by S. K Munt
‘If you don’t like what they talk to you about- tell them to change and they will.’
Kohén gave me a surprised look. ‘Isn’t that mean?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘You’re not supposed to romance them, Kohén- you’re supposed to make companions out of them. Those girls will jump through hoops to make sure they stay in the palace rather then get sent to work out in the villages, so if you tell them ship out or shape up… they’ll shape themselves. It’s hideously unfair that they have to, but they all want to become your favourite and stay, and if that’s the only goal any of them have… you may as well help them attain it by being blatantly honest.’
Kohén grinned at me. ‘I hold a lot more sway over your future than I do over theirs. So does that mean that I can command you to give up this southern fantasy of yours and start researching pineapples- or else?’
I glowered at him. ‘I’ll tell you where you can shove your pineapples!’
Kohén laughed and swung out of the tree, landing on the ground. He tugged down his shirt, but not before I caught a glimpse of his abdomen. ‘Oh, look at you!’ I pushed off the tree (I’d stopped climbing them since we’d been given long gowns) and reached for his stomach, giving the muscles there a little slap. ‘Aren’t we getting all manly! Look out! They’ll start fainting at your feet soon in a swoon!’
Kohén slapped my hand away and backed up, pulling down his shirt. ‘Watch it duckling,’ he teased, ‘I can’t have you touching this and falling for me like the big girl you are…’ he frowned and stepped forward, obviously noting the way I’d stiffened. ‘Hey! What’s wrong?’
The muscles in my throat had grown tight. ‘You…’ I wanted to point out that he’d just called me duckling for the first time- just like the other girls and that I was beyond offended. But I bit my tongue and swallowed down my hurt, knowing that this was a good thing- a very good thing. I needed to be ugly, and to him more than anyone. And if I started pouting over my looks or his attitude towards them like the rest of the girls, he’d think I’d changed too, and I hadn’t! ‘I just realised that I left my curling sticks on.’ I gathered my skirts and turned to run away. ‘I have to get back up to the dorm!’
‘But you don’t curl your hair!’ Kohén called after me, but I ignored him, pretending not to hear. I got to my dormer and was grateful to find it empty, but when I walked to the window and looked out to the common and saw that Emmerly was now leaning against the tree that I’d just vacated, I suddenly wished that every single Given girl in the palace was in that room- and the door locked to keep them from stealing my best friend.
*
As our fourteenth year passed us by, Kohén started spending more and more time with the other girls and smiling more broadly when he did. He took dancing classes with Lette, discussed art with Elfin, and started teaching Emmerly how to play chess- and I started avoiding him every leisure hour I had, trying to act like I was as in control of our estrangement as he was even though I knew that wasn’t true- he was simply growing out of me, and I was not inclined to grow with him.
In the warmer months, Martya’s vegetable garden was the perfect place to hide, and then when the weather grew cold I started finding other ways to amuse myself alone in the last places where Kohén would think to find me. Sometimes I’d read by the great fire in the lounge and others, I’d find something to do with Kelia in our dorm to keep her dropping face from falling off- like letting her paint my nails or discussing how silly the other girls were acting. But that got tedious and so I ended up crawling to Maryah and asking for extra training. She wanted me to do more beauty and deportment stuff, but I refused to do that alone and so in the end, I compromised and accepted extra dance and vocal tutorials to gain a private swimming lesson three days a week, and two extra combat classes on the alternate days. The new schedule did not leave me with much free time, but I didn’t mind doing the girlish classes, because they’d help elevate my grades without me having to get about publicly with my face painted more or with a book on my head. I started going to bed sore and weary, but too exhausted to think much about the fact that Kohén was spending at least two hours a day with Emmerly hanging off his arm by then. She’d become his companion, and I’d become his past.
Our lessons changed at the start of our fifteenth year. We still had to take academics, dancing, singing, grooming, deportment and art- but the classes were made smaller to accommodate a seventh- Companionship, which was a fancy way of saying sexual education.
Obviously we’d already learned about blossoming and the birds and the bees, but companionship classes were about the mechanics of it and they were beyond mortifying. At first we were taught about how the act worked, why we did it, what chemicals were stimulated by it and how male and female needs varied, but the classes accelerated quickly and not only did they come with lectures- but actual pictures and sometimes, physical demonstrations on how to kiss, touch and love with either a couple or a duet of companions who would embrace one another. Having two people of the same sex touch one another was nothing scandalous, but the fact that we could be offered coin by another woman one day made my skin crawl because I did not find Lette any more appealing than I did Karol! And, every Friday, Maryah would have a companion brought in to explain what her life had been like as a companion.
Adeline was our first speaker, and she was so overtly sexual and candid that poor Martya spent most of the class examining her dirty fingernails and blushing. Adeline waxed lyrical about what an expert lover Karol was- how he gave as much as he took and how he’d sworn to keep her around forever because she was uninhibited and relaxed. Resonah was the second, and she was much more demure than her younger counterpart. She’d been in the castle for forty-seven years, and though Elijah had kept another Given girl, he had not actually touched Rosina for years and kept her around just so Resonah wouldn’t get lonely, and both women were now the best of friends.
‘He loves the duchess, very much so,’ Resonah said, catching my eyes and smiling gently at me. ‘But I have had a place in his heart for longer, and he’s never forgotten it. Elijah Barachiel is the love of my life-and I don’t care that he’s had children with her, because I’ve had so many of his smiles without having to.’
I returned her smile with a blank stare. Clearly she hadn’t read Gone With the Wind. I, on the other hand, knew that a heart could not be divided two ways equally, and that true love came only with a freely given heart and nothing held back.
Then again, I’d read Memoirs Of A Geisha too and knew that sometimes, the world made love impossible and the only chance we had was to hold onto what felt real. If Resonah believed that the king loved either of them or both, let her have that comfort. It was the most a Given child could hope to expect, even if it was the last thing I’d ever crave.
After that week, Maryah started bringing in Companions from the villages, so we’d understand that staying on in the castle didn’t have to be the only route to happiness. Millana Arlvoti was so beautiful at twenty-nine, that she only had to do one ‘job’ a week with nobles to keep herself. Cinnamin Krause had at least a dozen a week, but swore that she did it more for her pleasure than financial gain. Ruby Lauder was grey-haired, and she’d earned so much gold in the palace that it had set her for life. Lloyd Barachiel, our previous monarch, had been madly in love with her and pained by the knowledge that he couldn’t marry her, so he’d given her actual gold bullion- twenty thousand dollars worth as a parting gift. The kings did not have to do that, but he’d chosen to and like Resonah, Ruby swore that loving him until his dying day five years ago had been her purpose on earth and must have pleased God greatly.
There were less successful stories and to be fair, Maryah brought those in as well. We met whores who had to work hard to get customers because they weren’t naturally attractive or sexual (those women made me cringe in sympathy) and girls who’d lost their looks from drinking too much and could only get the less affluent customers through their doors. We met a Companion from the sout
h, who practically gleamed from her gold but still hated the fact that she was forced to do this and finally, we met one who’d been released prematurely for not having appealed to the king or adjusted to the lifestyle. She’d been traded to one of the female Corps divisions in her seventeenth year and though she was now a free woman, she regretted not having tried harder to make a go of the lifestyle because no one wanted a failed Companion. Failing to be a good lover meant that they’d failed to do what supposedly came to women more naturally than anyone else. (I’d thought that was motherhood but clearly, I’d been mistaken!) And because we all had to have the vial injected into our stomachs on our sixteenth birthdays to prevent us from ever getting pregnant or diseased, she still couldn’t have children- and that had been the part of the Companion lifestyle that had bothered her the most.
‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…’ Martya muttered.
After having met twelve companions, Lette, Elfin and Emmerly graduated from being resigned to their fates, to excited. Kelia only withdrew more into her misery and once she even told me that it was her goal to be noticed by some gorgeous prince from another land at a ball who would offer Kohén a fortune to buy her out of her contract.
One day, at the very start of the year we would turn sixteen, I mentioned this to Kohén and he’d sighed while lining up my soccer ball for a kick. Spring had come earlier this year for some reason, and most of the gardens had shot up at a rapid rate only to be felled immediately by an equally premature swarm of locusts, which King Elijah worried were mutating and becoming more vicious every year. The ground was still slushy in many places, (the crop fields in Eden were protected by gigantic greenhouses in the winter to keep them safe from the snow and germinating) on that late January afternoon, but Kohén was to leave for Pacifica in two days and would be gone for at least six weeks, so I made myself invite him outside and left Martya to dig through our failed garden alone. ‘Had to be the prettiest one who hates me the most, huh?’ he asked, then raced forward to kick the ball hard.
I stared at the back of his head, surprised. ‘You like her?’
‘She’s beautiful. She’d be a lot prettier if she stopped scowling and crying all the time but yeah…’ he glanced at me and smiled. ‘Besides, you like her, and I trust your judgement. I’ve tried to approach her a few times but she always runs away so, who knows? Maybe my father will get fed up and kick her out and she’ll end up in the Corps- though I doubt he’d do that… the girl wasn’t exactly built to do hard work, was she?’
‘That’s not your decision to make?’ I managed to ask; even though I was still reeling from the knowledge that Kohén had started pursuing one of us instead of the other way around. And he was noticing who was more beautiful than the others! It made me feel sick. I’d never been one to feel the cold but although Kohén’s bare arms were dotted with goose bumps, I felt a slick sweaty trail running down my spine.
‘Nope. I can appeal to him if I’m inclined to, but the king has the final say on who can and cannot leave the harem. And if he catches her making eyes at another prince at one of our balls, she’ll be bloody-well Banished before sold!’
I stared down at my sandals, feeling distinctly uncomfortable to be having this conversation now, and sort of shocked that someone like Kelia would be sent out into the Wildwoods for flirting.
‘Larkin... don’t.’
I looked up at him, blinking. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Judge me for rules I didn’t make that I have to comply with as much as you do.’ Kohén put his hands on his hips and gave me a hard look. ‘Don’t you think I want more for myself than this? Don’t you think that I’d like the right to choose how I live my life or whom I live it with? That dad did? That Karol wants to fall in love? I mean, my wife is going to be chosen for me if I can’t find one just like the rest of you, and how am I supposed to find a girl who’ll love me when she knows I have a whole bunch of others on the side? I mean, I can’t get married until I’m thirty, so I’m even more trapped than you are, when you think about it.’
‘But eventually the choice to marry will be yours and you can opt to be faithful to her,’ I argued. ‘None of us will ever know love.’
And you are being trained to believe that it comes easily on a platter!
Kohén looked away, laughing. ‘Since when do you care about knowing love?’ I blushed, and he looked at me, surprised. ‘You’re not seriously telling me that you think about that stuff, right?’
I sighed. I didn’t want to have to talk about this and yet he needed to understand all that the Given girls were slotted to lose as soon as he touched them. Who knew? If he denied his right to all of us- we’d all walk free! ‘As grateful that I am that you see me as a boy Kohén Barachiel, the truth is that I am a girl and that even if I wasn’t- males fall in love too.’ I lifted Pride And Prejudice, and smacked him lightly on the head with it. ‘Do you think these books are only about people raising farms? That my desire to live in the south has nothing to do with meeting some gorgeous gentleman with a beautiful accent who’ll come to my plantation bearing jewels and vows of undying love?’
Kohén frowned as though I’d just said that the world was flat. ‘The southern accents aren’t what they used to be, you know- and you don’t wear any jewellery but that wooden ring that Kohl sent you- not even the silver comb I gave you for your tenth birthday!’
I rolled my eyes, but was glad that he hadn’t seen me hurl that comb over the palace wall. ‘The point is that of course I have fantasies- every one of us does! I can understand why this system was used when we first re-started civilisation but let’s face it- there are enough people breeding now and making good decisions for the right reasons for some of these archaic rules to be done away with.’
Kohén ran a hand through his hair and squinted at me. ‘So it’s not enough that I’m saving you this life- you want me to start changing everything that works now too?’
‘You just pointed out that this life is limiting even to you!’
‘And yet people are prospering-’
‘Some people are,’ I said quickly. ‘Others are suffering- girls like Kelia. Girls like me.’ I opened my mouth to say that his twin was among them, and yet he brushed hair away from his eyes, and a shower of sparks shimmered off his palm bright enough to burn my eyes, like a welder’s flame.
‘I know you’ve suffered estrangement!’ he snapped. ‘But it’s your parents who broke the rules, not me! If I choose to procreate beyond the legal limit, I’ll pay for that- just as you have.’
I scowled at him. ‘Your child will pay for it more.’
‘Which is why I won’t have a third,’ he said sharply, turning away, and I stared at the back of his head, hurt. So he judged me for my mother’s actions too? It was so irrational! ‘Are you going to go get that ball or what?’
I stomped past him. ‘Yes, your majesty!’ And when he called out my name in a whiny voice, I didn’t look back. I found the ball, kicked it back to him so hard that it overshot my mark by about ten metres- and the continued on out to the garden for fear that if I returned while he was so angry, I’d get banished by accident or on purpose.
Being a noble would be lovely- but being free would be worth far more.
18.
January 12th, AA643
Kohén was slated to leave for Pacifica the following Monday night, and though I still hadn’t spoken to him or him to me, all of us Given girls had to farewell him and his parents that night after supper, which was the first time that we’d ever been invited to eat with them, and excited those that it did not terrify.
Elfin, Lette and Emmerly went all out trying to outshine one another visually- with beautiful loops of braids and glittering silver ornaments, earrings received as birthday gifts in the past and too much make-up and scent- so much that our room reeked and I thought that Elfin at least, looked better without all of that war-paint on. Lette on the other hand was one of those girls who polished up in an almost unrecognizable way. I dressed i
n my usual dress, Kohl’s wooden ring (which I now wore on my index finger for I had grown into it) and styled my hair as I always had; with one braid that swept up from the nape of my neck then coiled into a bun. With enough pins, I could wear it like that for days without having to fuss over it, and by letting the hair near my temples hang loose, I created myself a nice little veil to hide behind.
Martya, always the contrast, came running in at the last moment from an early morning visit in the garden with leaves stuck to her hair and a few stains on her dress- clearly, she’d forgotten to change first.
‘Ugh, Martya you smell positively awful,’ Emmerly remarked, scrunching up her face. She would turn sixteen in a month and had given herself airs over that fact. Kohén would probably not be back in time for her birthday, but she didn’t care.
‘You could at least polish your lenses if you’re not going to take the glasses off,’ Elfin agreed.
‘Yes- aren’t you ever going to try at all?’ Lette asked.
Martya strode past them with a poker face on. ‘So you could start talking about me the way you all talk about one another behind each other’s backs?’ She snorted gently, pulling off her hat and tossing it onto her bed, which was beneath mine. She had a red mark embedded into her forehead, and even I had to admit that she did smell like something very strange indeed. ‘No thanks- I’d rather lose obviously, than delude myself into believing that I’m winning something here.’
Lette turned and gave Emmerly an accusing look. ‘What have you been saying about me?!’
‘ME? You’re the one who was giggling with HER when I walked in last night!’ Emmerly snapped back, motioning to Elfin.
A full on bickering fit ensued and I caught Martya’s smug smile as she bent to brush off her skirt.
‘You’re a genius,’ I whispered, and she looked up and touched her nose gently. The door opened behind her and the three angry girls pushed their way out of the room, anxious to get to dinner first so that they could leave first.