Chapter 3
Chapter 3
I make my way back to our lands in the light of early morning amidst the rising songs of birds. The boy was still asleep, stretched out beside me on the bed and I’d wanted to stay there, relaxed and warm in his arms but, it had frightened me, that feeling, and I’d left.
I follow the path tramped through the wood last night by a dozen pairs of feet and, with every step, I try to come back to myself and shake off the strangeness of the Reaping. The insistent beat of drums, the costume, the haze of smoke and smell of sex—In those hours you’ve not yourself and I have to work hard to remember the me I was a day ago. I am Katniss of the House of Firebirds. A hunter of the Twelfth Tribe. I am sixteen years old.
I’m halfway to myself when I come upon the temple. It’s the back of the building, the classic lines melting in rough-hewn stone and what I now know are maze-like tunnels.
I round the building and enter the smaller side building where the healing rooms are located. My mother and sister should be here by now and they’ll want to see me. They spend most of their time here, working with the sick, studying the plants and medicines of healing.
The first person I see isn’t my mother, but I feel a sudden jar of shocked recognition. A moonbeam-blonde woman stands in front of me, her face set in a permanent frown, a lark marks her bare arm and she wears the white, floor-length robes of a priestess. Along with Snow, the priestess’ act as a governing body, writing laws and issuing judgements, like the judgement I’m receiving right now. Her eyes are cold, full of distain as they rake over me. She looks me up and down, her critical eyes taking in the oversized tunic I still wear, my bare feet, my body still smudged with the gold of last night’s glorious costume.
“You are returning from the Reaping, Daughter of Firebirds?”
“Yes, Daughter of the House of Lark,” I say. She arches an eyebrow at me, still disapproving, and I realize what she wants. “I mean, Priestess of the House of Lark,” I correct, using her title.
She nods, looking slightly mollified. “Well, you cannot enter the house of healing until you have gone through the cleansing. We would not want to infect the sick with some pestilence you received during your…exertions in the village of men.”
Bristling, I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from saying something nasty to her, instead I force myself to walk down the steps to the cleansing pools. She acts as though the Reaping were something dirty, when it has been blessed by the High Priestess and sacred.
I fume the whole time I’m disrobing for the baths. Would she have acted the same way if she’d known I’d chosen her male child at the Reaping? Probably. She would be embarrassed to admit she ever conceived a male child.
Strange how this woman could have given birth to the boy I met last night. I can’t help thinking it was good that she didn’t raise him, that somehow she would have made him cold and stern like her.
I pass through the waterfall, the ever-flowing shower of cool water in the first of the bathing rooms and then take a towel and small jar of oil from an attendant and head to the pools.
Like the cleansing pool for the Reapings, these pools are fed from hot springs, but unlike that large central pool, there are multiple small pools here, some big enough for four or five, others only for one or two. Today, the pools are full of laughing women, splashing water, boisterous after the Reaping.
Normally, I like to bathe by myself, but there aren’t any empty pools. I’m almost tempted just to leave. I’ve already taken the cold bath, but that priestess would somehow know that I didn’t go through the whole cleansing and kick me out of the house of healing again.
I see Annie alone in a medium size pool in the far corner and head over to her.
“Can I bathe here?” I ask. She nods through the curtain of her long brown hair and I quickly drop the towel and slip into the hot water. All the pools here have been carved into squares with seats. Some have seats facing the same way, usually reserved for lovers, but these face in opposite directions.
“Did you have a pleasant Reaping?” I ask. It’s a tame question for the morning after the Reaping. Reaping night stories get bawdy quickly.
“Pleasant enough,” Annie says softly. “And you? Your first Reaping?”
“Yes, pleasant.” I answer.
We don’t speak much after that. I’m horrible at making small talk and Annie has always been quiet, but she got even more quiet after her mate died. They both worked in the fishery down by the coast. It wasn’t official, their joining, but they’d been together for years it was just common knowledge that they would be together after their Reapings bore fruit.
It didn’t work out that way, the girl died in a drowning accident and Annie had seemed so lost. It had been so bad, the healers kept her back from her first Reaping for over a year. She probably wanted it over fast, though, she’d chosen Finnick after I chose Peeta. She would have her mandatory daughter soon.
I finish my bath quickly, not lingering like some of the more social people. I braid my straight hair bac and dress in a proper green hunter’s tunic before heading back up to the house of healing. Hopefully this time I can avoid the sour priestess.
Prim greets me, throwing herself into my arms, her lilac-colored apprentice robes a pretty contrast with her yellow hair. “Katniss!” she calls, squeezing me tight.
“How are you, little one?”
“Missing my sister,” she says. “It’s been weeks.”
“A week and a half,” I say. Hunting takes up most of my time and the rest is setting and checking traps and practice. It leaves little time to see my family, but hunting is the only place I really feel at home.
“And I’m not so little anymore. Soon, I’ll be taller than you.”
I look at my little sister with new eyes. She’s already up to my shoulder and she’s only twelve. I wonder if it’s because she gained her features from her sire or because she grew up easier than me, with food brought at the market and long hours of sleep.
When my mother decided that Prim would remain at home instead of going to the camps like I did, I was jealous at first, angry that she would grow up with our mother while I had only teachers and a weekly visit home. Now I know it was for the best. Prim is a natural healer and I am a natural hunter.
“We are learning more about healing herbs this week,” Prim says. She talks about what she is learning as we go through the healing houses. I try not to look at the ill, I can’t take it. Most have simple maladies, but some are maimed, screaming in pain. We make it to the room where our mother works.
She is not a healer, me and Prim are proof that she’s taken part in the Reaping, so she wears the brown tunic of a healer’s assistant. Her real talent, though, is in the creation of medicines. She’s pounding a dried herb into a fine powder when we walk in.
My mother is like my sister, blonde and blue-eyed, beautiful, calm and regal in her workroom of healing. “My daughters,” she says. “It is wonderful to have you both here.” She looks surprised and pleased, pulling both of us into her arms and squeezing tight. The surprised look is because me. We haven’t had the closest relationship. Hunting takes up most of my time and it’s harder getting to know a parent, trusting her when you only see her once a week.
We sit together and my mother makes mint tea for us to drink, the taste and scent calming the tattered edges of my nerves. Surrounded by my family, it feels like my thoughts are wholly my own for the first time since the Reaping. Prim chatters away, but my mother watches me, her face thoughtful. After a while, she shoos Prim back to her training and then we are alone.
“How are you, my daughter? Your first Reaping, it can be…overwhelming. Did you come to see me for… some kind of healing?”
“No, nothing like that.” Telling her what happened isn’t an option. I look down into the dregs in the bottom of my cup. Legend say that you glimpse the future in tea leaves, but everything I see is withered and spent. “But I did learn that my sire disappeared.” I watch her face, waiting for something, but there is no reaction.
“I think I heard the same years ago,” she says. She stands and gathers up the cups, nesting them inside one another, and carries them to the counter before fiddling with one of the planters of rosemary growing on the sill.
“What do you think happened to him?” I walk over to her, watch as she waters the plants.
“I wouldn’t know,” she says, putting down the watering pitcher. “He is only you and your sister’s sire, nothing more.”
“Prim and I have the same sire?” It hadn’t occurred to me before, but if there were no others in Panem with the mark of the Firebirds, the same man had to be both our sires. It wasn’t something people talked about, outside of Reapings and Joinings it wasn’t important. I’d always imagined she had a different sire, someone blond and gentle like her.
My mother keeps her eyes on the plants. “It was just convenient and....” She reaches up to caress my cheek. “I had such excellent results the first time.”
I leave after that, letting her get back to her work, and head for the woods, for mine and Gale’s rock in the clearing.
This part of the woods is as familiar to me as my own body and as much a part of me. I collect one of my spare bows from a hollowed out tree. It’s late in the morning and I’m sure Gale has left our meeting spot hours ago, but when I enter the clearing, I see her there, waiting for me.
She stays seated while I walk up to her, her eyes searching mine like she’s looking for some kind of difference, some change. “Well,” she says. “Should I start making a miniature bow and arrow set now or should we wait to see if she’s left or right-handed?”
Quiet laughter shakes my shoulders. “Nothing happened, Gale.”
She sits up. “What do you mean, nothing happened? You went to the Reaping.”
I sit down on our rock and tell her about the boy and the deal we made. As I go on, the tension in my hunting partner seeps away and she relaxes beside me, leaning into my side. “And you trust him?” Gale asks.
Do I trust Peeta? I think of the boy with his bad leg and piercing blue eyes, his easy smile and the intensity that sometimes lurks behind it. I have no reason not to trust him; he’s the one doing me a favor.
“I think I do,” I say slowly. “He was nice to me when he didn’t have to be.”
“You’ve always had too big a soft spot.” She slips her hand down the length of my braid, tugging gently at the end. She’d done that forever, as long as I’ve known her, but now it feels somehow different, more intimate. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I hated thinking about…thinking about some man touching you.” Suddenly, her arms surround me, holding me in a way she never has before and then her lips press to mine, insistent and firm.
Gale’s long, lean body against mine, the touch of her lips is almost familiar, as well-known to me as the woods around us, as the beat of my own heart. Gale is the first to pull away, leaning her forehead against mine, breathing hard. She’s about to kiss me again when I call her name.
“We shouldn’t,” I whisper. “At least not now, not until I know if this plan is going to work and I can stay a hunter.”
“I told you I don’t care if you’re a hunter or not.”
“I care and I can’t think about anything like this until I know.”
Gale’s gray eyes find mine, a reproachful gray, a gray as solemn as a vow. “Then we wait.”
I close my eyes and nod, not sure exactly what I’m agreeing to, but knowing that with one kiss the relationship between Gale and me has been irrevocably changed.