Free Tortall by Tamora Pierce

protest. Father held up his hand, his old signal for me to be silent. I hated it when he talked that way; he knew I hated it.
    “If something happens to me, return to your aunt’s house. She will arrange a good match for you, every bit as good as the one she arranged for your cousin.” My father nodded as if he agreed with himself. “We talked about it. She knows what to do.”
    “Now, see here, my boy,” I began in Omi Heza’s old voice, thinking to joke him out of his decision.
    He raised a hand. “Hush, Teky. This is no laughing matter.” He took up The Book of the Distaff and began to read.
    I continued to watch the fire, but instead of warmth, a creeping veil of cold eased up my back, my shoulders, and over my head and face. Go to my aunt’s house, and wait to be married? When all I had done for the last five years of my life was this? Walk the roads of our country, talk to women and girls, men and boys, hear their stories, cook and eat with them, visit their homes, sew and weave with them, change their babies, and hold the hands of their grandfathers and grandmothers? I had cobbled sandals, made round bread, collected honey, milked cows and goats and sheep and even mares. In one village I had twisted rope; in others I helped to bring animals in from dust storms. In the mountains in the spring I had waded up to my waist in floodwater to save a child who had strayed. In stick huts in forests I had brewed medicines. In three cities I sold fruit and honey in the marketplace. In a hundred marketplaces, big and small, I studied with my parents and learned to dicker with merchants on my own. In my short sixteen years I had eaten hummus made at least thirty different ways. Sitting by this small fire with my back to a hollow in a hill, I could feel my world shrink to the size of a sun-dried brick house, of a village wall. To know only the same faces for the rest of my life, with only a light seasoning of new ones …
    I think I slept where I sat, because the flames parted at their bases, opening like a teardrop to reveal orange coalsthat rippled with heat and bits of blue fire. Dreaming, I knew the god had come.
    “Did you hear?” I asked the god as if he, she, were one of my cousins who had been sitting close by. “He just … he decided. He didn’t ask me; he just decided. Why didn’t he even tell me what he was thinking?”
    “He is a man,” said both halves of the god, woman and man. “He has never been stripped of his voice, so he does not know how it feels to be stripped of it, even a little. Now I, I understand it very well. I have been stripped of half of my voice for centuries of your time. My man voice thunders clearly—wrongly, sometimes, thanks to the priests who decided which words of my Oracle they would repeat—but clearly. But no one hears my woman voice anymore. I would like my woman voice back. You would like
your
voice back. And this man who loves you will never realize it. Don’t you ever wonder who
will
realize it, Tekalimy?”
    “Teky, Teky.” My father was shaking my shoulder. “You are sleeping where you sit. Go to bed. I will bank the fire.”
    I looked up at him, blinking, my eyes hot and dry. They felt as if I had never closed them. “What if I do not want to go to my aunt and have a husband, Father?” I asked, my voice very tiny.
    “Don’t be silly,” he said, kissing my cheek. “What else would you do? Go to bed.”
    I looked at the fire. If the flames had parted, they were joined again now.
    As I unrolled my blankets and covered myself up, I admitted he had made a good point. What else would I do?
    The next village already knew of the destruction of theHartunjur temple. As soon as the priest finished each night’s lesson and banked the fire, many of the men who heard him came to the man who housed my father and me, to hear my father teach, to hear me read, and to talk with my father about what the reading meant. That first night, as I did in a strange town, I went to