A Tyranny of Petticoats by Jessica Spotswood Read Free Book Online

glittering snow. I called after her, begging her to come back, but she did not listen.
    I cried. The blizzard howled, threatening to devour me. The shouting returned, and as I tried in vain to find its source, I saw a pair of hands dragging at my hood. I tried to reach for them, to push them away, but my limbs were too numb. The world sharpened and blurred and sharpened again. As it faded away, a pair of faces appeared above me. They were pale, with thick beards and blue eyes.
    Then the world turned dark, and I remembered no more.
    A dim light. Footsteps and fire. Bubbling water. Most of all, warmth — a deep, soaking warmth that wrapped its way around my icy insides.
    My eyes opened.
    Wooden beams lined the ceiling. The glow from a fire lit the walls. I blinked, clearing my eyes, and looked around. A harpoon hung on the wall, and a deerskin covered an old wooden bench. Something bubbled in a pot by the fire, filling the air with rich aromas. It did not smell like anything I was familiar with. A stew, perhaps? Caribou? My eyes went to a wooden wall sculpture that looked like a bare tree with three lines through it.
    I tentatively wriggled my toes and fingers. To my surprise, I could feel all of them. The bed beneath me crunched as I struggled to a sitting position and looked around the tiny room. I saw no sign of my dogs. Instead, a woman stirred a pot in one corner while a
gusak
man in a simple robe sat by a table with his head down.
    The woman saw me stir first. The man at the table was a
gusak
, but this woman looked like me.
    “I’m glad you’re awake, child,” she said. She spoke flawlessly in the Inupiat tongue. “I am Olga.” She nodded to the
gusak
man, who looked up long enough to give her a kindly nod. “My husband, Peter. You’re safe here. Your dogs are resting outside.”
    I could only stare. This woman married a
gusak
?
    When I did not respond, Olga went on. “We are missionaries, from across the sea. We found you on the ice.”
    My pursuers were not the same as the men who came to my village.
    Olga wiped her hands on her apron and came to sit beside me. She put a warm hand against my cheek. I trembled, unsure if I wanted to pull away or linger. “We are a part of a larger community,” she said, nodding at the window, where snow blanketed the world. “We have taken in many orphaned by the traders. My husband and his men heard of what happened to the village farther north. You must be from there.”
    Mother, lying in the snow. Father, lost in the ocean. I closed my eyes and felt the Seal King lift me out of the water, the muzzle of the great Nanuk against my palm. I had followed the falling star, just as the tales said, and the star had led me
here.
    “Why did they burn our village?” I whispered.
    Olga was quiet for a moment. “The world grows smaller,” she finally said. “And small worlds cultivate greed. It is a grievous sin.”
    A great weight pressed against my chest, and I wanted to cry again. I didn’t understand.
    Olga gave me a sad look. “We are not all like them. I am sorry, child, for your loss, and I am sorry for them, for seeing such a small world.”
    Such a small world.
When I was a child, I would spend hours looking out at the sea, asking Father what lay on the other side. I used to think that the ocean went on forever, until it became the sky and entered another realm. My thoughts wavered, confused and lost.
    How did the world become so small?
    Olga nodded at me. “You can stay for as long as you like,” she said kindly. Then she told me to rest, and went back to her pot.
    I lay back down, thinking.
    Olga offered me a rich stew, swimming with chunks of caribou and fat roots. She watched as I ate. Then she and her husband, Peter, turned their backs on me in the night, extinguishing their candles.
    I lay awake for a long time. I still had my harpoon. These
gusaks
did not protect themselves. They were just like my village. Helpless.
    But I continued to lie in bed and did not