“I’m considering my options for my future. Not that there are many.” She managed a laugh.
“No? Why not?”
She looked at him, wondering if he were teasing. “Well, I’m sixteen years old and still living with my parents. No one’s ever made an offer for me and no one ever will. So, either I live with my parents until the end of my days, or I strike out on my own. I know something about hunting, and I know something about gathering. But what I mostly know about both of them is that if I try to go it alone with those as my only skills, I’m going to lead a skimpy life. In the Rain Wilds, it always seems to take at least two people in partnership, working hard, to keep skin and bone together. And I’m always going to be just one.”
Tats looked startled at her flood of words and a bit uncomfortable. He cleared his throat. “Why you think you’re always going to have to make it on your own?” More quietly he added, “You talk about living with your parents like it’s terrible. Me, I’d love to have a mother or a father to stay with.” He gave a short laugh. “I can’t even imagine having both.”
“Living with my parents isn’t terrible,” she admitted. “Though sometimes, I know my mother wishes I weren’t around. Da is always good to me; he lets me know I’m welcome to stay for always. I suppose that when he brought me back home, he knew then that I’d probably be underfoot for the rest of my life.”
Tats knit his brows. His confused scowl made the spiderweb across his cheek crawl strangely. “Brought you back home? Where had you gone?”
It was Thymara’s turn to feel awkward. She’d always supposed that everyone knew what she was and the story behind it. Any Rain Wilder would be able to tell just by looking at her. But Tats wasn’t Rain Wilds born, and she and her kind were not something the Rain Wilders spoke about to outsiders. Just as some of them never spoke to her or looked directly at her, so her existence was not a topic for casual conversation with outsiders. That Tats didn’t know meant that most people still considered him an outsider. He truly didn’t know. The newness of that thought stung her. She gritted her teeth in a strange smile and held up her hand to him. “Notice anything?”
He leaned closer and peered at her hand. “You cracked one of your claws?”
She choked on a laugh, and suddenly understood something about him that she never had before. He’d acted friendly toward her because he truly didn’t know better.
“Tats, what you should notice is that I have claws. Not fingernails. Claws like a toad. Or a lizard.” She sank them into the branch and drew them back toward her, leaving four stripes of torn bark. “Claws make me what I am.”
“I’ve seen lots of Rain Wild folk with claws.”
She stared at him. Then she said, “No, you haven’t. You’ve seen lots of folk with black nails. Even thick black nails. But not claws. Because when a baby is born with claws instead of fingernails, the parents and the midwife know what they have to do. And they do it.”
He hitched closer to her on the branch. “Do what?” he asked hoarsely.
She looked away from his intent stare, into the interlacing branches that webbed the night. “Get rid of it. Put it somewhere, away from where people go. And leave it there.”
“To die?” He was shocked.
“Yes, to die. Or be eaten by something, a tree cat or a big snake.” She glanced back at him and found she couldn’t meet his horrified stare. It seemed accusing, and it made her feel ungrateful, as if she were being disloyal to talk about what happened to deformed children. “Sometimes they strangle the baby or smother it so it doesn’t suffer too long. And then they drop it in the river. It depends on the midwife, I guess. My midwife just put me out of the way; wedged me into a forking branch away from any path and hurried back to my mother, who was bleeding more than she should.” She cleared her throat. Tats was staring at her, his mouth slightly ajar. For the first time, she noticed that one of his middle bottom teeth slightly leaned past its neighbor. She glanced away from her rapt listener.
“The midwife didn’t know my father had followed her. I was not their first child, but I was the first one to be born alive. Da says he just couldn’t stand to let go of me, that he felt I deserved a chance. So he followed the midwife and he brought me back home, even though he knew a lot of people would say he was doing wrong.”
“Doing wrong? Why?”
She looked back at him, wondering if he were teasing her. He had pale eyes, blue or gray depending on the time of day. But they never glowed. Not like hers. They looked at her without guile. His earnest look almost exasperated her. “Tats, how can you not know these things? You’ve lived in the Rain Wilds for, what, six years? A lot of Rain Wild children are born, well, touched by the Wilds. And as they grow, they become even more different. So, well, people had to draw the line somewhere. Because, if you’re too different when you’re first born, if you already have scales and claws, then who knows what you’ll grow to be? And if the ones like me married and had children, well, those children would likely be even less close to human when they were born, and might grow to be Sa knows what.”
