I remember learning to swim. The hot feeling that would spread from my belly up; the small cage of my chest burning, heart a warming furnace, neck and shoulders and pinched face afire with the intensity of concentration necessary to hold my breath. I would not count the moments as they passed, but my elder siblings, who took their turns holding me under the gloomy surface of the floodwater lake, would. In the summer, only, I held my breath. Days passed under the water. I felt myself transforming, when first my lungs began to understand the pressures and demands, and later, my arms and legs stretched, bending and knowing their own power. Before I grew from girl to woman I learned of a different creature altogether, curling and uncurling inside.

There was never a choice in the learning, not with this, not with other skills. In the summer months we had the floodwaters layered upon muck layered upon mud for swimming. We had climbing and hanging and scrambling, barefoot, glove-handed; the lore of herbs and undergrowth, the natural poisons and medicines we would come to know by sight. The baying of animals became our own calls, the howls of dogs and their more dangerous cousins; bird song, their melodies alternately sharp and soothing.

Autumn and winter reined our spirits in, and we feigned patience with the tight circle of what we thought of then as less practical, and infinitely less enjoyable, studies. We began with sounds and the letters paired with them; words and sentences and delicate phrasing ensnared us later, our heads bowed over the bound scraps of copybooks, paper that could be spared. We read aloud before we were given leave to eat our evening meal, and too many mistakes ensured that your dinner grew cold as you returned, again and again, to the beginning of your reading.

Hours were spent on the tasks of learning oneself, cultivating a keen ear and watchful eye, while learning also the slight movements of the body that would render one virtually invisible, easily forgotten, by others. The lazy eye will glide right over the half-crouched form, the individual who speaks always with sense but never with wit, the figure who seeks neither to hide themselves or any other thing.

In the deep months of winter, whose shifting snows and chilling cold became more difficult, and not less so, with the passing time, were spent fasting, testing in ways far different from those of the warmer months the limitations of our bodies. Meals were intentionally meager, when consumed at all, and a tolerance for the low temperatures was learned during forays into the forest when the storms abated. We learned to use the fat of animals to line our own skins, to manage with a heavily mitted hand tasks that would otherwise require freed fingers. We learned to rely on each other, when there was company, and ourselves, when there was not.

The time of growth and green came later for us than those who lived further south, but it was no less celebratory for it. Traveling merchants and players, messengers and task-takers, made their rounds of the villages in the thaw, bringing news and lies and work. This was the time of learning diplomacy, the art of reading the face and the tongue and the twitching form; the time to learn deceit, how to recognize it, and how to perfect it so that you could not be recognized in turn. We were given leave to hustle and play with the children of the traveling families, to mimic their accents, if we could, and their language, if we knew it. These pursuits were made favorites among us.

I was Beaky, then, the summers and autumns, winters and springs, named for the bird whose life my life took, whose death cry took the place of my first wail. My mother, already a woman with six children born, moaned that she should live yet, her essence too weak to empower a living child. We were all of us unlucky in this, but I was unluckiest of all, born at the dying of a beloved singer, born when the screams of those living on the outskirts of the village ceased to live. The child of a raid, the child who, my mother believed, had been their aim, their purpose. I belonged to the kosackt, their large, feral forms, the wild eyes part-human, their reeking claws mauling the poor who had not made it within the walls in time. Their howls beckoned. Mother would’ve taken me out to them, I think, had not my father interfered, stupidly in love with all of his children, even this youngest, whose mouth could not even form a cry.

I did not think of it. We were kept occupied, always, though I never failed to notice the sidelong looks of my mother, contemptuous, sometimes, though fearful, mostly.