Free Rachel and Leah (Women of Genesis) by Orson Scott Card

gave her a feeling of power, to control their thoughts that way, and to leave them shamefaced whenever she chose to let them know that she knew what they were about.
    Zilpah didn’t hate her life—she had many pleasures and amusements, and if some kept their distance from her because of who she wasn’t, she still had her friends, and for all that her mother was so grimly protective of her, they were still close and Zilpah enjoyed her mother’s company. It was not a bad life. It was her future that didn’t bear examining. What if she never found a man who wanted her for anything other than a bondservant? Laban would never sell her without her consent, but what if that was the only way to have a man? What if she ended up like her mother, raising some man’s baby without even concubinage to give the child a position in the world? No, I’ll never do that, Zilpah resolved. I’d rather be one of the spinsters in Laban’s camp, dried up and childless, than be trapped into a position of shame like my mother, or bring up a child in shame, as I have had to grow.
    Even a future as a spinster was uncertain, though. Spinsters were well-treated in Laban’s camp; no one was allowed to treat them with open contempt, despite their barrenness, their unwantedness. But Laban’s two older sons, Nahor and Terah, showed no sign of growing into kindly men like their father. They were thick as thieves, those two, always thinking of mischief and goading each other on when they were young, and now that they were adults and married, theystill took more pleasure from going off to town together than from their wives or the new babies that both of them had. It was Laban who doted on their babies—daughters, both of them—and looked after his sons’ wives while his boys went off to play. No doubt visiting prostitutes in the city, though they swore to Laban that they were there on business and were full of talk about merchants taking caravans who might bring them exotic dyes or to whom they might sell one of the young camels, if things worked out right.
    What would happen when they were masters of the camp? For they had already hinted that instead of Nahor inheriting alone, the way they would avoid dividing the inheritance was to rule it together. “We share everything as it is, so why should that change?” Zilpah figured
that
arrangement would last until the first disagreement, whereupon Terah would find out just what it meant not to be the eldest son. The third boy, Choraz, who was still just a boy, was wiser than his older brothers—he was off in the service of some desert lord, preparing to make a place for himself without counting on the mercy of Nahor.
    But the brothers’ future hardly mattered to Zilpah. All that she cared about was what they might have in mind for her, when she belonged to them. By then she’d probably be an old woman. But what if Laban died suddenly? Men did. And she had seen both of them look at her from time to time, not with the hopeless longing that some of the young men showed, but with cocky certainty. She did not bend over toward
them;
that was no sport at all, when she knew that someday they would own her more certainly than she owned herself.
    Then Laban’s nephew Jacob came to camp.
    There had been many visitors before, and some so importantthat young he-goats were slaughtered and roasted. But all those other visitors had been men of business, or suitors trying to ingratiate themselves with Laban in advance of his daughters’ maturity. None of them got much encouragement from Laban; he put on a good feast because that was one way a man showed his wealth and power, but he was just as happy when they went their way.
    With Jacob, it was obviously different. Instead of leaving matters to his steward as he usually did, Laban was hurrying from place to place giving needless and sometimes wrong advice to people who knew their work better than he did. And he sent two riders to the city to fetch his sons home