Champion of Fate by Kendare Blake EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Kendare Blake
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Fiction about New Experiences
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The Settlement
The rice balls in the basket looked wrong. It didn’t matter which way she
stacked them or how carefully she and Mama had rolled and rerolled them
into perfect shapes, stuffing each with sweetened paste made from the fruit
that grew so plentifully around the new settlement. New fruit, tangy and
soft, with a texture somewhere between bread and a root vegetable. Fruit
that Reed had never seen before they came, not even in the large
marketplace by the pier, where nearly anything could be found.
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“Enough fussing with those balls,” Mama said. She had changed into
her finest shift: soft linen dyed a dark crimson. “They will taste no better,
and you’re likely to dent them. Pick up the basket. Let’s go.”
She sounded not cross but distracted, like she was giving the order to
herself rather than to Reed. Today they went to see Orna, the Wise Woman.
And Mama was no more excited about it than Reed was.
“She won’t even eat them if she knows I touched them,” Reed said. And
to make the point she reached out a finger and touched one again.
“That isn’t true,” Mama said. But she used her thumbs to wipe spots of
dirt from her daughter’s face and tugged her shoulders straight before they
marched out of the lodge.
Reed didn’t like the new settlement. A new settlement for a new
beginning, Papa said, but it was a jungle—hot and wild, the air too wet, and
everything seemed to fight them: branches snapped back and hit her in the
nose. Long grasses tangled around her slim, tan ankles to keep her from
getting where she was going. Reed missed the port city where she’d grown
up. Stone-paved roads and strong buildings, horses and ships and merchants
who spoke many tongues.
“Why does it matter if Orna likes me or not?” Reed asked as she and her
mother walked. “She can’t do anything to me.”
“It matters because it is unlucky. And because eventually it will make
others . . . It will change the way others look at you.” Mama paused and
reached down to smooth Reed’s long, dark hair. “Besides, she does like
you. She was only irritable because of the seasickness and then the travel.”
Orna was on the last boat to arrive in the port from their home country.
It was her arrival as much as their readiness that signaled it was time to
depart for the settlement. Papa and Mama said she was a great mystic and a
great healer who bent the ear of the gods. And she had hated little Reed the
moment she set her old eyes on her.
“Mater Orna,” Mama said when they reached the door of the lodge. She
used the honorary ‘mater’ to signify that they came to her as family. Had
they come for healing or blessings, Mama would have called her “Healer
Orna” or “Wise Orna,” as the case allowed.
“Come in.”
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