The Blood King's Love

Ten

You see, my birth was a sort of miracle.

The average woman the age of my mother when she got married was expected to already have four to five children, and several doctors in Eseq (my home town), and the village after that, and the village after that, always told my mother that she wasn't even physically able to have children. They looked down on her a lot—for marrying a city boy and betraying her people, for taking so long to get married, for being the quiet, social pariah she was so good at being. And now, for trying to have a child when it was long overdue. It always frustrated me; they talked down on her for not having kids, and when she did decide it was time to build her family, they kept talking shit.

I was certainly an unexpected visitor, even to the woman who bore me. She named me after the special night I was born in—Varona, meteor shower.

My parents met when they were in their early forties, fell in love rather quickly, and married not long after. Father wasn't from Eseq—he was a city boy, with a city education, and city charm. My mother was the exact opposite; she oozed with the smell of open fields, sandy beaches and sugary sweat. To be honest, I don't know too much of their relationship. My mother wasn't employed in Eseq, and my father had a job in the deep, far off city, so he had to leave home for long periods of time, so often that I barely remember the kind of person he was. I don't know what drove them to fall in love, I just knew they were.

But I'm certain that all the books we had came from my father.

There was only one public library in all of Eseq, and it contained mostly meek picture books for toddlers, particularly biased Valon history books, basic first-aid booklets, and other topics lacking in depth or any real substance. No one really went there, anyway. Young boys spent most of their time in school or skipping it to play around in the streets, until they grew into teenagers, where they had to begin enlisting into the Valon army. As for the girls—well, they stayed at home. Girls weren't typically educated at all. They got married young, and the only places you would see them were during the day for a quick market run, or in their homes, with their mothers, their mother's mothers, their husband's mothers, and so on.

I was barely six when I stumbled upon the treasure chest under my bed. Admittingly, it was a smart move—I was always snooping around the house as a kid, looking for anything to get my hands on and play around with. It took my forever to suspect that something might be under my own bed, but I found it nevertheless. I ran to the closet and grabbed an old hatchet (quite a funny picture, huh? A three-feet tall jungle-haired six year old with half her teeth missing running to her room with a hatchet in her arms. At least I was practical and chose the easiest thing to break the box with) and eventually cut a hole large enough to slip my hand in and grab whatever was inside. I unloaded the chest one by one, and each time I put my hand in, I pulled it out with a book in my hand. Of course, I knew what books were. Mother would read to me and help me read myself every night before bed. But the books I knew were thing and light, with illustrations and words with big letters. These books were heavy, old, grim-looking, and some were even in languages I didn't recognize.

By the time I finished unpacking the whole thing, I whirled around to see my frowning mother at the door, her arms crossed and her foot tapping. When she saw the hatchet, I think she smacked me.

That's where it started. My mom would try and distract me with anything else, but I would always go back to the books. I understood very little, but I had never seen anything like them before, and I couldn't take my hands off them. Some books had old, smudged sketches of birds or reptilic animals. There were different kinds of plants with detailed descriptions of what they could do when used, documents of historic figures I had never heard about before or even after I read the books. Entire chapters of one book were dedicated to philosophy, another book to religion, another to more mature fiction. I had never been so enlightened before as a child; not even toys could distract me. My mother later told me she was a little worried, but at the same time, relieved. She didn't want me to end up an outcast like her, but she didn't want me to become a part of the bubble that was Eseq, either.