Tortall by Tamora Pierce Page A

our second error when we let you stay with my mother when you were young! If I did not look at you, I would swear she was alive again, and scolding me.”
    I grinned at him. He did so like it when I made Omi Heza live again, even briefly.
    That night I had the strangest dream. A voice that was two voices, a man’s and a woman’s, speaking as one, called to me. “Look. What lies before you?”
    Before me stood veiled women, dressed in strict black from head to feet, some even covered in black to the roots of their fingers and toes. Their eyes watched me from the windows of their veils, brown, gray-green, blue-gray, all the colors of my people, set in every shade of brown and bronze skin, firmly young to dry with age.
    “I see women and girls,” I replied at last. Somehow I knew the voice was that of the God in the Flame, the god who spoke to my own Oracle. “I see watchfulness and waiting. I see silence.”
    “What else do you see?” asked the god’s intertwined voices.
    “I see veils.”
    “Then you do not see everything.”
    With that I woke. Since it was dawn, I chose to prepare myself for the day. Once I wore my veils, I picked up the yoke with the buckets and went to fetch water for my aunt. I passed few other people. Most women preferred to wait until later in the day to fill the water jars for their houses. On my fourth trip, one other person was at the well filling buckets, the young man Fadal my cousins had talked about.
    I did nothing so improper as acknowledge him. One of my cousins might have smoothed a sleeve or looked at him sidelong. They were more daring than I. They also had prettier eyes and longer lashes. I bent to my work.
    “How do you stand it?” To my shock, the voice was Fadal’s. “Doing all that draped in veils? A slave in chains has more freedom to move.”
    Without moving my head, I looked around. We were quite alone. People were inside, eating breakfast. Worse—or better, I wasn’t sure which—this Fadal spoke with the barest movement of his mouth in a soft, carrying tone. Girls learned it young. Had he imitated his mother and aunts, before they told him men never had to talk that way?
    “Don’t you want to throw the whole bundle in the priests’ faces? Tell
them
to wear veils, if they like them so much?”
    Some of the things he said were complaints I had made, it’s true. Every girl has. Every girl who is not a twittering pushover for the nearest creature to grow a mustache. But still …
    “Said like a man,” I replied in the same way, only better,because I was more practiced. “You see only the outsides of things, when it is we women who see the heart of it all.” I checked our surroundings a second time before I went on. “These veils are freedom, beardless
boy
. Before I put them on, I was a sheep on the market. My nose was longer than my cousin’s, my skin not so fine as my mother’s, my hair not so curly as my aunt’s. My teeth, my weight, my length of bone—pick, pick, pick. Then I put on the veil. Poof! The gossips have my eyes, my hands, my voice, my feet. They must judge me on my value to my family, and my family values me for who I am and what I can do.”
    “You
like
the veil?” He seemed so shocked! “You like being hidden away?”
    “I
like
keeping myself to myself. My heart is hidden. It is mine,” I told him. “And …” Suddenly I remembered the dream, the many women in black. “If you wished to have me beaten for speaking to a man, how would you find me? I could vanish among a crowd of women, and you would never even know which of us you spoke to.”
    “But you have no power,” he protested. Now he sounded weak, or thoughtful, perhaps both.
    “Again, said like a man who wears his thoughts on his face.” Really, I was getting tired of this pup. “No power? Who cooks for you, when you have a home? Who weaves and sews the clothes you wear, the sheets and blankets you sleep in? Who is awake while you sleep? No power? Ask yourself how much