Turn, Fir of Marla: 28 Xiven

Collecting firewood was a tedious and undesirable job that adults gave to their children, because children had to do what they were told—or at least this was how Kayin saw it. All he had to do was pick up pieces of trees that had fallen off, put them in a giant pile, take the pile back to the central village fire and repeat. Tedious. It wasn’t any better in suddenly moody weather, either. Once Dania had joined him, the clouds covered the sun and the wind blew warm and harsh; how symbolic. Bad weather always meant bad things were going to happen in the stories Aunt Aayin told. Though, in this case, the warm air was typical of the newly budding Sow Season.

“This is stupid,” Dania muttered next to him as she bent down to pick up a few branches next to a root. “We just wanted to play a game.”

“Your blame-it-on-you thing didn’t work,” Kayin noted flatly.

“Well how was I supposed to know those were Aayin’s traps?” Dania huffed and threw the bunch of twigs and branches in a bigger pile Kayin had started not too far away. “I wasn’t planning on getting caught, you know.” He ignored her as he ripped a lower branch off of the nearest tree. The bark scraped at his hands and left them to sting, but as of right now he didn’t entirely care. “Oh, now you’re ignoring me? How mature,” Dania added. “Way to act like the grown-up you’re supposed to be!” Kayin literally growled through his teeth.

“Look who’s talking! You always nag me like a grown-up, then you make fun of me like a kid! Why can’t you stick to one?” Dania’s jaw dropped.

“I do not nag!” she insisted angrily. Kayin sensed a bit of hurt in her voice, enough to make him drop the branch he was carrying to his larger pile and turn to her. “And I don’t make fun of you. I just want you to listen to me sometimes.”

“All the time,” he corrected.

“All right, yeah, all the time!” The vulnerability disappeared from her voice. Suddenly he felt himself losing interest in arguing with her—again. Sometimes he argued with her on purpose just to annoy her, but it quickly got old when she crossed the line between irritated and angry. “You’re supposed to listen to me! You’re going to be my—we’re going to be—” She choked on the word married— “That’s what you’re supposed to do! You’re supposed to listen to your female and do everything you’re told. I’m supposed to make the orders, keep the house, make the clothes, get the food, trade, do everything, make sure it’s all working—all of it, and you’re supposed to protect the house and do what I tell you! That’s all!” Dania’s breath was even shakier than her voice now. “Look, look what happened when the males took over—when the Queen died. That’s when they said it all got bad. When Prince Sahtin was born, he ruined everything, and he didn’t have a mom to fix him! And he’s the reason we had to go to war, why my dad had to go fight—and Aayin agrees.” She hesitated, knowing full well that wasn’t the entirely what Aunt Aayin said. But Dania’s voice got louder, shriller, more fragile the more she spoke. “If Aayin agrees, you know that it’s true. You’re supposed to do as I say, or we’ll have to keep starving and dying!” When Ichaemi hushed them with a large gust of wind, Dania finally breathed again. Kayin stared at his feet. He didn’t have a mom to fix him, but he had Aunt Aayin. So he wouldn’t be as bad as Prince Sahtin, would he? Even if he didn’t listen to Dania?

Kayin switched tactics and lowered his voice. Dania’s face grew red, her eyes watered. It made his eyes burn, too. Instead, he gently asked, “I thought you were proud to, you know….” Boss me around. He gestured broadly.

“I—well, I guess. I don’t want….” She sniffled. “I don’t want everything to always be my fault. My mom says if I can’t make you listen, then no one will ever listen, and we’ll keep upsetting the Gods, keep having to go to war. And it would all be my fault!” Even though she let out a sob, Kayin only half-listened to her complaints. He’d heard it a dozen times, from everyone in the village. Him arguing, asking questions, meant nothing good would come of it. But the more Aunt Aayin allowed him to speak, the harder it was to bite his tongue around everyone else. And he liked talking around Aunt Aayin. Everyone else, even Dania sometimes, made it feel like every word came through a muzzle meant for some sort of rabid animal.

“I don’t want to just blindly do what you say. What anyone says,” he said flatly. “I want to decide for myself.”

“But it’s how we do things,” she said through a defeated sigh, echoing words they’d both heard from her mother again and again.

“It’s your way,” he began, “I don’t have a way. Aunt Aayin never told me where I was born or where my parents went, just that we left. Wherever they’re from, I’m supposed to be like that.” And maybe it wasn’t like this. Maybe wherever they were, even someone like him could have a say, where obedience wasn’t the most important trait.

There was a thick silence in the air for several quiet moments until she cleared her throat.

“It’s like this everywhere,” Dania reminded him even though neither of them had ever stepped foot outside of Yatora. “The Native Natus are even like this. Everywhere is like this, too. You have to do what you’re told, by anyone better than you.” It almost made him flinch to hear her say it so easily. “This is how it has always been. Why don’t you just accept it now?” Kayin’s only response was to kick a loose branch into the pile. It got his point across. “You’re making my life hard by being difficult. I’m supposed to be able to control you by now! My mom thinks I’m letting you act like a stupid, foreign boy because I’m lazy! We’re supposed to be having our own kids in...one, two...five years, but at this rate, you’ll never grow up, and I’ll have to raise our kids and you.” Taking a page out of his book, Dania kicked a slightly larger branch to the pile, springing the crunching leaves into the air. For a tense minute, that was how they gathered branches: by messily scooting them along with their feet. It let them cross their arms, ball their fists, stomp around a little.

Fat droplets of rain dampened their tempers until it was time to take the firewood back to the central village fire. They didn’t speak the entire time, just stewed in their anxieties and anger. The longer it took Dania to look at him, the more it felt like something sat on his chest and refused to move. It was getting hard to breathe—and now that it was raining, getting hard to see.

By the time the two had taken the last bits of wood to the storage shed, Kayin sighed. Any hint of Rinesa’s warming rays were long gone; even the wind began to cool, biting his skin and returning his feet to their usual numbness.

“I don’t want to fight,” he said finally. Despite the rain, the village still stirred; parents repaired their leaking roofs, children collected the worms from the mud for dinner. But Kayin put a pause on his own world for a bit.

“I don’t want to fight, either,” Dania admitted through a sigh. Finally, she looked at him. The weight on his chest lifted just slightly. “But—” Now, he could tell, that her sniffles weren’t from the weather. She was crying. This entire time, and he didn’t notice? “I don’t want you to be like—be like Prince Sahtin.” The weight returned to his chest, cold and hard, as he stared at her, wide-eyed. “I don’t want you to be—be mean or cruel or evil.”

“I—I don’t want to—I don’t think I’m like that….” Right? He wouldn’t cause a war. He wouldn’t make a bunch of people die for his own reasons, make a whole village starve just because he couldn’t keep his temper.

“B-but my mom says—” Dania sighed and wiped at her face. “I know you aren’t,” she settled with saying. “I just miss my dad. And my mom says that when boys misbehave, it’s because no one kept them in check—and….” And she was supposed to keep him in check, so now, suddenly, Kayin was responsible for the whole war, because he wouldn’t blindly let Dania boss him around. Or was it her fault, because she couldn’t control him? Dania let out a frustrated sigh, just as the rain began to let up. “It’s stupid.” Kayin shrugged at her, but offered a sad smile.

“Maybe if we were important it would matter,” he said. When Dania let out a small laugh, he nudged her in the arm. “I can be responsible for me.” She sighed.

“Maybe sometimes. But could you at least pretend in front of everyone else? I don’t—I don’t think you’ll be some evil prince-guy. But….” Kayin frowned at this. “But maybe sometimes you could act like you want to do what I say?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But just in front of everyone else.” She never really tried to boss him around when they were by themselves, anyway.

Dania sniffed one last time, and nodded to him. “Deal.”

In perfect timing, the rain began to let up. Kayin glanced to the sky, covering his eyes with his hand to check the cloud cover.

“Do you think it’ll clear up for a bit? Maybe we can play Catch the Arrow?”

“Yeah!” she said with a smile. “Let me go find an arrow!”