Page 161 of Mates for the Raskarrans #1-6

CHAPTER EIGHT

Carrie

S hortly after breakfast, Calran and Grace head out into the forest. Calran carries a tent and a single bag over his broad shoulders.

Grace has her own, much smaller pack. She hugs Molly tight before she leaves, exchanging a few quiet words with her.

Molly holds up with impressive brightness until after Grace and Calran are out of sight, when her shoulders droop, her whole body sagging. Khadija puts an arm round her shoulder.

“They’ll be back soon,” she says.

“I know,” Molly says. “But… They aren’t going to want me getting in their way, are they?”

It’s a shift from her previous attitude of wanting to live by herself. The day Molly spent on her own outside the village has obviously convinced her that she doesn’t really want that kind of independence after all.

Khadija, never one to sugarcoat things, says, “I don’t know what arrangement is going to be the most suitable for everyone. But you aren’t in anyone’s way, Molly. There will be a solution.”

Molly blinks, looking on the verge of tears. Lorna comes over to her, a gentle smile on her face.

“So, I thought we could do lessons outside today,” she says. “We haven’t got long until the big rains come, and we should make the most of being able to be outdoors. We’ll all be going stir crazy in a month’s time. Will you help me carry out the slates and chalks?”

The Molly of a week ago would have turned her nose up at this, but now she just nods, swiping aggressively at her eyes as if angry at them for leaking.

“Everyone else okay?” Liv asks, looking to me, Hannah, Mattie. “Didn’t sleep too terribly, I hope?”

I shake my head. I might have gone to sleep late, but when I returned to my bed after sitting with Endzoh, it didn’t take me long to drop off, and I slept right through to morning. I feel strangely invigorated.

Mattie, on the other hand, looks like she’s been to the beach and back, her eyes dark, her whole posture heavy with exhaustion. Hannah’s somewhere in the middle, tired, but not unduly so.

“Go back to bed if you need to,” Liv says, offering a sympathetic smile.

But Mattie shakes her head. “May as well come to the lessons. I’ll nap after lunch.”

We all head over to the fire. It’s a balmy day, warm but not close to hot.

So, in raskarran terms, it’s a bit chilly.

But to us girls, it’s perfect, and we get comfortable in the sunshine, turning our faces up to the sky, letting the heat soak into us.

Molly and Lorna hand out the slates and chalks, then Lorna sits herself at the head of the group and talks us through the last few letters of the alphabet.

We practise writing them out in upper and lower case a few times, then Lorna grins and declares us ready to try some words.

“We should start with names,” Lorna says. “Names have lots of variant spellings, you can pretty much decide how you want to spell them, really, but I can help you with the most common spelling if you want? Or you can just write it a few different ways and decide which you like the look of most?”

I want to spell mine properly, so I wave Lorna over. She sits beside me.

“Give it a go, then,” she says, grinning.

I hesitate, unsure whether it would be ‘c’ or ‘k’ to start. In the end, I write ‘care’.

“That actually says ‘care’,” Lorna says. “There’s a rule I probably should have gone through first about double letters. You need one in the middle, otherwise the ‘e’ on the end changes the pronunciation of the ‘a’.”

I give her an unimpressed look. Every time I start to think I’m finally going to have a reliable way of communicating with the others, Lorna pulls out some rule that makes it sound like I’m never going to be able to get the hang of writing.

‘Carre’, I write, showing it to her.

“Better.” I sense the ‘but’ before she says it. “But you need the ‘e’ at the end to make the long ‘ee’ sound, rather than ‘eh’, as it would like that.”

I scrawl another ‘e’ on the end.

“That would do it. Or, if you prefer…”

She writes on my slate, her handwriting so much more fluent and neat than my own.

Carrie.

“When it’s ‘ie’ it makes an ‘ee’ sound, when its ‘ei’ it makes an ‘eye’ sound,” she says, in the sing song tone I can imagine some upper tier school teacher used when she was five and learning this stuff. I give her another unimpressed look, and she laughs.

“I know, it’s ridiculous. And there are always loads of exceptions, anyway.

Don’t worry about any of that, though. You’re not writing novels.

The only thing that matters is that someone else can interpret what you write.

We can work on proper spelling later, if anyone even cares.

” She gives me a shy smile. “It’s more important that you get your voice back. ”

My eyes get a little watery. I want to say thank you, but I can’t remember what letters make the ‘th’ sound. So instead, I write a quick, three letter word on my slate and hold it up to her.

Hug

Lorna grins, then holds her arms out.

“See,” she says, as we embrace. “We can figure this out.” She sits back, but grips my hand. “I spoke to Shemza.”

My throat goes a little tighter at this, but I nod, awaiting his verdict.

“He doesn’t think it’s likely that there’s anything wrong physically.

” She’s careful how she says it, not wanting to hurt my feelings, but it’s a conclusion I’ve come to on my own.

“He says you can pop over today any time and he can have a look, just to be sure.” Her expression goes soft.

“I warned him you might not be too pleased if he tells you there’s nothing wrong.

He looked at me like I was confused and told me that there had to be something wrong for your voice to stop working.

I clarified about it not being so nice to be told something’s all in your head, like it’s not really real.

He said - how did he put it? They’ve got a funny way of talking.

He said: ‘Ills of the headspace are just as real as ills of the body. Why would they be otherwise?’ I didn’t bother trying to explain what it can be like to go to a doctor where we come from. ”

I think of the medic who dealt with Mom when I took her to see about her eyes.

The disinterested shrug. The look of ‘what else do you expect?’ As if blindness was just an inevitable part of living past thirty-five.

As a bottom tier worker, it would never have occurred to me to go to the doctors for a problem with my mind.

I scrub my slate clean and write Lorna another message.

How fix

“We’ll go and see him when he’s done getting everyone unpacked,” Lorna says.

She gives me another encouraging smile before heading off to help the others write their names.

We practise writing most of the morning.

When the others start to lose steam, setting their slates down on the floor as they drift into groups of conversation, I keep hold of mine.

At first, I keep practising, but my brain starts to hurt with it after a while, so I wipe my slate clean, turning my attention to the rest of the group.

I spot Ahnjas a little separate from everyone else, his face pressed close to one of the log benches.

I’m sure Lorna has half an eye on him, but I shuffle over just in case, tickling at his chubby little sides to get his attention.

He grins up at me, then puts his fingers to his lips and gives me the loudest - and most unnecessary - shush.

I pull a face at him, and he presses his hands to his mouth to stop himself giggling.

When he calms down, he turns back to the log and points to a little insect that’s sitting atop it.

In the concrete environment of the bottom tier, we rarely had to deal with bugs outside of flies and ants.

There certainly weren’t any monsters as long as your arm with thousands of legs, like the creepy jorlas that come out of the forest far too regularly for my taste.

Liv and Sally had to give most of us words for the different kinds of creatures, because we’d just never come across them before.

This one that Ahnjas has found is a beetle, too small to be shudder-inducing.

Ahnjas studies it with fascination, quiet as a hunter.

I look at it, too, and for all it’s still a bit gross with its many jointed legs and strange pincers at the front of its body, it’s a beautiful pearlescent purple colour, the outer casing shiny and smooth.

It reminds me of the fabrics we used in the dressmaker’s - all those beautiful, shimmering colours we worked with.

I tap Ahnjas’ arm and hold up my slate. He looks confused for a moment, but toddles away to fetch his own. When he returns, I point to the beetle, then point to the slate. When he doesn’t appear to understand, I take a sip of breath.

“Draw,” I say, the word slipping out on a rush of air, barely loud enough for me to hear it. But Ahnjas grins, pressing his face close to the beetle for a moment before turning to his slate and starting to draw.

I draw it, too, tracing the shape of its body.

We had to draw plans for our designs in the dressmaker’s, and it was always my favourite part of the process - sketching out skirts and detailing bodices, trying to bring to life the vision Ms Isserman’s clients had.

We never saw the clients. Not to hear their visions or to see their reactions to the finished product.

No upper tier girls would come to a dressmakers in the bottom tier.

Ms Isserman had a separate boutique for that.

I had to work from other images and descriptions Ms Isserman recorded.

But I liked that. It was like a puzzle, pulling together lots of different elements into one coherent and beautiful design.