Strength.
She knows what it is to be strong. She has grown, clever and thriving, despite all that her father hoped for her.
She isn't like the other girls. The daughters of his friends, who care for nothing but what they should care about. They want only jewels and dresses and litters and parties. She wants for other things. Lessons, that she might know more about things she has questions about. She learns etiquette, and horseback riding, and is rather horrible at embroidery and dancing, but she still tries. She argues with her rhetoric tutor, which is encouraged, and then argues more with her history tutor, which is not.
She uses her etiquette lessons when her father introduces her to his new wife. She uses rhetoric to engage in polite conversation with her new stepmother while also wholeheartedly disagreeing with her.
She learns the game. The game that her stepmother has been playing at for many more years than Aravis' scant fourteen.
Her small pleasures are slowly taken away. Her favorite soaps and fragrances are replaced with new ones that her stepmother prefers. Her favorite servant, Fatima, is reassigned to work in a different part of the estate. Her tutors are dismissed and replaced with strangers who stress teaching Aravis dull, unimportant things she doesn't desire to learn.
She is subjected to uncomfortable fashions and trends that she feels silly and unnecessary. She is put on a diet and exercise regime, and dressed in ridiculous, flouncy clothes, and her wardrobe grows increasingly, and yet Aravis can never find the clothes she likes wearing.
She retaliates. She consents to the exercise regime but convinces her father to let her complete it with her elder brother, who is learning the art of swordplay, and doing exercises to strengthen his body in preparation for wielding weapons. She destroys her wardrobe in a purposeful accident, and accompanies the servants who buy the replacements, to ensure that the styles are to her liking.
She finds solace in riding. There is something comfortable about her new mare, and she enjoys racing the wind, and feeling it strip her problems away.
Then she discovers that she is betrothed.
Strength.
He knows the worth of strength. He isn't sure if it's a word he would use to describe himself. He doesn't feel very strong, most days. But he is, after a fashion.
He knows the strength of preparing a meal, only to have it dismissed as nary a worthy accomplishment.
He knows the strength of completing chores and tasks beyond his ability, and continuing to work at them, and to try again and again.
He knows the strength of taking a beating, and then getting up the next morn anyhow, and going on with life, like it's all right. Like it's normal. Like it's deserved.
Though it's not. None of it.
He awakens each day and feels generally optimistic. Perhaps today will be a good day. Gods willing, his Father would catch many fish. Gods ever more willing, perhaps the fish would be sold well at the market. Perhaps today would be a day of leisure and sunsets, and conversation with his Father, where he could ask an inquiry, or ask for a story, and it will be answered or given kindly.
He doesn't see it as strength, and yet it is. It is not the kind of strength he has been brought up to value, but there is strength, nonetheless, in holding out hope and faith, when reality dictates that good days happen only a handful of days in a fortnight.
He wonders, after a particularly bad day, when he is nursing a scrape he'd sustained during the latest beating and blowing on it to lessen the sting he felt after dipping the offending injury in the donkey bucket to clean it, what it means to be happy.
He reflects on the day up to this point, and smiles. He was happy, earlier. He accomplished his tasks, and saw a juggler practicing down by the surf, tossing small rocks into the air and trying not to let them drop. He'd awakened early enough to see his father off and ask about what he wanted for dinner, so that Shasta might go about procuring it, if he were able. He'd seen a magnificent starfish, and felt a breeze come in from the North, blowing away, for a moment, the stink of fish, and decay, and replacing it with something…else. Something more.
He decides to claim the victories of the day and puts aside the beating. Even the best days have things in them that keep them from being perfect. And the day isn't over yet.
AUTHORS NOTE
I've read Horse and His Boy four times this year already. I'm obsessed.
Take it! More to come!
~Angela