Asha giggled, loud and long as the giant lokoki bird cried out like a squadron of trumpets, and because the bird was so loud no one heard her. Not that she cared. She had nothing to fear.
Tonight, she could do anything. Tonight she wasn’t Asha. She was dressed in a skin of magic, made new with it! She was—at last—her freed self.
All her life, she’d lived on wishes and hopes, on imagined stories of worlds far away, but tonight she could truly live. She didn’t need to worry about pleasing her family. She didn’t have to scrub everyone’s clothes and mend their rips; she didn’t need to make meals and bring in bathing water. Tonight she could forget about holes that needed patching in the roof and the meats that needed to be cured and dried. She didn’t have to worry about the fortunes of her family slipping every day closer to beggar women. Right now, she did not even have to keep her promise to Baba and look after his other girls.
Asha had done nothing but care for them for the past year and a half. She had not complained once as she went from favored child of a great man to servant of his widows. She’d cheerfully sewn clothes, cleaned, cooked, cleaned again. And not one of them appreciated her. Not one of them loved her. She’d always known Jauhar and her daughters did not love Asha the way they loved each other, but it was not until Baba died that she realized they did not love her at all.
Tomorrow she would be their servant again. Tomorrow her life would be merely work, and fantasy. Tomorrow she would be starved again for love. Tonight she would gorge herself on stories of the wide world, she would taste magic, and desire, she would be filled up—so that when midnight came, and she must hibernate again, she would have stores of adventure to sustain her.
“Daku uli, Baba,” Asha whispered brightly. Sending her father’s spirit her thanks for the magic he’d sent her way, even in death. “I will not waste one moment of this gift!”
Asha stepped through the door in her finery and her new skin and had every eye on her. She smiled, basking in the attention, in the hush that fell over the hall, in the eyes all drawn to her radiant power. This was so exciting! Baba would have loved this. He should have felt this. But there would be time for grieving later, he’d sent Zawadi to her with this magical gift, and she wouldn’t squander it.
Asha felt a familiar chilling gaze and glanced over. Jauhar, Baba’s first wife, was on the other side of the ballroom, still her eyes tried to peel away this magic skin and destroy Asha. But Asha wasn’t known to her tonight. She wasn’t her servant tonight. Asha slid her eyes slowly to Jauhar’s right, where Hadhi always stood. And there she was, at her mother’s side, trying to capture the attention of any man she could, believing that she’d kept Asha from the ball.
Asha wondered if her sister had realized yet, that Asha was not her problem. Hadhi could never capture a man’s attention, not because she was the less attractive sister, nor because she was the less vibrant. She couldn’t do it because she spent all her time worrying that everyone found her lacking. It wouldn’t matter if Hadhi was the only woman in the room, she would still be the same pinch-faced, dull specter she always was.
Asha smirked at her half-sister, looking over Hadhi’s fraying gown and simple adornments. Asha shook out her magic gown, so soft playful music escaped its layers, all but daring Hadhi to try and destroy this creation. Nothing she could do would stop Asha from being here, and if she thought her sister too much competition in the gown of silk she’d destroyed, then she would be helpless against this magical creation.
Asha flounced her gaze away; she wasn’t here to think about her family. She was here to embrace the joy they wanted to deny her.
There was a group of oddly dressed and styled men, who must be foreigners; Asha walked right up to them and randomly selected a man to greet.
“Hello, tell me, where were you born? What does the air taste like there?”
The man with thick red hair and a fluffy beard laughed, as did his companions, but he nodded his head and complied with Asha’s demand. “I was born in a tiny nation called Thlop. It is one of the southern most nations in the world, and our air tastes...cold.” He finished with a grin.
Asha sidled up closer. “Tell me more. Tell me everything.”
“Wait, what about me?” Another, younger man, with short dark hair as fine as the feathers at a vulture’s neck spoke up.
Asha grinned. “Oh I ’ll be getting to you as well. We’ve all evening to travel the world together, and I mean to visit every land I’m able.”
That garnered much enthusiasm, men talking over one another to answer her questions or ask her theirs. But they spoke so fast, and were all so eager to know her, or for her to know them, when what she wanted was to know the world. So within five minutes, she was full of what they had to offer and off to find more. More. More. She needed so much more than they gave.
The air in one land tasted cold, in another salty, in another it tasted like fire, and all were intriguing descriptions, but where was the man who could feed her imagination? Her favorite thing she’d learned among them was from the first man, who claimed that in the winters of Thlop there were full months with no sunlight. Night for all the hours. It had sounded thrilling and dangerous, until he spoke of families bundled up inside their homes around fires, riding out the majority of the darkness. That was essentially how Asha spent all of her days, trapped inside her same walls, with no new faces and no new tasks. The same chores and sights day in and out. What sort of adventure was that?
She didn’t want to know that every land had some seemingly exciting element, but when you looked closely, all the excitement was mundane for those who lived it. She wanted magic! She wanted adventure! She wanted life, wild and open, and lived in every second. Who would give her that?