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i.
Her father bought her mother from a Lysene pillow house, they say, because he was bewitched by her heart-shaped face. For her beauty she received a luxuriously embroidered tunic, five gold bangles, and a daughter with red eyes.
Melony is protected from the most common abuses of slaves, but gets no gentle treatment otherwise. She forces herself not to cower under her father's sharp purple gaze, not to duck out of his path and into the light of the courtyard.
His mouth is moving. She blinks, and swallows, and tries to understand the High Valyrian coming from his lips. "Can’t you speak, girl?”
That much she understands. "Yes, my lord."
“I asked who hurt you.” She blinks again. She is a bee born in winter. There is no pollen to drink, no honey to dip her toes into. “Your nose,” he snaps. She touches a pale finger to her nostrils, and it comes away awash with crimson.
“Oh,” she says.
“Whoever struck you shall be punished.” It is not fatherly concern, she realises. Someone has damaged his property. He will want compensation. He waits, growing more agitated by the second.
"The gods," she answers, in her bastard Valyrian. "It happens to me sometimes, the blood."
He mutters a curse, though she is not sure why.
ii.
One day Melony is polishing a brass bowl and catches sight of her eyes for the first time. She looks at the master, and looks at her mother, and she understands.
She asks if her true father is in Lys, and her mother only closes her green eyes, stilling unshed tears. When she opens them again, they seem to be different colours, but then she blinks and the strange illusion is gone.
iii.
The women's mourning songs come to a crescendo. A wailing, mewling crescendo. The smell grows stronger with each hour: sweat, moonblood, milk, urine, fear. There is a way out, when a city is sacked. Her mother assures her of that in even tones. A way out of this. Of being sold, and bought, and sold, and bought.
The chaos continues outside the tent, and inside too— women crying, squabbling over their few salvaged possessions, even a girl keening with labour pains. The seconds creep by, shadows moving very slowly across the blazing earth.
Melony closes her eyes and tries to sleep. A dry breeze flows in, peters out. The song of the desert. The beat of her heart. To live a slave, or to die gutted like a fish, left to bleed out and stain the sands. A sudden wind crashes into the tent, and they groan in relief from the heat. Grains of sand trickle through the canvas flap.
Guards stand awkwardly amongst the rabble of women. They inspect teeth, breasts, make note of ages, size, race, marital status. I am valuable, she realises. A hundred slaves propelled their sails toward her city. A hundred virgins will fill their hull home. Such power we have.
There is a way out. Her mother bears a glistening knife in the folds of her ripped tunic. It is fearsome. It looks cold, though it bears the blood of some unwitting soldier. Clammy, congealed blood. Melony imagines it slicing cleanly across her throat. She also imagines it dull, clumsy, a painful hacking at the cords of her neck and spine.
There is a way out, but it must be now.
She looks at the faces around her, the captive women who'd comforted her when she was marched into camp as loot. Teokyna with her babe, in all her buxom beauty, sold to an old commander. "It will not be so bad," she says cheerfully, counselling Melony. "If you end up with a powerful man, it is not so bad. When he gets defeated, or dies, you'll be given to another powerful man. Food, water, shelter, protection. Give him a son, and you'll get jewels. That's how you make a comfortable life."
Her mother rebukes Teokyna, forbidding her speak to her daughter, and the entire tent tenses. These are the women who envy her mother's beauty, gossipers who say her mother must bathe in blood to keep her master's attention.
Teokyna rolls her eyes, though Melony can see the fear frozen on her face. "I remember when you washed up in the pillow house, haughty and big with child. See how far that got you."
"Quiet," a guard barks.
Melony glances at her mother in confusion, but her mother stares ahead with carefully restrained fury.
"Sorceress," Teokyna mutters.
Abruptly her mother turns and directs a curse at Teokyna— not a vulgar exclamation, but a calm, deliberate chant of words, in a tongue Melony does not understand.
She huddles with the women in the corner. Lykessa barely watches the growing conflict, catatonic in her grief. She has been awarded to her husband's killer as a war prize. Uruze comforts her, a former priestess of the red god, pale and stoic with her own daughters about her. Soldiers took her idols and urinated on them, lest she pray to her fire god for deliverance or revenge. Only Megdeza seems unfazed by the quarrel, tepid as a mountain lake. Megdeza, who had been consort of the triarch, reduced to a soldiers' plaything. She has done her crying and come out the other side, unmoved, unfeeling. How a woman should be.
Megdeza meets her gaze now, seeming to say: There is no life beyond this. You will live, yes, but you will also die.
Outside the tent, the fighting is drawing to a close. It must be now. Melony looks for her mother and her knife, but a group of guards have dragged her away.
iv.
do you see?
how the candle wanes as the moon waxes
do you feel its bud red hot
(white cold?)
do you see?
you are a bee born in winter
(not the apis with honey-dipped toes).
you are a girl with embers for eyes
(nursed on the half-ripe sorrow of a slave)
do you see?
how the pale moon cries alone in her sky
for the moon is caged
(and second to the sun)?
do you see?
Her mother sings it every night in the dark depths of the ship, when Melony is quaking with sobs and panic, when the pitch blackness threatens to consume her whole. Sometimes Melony sings it to her mother, on nights when she tosses and whispers Bittersteel in the Common Tongue. Melony does not understand what the word means, why it inspires such fear in her mother.
The lullaby follows her far beyond the blinding sun of the slave market. She blinks, and swallows, and strips its beat from her heart. Melony is not sure she can forget it, but vows she will try.
v.
She is popular in the temple, not for any deep reason, but because she is the girl with embers for eyes. She is the sorceress's daughter. There are men who venerate her body, though she is but little, believing her favoured by R'hllor himself. There are those who take turns trying to dim her fire, succeeding only in blackening her, making her blue at the edges, painting her face with vibrant purple bruises. They take and take and take until she fights them off with the little magic her mother taught her.
vi.
Soon she bleeds for the first time, and her belly grows with the child of a priest, and then another, and another. But she never carries one to term. Blood turns her thighs red, and she does not know if they will ever be white again. The women say she is lucky to be so coveted, and she starts to accept the fertility draughts they press in her palms.
Give them sons, Teokyna had said. That's how you make a comfortable life.
But Melony's mother never said that. It was always, you have fire in your veins, you will rise beyond this. You have magic in your blood.
Teokyna seems to have the right of it. This is simply the way of her life, and her mother's life, and her mother's mother before her (all nursed on the half-ripe sorrow of a slave).
Melony prays she never has a daughter.
vii.
She sees an angry man in the fires, her champion. She forces herself not to cower under his steely blue gaze, forces herself not to look away from the flames.
His mouth is moving. She blinks, and swallows, and tries to understand the foreign words coming from his lips. The language her mother had spoken. She squints, and sounds out the shapes his mouth is making. “I asked who hurt you.”
She is not Melony, not anymore. Who could hurt her? But blood is leaking from her nose, her mouth, her eyes.
“Seek me and I vow,” he says, “Whoever would harm you shall die by my sword.”
viii.
Her god of a husband burns, and burns, and burns, until she bleeds and grows heavy with fire, and pushes out shadows, and the blood turns black with smoke and ash, and she does not know if there will be anything left of her.
Good, the priests say. A sign, they nod, praising her skill.
Good, she agrees. You have fire in your veins. You have magic in your blood.
ix.
She dreams of a white face, a wooden face, a frightening set of bleeding red eyes, a gaping mouth. A man's long, bedraggled head. Daughter, he says. A raven in a gnarled tree, a raven pierced through the eye. Daughter. White hair, white skin, red eyes. White. Red. White, red, blood, snow, ice—
She forces the nightmare away. She dreams instead that her champion moves within her, and there is a pleasant warm trickle between her legs. This has never happened before. She wonders if her moonblood has started — but when she glances at the place where his manhood stretches her, there is no blood.
(Is it the apis with honey-dipped toes?)
The moon must wane if the candle is to wax, that much she knows. But tonight she swells and arches like the hunter's bow, and hums beneath his rough fingers like the pluckings of a lyre.
x.
They will call her the red woman. They will cower, they will whisper, and she will be the cruel mistress they want, a red serpent slithering through their noble kingdom, infecting the very ground with her fanatic fire.
She has seen cruelty. Girls trained as bedslaves before their flowerings, before they have even a bud on their chest. Children walking barefoot in the market, swollen with their master's children, suckling children at their dirty breasts. Virgins as young as seven paraded to an emperor's tomb and then cut at the throat so they might pleasure him in the afterlife. Concubines passed around armies for failing to please their owners, then dragged behind chariots on the hot stones, until death welcomes them with cool, quiet arms.
She has seen fanaticism — slaves trapped alive between bricks in the Black Walls, food for the old Valyrian gods, slaves thrown in the furnace for stealing one drop of a god's libation. Little noble infants fed to dogs for not having violet eyes, their tiny bodies left broken and scattered in the street. And there are other things her tongue cannot give voice to, images her mind cannot make sense of.
A woman named Shiera, sold to the mines. She clings to the memory of her mismatched eyes, the lullaby, wonders if she's still alive.
Death on a pyre is clean and honourable. R'hllor is a merciful and generous god. For understanding the truth, they will condemn her as the red woman. Not the girl with embers in her eyes. Not a honeybee, not the black apis, or the pale, caged moon.
She steps toward the image, eager to forget.