norris looked up from under his thick eyebrows. “Why do you want to know, Mlass Gaia? Will it make a difference? Are you going to give in to the Matrarc if you hear he's miserable? Did you think he wasn't?”
It was the first time Norris had spoken to her this way. She ran her hands slowly down the front of her apron and watched him, feeling her cheeks grow warm. It definitely made it worse to know for certain that Leon was in trouble. Suffering, even. She couldn't concentrate at all anymore.
Norris turned away with a disgruntled noise. “You might as well open these,” he said, poking a finger into the package on the counter.
“Promise me you'll tell me if you hear any more about Leon,” she said.
For answer, he merely pointed at the package again.
“What are they?” she asked.
“My cousin's a cobbler. He had some extras lying around. I figure you're going to be here awhile, and I'm getting tired of hearing your boots drag around all the time. I traced the bottom of one of your boots.”
She unrolled the cloth wrapper to find two neat leather loafers inside, slender and soft, with thin, flexible soles. Wonder
rose inside her, tempering her anxiety. “For me?” She couldn't believe it. She shucked her heel out of her boot, slid off her sock, and tried the loafer. She tucked back her skirt and pivoted her ankle, trying to get a look. Her birthmarked tattoo showed clearly.
She looked up at him, puzzled. He was trying to make her feel better, obviously. “You didn't have to do this.”
He shrugged. “Maybe I like that stubborn streak in you. Nobody's stood up to the Matrarc in a long time. No mlass, at least.”
She studied him as he lit the stove and dropped the iron plate back in its groove. “I didn't do it on purpose,” she said.
“No.” He glanced up. “But you did it. You're still doing it, every day you're here.”
Gaia hadn't thought that she was making the kind of statement that anyone else would notice, let alone respect. She wondered if Leon understood what she was doing. “You don't even know what I did to get in trouble,” Gaia said.
“I know it had something to do with that box Sawyer found.”
She remembered the box too well. “Do many other people know?”
“There's been some speculation. Most of the cuzines approve of what the Matrarc's doing with you, or she couldn't do it.”
Most
, she thought.
So not all
. “What about the men?”
“I can only speak for myself. I stay out of that woman's stuff.”
 
It got worse after that. Every day, she hoped for more news from Norris, but he rarely had it and it was always the same: Leon was still in prison. No, Norris didn't know if he'd been back in solitary. No, he didn't know if Leon was well or not.
She began to wonder if he deliberately wasn't telling her things that would upset her.
The lodge itself began to feel tighter, smaller, its spaces dead, its walls claustrophobic, especially in comparison to what happened outside. The village had a big potluck dinner on the commons one evening, and Gaia brought dishes to pass out the door, but went no further. The dinner was followed by the thirty-two games, an athletic competition on an open field north of the village proper, and she could hear the cheering from the kitchen where she did dishes, left out completely. On another day, from an atrium window, she watched as three boys in their early teens were put in the stocks. They'd stolen the microscope that was used to determine who was an expool. On other days, men were put in the stocks for wife abuse, drunken fighting, and theft.
The public punishments never failed to remind Gaia what would happen to her if she ever stepped outside the lodge. The Matrarc would keep her word, and a merciless exile to the wasteland would mean death, like what had come to the man at the oasis. Yet if Gaia never submitted to the Matrarc, never told her about Peony's miscarriage, the lodge would become a living tomb for her, and Leon would be stuck forever with the crims.
She could see no way out unless she submitted, utterly.
The longer she stayed confined, the more she began to doubt herself. At night, restlessness drove her to the clerestory, where she paced around and around, trailing a hand along the smooth wooden balcony railing. By starlight, the sleeping village was an even hue of soft, deep purple, interrupted by bits of lamplight shining in the cabin windows, and Gaia could almost, but not quite, make out the prison down by the marsh.
Leon was still there, because of Gaia.
Pain sliced through her, and she cast her mind around for the millionth time, trying to find an answer.
She could tell about Peony. Peony would be cast out of the cuzines and join the libbies with no chance of raising her own children someday. Gaia would have to agree never to assist anyone else with a miscarriage, no matter what the circumstances. She feared what would happen then. Women desperate to end their pregnancies would still try to do so, in secrecy and shame. Gaia drew a hand back through her hair and squeezed.
Gaia didn't want to be taking a stand against the Matrarc for the rights of hypothetical women she didn't even know yet. It was such a small, small part of her job, so how had this become her issue?
She closed her eyes, leaning her forehead against one of the window jambs. She certainly didn't want to be taking this stand at Leon's expense. “What should I do?” she whispered. If she gave in on this, she could give in on anything. Once tamed, she would be at the Matrarc's service for the rest of her life.
But how was that different from Will, or Norris, or Mlady Roxanne? Certainly they'd made compromises, too, to exist in this society. Maybe the rules she'd learned in Wharfton at her mother's knee didn't apply here. Cooperating might just be what she had to do, as a survivor and a grown-up.
I'm not a grown-up.
She didn't ever want to be one if it meant giving up who she was.
The cool night air drifted through the fabric screens, barely moving, and mosquitoes hummed on the other side, smelling her blood. The wild, insane birdcall rose from the marsh, and the echo of it made the hairs on her arms stand on end. She peered upward through the window, searching the heavens, and found the distinct row of three stars in Orion's belt. As
she made out the rest of the constellation, she thought of her parents, missing them, and wondering what they'd advise her to do.
Another day.
She would just get through another day, one at a time. She could do that. It couldn't go on forever. The Matrarc would have to let her out when she saw Gaia would never give in.
 
There was a tap on her door late one night, and Gaia woke instantly. “Come in.”
The Matrarc entered quietly, keeping a hand on the knob.
“Norris's niece, Erianthe, is having a baby,” the Matrarc said.
“I can be ready in a moment,” Gaia said, swinging her legs to the floor.
“I need to know who you helped to miscarry.”
Gaia gripped the edge of her mattress, looking up. The room was dark still, but Gaia realized the Matrarc wouldn't be affected by that. By the barest hint of moonlight, she could see her waiting, a gleam of gray along the length of her cane. Gaia licked her dry lips.
“I can't tell you,” Gaia said.
The Matrarc waited a long moment, then took a step backward.
“Wait, please,” Gaia said. “Let me come. Erianthe might need me.”
“Only if you tell.”
Indecision ripped at her. Someone now, in childbirth, needed her. How could she not go?
“Please,” Gaia said. “There has to be a way. You have to let me come. Assisting with miscarriages will be such a small part of all I ever do, hardly a fraction. Why can't you just let this go?”

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