The Fire Seer by Amy Raby Read Free Book Online Page A

was she so awful at this? At the temple, when she’d practiced the individual components of writing, it hadn’t been so bad. She could form letters readily enough, she could spell words, and she could compose sentences—as long as she dealt with only the one task at a time. When she put them all together, she was hopeless, overwhelmed. Many of her farmer-caste peers had similar struggles. She felt sick inside. Mandir had been right the day she’d first met him. She wasn’t cut out for Coalition work.
    She flicked a bit of clay off her palm and stared resentfully at her worn, callused hands. She might have shed the telltale isu Ikkarum from her name, but the marks of hard use she could not remove. They told the truth of her humble origins. They would inform everyone she ever met that she didn’t deserve to wear the green and silver. She should be out in the fields digging in the dirt, or serving as the latest fuck toy for some ruling-caste princeling who’d wearied of his shared wife, to be set aside when he was done with her, perhaps with a pittance of copper sticks as a consolation prize.
    Taya brushed away the tears that welled at the corners of her eyes. She was not going to fail at this. She wasn’t . She would finish this if it took her all night. She took up the stylus and began, laboriously, to write.
    Mandir sauntered in through the courtyard door, looking refreshed, as if he’d taken a nap. He looked around for Taya and spotted her at the table. “Aren’t you finished yet? What’s taking so long?”
    “Get out,” Taya snapped, not in any kind of mood to deal with Mandir. She placed a protective arm around the tablet she was working on, to block him from seeing it.
    “What are you writing, an epic?” Mandir picked up the first tablet, which she’d already filled, and said, “Oh, you just started.”
    “I’ve been working on this for hours, bollhead.”
    “Look, you can’t have been working very hard, and I don’t want to sit around all afternoon. Have you felt the change in the air? There’s a storm coming.”
    “If you want me to finish quickly, leave me alone.” Taya glanced out the window. It was still sunny out, but Mandir was right: the air did feel different. It was too humid, too still, like the air had been crammed into too small a space and was ready to burst.
    “Maybe I can help you,” said Mandir.
    “No. Just leave.” The last thing Taya wanted was to let him see her slow, childlike writing. He would pounce on it and make fun of her. He always had.
    “Why should you have to do this yourself? We’re a team.”
    “Writing is a one-person job,” said Taya. “Your job is just to protect me.”
    “Protect and advise,” Mandir corrected.
    “If this is what constitutes your advice, I’ve had enough of it.”
    Mandir folded his arms. “So far I’ve been nice to you, Taya. If you’d like that to change, provoke me some more.”
    Taya sighed. “Please, let me work in peace.”
    Mandir’s brow furrowed. He peered closely at the tablet he’d picked up, then at the half-completed tablet in front of Taya, then at Taya’s clay-stained hands and the weary stoop of her shoulders. His face softened. “Have you really been working all this time?”
    Taya held her tongue. There was nothing she could say that would not condemn her. She was either lazy or she was stupid. And Mandir was too astute not to have worked out which one it was. She glared at him, wordlessly daring him to mock her. If he so much as laughed, she was ready to set him on fire like the jackal had done to that poor boy in the mud.
    Mandir sat down at the table and beckoned for the tablet and stylus. “Hand those over.”
    Unsure of his intentions, Taya shook her head.
    “Do you want to get this done or not? Quit balking, and give them here .”
    Taya obeyed, responding more to his tone of voice than to his words, and then berated herself for having done so.
    Mandir picked up the stylus and turned the tablet so