osiris zontini | d11 | finished

The boy had been forbidden, but without him, you would be dead.

They were the ones your parents told you stay away from, men and women with skin burned by long days in the sun, and the boys your age who lived in the tiny wooden houses near the river, the floodplain, where land was said to be worthless. Your worlds were separate, and it was meant to be that way. They worked in the fields, but a Zontini was more than the dirt and grime; you were destined to lead, and they were meant to follow. They lived in shacks, and you lived in the big house on the hill because you were meant to look down from it. They toiled, and your family gained.

This was the way of the world.

Stay away from the workers, mother would say. If they got close, it was only to find a weakness, a chink in the armor so they could steal from you and cheat you. They were envious of what your family had, and they couldn’t be trusted—you were only to trust family. Family was your fortress. Anubis and Nephthys had been with you since your shared conception, so there were enough playmates in the house. From the workers the Zontinis demanded respect, not friendship.

This was the way of the world.

As you grew you were a watcher and a listener. Perched on the hill you would watch the workers for hours in their rhythm, hacking down the cornstalks and stacking them in wheelbarrows. Outside you followed squirrels and birds, and were fascinated with their lives—the sleep in winter and the birth in the spring, new trains of ducklings following their mothers to the pond. It was like the animals knew a schedule, a rule that you didn’t, and someday you would figure it out.

You were a collector of the living. In your windows plants stretched to the sun and climbed the curtains to the ceiling, field mice ran at your feet, and birds perched in your windowsill where you left seeds for them. Djeti, the hound, would lay at your ankles at a snap of your fingers. Dwellers of the earth and air lived with you. Your parents had their kingdom of earth and sweat and you had yours of beating hearts, the subjects you fed and protected, and in return you knew you had their love without ever needing to ask. You celebrated the lives of the ant and the falcon equally, and mourned their deaths equally.

The way of the world, the way of the world.

One evening you were collecting by the river, even though you knew it was too far from home. Even as you leaned into the shallows to overturn the rocks for salamanders, you could hear your mother’s warning, but there were so many here and you had just learned how to catch them. When you lifted a rock and saw something scurry away your heart started pounding, and you scrambled to reach under the next rock where it had hidden. But under that rock lurked a black shape, scales glistening as it bristled and struck. You will never forget the bite, and the pain that sucked you dry.

When you cried out the boy heard you, came running from his house as your blood blackened the shallows, a dripping tap of crimson. When he reached for your wrist you yelled and recoiled, drawing it into your chest, scared that he would give you a disease like your parents had warned. You were scared of the snake and scared of the river boy, and as your scared heart pumped blood through your punctured wrist, the world faded into darkness.

All you could remember when you awoke in your bedroom, wrist swaddled in linen, was the feeling of being lifted.

Your parents seemed baffled, solemn. The boy had wrapped your wrist when you fainted and carried you home, and he hadn’t stopped to clean out your pockets. Urgency hadn’t even been a question. Most of all, he hadn’t known that you were hemophilic, and that without his help you would have bled out into the river.

Reckless, your parents called you. They said your condition had always made you a troublemaker; doctors said hemophilia turned people into adrenaline addicts. Your curiosity had grounded you for a week. Then they dismissed the boy who’d saved you as a stroke of common sense on his part. It was a good thing he’d brought you here instead of taking advantage of you, they said, or we’d have to make him pay for it. How they would do that, you didn’t know—pay off the Peacekeepers, probably. But he’d carried you home himself, without a second thought.

You couldn’t help but wonder.

The way the boy had treated you had been a rush in itself, a taste of kindness from a stranger. Now the borders of the world had widened, and you couldn’t stand to be in the house. You weren’t content with your brothers and sisters—what if there was something you were missing? What if there was more than family? More than birthright? And what was life for, if not to feel your heart race?

Over and over you asked to go to the river and find the person who’d saved you, to thank him. But your parents reminded you of the differences between your hill and their flooding valley. They were born to sweat and toil—they had dirt beneath their fingernails and grime in their teeth and plague in their homes. You were Osiris Zontini, and your family was born to rule. You were clean and healthy, well-fed, with the tight brown curls of your father cut close to your head, with hazel eyes that spoke of intelligence and good breeding. And though you bled easier than others, there were doctors to keep your joints from aching and bruises from spreading. You deserved them, because it was your destiny to be served. So you stopped asking. You remembered.

This was the way.

Right?