Kaye broke into a wide grin at the sight of her sister and the promise of a secret. “What is it? Tell me please!”
Kindra stood over her for a moment, her hands planted firmly on her hips, a haughty smirk playing on her lips. “I’m going to be a warrior. Dad’s going to teach me.”
A giggle bubbled up in Kaye’s throat, and soon she was laughing hard with tears beginning to stream down her face. Kindra looked hurt. “What’s funny?”
“You can’t be a warrior!” Kaye gasped through her merriment, “you’re a girl!”
“So.”
“Soooooo, only boys are warriors.”
Kindra frowned – that did present a problem. But there was a simple enough solution to that. “Then I’ll become a boy.”
“But then I will have to be a boy, because we are twins. I don’t want to be an icky boy… or a warrior.”
This posed yet another problem that Kindra was quick to fix. “Eoin and Trina are twins, and they are a boy and a girl.”
That was a truth Kaye couldn’t argue with. “Ok,” she relented, “let’s make you a boy then.” She chewed her lip for a moment as she tried to figure out how to do such a thing. Kindra was already in boy clothes, and she was already stained with dirt like a boy, so it seemed to Kaye that there was only one thing left to do. “We need to cut your hair.”
“Ok.”
There were no questions asked – Kindra trusted in her sister’s judgment and got a sharp knife before plopping herself down on the dirt floor at Kaye’s feet. Kaye held out a handful of hair and ran the knife across the taunt strands. They fell from her palm like wisps of gold and her eyes welled with tears at the sight of all that beautiful, identical golden hair falling down onto the dusty floor, making her sister into someone different for the first time. With effort, she grabbed another handful, cutting unevenly without meaning to, until she was finished and her sister was left with a head full of miscellaneous short curls.
As Kindra turned and they faced each other, Kaye gave a smile that could not hide her thoughts. “Well… you look like an ugly boy now,” she said and gave Kindra a hug so she wouldn’t see her tears. It was the first cut that separated them from each other, and Kaye already regretted being the one to hold the knife.
*****
“Look at what your daughter has done to herself!” Loria spun Kindra in a quick circle to show her ragged haircut, making the little girl dizzy.
Fennec laughed at the sight of his daughter, her hair flying out in fuzzy curls around her head. “Kindra, what in Aleda were you thinking?” He knelt down and ran a large hand through the mess; she grinned up at his amusement. As long as Fennec wasn’t mad she had nothing to worry about.
“Kaye did it,” Kindra said proudly. “She said only boys could be warriors and that I didn’t look like a boy with long, pretty hair. So she made me look like a boy.”
Fennec gave a hearty laugh at this explanation and rumpled her hair. Loria was not nearly as amused and crossed her arms with a frown, “you look like an ugly girl, that’s what you look like.”
“We will have to fix it,” Fennec agreed, unable to hide his smile.
“And what is this about becoming a warrior?” Loria stared down at her husband.
Fennec’s smile froze and he looked from his wife to his daughter. “Kindra, what did I tell you about secrets?”
“Not to tell anyone,” She recited faithfully, “otherwise it isn’t a secret; its news.”
“Right. So why did you tell Kaye?”
Kindra’s face pulled together in confusion. “Because she’s Kaye.” Why wouldn’t she tell Kaye? Kaye already knew everything, so telling Kaye wasn’t really telling a secret.
Fennec smiled and leaned down further, putting his head against hers and looking at the cyclops eye that formed in the middle of her forehead. “Then why did you tell your mother, silly fish?”
“Oh… opps.”
“Now your mother’s going to make me sleep on the floor like a bad fox,” he said with a wink to them both. Loria probably would make him sleep on the floor, knowing her; she was quite miffed.
“Like a bad rabbit!” Kindra proclaimed and squealed as he attacked her with tickles. She had always thought the long-eared mark on her father’s back looked more like a rabbit than a fox, and had been calling him Rabbit since she first began talking. Her father had taken to calling her Little Fish or Angelfish in return.
Picking her up and swinging her over his shoulder, Fennec gave Loria an apologetic smile while his daughter squealed and squirmed.
*****
“I don’t want her growing up thinking she can be a warrior,” Loria said later the next day. She hadn’t made Fennec sleep on the floor, but she’d been tempted to.
Fennec smiled to her, “I never told her she could be a warrior; she got that into her head all on her own. I just told her I would teach her a few things. It won’t hurt her to know a little self-defense to keep the boys away.” He winked.
“Don’t keep the boys away for too long – no man is going to want to marry someone like her.”
Grabbing his wife around the waist, Fennec pulled Loria in and nibbled on her neck. “When the right boy comes around he won’t let a little self-defense stop him. And it will help keep all those hooligans away – Tom and his friends always pick on her.”
“That’s true,” Loria admitted. “But if she would just make some friends it wouldn’t be a problem. I told you we should have separated them sooner; it wasn’t healthy for Kaye and Kindra to have relied on each other for so long.”
Fennec let go of her waist. “Oh, they will be fine. Kaye’s going to make friends easily enough, and with a little self-defense training Kindra won’t be so shy and clingy. It will all work out.”
His confidence was infective, and Loria reluctantly agreed to self-defense lessons, “so long as she also goes out and tries to make friends.”
“You got it.” Fennec pulled her in for another squeeze and a kiss.
*****
“And I met Susan, and I met Jill, and I met Mary who is a lot older than me but really nice. They can all do magic and they go in trances, and the High Priestess says I will be able to do it soon too,” Kaye explained her first official day of priestess training during dinner that night. There was no table in the tent, so they sat on their cots, Kindra and Kaye’s legs swinging in unison. Kindra was eating silently, sitting as close to Kaye as possible; she looked less than thrilled at the news of Kaye’s new friends.
“What about you Kindra, what did you do today?” Fennec asked. She was usually just as chatty as her sister, finishing each other’s sentences and looking at each other with smiles as they related their day’s adventures.
Kindra sighed and picked at her food. Her hair had calmed down after her mother had fixed the trim Kaye had given her, and it curled around her ears and neck and forehead like a cap. “I helped mom make dinner, and I picked some raspberries. Oh! When I was on my way back with the berries Tommy said I looked like a boy and I said thank you and he gave me a funny look and I threw a berry at him and he chased me and I got inside just before he caught me.” She was grinning by this point in the story before she remembered what happened, “but I spilled the berries while I was running.”
“Which is why we have no dessert tonight,” Loria pointed out.
“Which is why we have no dessert tonight,” Kindra repeated with a frown and stopped swinging her legs.
“We can pick raspberries tomorrow!” Kaye exclaimed. She loved picking raspberries – she could eat them while she worked and always came home with bright red lips and fingers.
Kindra immediately brightened at the thought of picking berries with Kaye, but her mother cut off her cheer.
“You have to go to priestess training again tomorrow, Kaye. You won’t have time to pick raspberries.”
“Oh,” both twins said together, looking down at their still legs and frowning. Fennec felt sorry for Kindra.
“How about you come watch me at practice tomorrow Kindra? You can make friends with some of the other girls, and afterwards I can teach you a few things.” He raised his eyebrows and took a bite, watching Kindra’s face turn into a hesitant smile again. She looked quickly to Kaye, who still seemed a bit down, and nodded.
“Ok, that sounds good.”
*****
Short legs kicked happily against a rock as Kindra cheered. Her father was helping train some of the youngest boys – specifically William Bayn, mean-spirited eleven year old that he was – and had just taught him a lesson that looked as if it would hurt for days to come. An excellent reminder not to rush into an attack, but for Kindra just another reason to worship her father. Fennec would always be there to protect her from the bullies.
With one last, good cheer, Kindra settled back onto her rock chair and took to watching some of the other training matches. The older, more experienced warriors gave the best shows, of course, swinging their weapons in wide arcs and deflecting attacks gracefully. She felt herself drawn to watch the younger warriors though, trying to learn with them as she watched them repeat the same motions over and over again. She was impatient to begin herself.
As the training leader, Wolf, called a break Kindra finally hopped off of her rock and meandered through the exiting warriors to find her father. She came across Tom, Will, and the rest of their friends, and giggled to see Will limping after his lesson from her father. “They are going to call you Mockingbird if you ever make it,” she taunted him with a smile, “you dive head-first and end up getting hurt in turn.”
“Well at least I don’t look like I’ve been mauled by a bear,” he spat back. Everyone laughed and Kindra fumed.
“I’m going to be a warrior,” she said, voice haughty, “and I didn’t want my hair getting in the way like yours does.” She stuck out her tongue and immediately regretted it as the future warrior barreled into her and they both fell to the ground. Blood bloomed across her taste buds as she bit her tongue, and tears rimmed her eyes, but for Eoin she was going to fight back her hardest. So she bucked and squirmed and eventually twisted herself into a position to bite his arm until he let go. Scrambling up, Kindra smiled with redlined teeth – she’d drawn blood.
“William Bayn!” one of the older warriors yelled across the field as he caught the tail end of the scuffle.
“Kindra Odion!” came from the opposite end of the field, and she immediately stopped smiling. That had been her father, and he had not sounded pleased.
“S/he did it!” They chimed in unison.
“You know better than to attack a girl, even if she did start it,” Petoskey said, and he fully believed she had started it. Kindra was constantly harassing the five friends, and they her.
“But she’s not a girl; she’s Kindra!”
“Much as you all try to ignore the fact, Kindra is indeed a girl and needs to learn to stay away from the trainees during practice.” He turned his eye on her and she looked shocked at the accusation in his voice.
“I juth came to wath my dad!” she protested around her swollen tongue and glared at the five friends who were ruining her chances to practice.
The warrior sighed. “Well you’ve watched, now back home with you. Shoo!”
Kindra relented and began to slowly drag her feet home. She smiled, however, as she heard that all five of them would be punished. Standing by and letting your friend beat up a girl was not warrior-like.
*****
Kindra got just out of sight before the pain in her swollen tongue overtook her and she began crying. Warriors didn’t cry, but she was far from being a warrior yet. She was just wiping off her face when her father came into view, and she banished the signs of her cry and jogged over to him.
“There’s my Little Fish,” he scooped her up and planted her on a hip despite her age. “I was afraid you’d been hurt in that little scuffle.”
Kindra grinned, the faint pink of her teeth the only outward sign of what had happened. Her tongue still smarted, but she ignored it until she spoke. “Will you theeth me now?”
“Will I what?” Fennec teased, but grabbed her chin with a big hand. “Out with it, Little Fish.”
Obligingly, Kindra stuck out her tongue, which was puffy and had a row of red tooth-marks across the top.
“Ouch, it looks like that hurts.”
“Noth ath much ath Will’th arm,” she grinned.
“Oh, you evil little fish,” Fennec said with his own grin. “Not a word to your mother now; she’ll skin me alive if she finds out you’ve been scrapping with the older boys. And then you won’t be able to come to my practices anymore.”
“Ok.” Kindra promised and he sat her back on the ground so they could walk home together.