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Chapter 2
“Kestrel! Kestrel!”
I swim through what feels like thick fog while someone beats a steady rhythm inside my head. I start to open my eyes and think better of it.
“Kestrel, it’s time to get up. Past time. Your grandmother will be here soon, and I wanted you to watch Mallee so that I can finish getting ready.”
Inside my befuddled mind, two things are going on. One is that I don’t want to get up, and I don’t want to tend Mallee. The other is a little nagging voice that says that there is something odd about my mother calling me to get up.
And then I remember. I was in the tent. How did I get here? I sit straight up and instantly regret it as some bad fairy whacks me right behind the eyes. I groan and hold still for a moment until I can only feel the throbbing rather than see it as expanding and shrinking tunnel vision.
Then I hear footsteps. Small ones. Great my mother has sent Mallee upstairs to make sure that I get up. I hurry to grab my clothes and put them on before she barges through the door because as much as I like my sister, having a four year old help me get dressed is not top of my list for fun things to do today.
Thwack, thwack. It’s not her fist. She must be hitting my door with something else. “Kestrel! Mom said chickens. And Feld said that chickens poop eggs, so I want to see.” The tail of her sentence becomes a shriek. I hurry to open the door before she can get any louder.

It’s too fast. I need some time to put myself together, to figure out what happened. I don’t need normal life to come banging on my door. But she’s there anyway.

“Okay, okay,” I tell her as I open the door. Just let me get my boots on. It’s full light outside already, which means that either my father or Wren will have had to do the milking. If it was my father, I’ll feel bad. If it was Wren, I’ll never hear the end of it.

Shoes and coats and mittens don’t seem like a big deal when I’m by myself, but when I’m with Mallee, they’re a whole project. And she doesn’t stop talking--the entire time. She has to point out what color everything is and what other things are the same colors. Then as we walk out toward the hen house, she tells me what animals are on the farm and what noises they all make. She doesn’t use the noises that you would read about in a book, she has her own squeaks and snorts that she’s made up. I have a hard time keeping track because I can’t always understand what she is saying, and I definitely can’t identify the sounds most of time. So I just agree with everything and then she’s happy.

We pass Feldspar as we come back to the house. He’s got an armload of wood to fill the box, and I hold the door open for him, even though Mallee is inside wailing for me to help her with her coat buttons. I hear the thumps as she kicks her boots off and they smack into the walls.

“Kestrel, can you come help me with this?” my mother asks much too cheerfully.  Apparently she got more sleep last night than I did. I know today is called Work at Home, but since there are the normal days, Work at Home, and Sacred Day, then that doesn’t leave any time for fun day--or catching up on missed sleep and worrying about my future day. Instead, I’m sucked into my mother’s world of making sure that the house is perfectly clean for when my  grandmother, Anen, comes. It’s not that I forget about what happened last night, about waking up in my own bed when it shouldn’t have happened. It’s just that I don’t know what to do with the fact that it happened, so I leave it alone and pretend that it’s not there.

I finish with Mallee and then walk cautiously into the kitchen. I can tell that she has already cleaned everything, but since she then proceeded to get out every dish and bit of food in the house so that she could cook, cleaning in the first place didn’t help a lot. I look at the dish bushel and sigh. I start to rub my face with one hand, but then stop because my mother is looking at me, and I don’t want to annoy her first thing. Maybe if I’m really calm and clear, then she’ll understand.

“Mom,” I say. “It’s not that I don’t want Anen to come. It’s just that now isn’t a really good time.”

She hands me a bowl of green beans. Of course. I can’t just sit. I have to be working all the time. Some day, as a Lady Domini, I plan to spend a few days doing absolutely nothing, just to see how it feels.

“I know that you have Exams next week, and I know things are a little bit unsettled.”
No, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t even know the half of it, I think to myself. She thinks that I’m tired because I stayed up too late studying. She has no idea that I feel like a cow kicked me in the head.  I don’t really know what happened, but I think I saved a young man’s life by performing illegal magic.

But I don’t say it. How could I? She reaches over to pat my hand. I have no option but to start snapping the ends off of beans and put them into a bowl. I resent needing two bowls for this job because I know that my next job will be to wash dishes.
My mother chatters on about every detail of everything we will eat for the day and how to cook it and what it will be served on and who ate how much of it last time she fixed it. I think my head is going to explode.

Anen is my father’s mother--everyone calls her Anen. She’s a greenwoman for her zone, and she doesn’t care about having so many courses or what dishes they are served in, but somehow, my mother can’t let go of how she thinks that life ought to be. Which I think is a problem when she doesn’t have any servants besides her children to help. Of course, if I had a real staff of servants, that would be different. It’s just that a greenwoman isn’t really the person you need to impress, even if she’s your mother-in-law.

Once I’m finished helping, I go out to the shed to check on the goats’ water. If Wren did the chores, the she will have forgotten to fill up the water trough. This time I’m glad I have an excuse to get out for a few minutes. I need some time to myself.

1) Briefly,I consider taking off and heading to Daisy’s house, or even to Boron’s house.  But I instantly discard the idea of seeing Boron. I look awful, and it won’t work to go see him if I look awful.  To him, I have to be perfect, the future Lady Domini--that is, I have to look like I could be so that he’ll think of asking me. I really thought that he would say something last time I was there. 


I need to see him, but later. For now, I'd better spend time with Anen so that my mother won't be angry if I slip away later. 


http://kestrelbook.blogspot.com/2012/04/chapter-2a.html 

2) I don’t know that I look good enough to invent an excuse to try to see Boron, and he probably won’t be there anyway, but I could go to visit Daisy. After all, isn’t studying more important than visiting Anen? It's a good rationale to justify it to my mother, but really, after all that happened last night, I need to think, to sort it all out. Maybe I can tell Daisy about it, but what I don't need is hours of polite dreariness right now.