Free Golden Daughter by Anne Elisabeth Stengl Page A

lantern, light enough to tell him that the figure he now faced was not Brother Yaru.
    “Who are you?” the Besur demanded. “Do I know you?”
    “We haven’t met, Honored Besur, no fear,” said a bright young voice. The next moment the low hood was thrown back, and the Besur drew himself up in surprise.
    “What are you doing here?” he growled. “Women are not permitted within the sanctity of Hulan’s Throne!”
    “Which seems odd when one recalls that Hulan herself is thought to be female,” said the girl with a cheerful grin. Then she looked around the Besur’s ample girth, spied the quiet one seated across the room, and raised a wry eyebrow. “No women at all, Honored Besur?”
    “Get out! Get out at once, before I summon the guards!”
    “I’ll go if you wish it,” said she. “But will you look at this first?” With that, she raised her arm and drew back the long sleeve of her garment, revealing her left wrist for the Besur’s inspection. He saw, scarred there, the contours of a small carnation.
    Sairu had been branded thus the day she entered the Masayi. Her agonized cries at the pain of it had been nothing to her irritation when, days later, she had noticed that the applied burn was crooked. She’d marched straight away to Princess Safiya and demanded it be done over again.
    “ A brand cannot be undone, ” Princess Safiya had replied. “ Besides, it is your own fault for flinching from the iron. ”
    Shamed, Sairu then looked upon her crooked mark as a badge of weakness rather than the honor it was meant to be. But it had motivated her to excel. To never flinch again.
    Crooked or not, the mark was recognized by the Besur. His eyes rounded and filled suddenly with respect as he looked anew at the young woman before him. “Golden Daughter!” he exclaimed and, rather to Sairu’s surprise, made a sign of reverence. “I had given up hope of your coming.”
    “Of course I came, Honored Besur,” Sairu replied, grinning still and enjoying herself perhaps more than she ought. She had studied the Besur many times over the years, a man of great dignity bordering on pomposity, who believed in the sacredness of his traditions, if not in his religion. From the time she was a child attending ceremonies and observing fasts, Sairu wondered what use there was in clinging to a faith that even the High Priest himself did not believe.
    Thus Sairu had lost her faith. And been left a little hollow without it.
    But this did not mean she must lose the purpose for which she’d been trained, honed, and sharpened throughout the years. So she made a returning sign of reverence, adding a deep bow. “May I meet my new master?” she asked.
    As soon as she spoke, she realized her error. Rising from her bow, she looked, not at the Besur, but across the room at the young woman sitting so quietly. And she knew immediately that this was to be her charge, her assignment.
    A mistress , not a master at all! Such a thing was unheard of among the Golden Daughters.
    “Allow me to present the lady Hariawan,” said the Besur, leading her across the room to stand before the low cushioned chair upon which the young woman sat. A brazier of coal—no doubt hauled up from the mines by little coal-children—burned near her left elbow, casting her face half in warm light, half in deep shadow. Even in that strange glow, Sairu could see that the lady was very beautiful, like a painted statue or one of Empress Timiran’s hand-crafted dolls.
    Hariawan, Sairu knew, was not the lady’s name, not her birth name anyway. It was merely an indication of her heritage. She was from the Hari Tribe of the Awan Clan, selected from among the other girls of her tribe to be the clan’s temple tribute. Sairu inwardly shuddered at this. Everyone knew what sort of opulent yet simultaneously wretched lives temple-tribute girls lived. The world beyond Manusbau and the Masayi was full of wickedness, even within the temple walls.
    Why then was she called