Chapter One
“Akelda.”
She didn’t know how to tell me. I watched her struggle inside, opening and closing her mouth like a dying fish. I didn’t help her. The pain threatened to swallow me whole. Disbelief tried to overtake me, but even if I had wanted to, I could not let it. Insistent images from Mother’s mind swam to my own, and there was no way for me to close them out. I saw Father crushed beneath the wheels of the wagon, saw his chest rising and falling so slowly, then stop completely. I saw his eyes go glassy and vacant, felt my mother’s agony as she clutched him in his arms. The memory was so sharp, so vibrant that I may as well have been there myself.
“Akelda,” my mother said for the second time. She clutched her tunic to her chest, tugging at it. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “Akelda, something has happened.”
I wanted to get up and leave the room. I wanted to go to the market and lose myself in all the hustle and trades. I wanted to find Hassan. He would know as soon as he saw me that there would be no need for words. He would take me to the stream that we cast our nets each morning and we would sit in peaceful, soothing silence. And I would forget this passing. Forget and pretend that it had never happened.
“Y-Your father. H-he…” Again, she failed to say what needed to be said. And still I remained silent. I dared not let on that I knew of Father‘s death, despite the obviousness of her tears, lest my secret be found out. Yet another reason to mourn Father’s violet passing--he had been the only one who’d known. Sometimes he’d made my terrible secret into a game, lightening the burden of my strange mind.
“Akelda, I am thinking of something colorful and alive and loved,” he would say sometimes. I’d look up from the bowl I was molding, smiling. Fish, his mind whispered. I repeated back the answer he gave me, and Father would shake his head.
“Wrong, silly girl,” he’d say. “It’s you. Always you.”
A sob hitched in my throat. I did not let it escape. Mother was trembling now, her eyes wide and tortured. Finally she blurted, “He’s dead.”
She expected me to scream in denial. She waited for me to react as she was. She received nothing of the kind. I only nodded, dry-eyed. “I see,” I said. “Please, do not tell me anything else. I do not want to hear the details.”
Mother stared at me. It may have been foolish of me not to respond as a grieved daughter normally would, but I could not bring myself to. I studied my mother’s face. Her skin was red, contrasting with the darkness the sun had given her. My instincts urged me to focus one something, anything, else, while I regained my composure. The sounds of the outside world reached me then; I could even hear the call of the slave traders in the center of the city. Carts rolled by our small house, laden with vegetables, fallen trees stripped bare of their branches and leaves, clothing materials and jewelry. Our city thrived on these traveling carts of goods, survived on them. Our own family sold the fish we caught in the river and the bowls and plates we made from the clay I found at the bottom of the river. But Father had brought in the most money by the armor and weapons he made at his workshop. He’d been one of the many smiths in Tamoan, but I’d always known his work had been of the best quality.
How will we survive now? I suddenly wondered. The fish and the clay will not be enough to feed Mother, myself, and Gigorn. The thought of my little brother brought me back to the present, and I forced myself to look at my mother again.
“I need to find Gigorn,” I said. “He will need to know the news.”
She did not nod or speak. Her mind had wandered, and her gaze clouded over as she stared at the wall. I left her, unable to comfort her when my own pain screamed out for all the world to hear.
), I did get a sense of her pain and her personality. Trying to explain the thoughts and feelings of a character when they lose someone close to them is 