Kira's Quest by Dawydiak Orysia;

Author:Dawydiak, Orysia; [Dawydiak, Orysia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 4814385
Publisher: Acorn Press, The
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight—

A New Home

Kira was not allowed to mope for long. Calista made sure she got to know a number of other children in the village by introducing Kira to all the neighbours and enrolling her in school. Classes were held five mornings out of every week; afternoons were reserved for skills training. On Hildaland, a week was six days, not seven. The first day she walked into her school classroom Kira almost burst out laughing. All the merrows, with their large, round, weak eyes, sat in the front rows, closer to the teacher and the writing board. Guessing who was a merrow and who was a human was a game she and Cody used to play back at home.

Meanwhile, her parents both worked like every other able-bodied adult in the village. Calista made cloth and mended clothing, skills she learned when she first arrived. As a merrow queen she had not been required to do any labour, but now she had no choice. Over time, she told Kira, she had come to enjoy her work. It distracted her and kept her from thinking too much about Merhaven, about the home and life and child she had lost.

The job was challenging, since everything had to be made from the material around them. Wool clipped from the sheep was spun into yarn, sometimes dyed with natural pigments found in wild and garden plants, then woven into cloth for warm winter garments. For summer wear, special sea grasses were softened, then split into threads and woven into linen sheets. Women from the village made the cloth, cut it, and sewed it into clothing by hand.

Calista had started as a mender, but she was so skilled as a cloth-maker she now directed the weaving studio. Thanks to her eye for colour, the clothing she designed and made was in demand by all the islanders. Her home was filled with the beautiful wooden bowls, stone tools, and utensils made by skilled wood-workers and stone-cutters, traded for her blankets, shawls, and clothing.

Currin worked in the silver mine like most of the other men. Everyone knew he was the rightful merrow king, but he wished to be treated like all the others. Every evening he returned to their small house, filthy from digging and so exhausted he barely had an appetite. Kira asked why he had to work so long and hard.

“We have little choice, Kira. If we don’t deliver the silver quota they set for us, we don’t get fish to eat. There aren’t enough livestock or wild animals on Hildaland to keep us all properly fed. We would starve without their fish.”

On Hildaland, Kira’s parents were common folk, not the royalty they had once been in their underwater kingdom. The daily pattern of parents going off to their hard and tedious labour and Kira going off to school was really no different from her life on the mainland, except, of course, that it was completely without electricity and modern conveniences. Life on

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