Free Spirit's Princess by Esther Friesner

Ohhhhh, I wish I was older. By the time we can get married, he might already have one wife, maybe two, and I don’t want to be a junior—”
    I pulled my hand away from hers and staggered out into the daylight. I heard her calling after me, but I kept going, never looking back. I didn’t stop until I was up the ladder, inside my house, and curled in a corner, crying.
    Mama and my stepmothers flocked around me, demanding to know what was the matter. I refused to explain, and so they waited until Father and the boys came home and begged them to discover the reason for my misery.
    By that time, I’d stopped crying. Suzu’s meanness and Ume’s offer of false friendship were buried, no longer a sharp pain but a lesson and a memory. I was able to turn a smiling face to Father when he sat down to question me about my tears.
    “It was nothing,” I told him cheerfully.
    “Ah.” He stroked his chin. “All right, then. Let’s eat.”
    “Is that all you’re going to say?” Mama objected. “If you could have heard how loudly she was sobbing when she came home this afternoon, it would have broken your heart.”
    “Probably so. Children cry , woman. They cry and theystop crying, and unless they’re sick or injured, it’s nothing for us to bother about. She’s not crying now, is she?”
    “It doesn’t mean—”
    “Then that’s that. It’s over.” There was no further argument allowed when Father used that tone.
    But it wasn’t over.
    In the days that followed, I stayed close to home. I wasn’t afraid of encountering Suzu and the others, but I was scared of running into their parents. What if they had tattled about me to the grown-ups? Himiko hurt our guardian on purpose! Himiko says the spirits don’t exist! Himiko’s going to make the gods angry and curse us all!
    Would any of our clanfolk believe them? And if they did, what would they do about it? What would they say to me if we met? In my mind, I conjured up one outcome after another, all of them terrifying. The grown-ups of my imagination did everything from scream at me to throw stones.
    The worst part was knowing that some of what Suzu and the rest said was … true. Since my fall, I hadn’t heard the voices of the spirits in my dreams. I no longer called the ancient pine Grandfather. I saw it as nothing more than just an old, empty tree.
    If one of the grown-ups were to ask me straight out whether I believed in the spirits, what would I do? Tell the truth or take refuge in a lie? I didn’t know, and that made me even more afraid. I chose to hide from the village instead, in my home or under it.
    You can learn many things from a good hiding place. Itwasn’t long before I had the luck to overhear Father confronting Suzu’s parents when they came to tell him what I’d done. The three of them stood at the foot of the ladder leading up to our house’s platform and never knew I was taking in everything from behind one of the pillars.
    Father let Suzu’s parents speak freely. Her mother did most of the talking. Her father put in a word now and then, but mostly he just nodded.
    When they were done, Father spoke. “Is that so?” he said. “Your daughter tells you that mine rejects the gods?” He sounded calm, the way the air feels right before a thunderstorm breaks.
    “We thought you should know about it,” Suzu’s mother said primly. “This is very serious. We’re concerned about the child.”
    “You should be,” Father replied. “She’s a liar.”
    Suzu’s father sucked in his breath sharply. “You can’t mean it! A sweet-faced little girl like Himiko, a liar?”
    “I’m not talking about Himiko,” Father said, and without warning burst into a fierce rant, berating Suzu’s parents for taking the word of an eight-year-old about something so important. “By the gods, do you let your child rule the house? Do her words drive you here and there, like chickens? Little girls quarrel all the time; even I know this! And when they do, they