Games of Flame and Dust by Val Saintcrowe EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Val Saintcrowe
- Language: English
- Genre: New Adult & College Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
FOR SOMEONE WHO craved knowledge, there were two paths after
completing the training school in Cilbraich, Banyan Thriceborn’s home
village. One path was to continue on, to South Ridge Academy, the dragon
fighting school. The other was to join the cloister. If Banyan wanted to
continue reading and writing, if she wanted to continue thinking, she would
have to join the cloister.
“You can’t join the cloister,” said Deke to Banyan. The night before,
Deke had told her that he loved her, and she hadn’t said it back, and he was
hurt, and she could tell. “Women in the cloister can’t have husbands.”
“You could join, too,” she said.
“But then we can’t touch each other.” And they were doing that
relatively often these days, touching each other. Kissing each other. His
hand on her hip or her waist, through her clothes, and she did like the feel of
his hands.
“You just don’t understand,” she whispered to him, touching his face,
the coarse orangey-red hairs on his chin. Deke was old enough for a beard,
but not quite good at growing one. For men, it might be better. It was
possible to make a life out of hunting, if you were a man. Hunting could be
a game of strategy—learning all one could about one’s prey, setting traps,
devising new weapons, that sort of thing.
It wasn’t that there weren’t female hunters.
There were.
But once a woman’s belly swelled with her first child, she got sick to
her stomach and exhausted, and whatever man who’d put the babe in there
tended to get protective and insist she stay home. She was usually too tired
to protest. After the first child came, a woman would nurse it, and that
would take a lot out of her, and as soon as her milk dried up, that man
would usually put another babe in her belly, and the process just continued.
It wasn’t that women didn’t want to do things like hunt or strategize, of
course. It was just that they got worn down. Pregnancy took its toll.
Children were demanding.
Sometimes, later in life, a woman might go back to hunting, but more
often than not, when Banyan talked to the older women in the village, they
would chuckle to her and tell her she didn’t understand what it was to have
children and grandchildren and a husband.
“You’ll see, Banyan,” they would say, smiling indulgently. “You’ll see.”
Banyan actually wanted to see, that was the thing. She was situated
exactly in the middle of her family, with two elder sisters and two younger
brothers, and she had held each of her small brothers when they were tiny.
She loved the feeling of a small, sweet bundle in her arms. She loved the
way a baby’s tiny fingers would grip on of her fingers, the way their faces
would contort adorably, the way they would blink and coo.
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