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Quynh squeezes Andromache’s hand, marveling at the feeling of her long capable fingers in her own.
She looks out at the water of Cass Lake, of the sun balanced just on the horizon. Just a few years ago this would have been intolerable to her, water as far as the eye can see. Now, she sighs and is glad that she feels no spikes of anger or terror at such a view.
It’s been a long road back to this, to sitting around the fire with Andromache and Yusuf and Nicolo, to feeling like she knows her brothers, knows her love, to feeling like she knows herself. She could not have done it without Nile’s steady optimism and Booker’s willingness to indulge her darkest humors. She could not have done without their belief in her value, despite the rage, the violence, the malice she felt towards them, towards all of them.
They know her recent past. They know her trauma.
A few months ago, a late night in a tent, curled around Nile, Quynh had needled at her young sister until Nile relayed the stories she’d heard from Nicolo and Yusuf and Andromache about her. Quynh was amused and delighted -- “a pit viper in a fight!” -- Yusuf always did have a way with words -- and she was glad, that they spoke of her with such love, still, after so many years.
They have been so vulnerable with her in the years since her return, so willing to embrace her at her worst. She wants to be vulnerable to them in return.
Only Andromache knows what she is about to say.
“I have never told you of my very first death,” she says slowly.
“Not even to…?” Nile tilts her head in Yusuf and Nicolo’s direction.
“No,” Nicolo says with that slight smile on his lips, “she has always claimed it was irrelevant.”
“It may still be irrelevant,” she replies, “but I would like to share it with you all the same.”
She sees four heads bob eagerly, senses the slight dip of Andromache’s chin. She closes her eyes and begins.
“What must you know of life in the Red River Delta at that time? You must know that my parents were wealthy and powerful. You must know that I learned to read and write and fight alongside my brothers. You must know that I was married to a man of average appearance, a man I thought was a bore, but our parents arranged for and approved of the match. I had, to my own eyes and everyone else’s, a fairly average, comfortable life.”
Quynh takes her son’s hands in hers and presses a kiss to his forehead. “I’m going away,” she explains to his wide, dark eyes, “so that I can bring your brother or sister into the world.” She sees his eyes dart to her rounded belly and then back to her face. He nods. Only seven years old, but smart and dutiful already. “I can’t wait for you to show me all that you’ve learned when I return.” He nods again and wraps his little arms around her neck and she holds him close and breathes him in. She smells the gardens the tang of sweat from playing with the other children his age and dodging his minders. It may no longer be the sweet milk scent he wore as a babe, but it is comforting to her just the same.
And then, with a sharp word from her own mother, standing in the doorway, Quynh is whisked away to her confinement.
She hates this part, hates not being able to do anything except for waiting.
And then, when it begins, pain. Wetness and stickiness between her thighs. Women palming her belly and peering between her legs.
She pants and pushes, pants, pushes, pants, pushes pushes pushes.
With a shout, she feels a burst between her thighs, something slimy slithering out of her.
There are cheers in the room. She should be happy. She should be proud. She should celebrate with the other women. Quyhn closes her eyes. She feels woozy, overwhelmed. She feels another twist of pain, another gush between her legs.
The voices around her seem to shift: sharper, somehow, or worried, maybe. It all feels distant, like beyond a paper screen, shadows on the wall…
There is cloth over her face.
Quynh bats it away, sits up, looks around.
She shivers.
She is alone.
The room is starkly furnished. Cold. Not where she spent her confinement. Not where she gave birth.
Birth.
She glances down at herself and her shift is soaked brown with blood, smeared with it.
She has spent enough time in the confinement rooms to know that women whose shifts look like this after giving birth do not survive.
And her stomach.
It is as flat as the day she left home for battle, flat as the day she was wed.
She should hurt, hurt everywhere, but especially between her legs. She does not. Nor do her breasts ache and prickle with their coming milk.
This must be a dream.
She loses the babe and then she loses everything else in rapid succession.
Nobody will meet her eye. She hears whispers of “unnatural” swirl in her wake as she walks the same paths she has since childhood.
Still, she cannot believe it at first when her husband pushes her into the back of a cart bound for the mountains and deposits her son next to her.
They are sent away from everything they have ever known, from family and friends, from the comforts and pleasures of their lives.
The cart driver deposits them two days later in front of a ramshackle, one room dwelling. Quynh decides it is a kindness, however small, that she does not have to build them a place to live out of nothing.
The first years they spend in that small, single room are some of the hardest of her life. Her hands dry and crack and bleed each day from the labor of doing everything they need to survive. By the time she wakes each morning, they are healed.
Somehow she teaches her son to read and to do numbers. Somehow they do not starve.
Years pass.
At ten he sneaks off and learns how to weave baskets from the daughter of their nearest neighbor.
At eleven, Quynh tries to teach him to fight with staff and blade and bow. He hates it and has no talent for it. Within six months, she gives up.
At thirteen, he begins taking his baskets and goods to the market. He wakes before dawn to begin his two hour walk, returns after sunset with the goods he has bartered for and a little coin.
At fifteen, he sells a basket to the daughter of a local chief and falls in love. Quynh is sure she is just as beautiful as he says, but she also sees the glint of opportunity in his eyes. His early memories are scant, but he can still recall a life of tile floors and paper screens, of the early evening breeze coming off the delta, of meals that just appeared before him at the table.
He returns to the market again and again with hope in his heart. The girl never acknowledges him again.
He asks, in his adolescent despair, “Will I ever find anyone to love me?” And then he turns and looks his mother in her eyes, a realization dawning. “Will you ever find someone?”
“You and I,” she says, “are enough on our own. We do not need another person to live long, happy lives.”
Quynh does not tell him of the fierce and beautiful warrior woman who haunts her dreams.
At eighteen, he weds the girl he has known since their childhood spent sneaking off to weave baskets together.
They are happy, settled, content together. Complete.
Quynh still dreams of the warrior woman. Years and years and years of dreams.
She realizes those words of comfort for her son were a lie. Perhaps they are not meant to be alone. Perhaps this was never the life she was meant to live.
So she leaves, in the middle of the night, and hopes that one day, far from the lush water of her delta and the rugged green of her mountains, she will find the other half of her soul.
As she finishes, Andromache squeezes her hand, presses a kiss to the tender spot behind her ear. There is grey at Andromache’s temples now, but she is just as beautiful as the first time Quynh saw her in a dream.
Yusuf’s soft, “Quynh,” draws her out of Andromache’s gravity. She looks over the fire to him, sees his creased eyebrows. “What was his name, your son?”
Quynh hears Booker and Nile’s hums of agreement. She sees their expectant eyes. Andromache squeezes her hand once more.
She feels the words stick in her throat.
She is not ashamed of this, just that they are all so young, even Yusuf and Nicolo, and they do not, they cannot begin to--
“You do not remember,” says Nicolo, gently. She catches his eyes, eyes that have always been so open to her, but can be so cold to the rest of the world. Out of all of them, of course it would be Nicolo who understands.
She nods. “The deep took much of what time has not.”