She grinned and nudged him toward one of the two chairs in the room. “Hold her while I help your amman tend to Mistress Gheza. You can tell Disa when you see her that you held her sister before she did.” She patted his shoulder. “Don’t fret. I’ll be right back.”
Though Hazarin was a midwife and had overseen numerous births in the mothers’ homes and even her own home, it was the first time Bron had been present for any part of one andcertainly the first time he held a newborn baby. And he was terrified.
He sat frozen in the chair, hardly daring to breathe in case he accidentally dropped his fragile charge. The baby made tiny mewing noises, her nose wrinkling periodically as if she smelled something unpleasant. Bron didn’t understand why some people made a fuss over babies. They were usually fussy, smelly, and loud. And this one, with her cone-shaped head and puffy eyes in a wrinkly face, was exceptionally not pretty. Still, he touched a fingertip to the shallow indentation below her nose and chuckled when she blew out a tiny sneeze.
It felt like hours, but also seconds that he held the baby until Hazarin herself stepped out of the bedroom to rescue him. She scooped up the baby with a practiced move, pausing to tilt her head when he resisted giving her the baby. “Thank you for watching over her, Bron,” she said. “She needs her mother now, and Gheza worked hard to bring her into the world. She’s eager to see her. Why don’t you wait in the garden for Reylan and bring him inside once he gets here.”
When Reylan galloped up to Hazarin’s house on a borrowed horse, he had Disa with him. Bron raced ahead of him to throw the door open before the man crashed through it, calling his wife’s name in a terrified voice. Bron caught Disa by the arm before she could follow him. “Your amman’s fine, Disa,” he said. “You have a sister.”
To no one’s surprise, her reaction to the news was comprised of a great deal of joyous shrieking, dancing, then sobbing on Bron’s shoulder as fear for her mother came crashing down on her. He patted her back and comforted her in the best way he knew how: he took her fishing.
When it came time to bestow a name on Reylan’s and Gheza’s new daughter at her naming ceremony, they asked Bron to choose it.
Stunned by the honor, both Hazarin and Bron had gaped at them until Hazarin stuttered a soft “Are you sure?”
Bron, caught unprepared by such an unexpected gift, scrambled for ideas. He’d never named anyone or anything before, not even the cricket he’d caught and kept as a pet until a toad ate it.
He recalled a recent moment when Disaris had held her sister, gently rocking back and forth to keep her asleep as Gheza looked on with a watchful eye. “I’ll love her dearly, Amman,” she assured her mother.
“Dearly,” he muttered. What name meant “dearly” or “dear one?” He snapped his fingers. “Luda,” he announced to the startled adults waiting for his answer. “Name her Luda.”
Thus, Luda jin Gheza was named and became the younger sister to Bron that his mother would never have. She was still a small child when he reached manhood, but her impact on his life was as profound as her sister’s. At the ripe old age of four, she almost got him killed and was the reason the magic asleep inside him came awake with explosive power.
As adolescence matured into adulthood, Bron discovered that turning sixteen was not much different than turning fifteen. His mother still complained she couldn’t keep him in clothes or shoes for more than a month before he outgrew them. The stray whisker or two had begun to sprout above his upper lip and on his chin, but they were wispy, thin, and white, and mostly invisible against his skin. Disa’s father had gifted him with a razor and a lesson in how not to cut his own throat or slice off his nose with it. Bron had only used the blade three times, considering it a waste of time. He’d be able to shave more hair off a peach, in his opinion. Still, he'd made the effort, not wanting to seem ungrateful to Reylan or look as ridiculous as some of the boys his age who carefully groomed the ghostly bits of scruff dotting their chins and lips. Even Ceybold,whose confidence in his own attractiveness was unshakeable, constantly fiddled with the lace below his nose.
While sixteen arrived without much fanfare, it was less embarrassing than fourteen. Disa had called it the Year of the Crack, and the term still made Bron’s ears turn red. His voice had changed overnight, its register sliding abruptly into mortifying honks at the most inopportune times, eliciting grins or smothered laughter from the adults—even his own mother—and outright laughter from those younger than him. Only those boys close to his age had nodded with understanding or turned as red as him in sympathetic embarrassment.
The first time Disa and Luda heard it, they’d stared at him with eyes wide as dinner plates. “Was that you?” Disa asked.
Bron’s entire upper body and head caught fire. He cleared his throat. “My amman wants to know if your amman has more bread to sell. We ran out this morning.” His voice cracked again on “morning.” Disaris’s lips compressed into a tight line, and her face reddened too, but from the effort not to laugh. Luda wasn’t nearly so circumspect.
“You a goose, Bon!” she yelled, then proceeded to run around both Bron and her sister, flapping her wings and honking.
He’d scowled at them both. “Never mind,” he said and spun away, desperate to flee.
Disaris caught his arm. “I’m sorry, Bron,” she said, the amusement gone. She shushed Luda who offered Bron a cheeky grin. “You just sounded funny for a moment. Like Ceybold and Hulgin a few months ago.” Her brow furrowed as if she pondered the fate of the world. “Why do boys always sound like geese?”
While he couldn’t answer her question, he did take comfort in the fact that his friends’ voice-cracking hadn’t lasted long, and neither did his. By the time he turned sixteen, his voice had acquired a much deeper, richer tone, startling Hazarinsometimes who once commented “I’m reminded that I’ve no longer a boy living in my house, but a man.”
Sixteen had its moments, some revelatory, others frustrating, and one so frightening that he’d never looked at a body of water the same way again. Nor had the villagers of Panrin looked at him in the same way.
Disaris, who’d been his friend since before she’d lost her front baby teeth, had changed. Not suddenly like he had, but with subtle alterations that happened gradually. He hadn’t really noticed any of them until one day he noticed all of them.
Her face, once round and chubby, had thinned and become more oval. Her jawline and wide cheekbones were more prominent. She’d inherited her mother’s mouth and nose and her father’s deep-set eyes and sweeping dark eyebrows. Those facial traits had always been there, but now had taken on a more refined quality.
Her body had changed too. Curves replaced angles, and where frocks she wore had once hung on her frame in wrinkles, they now hugged her small breasts and the gentle flare of her hips. He’d caught himself gawking at her more than a few times over the past few weeks as her awkwardness with which he was comfortable and familiar faded into a natural grace evident in the way she walked, gestured, and even how she spoke. With him she was still open and exuberant, but he’d observed the more restrained way she’d begun interacting with others.
He also didn’t miss how the other boys of similar age were starting to regard her. Jealousy, sudden and unwelcome, was a sharp blade, one that pricked him with its point too many times lately.
He’d started avoiding Disaris more and more, no longer visiting her home every few days. The last time he’d stopped by to deliver a honey cake his mother had made. It had been four-year old Luda who’d greeted him at the door.
She proceeded to make him feel guilty for not stopping by as much and accused him of not liking her anymore. Unlike Disaris, who would have likely stamped her foot in outrage and thrown her favorite toy at him at that age for such a slight, Luda used tears and a trembling lower lip to wring an apology out of him and a promise to return soon and play with her. He’d left the house without seeing Disaris, partially relieved and partially disappointed that she’d been at Nazlen’s house when he came by. At least he didn’t have to avoid staring at her or answer her inquiry as to why he was acting so strange around her.
He didn’t go home after delivering the cake. Instead he took a detour through the grove of trees that bordered Ceybold’s father’s property. Bron usually avoided any route that took him past the yeoman’s house, and while he and Ceybold had become friends, the two always met elsewhere in the village or at Bron’s house for a day of fishing, swimming, or getting into mischief.
Ceybold had never told anyone, including his father, that Bron had saved him from the worst of a savage beating, and Yeoman jin Silsu still believed he’d passed out in the garden and hit his head in the fall. Bron chose not to press his luck by triggering a memory, and avoided the man at every opportunity.
He made an exception this time. He’d landed a position of alternate-day work at the Temple of Firian on the outskirts of Panrin. One of the monks had seen Bron’s script by chance on a bill of lading, inquired to whom such fine handwriting belonged to, and showed his fellow monks Bron’s work. He was offered a job as a scribe’s assistant a week later.
