When they pulled her from the warm, dark embrace of her mother, the Yumi solpriest dangled her by the ends of her hair and slapped her. She did not react. At least, not in the way they wanted. She let out a pitiful cry, and her hair remained limp.
The solpriest grimaced and dropped her as if she were something infectious.
“She is clipped,” she said. Her withering gaze fell on the mother. “See what you have done?”
But her mother gathered her in her arms, hair sharpening and curling around her protectively. “Her name is Jaya.”
The solpriest gave them no blessings, no warnings. She stood impassively in the doorway with her face drawn and heavy with things Jaya could not have understood then.
But she would see that look, again and again, all her life.
It was always the Yumi adults. Like her mother, they served either as soldiers or as guards or, the rarer sort, in the palace. When invited to her home, they greeted her with pleasantries and comments about her beautiful hair. But as the compass turned to the blessed north, the conversation arrived at her truth. And one by one, she saw that same terrible look the solpriest wore, all those suns ago.
She was clipped. A Yumi without the power of her hair. A Yumi not worthy of their Great Mother.
Their disappointment irritated her, but it was their fear, laced in their hushed voices, in their reproachful gazes, that wounded Jaya. No one ever said it directly toher. To comment on her fate was to welcome the evil eye upon themselves. But over the suns, naturally, like a herd slowly outpacing the lame, they distanced themselves, creating a berth so wide that Jaya could hear its excruciating echo in her bones. She did not chase them. Her pride denied her, though at night she would stare up at the ceiling of her room, listening to sand rattle against her windowpane, and wonder about that terribleif.
What if she had been born worthy? What if she had not been born half-Yumi at all but as a normal Yumi girl with normal Yumi parents whose hair was a weapon?
Div laughed at her. He was always laughing, her younger brother. “You care too much what others think.” And when she would protest, he’d tease and tease until she found herself smiling with him.
Her brother fought anyone who sneered at her. Her mother braided her hair with gentle fingers. Her father smiled apologetically, for he was a man who had dared to love a Yumi, and unlike the stories of the twin moons, no gods had come to save them. No gods had delivered them from their collective unhappiness.
Not until she had met the gamemaster.
They were sitting at a bar, Jaya holding a cold beer to Div’s split lip (the latest of his chivalry) while he shouted at the game playing on the holos.
“Hold still,” she snapped.
“Come on—Jaya—look, look, man! He’s right behind you!”
The fighter stepped from behind a sand pillar, lancing his blade into the back of his confused opponent. His suit blinked red, and the Jantari fighter received another point.
“Fucking Jantari, always stabbing you in the back,” Div said. Jaya flicked beer into his face, and he yelped.
“It was a trap set up by the gamemaster and they both walked into it,” she said. “See how the pillars are formed? They force the fighters in. Close off the escape. If our fighter was smart, she would have remained along the perimeter, circling around like a vulture until she spotted the Jantari.”
“Then she would have gone in for the kill.”
They turned to the man beside them at the bar. He was tall, too thin, with a burn on his cheek that reminded her of a dying moon.
“Exactly,” Jaya said, eyeing Div as he sized up the stranger. She placed a hand on his elbow to calm him. There was no need to explain another black eye to their parents.
“Are you a game novice?” the stranger said.
“Who’s asking?” Div said.
The man laughed and extended his hand. “Akaros.”
She proved a quick study, taking to gameplanning with as natural a talent as Yumi took to the slingsword. She spent suns studying, enacting strategies, drafting gameplays, casting her favorite fighters for all-star matches. At night, she could barely hear the painful echo of the berth within her, her head filled with so many game designs that her heart, lonely as it was, gave in.
The day she was crowned a gamemaster was the day the gold caps had come for her parents.
“Rebel sympathizers,” the mob had shouted as they raised the fires.
She screamed for Div, her mother, and her father, all trapped within the house as the gold caps dragged her out of her home by her hair. Her useless, weaponless hair. She had never wished more desperately than at that moment to have been a true Yumi, one who could shred the hands grabbing her with the simple swipe of her locks.
Akaros found her rotting in a jail. He bailed her out and told her the news that she had already known, already feared.
