“Of course Nanaea is here. Do you think she’d miss the selection of the Sacred Maidens for anything?” Iltani brushed her hair off her forehead, leaving a smudge of dirt. I wiped it off with the back of my hand, doing my best to ignore the flippant way she’d talked about the announcement. No thought as to the terror those girls would experience when they were ensconced inside the black tomb with a dead body, forced to drink poison or be run through with sickleswords. But I didn’t blame her. It was a tradition almost everyone considered an honor.
Everyone but me.
I shoved away my somber thoughts as the stout town crier huffed by, a trumpet made from a tree root for amplifying his voice wedged under his arm.
The Sacred Maiden announcement? So soon?
I had to hurry. I turned toward another stall and, out of the corner of my eye, spotted a boy in the town crier’s wake, wearing a stark white tunic with a clay tablet on his hip. A page. The young boy turned his face to the sun, and the breath caught in my lungs.
My brother.
“Kasha!”
He’d been taken from our home to live in the Palace after my father had failed to heal the lugal’s son, who’d fallen from a Palace balcony and died.
It was fair punishment, everyone had said. A son for a son.
But it didn’t feel fair. It felt like theft, a crime we couldn’t do anything about. And although we hadn’t been completely restricted from seeing him, as the years had passed, his responsibilities in the Palace, or a diminishing desire, kept him away from us more and more. I missed that little face. I waved to him, trying to get his attention, but he moved through the crowd after the crier, his shoulders thrown back as if he hadn’t been stolen from his family and forced to fall asleep each night without anyone to sing to him. I quickly inspected a basket overflowing with lentils before my emotions took hold.
“Are you all right?” Iltani waved a gnat away from her forehead and squinted in Kasha’s direction. “He didn’t hear you, I think.”
“I’m fine.” I swallowed thickly. “I just need to be about my business and get back home. I don’t want to be here when they call the Sacred Maidens.”
“Well, good luck pulling Nanaea away from this crowd.” She raised her eyebrows, then looked over my shoulder. Her smile widened into a grin I knew meant trouble. “Gods of the skies, my friend. Look who’s here.” She nudged me, and I turned.
Dagan, Farmer’s Son, stood thirty handsbreadths away in his family’s stall, bartering with a man over a barrel of wheat. He spotted us over the man’s shoulder and sent me a brilliant smile. Over the past several years, I’d watched him transform from a scrawny child with ragged black hair to a thick-chested boy who was nearly a man.
I offered him a quick smile, then turned away, my cheeks flushing.
Iltani tugged me back around. “You can’t avoid him forever, and why would you even want to? No one else of his stature is going to ask for your hand, and besides, look at him! You could build an entire Palace using the stacked bricks of his abdomen alone.” Iltani plucked a stem of yellow chamomile from a cask full of water next to the lentils and tucked it behind her ear.
He was bare to the belt. Sweat clung like honey to the hard clay of his chest. I blushed furiously and forced my eyes elsewhere. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t care about him, because I certainly did. We’d played together in his barley fields since we were children, tying the grasses into chains and pulling each other around like mules at the plow. His mother had been friends with my abum growing up. Our eventual match was all but guaranteed.
And despite us losing our status, he—one of the wealthiest men in the city because of all the land his family owned—still courted me. I was supposed to feel grateful for the favor. Even Iltani said so.
But I couldn’t focus on him. I had one mission and one mission only: care for my family. Today, that meant buying food for them and then getting back to the hut to help my abum make preparations for his patients, assuming he could gather himself enough to minister to them. Nanaea stood nearby at a merchant’s stall with her two friends, giggling as the man made a dog perform tricks for her.
“Kammani,” Dagan called, pushing his hair out of his eyes. “You can’t pretend you didn’t see me. I know that lovely face of yours all too well.”
A smile tugged at the corners of my lips. I couldn’t help it.
Iltani elbowed me in the rib cage. “Let’s go over there. He has food to sell, does he not?”
“K!” Dagan called. “Come over to me. I’ve hardly seen you at all this past moon!” He reached up and tied his black hair into a knot with a leather cord.
At my nickname, I turned toward him and caught Iltani’s smirk. “Why are you making that face?”
“Oh, I don’t know. That blush along your cheekbones is telling me that you’ve been thinking of Dagan in a way that is not altogether wholesome.”
I sighed. “Gods of the skies, Iltani. Silence yourself. Let’s just go see what he wants.” I did readily admit that seeing him wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to me today, and Iltani was right. He was selling grain. I tucked a wayward strand of hair behind my ear and tried to smooth my worn tunic as we maneuvered to his stall.
He was stowing shekels in a bag on his hip as we reached him, and his eyes lit up like dawn when they met mine. His dark lashes accentuated the amber eyes I knew so well.
He nodded to me, then reached across the stall and took my hand. “Good day to you, Healer’s Daughter.” He brushed full lips across my knuckles, his beard, just beginning to thicken, tickling my hand.
“Such formality. What’s the occasion?” I smiled, mustering all my resolve to pry my eyes away from his light brown skin and thick shoulders, corded and rippled from working long days at the farm.
“Can’t even a bumbling fool like me have some manners in front of a beautiful woman? Two of them?” He nodded at Iltani but grinned at me.
“I award you three points for your efforts at flirtation,” Iltani saluted. “Now serve us beauties some food. We’re starved.”
Dagan laughed, and my attention fell to the barrels of barley at his elbow, my stomach rumbling in response. I was about to ask for a fair price on them when Nanaea joined us, the copper from three glittering bracelets on her arm winking in the sun.
Where in the name of Enlil did she get those?
“Hello, Dagan.” She flashed him a brilliant smile.
Iltani kicked me in the ankle.
“Nanaea, we’re busy here, as you can plainly see.” It wasn’t that I was jealous of her stealing Dagan’s attention, but her loveliness was beyond compare. Her hair, eyelashes, and brows were full and shiny, her teeth perfectly straight. Her cheekbones were high, like my father’s, and her skin was tinged rose under her copper glow. Men practically broke their necks to stare after her as she went down the street, her hips and breasts curved in a way that made them long for her. I adjusted my healing satchel over my rather straight shape in response.