and the world to appreciate the grand traditions that brought her favorite fruitseller to his corner each morning. He was simply there the first time she’d thought to bring fruit to Father, and there every morning since.
“Cabras, eleganta,” he said with a smile and a gesture toward four of the husky, dun-colored spheres. “Almost fresh from the Dolphiles estate. First of this year’s crop, and the best. A bit each, two bits for the lot.”
The fruitseller talked constantly, without expecting an answer, which Mahtra appreciated, and he called her eleganta, which Father said was a polite word for improper activities, but she liked the sound of it. Mahtra liked cabras, too, though she had almost forgotten them. Seeing them now on the fruitseller’s cart, she remembered that she hadn’t seen them for a great many mornings. For a year’s worth of mornings, according to the half-elf.
Years and crops confused Mahtra. Her life was made up of days and nights, strings of dark beads following light beads, with no other variations. Others spoke of weeks and years, of growing up and growing old. They spoke of growing crops, of planting and harvesting. She’d been clever enough to piece together the notion that food wasn’t made in the carts of yesterday’s market; food was born somewhere outside the city walls. But growing was a more difficult concept for someone who hadn’t been born, hadn’t been a child, couldn’t remember being anything except exactly what she was.
Staring at the cabras, Mahtra felt her differences—her made-ness and her newness-as if she were standing in an empty cavern and her life were a meager collection of memories strewn in a spiral at her feet.
When she concentrated, Mahtra found six cabra-places among her memories. Six cabra-years, then, since wherever cabras were born, wherever they grew, they appeared on the fruitseller’s cart just once a year. That made six years since she’d found herself in Urik and memories began, because the sixth cabra-place, all bright red and cool, sweet nectar flowing down her throat, was very near the beginning of the spiral. She’d have to make a new cabra-place in her memory today, the seventh cabra-place. She’d been in Urik, living in a hide-and-bone hut beside underground water, for seven years.
Changing her hold on her shawl, Mahtra thrust her hand into the morning. She extended one long, slender finger tipped with a dark-red, long, sharp fingernail.
“Only one, eleganta? What about the rest? Share them with your sisters—”
Mahtra shook her head vigorously. She had no sisters, no family at all, except for Father, who said the sweet cabra nectar hurt his old teeth. There was the dwarf, Mika, who shared the hide-and-bone hut. Like her, Mika had no family, but Mika’s family had died in a fire and Father had taken Mika in, because he’d been born. He was “young,” Father said, not new, and without family he couldn’t take care of himself.
Mika had arrived since the last cabra-place. Mahtra didn’t know if he liked sweet fruit.
She extended a second slender finger.
“Wise, eleganta, very wise. Let me have your sack—”
She retrieved a wad of knotted string from the sleeve of her gown. The fruitseller shook it out while Mahtra sorted two ceramic bits out of her coin-pouch. By the time she had them, the half-elf was stuffing the fourth cabra into the back. Mahtra didn’t want the other fruits, but he didn’t notice when she shook her head. She considered reaching across the cart to get his attention by touching his hand; Father said strangers didn’t touch each other, unless they were children, and she—despite her newness—wasn’t a child. Grown folk got each other’s attention with words.
With one hand deathgripped on her shawl and the other clutching her two ceramic bits, Mahtra used her voice to say: “Not four, only two.”
“Eh, eleganta? I don’t understand you. Take off your mask.”
Mahtra recoiled. She let go of the ceramic bits and snatched her string-sack, four cabra fruits and all.
“Eleganta…?”
But Mahtra was gone, running toward the elven market with her chin tucked down and the shawl pulled forward.
She took off the mask only in the hide-and-bone hut, where Father knew all her secrets, and in the high templar residences, but no where else. Though the mask wasn’t a part of her, like the burnished marks on her face and shoulders, she’d been wearing it when her awareness began. Her makers had made the mask to hide their mistakes. That was what Father said when he examined its carefully wrought parts of