“What?” she said testily.
Oldwife said in a strangled voice, “Child! Why, you don’t look like yourself!”
There were no mirrors in the bedrooms but there was one in the dressing area of the bathroom. Poised before it, Xulai stared at a stranger. No. Not a stranger, just someone unfamiliar. It was herself, but she looked thinner and much less childish. Precious Wind came in and peered over her shoulder.
In a voice totally lacking surprise, she said, “Well, overnight you’ve grown up a bit.”
“Overnight?” Xulai cried angrily. Change was one thing, but this was something else again! “People don’t grow up overnight.”
“Of course not. What I meant was . . . I think you have ordinarily appeared much younger than you really were.”
“This is the same dress I wore last night! It fits. It fit me yesterday and when we left Woldsgard, so I obviously haven’t grown!” She stamped back into the sitting room, angry for no reason she could name. “Nettie made me this dress ages ago. It still fits. So I can’t have grown any. Where is she? She’ll tell you.”
Oldwife and Precious Wind shared a glance, then Oldwife said coaxingly, “Nettie is visiting with her aunt. She never measured you when she made your clothes, Xulai. She just took a piece of cord from your shoulder to the floor and knotted it, then one from the middle of your neck to the shoulder, from the shoulder to the wrist, around your waist, around your chest—come to think of it, she recently changed that one . . .”
“My chest?” Xulai put her hands inside the long striped coat to feel her chest, strangely soft. “I have . . . I have breasts?”
“I don’t know,” said Oldwife. “I never saw breasts on you, and I’ll guess you never saw them, but then, maybe both you and we were only allowed to see a little girl.”
“You all stay here,” Xulai muttered. She went back to the mirror and stripped off the clothes she had just put on. She had breasts. They were not large; Tingawan women didn’t have large breasts. But they were definitely present. She raised her arms, felt of her groin. She had hair growing both places, dark and silky. Precious Wind had explained this long ago in the bath at Woldsgard. Precious Wind had told her all about women and how they changed when they were no longer children. Women did the moonblood thing, too, that monthly thing. This could not have happened overnight, and yet she would have sworn yesterday that she had no breasts, no hair growing on her body.
In the mirror she saw herself shaking, though she couldn’t tell whether it came from anger or fear. Panic, perhaps. She wanted to cry or scream. She put her clothes back on, awkwardly mishandling the buttons with trembling fingers. It would have been pleasant to curl into a ball on her bed and pretend this was not happening. She had known persons at Woldsgard to do that when confronted with unpleasant reality. Farmer Gilsek’s widow did so after he died, Old Fennig, who worked at the forge, when his son ran off. Curling up in a ball hadn’t helped either of them, so it was unlikely to help her. She took three deep breaths and concentrated on the Way of the Turtle, an exercise Precious Wind had taught her when she was very young and excitable. The Way of the Turtle was slow and placid and very, very quiet.
She went slowly back to the sitting room, where she poured, very slowly, a cup of tea, keeping her hands still, her mind still. When she had seated herself and sipped at it, very slowly, she said in as calm a voice as she could muster, “I have breasts. I have hair on my body. It didn’t come overnight, so I’ve been like this for some time. But you two haven’t seen it? Last night in the bath, you didn’t see it, Precious Wind?”
“We didn’t see it.” Separately and in unison.
Xulai tried to set the tea mug onto the table and succeeded only in spilling it on the floor.
“Sit down,” said Oldwife to Precious Wind in a firm and commanding voice quite unlike her usual one. “Xulai is upset and she’s obviously got to be told, and since the ones mostly concerned are here and she’s already upset, this seems as good a time as any. Where are the men?”
“Gone to breakfast,” Precious Wind said. “We won’t be disturbed for a while.”
Xulai put her cup on the table and folded her hands in her lap, trying desperately not to be angry at them, any of them, or all of them! “If there’s something to be told, I believe it may be past time to tell it!”
Oldwife wiped her lips with her handkerchief and took a deep breath.
“Justinian, Duke of Woldsgard, and Xu-i-lok were in love. No, no, listen, don’t flounce! I’m telling you. I have to start at the beginning. They were like two birds on a branch, giddy with happiness. They were betrothed and set a date for the wedding, but they did not wait on the wedding to love one another, and by the time the wedding date arrived, Xu-i-lok was several months pregnant.
“On the morning they were to be wed, she went walking in the woods. She returned white in the face, crying to Justinian that she had been cursed with death and with barrenness, that is, that in the future she would never become pregnant. She cried and laughed and cried again. The laughter was because she was already pregnant, though the one who cursed her had not known that. I was in the next room, making up their bed. I
