The Chosen One (The First Book)

Chapter 33

My dear Aurelia,

I do not know how to start these letters. Every time I try, I think there must be something important I should tell you, and then I remember that you are the one who used to come home muddy and tell me every detail of a day that had nothing important in it.

So I will tell you what happened here.

The old hen is dead. I know you hated that bird.

The roof is the same. Do not send anybody about it. The black pot sits under it and does the job. I have got used to the noise.

Your room is strange without you. I have not touched the things on your table. I know you told me not to keep it for you as though you were coming home tomorrow. I am doing it anyway.

I hope they are feeding you properly. If they are not, steal bread.

I am serious.

You have never been good at pretending you are not hungry.

Have you been rude to anyone? You will have been, and you will not have noticed, so ask somebody.

I know you are probably laughing at me now. You always did that when I worried about things you had already decided were not worth worrying about.

People here still talk about the Selection. I tell them there is nothing to tell.

There is.

You are there.

That is enough for me.

I heard from Mrs. Bell that they had started choosing the girls. I told her she should stop asking me questions about something she knows I cannot possibly know. She said she only wanted to know whether you were happy. I told her I had no idea.

That is the part I did not like saying.

I do not know if you are happy there.

I do not know if you are sleeping.

I do not know if you are eating enough.

I do not know whether you have found anyone you like, or anyone you cannot stand, or whether you are sitting in some enormous room somewhere wishing you were home.

I hope you are not wishing that too much. Not because I do not want you home. You know I do. I just do not want you to spend all your time looking backward.

I am not going to ask which of them you like. You would not tell me, and I would only get half of it.

And Aurelia, if they make you feel small, do not believe them.

I know you. I have watched you come home with blood on your hands and tell me it was only a rabbit. I have watched you carry more wood than you could lift because you would rather hurt your back than ask for help. I have watched you sit at the table counting our flour as though you could make the numbers change by looking at them long enough.

You are not helpless just because everyone around you has more than we do. Do not forget that.

And eat. I mean it. You get quiet when you are hungry. You always have.

Write to me when you can.

I know you will not tell me if anything is wrong. You never do.

You did not tell me about your arm until I saw it. You were bleeding through your sleeve while you told me it was nothing.

Tell me if it rained. Tell me what you had for breakfast. Tell me whether you found the bread too sweet.

I would rather know that than anything else.

I miss you,

Mother.

Then, underneath, in the same hand, smaller.

She made me write it out twice. The first time she said it sounded like she was too worried. She stood over me for the second one.

She tells everyone. She told the tax man.

Write back, or she will ask me every week whether anything has come. She asks on her way past the house, so I have to stop what I am doing.

I read it again.

Then again. Then I went back and read only the middle of it, then the whole thing from the top, then the last four lines twice over.

After a while, the letters started to go soft at the edges. I could not tell whether that was from staring at one piece of paper for hours, or from what was standing in my eyes, and I did not look into it any further than that.

The old hen. That bird went for my ankles every morning of my life from the time I was five.

I asked to eat it twice. Both times my mother said it was still laying, in the voice she uses when a thing is settled, and both times she was right.

It had been dead two weeks by now, probably. She wrote it down as news.

She knew exactly what it would do to me, from that far off, without being able to see my face.

She had no idea what I had been doing for seven days. She is defending a girl she has not seen since the morning I got into that wagon.

She is doing it out loud, in front of a woman who took her worry out of it and put it back in twice.

⸻

I did not go down to dinner.

I heard it happen. The corridor filled and emptied, the way it does.

Somebody knocked, twice, not hard. I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and did not answer.

After a while, whoever it was went away.

The light went out of the window. The room went blue, then black. I lit the candle and went on reading a letter I could have recited by then.

I hope they are feeding you properly. If they are not, steal bread.

I am serious.

My stomach went off like a badly shut door.

I laughed.

Out loud, in an empty room, for the first time in a week, at a joke my mother did not know she was making, from the other end of the kingdom, days after she made it.

⸻

I found the kitchens by going down until the stairs stopped and then following the warm air.

I have never been down there. It is a different building under the same roof. Low ceilings, stone worn into dips in the middle of every step, everything in it built for people who come through carrying something with both hands.

There was nobody in the big room. The fire had been drafted for the night. The heat coming off it was the first honest heat I have felt in this place.

Three loaves out on the board under a cloth. Cheese in the cold cupboard. A bowl of apples going soft at the bottom.

I took bread. I took a piece of cheese about the size of my palm. I took two apples and put one back.

There was enough food in that room to feed my whole village for a week.

I did not steal it.

She would be disappointed.

I went back up the way I had come.

The passage on that floor has doors down one side, and most of them are shut at that hour. One of them was not. It stood half open with the light coming out of it in a long shape across the floor, and I heard voices before I got to it.

Cassian. Then Julian.

I did not stop. I had bread under one arm, a candle in the other hand, and nothing in me for either of them tonight.

Whatever it was, it was theirs.

I was past the door when I heard my name.

I should not have listened.

I knew it while I was doing it.

Some part of me was standing there shouting that I did not want to know what was on the other side of that door, whatever it turned out to be.

I stopped anyway.