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Khala
"This is strange," Tyla whispered.
Her voice started me out of my thoughts. My hand hovered over my leather bag, my fingers curled around the heel of a boot. I dropped it inside and reached for its pair. I placed it carefully beside the first and started to sign a response.
After a moment, I lowered my hands to the top of the bag and sighed.
"Yes." It was strangely uncomfortable to speak out loud. At the ceremony, it seemed easy. Easier. Now it was difficult to put more than one syllable together. Unnecessary, because we could say whatever we wanted to say with our hands.
It was too long between spoken words. Ten years. More than half our lives so far.
She started to say something before she too dropped her hands in frustration.
"It's all right," I signed. Then out loud, "We don't have to…to talk."
She nodded. "We should though. To…practice." She looked like she wanted to say more, to communicate more, but couldn't put her thoughts into spoken words.
My own thoughts were a jumble of confusion. Questions with no answers. With no one we could ask, unless the Fae woman and her contingent were still in the Temple. If they were, what would I say anyway? Would she give me any answers? If she did, what would the price for those answers be? Fae were notorious for not doing anything for free. Hells, so were humans. What price would she put on my curiosity?
"I trust you're ready to depart?" Geralda's voice travelled up the corridor, addressing all eight of us with her brisk tone.
She shattered the moment like newly formed ice. Tyla and I both jumped and hurried to grab the last of our belongings. Like mealtimes, whatever we didn't have ready when the time came to leave would remain behind. Fortunately, our possessions were few, and what we were permitted to take with us, lesser still.
Any dresses still in good condition, we folded and placed inside the dresser drawers. Sandals were left neatly beside it. In return, we were given cream-coloured blouses and dark brown skirts made of thick cotton. Thin socks and leather shoes completed our new outfits. Everything was suitable—Geralda's favourite word—for travel and sent the message that we were no longer Silent Maidens. We weren't priestesses yet either. In Havenmoor, they'd train us. If we were found suitable, we would take our vows with the temple there.
If not… No one ever mentioned what would happen if we weren't found suitable.
We'd discussed, imagined and discarded a thousand theories, but settled on none of them. Some were as simple as the temple handing us over to a suitable husband. Others involved feeding us to mythical creatures, such as dragons, to have as a snack. The reality is, they'd probably put us to work in the kitchen.
"At least it's not white," Tyla signed and tugged on the hem of her blouse. She curled her lip at the dull brown.
I laughed softly and smiled. "You wanted some colour," I said out loud. I cleared my throat. The words felt caught there. I cleared my throat. It would get easier, but for now it was a strain.
Tyla snorted, then clapped a hand over her nose and mouth. She looked toward the door with wide eyes.
If Geralda heard, she ignored it. What time she took to punish Tyla would make us late in our departure. That would be a bigger crime in the priestess' eyes than a mere snort.
I shook my head at Tyla and gripped the leather straps, pulling them to close my bag. I tied them neatly, making sure each end was the same length as the other, and each loop of the bow were equal size. Geralda would take the minute or two extra to make me fix it if it wasn't perfect.
No doubt there was a priestess in the temple at Havenmoor just as particular as Geralda, if not worse. I certainly wouldn't miss her. Some of the older priestesses, who were more moderate in their dealings with us, I might miss. Billia and Lalys, for example. I suspected they wouldn't feel the same way. Tyla and I had a way of, as Zared put it, finding trouble. We weren't the worst for it, but we gave the priestesses a grey hair or two in our decade here.
"Time to go." I took a long, last look around the tiny room we'd shared for so long. It was nothing more than four smooth walls, a small window and a doorway with no door. The only decoration was a triptych of paintings depicting a scene of a place neither of us knew. Trees, a mountain and a lake, with a castle on the far right. Like the temple, it looked Fae made, but it might have been born from the painter's imagination.
I'd asked one of the priestesses about it once, but she had no more answers than I did. Just that the paintings decorated the wall long before she arrived. They would continue to decorate the walls long after we were gone.
"Are you sad?" Tyla’s expression was as wistful as mine.
I shrugged and settled the bag higher up my shoulder. "Somewhat." During my first three years here, I'd expected that, when I left, I'd go back to my family. To my mother and father, three older siblings and two younger. I dreamt of the day they'd come for me, and tell me I belonged with them and not with the Temple.
But they never came for me. Not once. I wrote some letters in my basic, childish writing. They never wrote back.
At some point in my fourth year, I stopped waiting and hoping. I don't know when I knew I would never go home, but it happened and that was that.
At some level, this was my final acceptance. I'd go to Havenmoor and take my vows in the temple there. I'd serve the gods by helping to keep the temple clean, and accepting offerings from people wanting more children or better crops, or whatever. If I was lucky, I'd find some ridiculously handsome men, like Zared, that I could fuck in my spare time. Maybe I'd have a baby or two. Fortunately, the temple welcomed that kind of thing. ‘More people to serve the gods’, or something along those lines.
As if he sensed I was thinking about him, Zared appeared in the doorway. He looked us both up and down and grinned.
"You don't look maidenly any more."
