Chapter 13 Sullha
SULLHA
The okra was ready to pick, which was a small, reliable pleasure that Sullha had learned to value, because the big ones were in short supply.
She worked her way down the row, bending each pod gently to test its length before snapping it from the stem.
The trick was timing. Too young, and there wasn't enough to eat.
Too old, and the flesh turned woody and bitter, good for nothing except adding to the compost pile.
The window of perfection was narrow, a day or two at most, and Sullha had gotten good at reading the subtle differences because Burda had taught her well.
Burda was not in the garden this morning because it was her turn in the kitchen.
All the women participated in the kitchen rotation, even those with small children.
Others took care of the little ones while their mothers worked elsewhere, but Sullha didn't trust anyone with Tomek, and when it was her turn in the kitchen, she took him with her.
The other women weren't happy about it, but they let him be.
He was a good boy who knew when to be quiet and stay out of the way of adults working around him.
This morning, Tomek was in Saphira's class, learning his letters and numbers with the other small children in the covered area beside the dining hall. Saphira was one of the few women whom Sullha trusted her son with. She was kind, patient, and had a gift for making learning feel like play.
Feyla and Mahra were working in another section of the garden, pulling weeds along the bean rows.
Feyla didn't have much to say, which suited Sullha just fine.
She liked working beside the woman because a whole day could pass without her saying a word.
Mahra, who was at least a decade younger than Feyla, had the kind of nervous energy that expressed itself in constant motion.
Her hands never stopped, whether she was weeding or braiding her hair or picking at the hem of her shirt.
She was much more talkative than Feyla, but Sullha wasn't in the mood for conversation.
She was content to do her work, going through the motions of bending and snapping and placing the pods in the basket while her mind wandered.
With Tomek occupied, the morning should have been peaceful, just her and the okra and the warm air and the smell of volcanic soil baking in the sun, but her thoughts kept circling.
She was thinking about the barrier in her head, the one she had erected between the rational part of her brain, which insisted on caution, and the irrational part, which kept replaying the same fragment of memory until it was worn smooth.
Yaaf's eyes.
The fraction of a second when something had surfaced behind the blankness.
Four days had passed since the soldiers' second visit, the one where two soldiers had come, and Burda had lied to their faces, and they had left without incident. Eight days since the first visit, when eight big warriors had walked in, and the world had tilted on its axis.
She couldn't stop thinking about them, or rather just one of them.
Sullha snapped another pod from the stem, tested its weight in her palm, and dropped it into the basket.
It was difficult to reconcile the boy she had known with the soldier wearing a dead expression on his handsome face, but that tiny spark in his eyes hinted that Yaaf was still in there.
Perhaps he was hiding behind a barrier that he had erected in his mind the same way she'd done.
To preserve her sanity, she had to compartmentalize, and Yaaf might have used the same technique to preserve his soul.
She bent to check another pod, decided it needed one more day, and moved on to the next plant.
Suddenly, something in the air changed, became charged.
It was a shift in pressure, the way the atmosphere tightened before a storm, even when the sky was clear. A charge that hadn't been there a moment ago, subtle enough that the other two women couldn't feel it, but undeniable enough that her body responded before her mind caught up.
She lifted her head and looked over her shoulder.
Yaaf was standing at the edge of the garden, wearing the standard Brotherhood uniform, hands relaxed at his sides, watching her.
Her breath hitched, and her heart stuttered. It felt as if it had skipped a beat, and her body registered it as a small shock, making her fingertips tingle and her throat tighten.
This time, she was certain that the soldier was Yaaf.
It wasn't the tentative almost-recognition from the first visit, but a knowing that was bone-deep and came from thirteen years of shared childhood.
She knew those eyes. She knew the way he held his head, tilted slightly to the left when he was studying something, a habit so ingrained that even the training camp hadn't erased it.
She knew the particular set of his mouth, which was harder now, the lips pressed into a line that held no trace of the goofy humor she remembered, but the shape was the same.
He was harsher.
That was the word she was looking for. Everything soft about the boy she'd known had been filed down or beaten away, leaving edges where there had been curves, and angles where there had been roundness.
His jaw was sharper. His posture was rigid, drilled into him by years of conditioning that had turned a boy into a weapon.
But he didn't look menacing. He didn't look cruel. He looked like someone who had been standing on the outside looking in for a very long time and wasn't sure he was allowed to enter.
Feyla and Mahra had both gone still, their hands frozen over the weeds they'd been pulling. Sullha could feel their fear without turning to look at them. It radiated like heat from the sunbaked soil.
She gathered her courage and smiled at him. "What are you doing here, Yaaf?"
His eyes widened.
It was the first genuine reaction she had seen on his face, the first crack in the expressionless mask, and it confirmed what she'd suspected. He was still in there.
"You recognize me," he said.
His voice was deep but pleasant. He didn't seem threatening or condescending, and something about his cadence still sounded like the thirteen-year-old boy she'd known.
"Of course I do," she said. "Do you recognize me?"
He tilted his head, that leftward tilt she knew so well, and looked at her with an expression that suggested the question puzzled him. "You haven't changed. You still look the same as you did six years ago."
Sullha chuckled, her brain bypassing the part that was insisting she should be terrified and emerging from the part that remembered a boy who'd made her laugh by saying absurd things with a straight face.
"Should I feel offended?" she asked.
The confusion on his face deepened, and the expression was so earnest, so completely devoid of artifice, that it made him look so much more like the boy he used to be.
"Why would you be offended?" he asked.
She shook her head. "You are all grown up, and you still don't know anything about women. I'm nineteen. I have a son. I don't want to be told that I look like a child."
Something shifted in his expression at the mention of her son.
A slight softening. As if he cared. As if he knew what Tomek meant to her.
He'd seen her son that day when he'd come with the other strange soldiers.
She'd been terrified that they had come for her son, but Yaaf had told her that they weren't there to take anyone.
When he started walking toward her, her body tensed involuntarily.
The response was so deeply ingrained that it operated below the level of conscious control.
A man was approaching her. He was bigger and stronger than she was.
Every encounter she'd had with males had reinforced the same neural pathway. Men meant danger, pain, violation.
But Yaaf didn't come at her the way those men had come, with the presumptive ownership of someone who had been given access to a body and intended to use it.
He walked to where she was crouching in the dirt and crouched right next to her in the soil, with the okra.
Her heart rate doubled, and the bravado that had allowed her to smile and call him by name evaporated like dew in the morning heat.
Having him so close to her was very different from looking at him from a distance.
Over there, he had been a memory she could manage.
Over here, he was a physical presence that overwhelmed her senses.
He smelled like soap and motor oil, and he was so big that he sucked in all the air around her even though they were out in the open.
"What are you doing?" she asked in a shaky voice.
"Helping." He reached for an okra pod, examined it the way she had been examining them, testing its length and firmness with his fingers. Then he snapped it cleanly from the stem and placed it in her basket.
Had he been watching her technique before making his presence known?
She stared at him. An immortal warrior was crouching in the dirt with her and picking okra.
"What I meant," he said, snapping another pod and dropping it in her basket, "is that you still look like the girl I knew. But you are all grown up now."
He smiled at her, and the smile was so unexpected that her brain needed a moment to process it.
There was nothing seductive in the expression.
Nothing predatory. No hidden agenda behind the curve of his mouth.
He was just being friendly, smiling at her the way Burda might smile if the occasion called for it.
It was disarming.
She felt something loosen in her chest. It wasn't complete relaxation because that would have been stupid based on just one friendly smile, but it was enough that the rigid tension in her shoulders dropped by a fraction and her fingers loosened their grip on the stalk she'd practically destroyed.
"Nice save, but you still haven't told me what you're doing here," she said.
"I told you. I'm inspecting."