Post by Heron on Aug 6, 2018 3:25:46 GMT
It’s her fifteenth birthday when the searchrider lands his blue dragon in the field of her family farm. The dragon’s name is Elbath, she knows, because she can hear the dragon speaking to his rider even though she’s pretty certain the dragon isn’t speaking to her.
Elbath looks her way quite often, jewel-bright eyes whirling an excited shade of blue, darker than the color she’s come to recognize as happiness. Something important then.
She sticks her pitchfork in the dirt so it will stand on its own, the lone sentry marking the rows of vegetation she has yet to plant, and she trots over to where the dragonrider is having an animated -- and agitated -- conversation with her father.
“You don’t understand,” the dragonrider is saying, hands moving in that way people have when they’re desperately trying to make a point in the face of extreme stubbornness. “Elbath is never wrong! He says your daughter has to be a Candidate at this Hatching! She must!”
“Obviously your dragon doesn’t have much sense,” Torsten growls, hand itching and inching toward his belt knife. “You’re not taking my daughter from me. Not now, not ever, and especially not during harvest season.”
She slows to a stop before she quite reaches them, overhearing that. So Elbath thinks she’s important, she has potential to be something, be SOMEONE. A dragonrider. A real dragonrider, not just some working drudge for her father to whip into working faster, or just whip because the produce isn’t selling at the market and somehow it’s her fault. There’s a lifetime ahead of her, suddenly, a lifetime out of reach of her father’s punishing hands, and he could very well end that lifetime if he goes for that knife.
Which he will, if she takes the wrong approach. Torsten is not a difficult man to set off when he’s drunk, but he’s even meaner and quicker to lash out when he’s stone sober, which he always is when the fields need work.
“The Weyr needs strong lasses like your daughter, though! There’s a queen egg on the sand! Do you know how long it’s been since there’s been a true queen on the sands?”
“You’re not hearing me, son,” Torsten growls, and his voice has dropped into that register she recognizes as his countdown-to-outburst T-minus one more provocation. “That little bint belongs. To. Me. Your Weyr isn’t getting a damn thing from this farm, except maybe a knife in a bluerider if you don’t go. Now.”
“Maybe you’d best go,” she finally chimes in, shaking. A little fear, a little adrenaline, mostly sickened rage that these words are even coming out of her mouth. “You’re obviously not welcome here.”
Please hear me, she thinks in Elbath’s direction. I don’t want you to go. I want to go with you. But you can’t keep pushing my father or he’ll kill your rider without a second thought.
Surprisingly, the dragonrider falls back. He’s human, full human, unlike her, average in nearly every way except for the gleam of intelligence and fire in his eyes. He’s a man who believes in a cause, she surmises, looking at him.
Elbath’s eyes have churned from dark blue to a more alarmed orange, though the spinning colors begin to settle just a little as the blue looks her way. <<L’maran understands now, some. But we cannot leave without you.>>
I know. I don’t want you to, either. But maybe you can leave just for a little bit and I can sneak away? My father won’t hesitate to kill your rider. Or me, if he thinks I’m set on leaving him.
<<Is this why you have no mother?>>
Elbath’s question is pure, guileless innocence, but it still stings. She fights to keep her face neutral beneath her father’s pointed scrutiny. Torsten obviously doesn’t trust his daughter’s spoken word, but she hasn’t done anything yet that he can use to justify hurting her. Yet. He’ll find something, though. He always does.
Yes.
Ilmarillia had been a beautiful woman with terrible taste in men. She had admired Torsten’s dedication to his work, his strength, his determination. There had been purity in his way of life, she’d explained to her then-five year old daughter. And by the time she saw what and who he really was, she had a daughter she couldn’t leave.
Until Torsten had pushed her down the stairs of their home during a fight and the elven woman’s neck had snapped like dry wood upon impact with the floor at the bottom. Ilmarillia’s death had been legally ruled an accident, her grave was in the backyard of the farmhouse, and the unhappy child visits her mother’s grave every evening she can get away with it.
“Apparently my girl has more sense than you do,” Torsten says finally, grudgingly ceding that his daughter is, in fact, agreeing with him. He takes three steps back, settling his hand heavy and controlling on the back of his child’s neck, squeezing until she fears he might leave permanent marks in her skin, squeezing until it hurts.
She doesn’t make a sound. For as often as Torsten finds himself driven to inflict pain, the man can’t stand hearing about it, and any sign of fear or discomfort will only set him off. She’s had practice being a blank statue.
“Maybe I should,” L’maran murmurs, finally, eyes going straight to Torsten’s grip on his daughter’s neck and lips twisting in understanding and disgust. “Looks like we’ll have to find our queenrider another way, Elbath.”
<<We leave for now. Get out tonight, sneak away. Call for me, and we will come.
It still pinches her heart to see L’maran mount Elbath and the two launch into the sky from there, winging away, the daydream of freedom shattered by the return to the routine of daily living.
The hand leaves her neck. She has just enough time to brace before the backhand strike lands across her face and knocks her sprawling in the dirt, and the blind instinct of long practice has her curling to protect her vulnerable parts before her father’s boot swings in to deliver another message.
“What did you tell them, you ungrateful little brat?” Torsten demands, face blossoming red with rage. “He goes from being a zealot for the cause to politely backing off when you say a few words? No, you told them something.” He aims another kick, and she grunts in pain when his steel-toed work boot makes contact with her kidney. “So what. Did. You. Tell. Them?”
“Nothing!” This time she takes the kick to her abdomen, which hurts, but she’d rather be kicked in the womb than the kidneys. At the age of fifteen, she’s got more use for the latter than the former. “Weyr’s obligated to back down if the potential Candidate in question doesn’t want to be Searched!”
The next kick sends her rolling until she’s face-down and trying not to vomit in the dirt, but no more blows are forthcoming, at least for the moment.
“Get back to work,” Torsten growls. “One more word and I swear, you’ll be seeing your mother soon.”
She limps back to her pitchfork with all due haste, because Torsten isn’t bluffing. He’s an honest man, at least. If there’s one redeeming quality she can find in her father, it’s that he’s not a liar. Of course, that means his threats are never empty, so it behooves her to do as told or she knows the next tool she’ll be using is the shovel...to dig her own grave, right before her father puts her in it.
Preparing the fields for planting is an old chore, one she’s done so many, many times. This time is different, though. The air tastes different now, knowing this could be the last time she ever digs a pitchfork into the dirt to rip up rows for the planting. This time, she digs and churns the dirt with determination, with intent. She’s planning, this time, actually planning escape, not just thinking what-if.
No, this time she has a way out. A real, certifiable way out. She just has to get away from Torsten, far enough that he can’t follow until Elbath can wing her away to Haven Weyr and to freedom.
Even if she doesn’t Impress! She can be weyrfolk, easily. She’s no stranger to hard work, to earning her keep. And this thought comforts her nerves as she works herself into a lather under the punishing post-winter sun, all but bleeding sweat from every pore.
Torsten is still wary of her when they finish their day and put the tools away. She’s been too quiet, even for a day when he’s told her another word will get her dead. She’s worked too hard, been too obedient. She knows she’s made a mistake the instant she walks in the door of the house, and she can’t even turn around before she’s shoved hard from behind, head pushed straight into a wall, meeting the plaster with a solid, meaty thunk.
Dazed, she grunts, but doesn’t yelp. She allows herself to be hauled back. Gripped painfully by the scruff of the neck and thrown to the floor, where she bounces against a threadbare rug that aspires to pad her landing on scuffed hardwood.
“You think you can fool me, girl, but I’m not stupid.” Neck grip again, and she struggles to crawl-walk alongside her father as he drags her back outside.
To the backyard. She’s thrown to the grass next to her mother’s headstone. Within seconds, a short enough time to tell her he’s been planning this for a while, the shovel is thrown at her, hitting her. She reaches around for it in the falling dark of evening, trembling and exhausted from a long day of hard work.
It’s with a cold and tired detachment that she uses the shovel as a crutch to haul herself to her feet.
“Start digging, bint. I should have snapped your neck when I killed your mother, but I got sentimental. Goes to show what love is worth, yeah?”
She snorts, but starts digging.
If it’s going to be her grave, it’s at least going to be comfortable.
The grave occupies her attention for some block of time she can’t measure. She only knows that it gets too dark to dig, even for her low-light vision, when her hole is about three feet deep and not quite six feet long.
Torsten has his belt knife in hand.
She looks down at her shovel, unable to see it clearly in literal light, but it’s an old and well-worn tool she’s used many times. She knows it well. Belatedly it occurs to her that her father has a belt knife, and she has a shovel.
Hers is bigger.
“Maybe you should have snapped my neck when you killed my mother,” she pants at last, body shaking with the shivers of muscle exhaustion. “It sure would have saved you a lot of trouble now.”
CLANG!
The “flat” back of the shovel impacts Torsten’s skull hard, swung with the full force of an angry teenage girl who has just dug her own grave and doesn’t fancy occupying it just yet. The big man drops like a sack of potatoes, and his daughter drags him into the hole. It’s entirely too small to bury him in, exactly, but this isn’t about hiding a body. He’s not even dead, just unconscious. She’s just making a point. The dirt she throws over him is petty, but satisfying in a way.
She drops the shovel. And then drops to her knees.
Elbath? Elbath, I’m at my farmhouse. My father...won’t stop you and L’maran from taking me now.
<<We come!>>
Eight seconds, then a loud pop as Elbath materializes over the farmhouse. The blue lands where he can, though the yard is more cramped than the field had been earlier.
“I thought you were going to sneak away, are you o-” L’maran cuts off when his lamp’s light illuminates the sloppily-occupied grave, Torsten’s bruised head sticking out of the shallow end, and the bleeding teenager on her knees by the freshly turned earth. “What happened?”
“He did. I’m kind of embarrassed it took me until after I dug my own grave to realize my shovel was bigger than his belt knife. If you don’t mind, I...might need some help getting to Elbath. Been a long day.”
“Of course! Of course.” L’maran latches his lamp to his belt and his gentle, steady hands grip under her arms to help her get steady and upright, even though her legs are pretty sure they’ve done enough hard work for the day and are quite content to be as wobbly as overdone spaghetti.
The ride to the Weyr, even the cold blank empty of between, feels like a dream. She’s given temporary quarters to sleep in, a place to bathe, food to eat, clothes to wear.
The next few days are a blur of peace and quiet. The weyrfolk would disagree, of course, preparing for a Hatching as they are (meat to butcher, clothing to prepare, invitations to send, stadium stands to clean, food to cook, more food to cook, and more meat to butcher, because apparently baby dragons are hungry little beasts), but nobody has once reminded her of Torsten in this time, except for one bronzerider who bears a physical resemblance. It stops at the physical, though. His face bears similarities to Torsten’s, but the man himself (M’khai, one of Haven Weyr’s Wingleaders) is so different in personality that she finds him immediately easy to speak with.
And then the dragons start humming. She rushes to dress down to her Candidate robe -- blank, white, nondescript, both bland enough not to confuse the baby dragons and cool enough not to overheat her on the sands -- and scrambles to get out to the Hatching Sands with the flood of other white-robed hopefuls.
Kemmenth is a great golden queen, overseeing half of the Hatching. Well, overseeing all of it, but only invested in half. Half of the eggs, a respectable twenty three, are hers. The other thirty are collected Mottle eggs that have been found abandoned randomly around Teragaia and that have been transported back for safekeeping.
She has always loved and admired the Mottles in all their strange glory, but something in her tells her to edge away from that half of the event, leave room for the other Candidates. Instinct has her inching closer to the pure Pernese eggs one step at a time.
It’s magical, watching the baby dragons hatch and stumble free of their hard-shelled prisons for the first time, damp and new and creeling for food and completion both. She can survive not Impressing, she thinks, just for this, watching soulmates find one another on the sands.
At least, that’s what she thinks as long as it takes for the crowd to start cheering wildly. The first queen egg laid in many years has finally hatched!
Whispers abound in the stands. Who will the little queen choose? WILL she choose, or will she go the way of her mother’s last queen egg and between for lack of a suitable partner before she’s even fully opened her eyes?
The whispers and excited exclamations catch like wildfire and build up even more as the little gold stumbles gracelessly across the sands, clearly on a mission.
And then green eyes meet whirling orange, and for a second that seems to last an eternity, the crowd is silent.
Sandasaaaaaa...Will you feed your Yuleth?
Everything clicks into place, like her soul has finally found a long-missing piece, and Sandasa laughs, joyous, relieved, thrilled, forgetting about the injuries left over from her father’s rough treatment of her in the rush of Impression.
“Of course I will, Yuleth! Come on, my beautiful girl, let’s get you fed.”
And as she watches baby Yuleth demolish three whole buckets of slaughtered herdbeast meat, it finally settles in Sandasa’s mind that she is truly, irrevocably free.
Elbath looks her way quite often, jewel-bright eyes whirling an excited shade of blue, darker than the color she’s come to recognize as happiness. Something important then.
She sticks her pitchfork in the dirt so it will stand on its own, the lone sentry marking the rows of vegetation she has yet to plant, and she trots over to where the dragonrider is having an animated -- and agitated -- conversation with her father.
“You don’t understand,” the dragonrider is saying, hands moving in that way people have when they’re desperately trying to make a point in the face of extreme stubbornness. “Elbath is never wrong! He says your daughter has to be a Candidate at this Hatching! She must!”
“Obviously your dragon doesn’t have much sense,” Torsten growls, hand itching and inching toward his belt knife. “You’re not taking my daughter from me. Not now, not ever, and especially not during harvest season.”
She slows to a stop before she quite reaches them, overhearing that. So Elbath thinks she’s important, she has potential to be something, be SOMEONE. A dragonrider. A real dragonrider, not just some working drudge for her father to whip into working faster, or just whip because the produce isn’t selling at the market and somehow it’s her fault. There’s a lifetime ahead of her, suddenly, a lifetime out of reach of her father’s punishing hands, and he could very well end that lifetime if he goes for that knife.
Which he will, if she takes the wrong approach. Torsten is not a difficult man to set off when he’s drunk, but he’s even meaner and quicker to lash out when he’s stone sober, which he always is when the fields need work.
“The Weyr needs strong lasses like your daughter, though! There’s a queen egg on the sand! Do you know how long it’s been since there’s been a true queen on the sands?”
“You’re not hearing me, son,” Torsten growls, and his voice has dropped into that register she recognizes as his countdown-to-outburst T-minus one more provocation. “That little bint belongs. To. Me. Your Weyr isn’t getting a damn thing from this farm, except maybe a knife in a bluerider if you don’t go. Now.”
“Maybe you’d best go,” she finally chimes in, shaking. A little fear, a little adrenaline, mostly sickened rage that these words are even coming out of her mouth. “You’re obviously not welcome here.”
Please hear me, she thinks in Elbath’s direction. I don’t want you to go. I want to go with you. But you can’t keep pushing my father or he’ll kill your rider without a second thought.
Surprisingly, the dragonrider falls back. He’s human, full human, unlike her, average in nearly every way except for the gleam of intelligence and fire in his eyes. He’s a man who believes in a cause, she surmises, looking at him.
Elbath’s eyes have churned from dark blue to a more alarmed orange, though the spinning colors begin to settle just a little as the blue looks her way. <<L’maran understands now, some. But we cannot leave without you.>>
I know. I don’t want you to, either. But maybe you can leave just for a little bit and I can sneak away? My father won’t hesitate to kill your rider. Or me, if he thinks I’m set on leaving him.
<<Is this why you have no mother?>>
Elbath’s question is pure, guileless innocence, but it still stings. She fights to keep her face neutral beneath her father’s pointed scrutiny. Torsten obviously doesn’t trust his daughter’s spoken word, but she hasn’t done anything yet that he can use to justify hurting her. Yet. He’ll find something, though. He always does.
Yes.
Ilmarillia had been a beautiful woman with terrible taste in men. She had admired Torsten’s dedication to his work, his strength, his determination. There had been purity in his way of life, she’d explained to her then-five year old daughter. And by the time she saw what and who he really was, she had a daughter she couldn’t leave.
Until Torsten had pushed her down the stairs of their home during a fight and the elven woman’s neck had snapped like dry wood upon impact with the floor at the bottom. Ilmarillia’s death had been legally ruled an accident, her grave was in the backyard of the farmhouse, and the unhappy child visits her mother’s grave every evening she can get away with it.
“Apparently my girl has more sense than you do,” Torsten says finally, grudgingly ceding that his daughter is, in fact, agreeing with him. He takes three steps back, settling his hand heavy and controlling on the back of his child’s neck, squeezing until she fears he might leave permanent marks in her skin, squeezing until it hurts.
She doesn’t make a sound. For as often as Torsten finds himself driven to inflict pain, the man can’t stand hearing about it, and any sign of fear or discomfort will only set him off. She’s had practice being a blank statue.
“Maybe I should,” L’maran murmurs, finally, eyes going straight to Torsten’s grip on his daughter’s neck and lips twisting in understanding and disgust. “Looks like we’ll have to find our queenrider another way, Elbath.”
<<We leave for now. Get out tonight, sneak away. Call for me, and we will come.
It still pinches her heart to see L’maran mount Elbath and the two launch into the sky from there, winging away, the daydream of freedom shattered by the return to the routine of daily living.
The hand leaves her neck. She has just enough time to brace before the backhand strike lands across her face and knocks her sprawling in the dirt, and the blind instinct of long practice has her curling to protect her vulnerable parts before her father’s boot swings in to deliver another message.
“What did you tell them, you ungrateful little brat?” Torsten demands, face blossoming red with rage. “He goes from being a zealot for the cause to politely backing off when you say a few words? No, you told them something.” He aims another kick, and she grunts in pain when his steel-toed work boot makes contact with her kidney. “So what. Did. You. Tell. Them?”
“Nothing!” This time she takes the kick to her abdomen, which hurts, but she’d rather be kicked in the womb than the kidneys. At the age of fifteen, she’s got more use for the latter than the former. “Weyr’s obligated to back down if the potential Candidate in question doesn’t want to be Searched!”
The next kick sends her rolling until she’s face-down and trying not to vomit in the dirt, but no more blows are forthcoming, at least for the moment.
“Get back to work,” Torsten growls. “One more word and I swear, you’ll be seeing your mother soon.”
She limps back to her pitchfork with all due haste, because Torsten isn’t bluffing. He’s an honest man, at least. If there’s one redeeming quality she can find in her father, it’s that he’s not a liar. Of course, that means his threats are never empty, so it behooves her to do as told or she knows the next tool she’ll be using is the shovel...to dig her own grave, right before her father puts her in it.
Preparing the fields for planting is an old chore, one she’s done so many, many times. This time is different, though. The air tastes different now, knowing this could be the last time she ever digs a pitchfork into the dirt to rip up rows for the planting. This time, she digs and churns the dirt with determination, with intent. She’s planning, this time, actually planning escape, not just thinking what-if.
No, this time she has a way out. A real, certifiable way out. She just has to get away from Torsten, far enough that he can’t follow until Elbath can wing her away to Haven Weyr and to freedom.
Even if she doesn’t Impress! She can be weyrfolk, easily. She’s no stranger to hard work, to earning her keep. And this thought comforts her nerves as she works herself into a lather under the punishing post-winter sun, all but bleeding sweat from every pore.
Torsten is still wary of her when they finish their day and put the tools away. She’s been too quiet, even for a day when he’s told her another word will get her dead. She’s worked too hard, been too obedient. She knows she’s made a mistake the instant she walks in the door of the house, and she can’t even turn around before she’s shoved hard from behind, head pushed straight into a wall, meeting the plaster with a solid, meaty thunk.
Dazed, she grunts, but doesn’t yelp. She allows herself to be hauled back. Gripped painfully by the scruff of the neck and thrown to the floor, where she bounces against a threadbare rug that aspires to pad her landing on scuffed hardwood.
“You think you can fool me, girl, but I’m not stupid.” Neck grip again, and she struggles to crawl-walk alongside her father as he drags her back outside.
To the backyard. She’s thrown to the grass next to her mother’s headstone. Within seconds, a short enough time to tell her he’s been planning this for a while, the shovel is thrown at her, hitting her. She reaches around for it in the falling dark of evening, trembling and exhausted from a long day of hard work.
It’s with a cold and tired detachment that she uses the shovel as a crutch to haul herself to her feet.
“Start digging, bint. I should have snapped your neck when I killed your mother, but I got sentimental. Goes to show what love is worth, yeah?”
She snorts, but starts digging.
If it’s going to be her grave, it’s at least going to be comfortable.
The grave occupies her attention for some block of time she can’t measure. She only knows that it gets too dark to dig, even for her low-light vision, when her hole is about three feet deep and not quite six feet long.
Torsten has his belt knife in hand.
She looks down at her shovel, unable to see it clearly in literal light, but it’s an old and well-worn tool she’s used many times. She knows it well. Belatedly it occurs to her that her father has a belt knife, and she has a shovel.
Hers is bigger.
“Maybe you should have snapped my neck when you killed my mother,” she pants at last, body shaking with the shivers of muscle exhaustion. “It sure would have saved you a lot of trouble now.”
CLANG!
The “flat” back of the shovel impacts Torsten’s skull hard, swung with the full force of an angry teenage girl who has just dug her own grave and doesn’t fancy occupying it just yet. The big man drops like a sack of potatoes, and his daughter drags him into the hole. It’s entirely too small to bury him in, exactly, but this isn’t about hiding a body. He’s not even dead, just unconscious. She’s just making a point. The dirt she throws over him is petty, but satisfying in a way.
She drops the shovel. And then drops to her knees.
Elbath? Elbath, I’m at my farmhouse. My father...won’t stop you and L’maran from taking me now.
<<We come!>>
Eight seconds, then a loud pop as Elbath materializes over the farmhouse. The blue lands where he can, though the yard is more cramped than the field had been earlier.
“I thought you were going to sneak away, are you o-” L’maran cuts off when his lamp’s light illuminates the sloppily-occupied grave, Torsten’s bruised head sticking out of the shallow end, and the bleeding teenager on her knees by the freshly turned earth. “What happened?”
“He did. I’m kind of embarrassed it took me until after I dug my own grave to realize my shovel was bigger than his belt knife. If you don’t mind, I...might need some help getting to Elbath. Been a long day.”
“Of course! Of course.” L’maran latches his lamp to his belt and his gentle, steady hands grip under her arms to help her get steady and upright, even though her legs are pretty sure they’ve done enough hard work for the day and are quite content to be as wobbly as overdone spaghetti.
The ride to the Weyr, even the cold blank empty of between, feels like a dream. She’s given temporary quarters to sleep in, a place to bathe, food to eat, clothes to wear.
The next few days are a blur of peace and quiet. The weyrfolk would disagree, of course, preparing for a Hatching as they are (meat to butcher, clothing to prepare, invitations to send, stadium stands to clean, food to cook, more food to cook, and more meat to butcher, because apparently baby dragons are hungry little beasts), but nobody has once reminded her of Torsten in this time, except for one bronzerider who bears a physical resemblance. It stops at the physical, though. His face bears similarities to Torsten’s, but the man himself (M’khai, one of Haven Weyr’s Wingleaders) is so different in personality that she finds him immediately easy to speak with.
And then the dragons start humming. She rushes to dress down to her Candidate robe -- blank, white, nondescript, both bland enough not to confuse the baby dragons and cool enough not to overheat her on the sands -- and scrambles to get out to the Hatching Sands with the flood of other white-robed hopefuls.
Kemmenth is a great golden queen, overseeing half of the Hatching. Well, overseeing all of it, but only invested in half. Half of the eggs, a respectable twenty three, are hers. The other thirty are collected Mottle eggs that have been found abandoned randomly around Teragaia and that have been transported back for safekeeping.
She has always loved and admired the Mottles in all their strange glory, but something in her tells her to edge away from that half of the event, leave room for the other Candidates. Instinct has her inching closer to the pure Pernese eggs one step at a time.
It’s magical, watching the baby dragons hatch and stumble free of their hard-shelled prisons for the first time, damp and new and creeling for food and completion both. She can survive not Impressing, she thinks, just for this, watching soulmates find one another on the sands.
At least, that’s what she thinks as long as it takes for the crowd to start cheering wildly. The first queen egg laid in many years has finally hatched!
Whispers abound in the stands. Who will the little queen choose? WILL she choose, or will she go the way of her mother’s last queen egg and between for lack of a suitable partner before she’s even fully opened her eyes?
The whispers and excited exclamations catch like wildfire and build up even more as the little gold stumbles gracelessly across the sands, clearly on a mission.
And then green eyes meet whirling orange, and for a second that seems to last an eternity, the crowd is silent.
Sandasaaaaaa...Will you feed your Yuleth?
Everything clicks into place, like her soul has finally found a long-missing piece, and Sandasa laughs, joyous, relieved, thrilled, forgetting about the injuries left over from her father’s rough treatment of her in the rush of Impression.
“Of course I will, Yuleth! Come on, my beautiful girl, let’s get you fed.”
And as she watches baby Yuleth demolish three whole buckets of slaughtered herdbeast meat, it finally settles in Sandasa’s mind that she is truly, irrevocably free.