Hotea’s voice failed as indignation shook her. Her form wavered and threatened to tatter, but she steadied herself, closed her hand tight about her brother’s arm. He winced but didn’t pull away this time.

The witch looks around the room one more time then leaves too. I stay where I am, flat out under the bed. I am thinking hard, you better believe. No wonder the Tekora is neglecting his other wives. I see he is looking younger. His skin is softer and moister, he is plumper, moving more like a young man. I see that’s how she is buying him, then I think, he’s running out of daughters, he’s going to start on the bondmaids too soon for me. And I think, what odds the Kadda wife doesn’t make me the first one to go? None of us Hinas are going to finish out this bond year. I wait under the bed for a long time, afraid she’s going to come back and sniff me out, but nothing happens. I creep out from under the bed when I hear the first sleepy twitters of the warblers in the willows outside the door, a warning that dawn is close. If I have to spend the rest of my life exiled, I am going down that cliff. Now.

No more this and that and the other. Out. Away. Far away as I can get, fast as I can get there. The last daughter is still sleeping, so is the bondmaid, but she is going to wake soon and start screeching the minute she sees the third daughter is gone. I kick the wedge away and whip out the door into the garden.

The Kadda wife is waiting in the garden for me. I get maybe two steps before she grabs me. I try to jerk loose, but her cold hands are hard and strong as iron chains, and they drain my strength away somehow. It is as if she sucks it out of me. I am scared witless. I think she is going to drink me dry right there. She doesn’t, she pushes me back into the nursery and across it into the hallway. I go without making a sound, I can’t make a sound though I try screaming; something is pulling strings on my legs as if I were a puppet in a holy play. No, an unholy play.