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The first house they went to was the palace of a King—such as palaces were in those days, which is to say the largesent his men to see to the coed Manikarnika: Jade and Granite and Opal with their , Shale and Iron Ore gleaht as water, and little Diamond, small and pale and delicate as the slenderest strand of a spider’s web They clung together pitifully, and asked to be brought inside the mud-brick walls, to be fed and clothed, to be loved
The King’s ht, and bolted their wooden gates against them
Undeterred, they went next to the cluster of small mud huts and knocked at the door of a poor ’s house Surely, her husband dead and her children grown, she would take thehters The oldopened her hidebound door and saw there the Manikarnika: Jade and Granite and Opal with their smooth, polished ar, and little Diaether iven warm arms and soft words
Theshuddered at their strange light and began to weep for all her lost ones, and in her weeping let the hidebound door fall shut against them
But they did not give up They went out beyond the mud huts to the mud-haired people who ons and horses and sleds They went to one of the tents, unreirl who lived there with her new infant The girl opened the flap of her tent and saw there the Manikarnika: Jade and Granite and Opal cool as wind-smoothed snow, Garnet hot as sun-battered sand, Shale and Iron Ore freezing till their toes were black, and little Diaainst the other, exhausted, and asked to be let in froiven milk
The girl laughed and said that she had plenty to spare The sisters s, and triuirl on the floor of a plain tent And they were happy, and the ground beneath theht
By , they were dead
IN THE DUNGEON, DUST AND STRAW COVERED THE dank floor and no slanting sliver of light crept in There was no sound but the soft dripping of water fro to damp floor Scraps of unfamiliar meat and swamp broater had been pushed under the door—I had heard nothing but rand the thick hair with a gentleness practiced on dozens of children I looked up at her cracked lips, her cracked face In the deep shadow I curled into ed dress over her painfully thin legs She sh it h her lips were split and spotted with dried blood, her face was lit like a festival lantern I wished that I could be as brave as she was, that whatever strength she had earned in the cave had been mine, too
I handed her the beaten jug of dirty water fro her, as I used to be But she refused it and with hands broken and bloodied by whoever had dragged her here, she worked at the leather knots of her robe until she could peel the filthy cloth away fro, twisting scar that punctured and poisoned her brown skin I stared
“So that you knohat I tell you is true” She chuckled as she bound up her dress again
“I… I didn’t doubt…”
My grandhtly “No, no, of course you didn’t You were always a good girl And so, you see, I have broken s I was reen-eyed baby in a brown-eyed man’s house But I have never ht And do you kno, the Mare comes to me in my dreams, and I do ride her, I ride her over the blanched steppes, with the sun gold and hot on our backs”
She didn’t need to say it—I felt it, deep in my stomach, that the Mare would never come for me, and I would never feel that hide between my calves
Grandiveyou in s of our mothers It is too important that you learn what I suffered in the cave; we both know that you will never face those tests There is no one now to guide you to the cave-mouth, no one to kiss you and call you their best and prettiest goat There will never be anyone to take you hoh blankets, no one for you, and no one for the child you are carrying, as tiny within you as a mayfly on the slow river So instead of a sweet reunion with your old grandet a lesson, and you had better learn it, and learn it well”
My breath caught, knotted like new yarn in my dry throat I had not even known that my belly had taken a child from the body of my husband before he died But in that ht to keep still at her side Shakily, I whispered, “I a to ith you and learn your steps”