Chapter 3: Fun Fact #1804: I Hate Whispers

Months passed with little or no excitement. Nothing happened. Narreta grew a centimetre taller. Ricco fell into the Tyrbery while fishing and stunk for days afterwards. Maeven changed her hair colour to a bright aqua and chucked a ball at the head of a boy at school after he told her it looked like seaweed. It was, like, a tennis ball, but he still had a bruise the colour of a grape on his forehead for half a week.

Nobody spoke of my Agecoming, and even though I had been awaiting its arrival tersely since the year began, it wasn't until the week before it that suddenly, I started hearing them.

Hearing them, not as if they had never been there, but as if they had multiplied and bred like rabbits, so that I began hearing them in every corner, in every street and marketplace, in every cranny, in every path and square.

Whispers.

In the hallway of the Villa. In the hallway of every house I visited.

They all started with one phrase. A ghostly pair of words looming over my brain at every turn like a dark storm cloud over the horizon. Not all, definitely not all, but many enough to be noticed.

"What if—"

Every adult seemed to say it. Let me say it again, every adult. I found that strange, more than strange. The teenagers of Kaleveh loved nothing more than to gossip, myself seldom included. Yet at the Agecoming of their Chieftess, their lips had been zipped.

Zipped by who? Certainly not themselves.

The adults, though, seemed to have stolen their children's big mouths. If I approached, they would either quieten their voices to a whisper or suddenly seem to be doing anything other than talking, often finding their shoes or the sections of wall behind them to be very interesting. It seemed like a typical nightmare, but it was real. Every bit like a troubling dream, every second the life I was living; even when I asked politely, I was shocked that they would even refuse a Chieftess and so palpably change the subject.

To add insult to injury, the subject transferred to was usually in the form of some weak tea, perhaps to belittle or perhaps to distract. It sounded petty of me, but even though I lived in a tribal village, me and my subjects live in comparable luxury to some of our sister-neighbourhoods. My family treated their people—the people that respected them—well.

The only adult who really spoke to me like usual was Grandma. Preferring to spend so much time with her, though, only introduced me more than ever to the glaring difference between her graceful gait and my clumsy walk, even though my body was lithe and thin. More to the delicate ways she prepared her meals and ate them with a fork and knife when I loved the food so much, I couldn't be bothered to use anything other than my hands. More so, she looked at me strangely, looks I caught often despite a heightened ability to hide the worried glances better than the whispered conversations. They compiled of sympathy that I didn't want or need, sorrow that I didn't understand, and some deeply infuriating concern.

The week dragged on forever, each hour, every minute that I had to listen to those hushed, mingled voices stretching infinitely into eternity.

What if I was one of them? One of the ones who disappeared, never to be spoken of again? The fact that I was an only child, the second-generation Chieftess heir didn't console me much at all. I had cousins, Narreta and Ricco, who were not much younger than me; the leadership could easily pass to them if I was gone. Gone for whatever reason.

-----

That dreaded day finally came in a flurry of excitement. It wasn't so dreaded if I thought hard enough. Not many people disappeared forever from Kaleveh. We were a tight-knit community. Not many people spoke of it, and if they did it was usually of the joyful occasion when they passed from child to adult. It was only the whispers, those whispers that broke out like acne amongst all the adults, that made chills run up my spine every time my Agecoming was mentioned. But I couldn't stop the thoughts from breaking in, from sinking deep into my skin to rattle my bones and let beads of sweat form on my forehead. To make me jerk up in my bed in the middle of the night, scared I would be ousted from my own home.

Our maid, Coralia, woke me an hour before dawn, not that I'd gotten much sleep anyways. She knotted my dark hair into five thick braids which hung down my back like the garlands of a willow tree, pushing into them a feathered headdress studded with beads that was twice the size of my head, then stringing a jewelled chain dangling with precious gems over my forehead. I twisted the braids around my fingers again and again, unable to keep still. Coralia slapped my hand away and I sighed. She wrapped me in a patterned dress of shocking blue to match my eyes, draping a shawl so silvery it looked like moonlight over my shoulders, smearing swirls of dusty red paint under my eyes. As she slid golden hoops through my ears and snapped the gilded cuffs to my arms, I felt like something was snapping into place. The shards of the child creating the mirror of the adult.

Coralia let me look in the floor-length mirror. I couldn't stop myself from wondering—what if this was the last time I stood in this room, looked in this mirror, let Coralia dress me?

I focused on the girl with the lioness's gaze who stared back at me. The Chieftess incarnate.

"Are you ready, Amita? Ready to become an adult?" Coralia interrupted. The only sign of her own anxiousness was her throat bobbing as she swallowed.

As I turned towards the door, I twisted back to give Coralia a small smile. I didn't deign to answer her. She knew the answer.