I ought to begin these confessions by setting out my intentions in writing them down. I ought to, but unfortunately I have no intentions, only compulsions. I am old. My body limits my movements, and I grow restless. I am alone, and I have no one to confide in. I will die soon, and what's left of the truth will die with me.
The truth! I am lousy with truth. I am sick with it. I need to be bled. They sing songs of me in this town too. Are they trying to provoke me? They could at least have the decency to wait until I'm dead to praise me.
No, no one will praise me when I am dead. These notes will see to that. I will leave them behind me. On my deathbed, I will clutch them to my breast. The people will find them, and when they read them they will see — what will they see, I wonder? What will they think of their heroine then?
But that's the end. I should start at the beginning.
My father was a decent, hard-working man. He had been a skilled and patriotic soldier in the wars, and though it won him no fame he did manage to secure in wages enough to purchase a bit of land in a small but fertile village in the east of Kiiro. He met my mother there, and married for love. She died bearing me, and he never loved nor married again.
I mean that he never loved a woman; for me, his love overflowed. He had wanted a son, but did not resent me for not being one. Instead, he raised me as though I were born a boy. I learned swordsmanship from him, and how to hunt with a bow and arrow. I did the hard work of tending the farm as well as any male. He was proud of me, my father. He called me his wild rose, his sturdy flower.
Despite our best efforts, I grew into a woman. At sixteen my face was quite handsome and my chest was as well-developed as my muscles. I was too awkwardly tall, however, to be considered really beautiful, and too dark, and far too boyishly lean. Nevertheless, I was something of a legend among the boys in my village and the neighboring town. They spoke of taming me. I laughed in their faces and challenged them at arm-wrestling.
There was one boy, however, a trapper from the town, who loved me for my wildness. He courted me with furs and jewelry made from pheasant feathers. He introduced me to his hounds and let me hunt with them. "They're beautiful dogs," I told him, and he was pleased — the rest of the world called them mutts! He said I was most lovely in the dappled light of the woods. He said I had the beauty of the eagle: powerfully graceful in my size, regal in my severity. Tell me, how could I not have loved him? My clever, charming wolf, I called him.
That was the year the drought began. There was a river not too far off, and my village and my clever wolf's town banded together to dig canals. In the following year, we fared better than most of the country. How could we have guessed that would be our ruin?
I was seventeen when the old king died. I did not care then, nor did anyone I knew. We all firmly believed that royalty was royalty and had nothing to do with us. We paid our yearly dues when the taxman came and were grateful for the protection of the army, but that was the extent of it.
Or, at any rate, it should have been. But when young Queen Rin took the throne, all of that changed. The royal guard descended on our relatively prosperous village and ransacked our farms like an invading army. They slaughtered our animals, cut down our crops, and carried both back with them to the aristocrats in the capitol. The neighboring town was pillaged as well, and my love's poor noble dogs were shot when they tried to protect their master's home.
Fearing starvation, many of the villagers and townspeople left to seek work in the cities. But my father, who had grown up in the slums, steadfastly refused to give up on the farm. Harvest season was already upon us, and it was far too late to start growing again. Without even chickens for eggs or goats for milk, hunting was for the rest of that year our only source of food. The animals of the woods, though, were also feeling the effects of the drought, and those that could had long since moved on. Throughout the whole autumn, there was not one night we did not go to bed hungry.
Then came winter, and there was hardly anything to be had at all. My father ate very little. He insisted what game we could come by belonged to me. I made token efforts to dissuade him, sometimes even refusing to eat until he'd had his fair share, but I was weak in will and he always outlasted me. If we had split the meat evenly between us we both would likely have starved.
Throughout my childhood my father had been strong and rugged. He was a solid oak tree of a man, my shelter and my support. Now, before my eyes, he withered away like a dried-out twig. To see him so reduced, to find myself caring for him as though he were a sickly child and I his mother, pained me more than I can tell. But the horrible truth is — and this is the first of my many dark secrets — my fear of the same happening to me was far greater than that pain. What's worse, it occurred to me even then — dare I write this down? — that while he lived I could not leave the village, for I would never forsake him to tend the farm alone in his impending old age, and so could not marry my trapper in the town. When he finally died my tears and moans were genuine, but even so a part of me was already thinking ahead three months to when the season of mourning would be over and my love and I would wed. Thus, the first of my sins: I am a wicked, ungrateful daughter.