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The Educated Girl
The lines of her body traveled straight up and down like the axe of a woodsman. She had learned her tallness from a very good teacher, learned it so well that she had overlooked certain things whose importancehad only recently occurred to her. Perched on a dragon across a rice patty, watching the boy with the smooth skin stretched across his broad shoulders, she wondered a little about how to turn his face towards her.
When the same boy turned to stare at the women bringing water from the river, Rin wanted to turn him away again, back to his fields. The women were farmer's wives, without luxury, hard and soft at the same time. No one had taught her where to put the curves and flesh around all that height and bone.
Sometimes, when she was left to herself, she drifted. Even to a city once, an Edo, to watch the dancers, with their fans and tops and brightly colored clothing, hoping for a gift from the people gathered among the merchants. She wondered at their stilted, careful grace, the affected fragility of the women. There were rules in the turn of a wrist, careful practice in the steps. Rin watched, rapt, she who had never bothered to learn any more beauty than she needed to climb and to run, tumbling across the earth wherever she found the joy to be quick and unexpected, to explore.
For a day, her exploring left her there, crouched in the square on foot-packed dirt, accepting coins absently for the antics of the strange monkey that pulled at her sleeve and was so exotically green. Jaken had been a good teacher. He knew how to serve and how to swim, but he couldn't do this. She watched the curve of the fan, the delicate bend of their limbs. She didn't pay much attention to the pale skin beneath painted faces, wanting instead to see them move. Paleness was easy, considering her teacher. Rin had left pale far behind years ago. Brown was more fun, though she had once tried a month or two of green.
She learned arrogance too, and power. The arrogance she kept in a box in her head next to the subjugation of powerful spirits in evil swords. She found little use for it, but it was her best friend's favorite game, so she kept the box around even though, unasked, it had a tendency to drift from her memory. On a cool afternoon when she was twelve, she finally mastered the art of status, of unreachable birth, nobility, - though her teacher had never been as distant from her as he pretended, so she hadn't learned that lesson as well as she could.
She stood up, brushing dirt from her knees. She flirted with the idea of staying, to learn the art of the immaculate, with color shining in her cheeks and in her silks, hair tamed and inky black, but there were more interesting tricks in life than cleanliness. She thought she almost had the hang of flying. Who knew where she'd drift to then.