Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
She remembered the fitting. It had been…
“Ten years ago?” she said aloud. “Really? No, it can’t be.”
Except she was sure because she’d gone the night after she’d made it through her transition. She’d been totally frustrated during the incessant fussing over her, so impatient to get it all over with.
She had done her best not to let her true feelings show, but she’d been exhausted, nauseous, sore all over. But more than that, she hadn’t cared about any of it, not the tailoring, not the rainbow of colors, certainly not her role in the royal protocol.
Not even the fact that she’d made it to the other side of the change.
Now, though, as she lifted the hand-spun wool and marveled at what a beautiful blue it was, she wondered whether she’d been as good at hiding her derision as she’d thought.
Turning back to the rack, she realized that all the robes came from that session. Ten years, and she was still using them. And not just because they were of high-quality materials, and made by careful, trained hands.
It was because the only time those robes were off the hangers was when she yanked them on here, entered the palace, and raced for her own quarters so she could take them off fast.
Maybe t’On had a point, although not in the way he’d meant. She had been hurrying through a lot of things, staying on the surface, too numb and disinterested to connect to anything and anybody. Like, when was the last time she’d shared a meal with her parents? Sure, there were pickup snacks at dawn when she checked in with them or a smoothie on her way out at night before she left for the restaurant… but what about the last time they’d lingered over a table, shared stories from their lives or the thoughts on their minds, laughed at some memory they all had in common from when she’d been a young?
Had there even been any funny stories from her early years?
She didn’t know. She certainly didn’t remember—
“What the fuck is going on with me,” she muttered as she went to the exit.
It was like the transition was happening all over again, just on the inside. With her mind, her heart… her soul.
Something had opened up a door she’d just as soon had remained closed. In fact, the damn portal had been bricked over so completely, she hadn’t even known it was there.
Except the trigger wasn’t t’On’s accusations. Or even the chart that predicted those two stars and everything that supposedly came after their appearance.
No… it was Allhan, in the clearing down by the river. That first kiss, and the one that came after. It was what he had done for a stranger, and the way he had stared at her. How she had felt when she had looked at him, stepped into his body, tangled her cold, hungry fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck.
Those stars didn’t mean anything to her. That male did, though.
Unfortunately, t’On was right about one thing.
Her future had to be with the s’Hisbe.
Stepping back out into the snow, she looked to the left. On all other nights, she just dematerialized past the Territory’s great wall, but now she hiked up the robe and trudged through the moonlit winter’s forest to the boundary. The going was hard, the drifts so high in places that the snow came up over her knees. But she managed to cross the distance, and as she finally halted to catch her breath, she tilted her head back and felt a stirring of awe.
The s’Hisbe had staked out a claim to its land centuries ago, and marked the vast acreage with a towering stone edifice erected by hands that were long, long since dead and gone. Some twenty feet high and a full arm’s length wide, its mortar had been shored up over time, different tints of gray showing a patchwork of incremental improvements against the nearly black, flat-faced rocks. Up top, there were coils of barbed wire, not that you could see them from the ground, and there was only one gate for entry on foot or in a car on the far side from where she was.
That entrance was manned by human guards who had been hired through quasi-human channels opened and monitored by court representatives. Did it still look imposing? she wondered. The last time she’d been over there had been almost twenty years ago, when it had been installed. From what she’d been told, her father had been the one to suggest that the Territory needed a proper gate because their secrecy and inaccessibility were attracting attention on the internet. Evidently, he had seen what happened when curious humans became determined to get to the bottom of things.
The dreaded Netflix documentary, he called it.