As soon as it was cool enough to be placed on the little plate that was always—and only—used for food presented to The Voice, I left the house. The fact that neither of my parents commented or demanded that I wait until after our evening meal told me how concerned they were for me.
She was already in the visitors’ room, sitting in the oddly proportioned chair that looked as if it had been specially made for a much fatter person. Since she was there, I was not her first visitor. Probably Kobbi and Tahnee had already been there with their mothers. She was alone, which wasn’t unusual. There was always a caretaker in the house, but visitors usually meant the caretaker had a little time for herself.
I approached the chair until I was standing at the correct, polite distance. But I didn’t extend the plate. Even though she had been bathed and carefully dressed and a new hood covered her head and neck, I looked into her eyes and remembered those horrific scars.
Tears filled my eyes as I touched my own neck and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
To my amazement, since she never showed emotion beyond a simple smile, her eyes filled with tears too. Then she smiled—a true, warm, compassionate, loving smile—and reached out, took my little moody cake, and ate it.
Feeling so much better, I wiped the tears from my face and smiled in return. “I have to go now.”
She didn’t respond in any way when I turned to leave. She never did.
Before I reached the door, ready to skip home to my family and dinner, the boys who had taunted The Voice entered the room, followed by stern-looking fathers and nervous mothers. I jumped out of the way and pressed myself against the wall to avoid notice, but no one was going to notice me at that point.
And considering what happened, no one even remembered I had been there.
The first boy stepped up to the chair and extended the plate with its little offering.
The Voice picked up the offering and threw it on the floor.
There were shocked gasps from all the adults in the room, and the boy’s father hurried to the doorway that led to the rest of the house, calling for the caretaker.
The second boy made his offering. She mashed it in her fist, then smeared it on her clothes. But the third boy, the one who had pulled off her hood, revealing a secret, exposing her pain . . . She moved so fast, no one could stop her. One moment she was sitting, just staring at the boy; the next she lunged at him, grabbing the cake in one hand and his head in the other. As he started to yell, she shoved the cake into his mouth, forcing him to swallow or choke. So he swallowed—and the look in her eyes haunted my thoughts for years afterward.
Shortly after that, the boy contracted Black Pustules. These were painful boils that developed deep beneath the skin. Sometimes it took weeks before they reached the point where they could be lanced. And a single lancing never cleaned out a pustule, no matter what the healers tried. The pain of healing was endured over and over while new eruptions developed and needed to be lanced. It took several sessions before the hard nugget that was the core of the pustule could be extracted and the body finally healed.
But no matter how carefully the healers dealt with their patients, the final extraction left scars.
It always left scars.
In the weeks that followed, I didn’t see The Voice walking around the village, but I’d heard my parents whispering to friends that The Voice had been refusing all offerings, and the Elders and healers had accepted the necessity of taking measures—for the health of the village.
My curiosity got the better of me and, pretending to have a moody day, I prepared a little cake and took it to The Voice.
No child should know so cruel a truth as what I saw that day.
She was no longer left unattended, and one of her caretakers was a burly young man. She was dressed in a robe with a matching hood. The design of the robe’s sleeves was clever but didn’t quite disguise that her arms were bound to the chair. The fact that she no longer had even the illusion of freedom was bad enough, but . . . They had done something to her so that the caretaker, applying pressure on a dowel of wood attached to something inside her mouth, could force her mouth open enough for the offering to be pushed inside. Then her mouth was forcibly closed so she couldn’t spit out the treat.
They had taken away all her choices. She would consume what the villagers wanted her to consume.
She looked at me, and I felt as if I had betrayed her by coming here and forcing her to take something she didn’t want. But I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t a real moody cake, not with the caretaker standing right there, listening. And I couldn’t say I had changed my mind and The Voice didn’t need to accept my offering. That wasn’t done, ever. So in the end, I watched the male caretaker force her mouth open, shove in my little cake, and seal her mouth shut again.
I didn’t cry until I was safely home. Then I hid in a sheltered spot in my mother’s garden and cried until I made myself sick.
I avoided The Voice’s house as much as I could. Oh, I still made the moody cakes when some telltale sign warned my mother that I was not in harmony with the world. I was still trusted to go by myself, so my parents didn’t know that once I was safely out of sight, I found a hiding place . . . and ate the moody cake.
There was nothing in the making of it, nothing in the ingredients that could explain the sour, gelatinous, grape-sized lump that I discovered was in the center of every moody cake. Break it open and you’d find nothing, but put it in your mouth and you could feel that lump growing in the center of the cake. And yet you couldn’t spit it out. You could spit out the cake, but then the lump remained with nothing to sweeten it.
The first time I ate the moody cake, I was sick for a day, but my mother concluded that I had eaten something that didn’t agree with me and, fortunately, didn’t press me to find out what it was.
The second time I ate a moody cake, a Black Pustule developed on my belly. It was painful and frightening, but I was more afraid to tell my parents and admit I hadn’t been taking my moody cakes to The Voice, so I dealt with it in silence, learning that a warm, wet cloth brought the pustule to a head quicker and a sewing needle was a sufficient lance. Extracting the core is something I do not care to describe, but the substance was a harder, thicker version of the gelatinous lump in the moody cake.
Perhaps if I had been older, I would have understood. As it was, seven more years passed before I reached that moment of understanding.
2.
“You really did it?”
It was the disbelief and admiration in my older brother Dariden’s voice that had me creeping a little closer to his open window. I was seventeen; I knew better than to eavesdrop on my brother’s conversations with friends. I found out too many things about him that diminished my feelings for him and gave me no liking for his friends. Especially Chayne, who had recently married Kobbi and was now one of The Voice’s caretakers—or guards, as I thought of the people who controlled her.
“Wasn’t easy, since Vision is such an unnatural city, but I managed to slip away from my father for an evening and find a particular shop.”
“And the stuff works?” Dariden asked.
Chayne laughed softly. “She’s pretty to look at, but when you spread Kobrah’s legs, she’s a cold piece. So I put three drops of this drug in her wine, and she falls into a sensual haze. I can do almost anything to her. She’s passive on the drug, but her body is so hot and willing it doesn’t matter that her brain isn’t in the bed.”
“A wife needs only enough brains to know when to spread ’em,” Dariden said with a smirk in his voice.
I didn’t dare move. Hardly dared to breathe. If Dariden found out I had overheard this, he would make my life a misery. Or more of a misery than it was.
“Will she do . . . that . . . when you give her the drug?” Dariden asked.