Information

Najda
Legacy Name: Najda

The Reborn Legeica
Owner: Molly

Age: 8 years, 3 months, 3 weeks

Born: December 21st, 2015

Adopted: 8 years, 3 months, 3 weeks ago

Adopted: December 21st, 2015

Statistics

• Level: 1
   
• Strength: 10
   
• Defense: 10
   
• Speed: 10
   
• Health: 10
   
• HP: 10/10
   
• Intelligence: 0
   
• Books Read: 0
• Food Eaten: 0
• Job: Unemployed

When I was nine, my father took me outside and gave me a basket full of sticks. It was mid-winter, and even the Nadirian desert was cold enough to freeze a child. My mother looked on silently, her burned hands wrapped in cheesecloth, the yogurt in the bindings turning rancid as it warmed on her charred skin. Her face was drawn tight, shutting me out the way we had boarded up the windows, trying so hard not to let any warmth slip out - and I knew that if my father had not been there, she would have sheltered me, just like she always had.

I hadn’t meant to burn my mother’s hands.

The ice had crept inside the night before, coating the tiles by the door in frost. In the morning, my mother’s fingers were cold past the point of trembling, stiff and pale, just like grandmother’s fingers had been when she froze to death last winter. I didn’t think. I could have given her my gloves, the calf leather gloves that were still too big for me, because my father had meant them to last me until I was grown. I could have brought her closer to the hearth and fed the fire. But instead I removed my gloves and I placed my fingers over hers. I thought I could control the warmth that always crackled inside me. I thought I could warm her better than a pair of gloves.

And then my mother drew away from me, shocked from her frozen stupor. She stared wide-eyed at her fingers as they flushed red and began to blister. Patches of her skin broke apart above the swellings. My mother wailed my name in dismay and I grabbed for her fingers in a panic, to soak them in water, to hold her close and apologize. But my gloves were still off, and where my bare skin touched hers, small blue flames tongued her flesh.

When my father came home to find my mother curled on her side, hands in a pan of cold water, when every inch of her must have been screaming in pain, my mother loved me enough to lie. But my father would not believe that there had been a cooking accident, that she had dropped the oil and that the fire had flared up fast and hot. Not when my my mother had built the underground fire pit with her own two hands. Not when the Guard had halved the oil rations this month. And not when it took hours to coax a flame to the damp wood, the nights so cold that even the sheltered embers froze out.

I hadn’t meant to burn my mother’s hands, but that didn’t matter. Mages in Nadir were exiled. Our Kings had always feared them, and so our people feared them.

Feared me.

Now my father held out that basket, and no matches. It was a test I would fail, no matter what. If my magic kept me from freezing to death, if I showed up at the front door the next morning, it would only prove what I was. And If I had no powers, my father would be sending his helpless daughter to freeze. So why send me out at all, if he knew, deep in his heart, what I truly am? Why not simply turn me in?

I realized then that my father knew full well that I wasn’t going to die tonight.

Survive, the basket meant, but do not return.

My father’s fingers lingered for a moment on the handle of the basket. I wondered if the flicker of reluctance in his eyes was for the sake of his daughter, or the basket. Fine wicker. Hand-woven. Worth more than a girl like me.

As I walked, I thought about this gesture.

My father had always turned a blind eye to my magic, dousing the fire with earth when we had visitors, lest they see how high it leapt on only meager sticks; showing up at the schoolhouse in his police uniform to bring me home, after my teacher went to the station to berate him for letting me leave the house without shoes. I was always like that: careless. Running to school barefoot in the snow because I was in a rush to catch up to the other children, and forgetting that they only went barefoot in summer. But if I had any illusions about the power my father had to protect me, they shattered on that night. His position was nothing compared to the power the Guard had in our country, the power they had over anyone even suspected of magic. He could not pretend any longer.

He could not pretend any longer. He had no choice. I spoke these words to myself that night, trying to stay calm. I still tell myself this, when I think of my father, as I choke down the urge to hunt him down and punish him for his actions. And then I remember my mother’s hands, pale, dead skin peeling from raw flesh, and I wonder if I should not have been punished more for mine.

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