Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80439 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Right now there’s just the four of us here. Me, Mila, Freya, and Bjorn, Freya’s eldest. He’s two years old and thankfully napping. Whenever he’s awake, he’s destroying something. He can’t help it. It’s in the blood.
He’s about to lose his status as baby of the family. I know how he feels. I used to be the baby of the family, before my older sisters started adding to our numbers.
I help Freya over to the kitchen, where she’s insisting on cooking dinner on the old stone range right in the center of the longhouse. This place is so anachronistic. The houses around it are on smaller sections and are made of modern materials. But my father bought three acres of prime land next to the river when he was just a young man, and he built this house to woo my mom before they were married.
It’s been ages since I was here. The first time I got the chance to get out of town, I took it. I was seventeen and eleven months when I hopped on a truck heading to the countryside. There were too many men already starting to circle, putting their claim on me unofficially. I was going to be dragged up for selection at one minute past midnight on my birthday, and I was not going to have it.
If Freya hadn’t gotten pregnant, and if Mila hadn’t also gotten pregnant, I’d have stayed away longer. But one thing or another seems to drag me back. My father’s loss is still felt. My mother’s is too, but she passed not long after I was born, so I have no memory of her. My father was all the parent I ever had, and his absence rings hollow through the house.
I almost expect him to come walking in the front door, wrap me in a hug, and tell me I don’t have to do any of it if I don’t want to. Or I walk into the kitchen, and I expect to smell his specialty cake. But he’s gone, and new family members are arriving, and that is how life is.
For the last few months I have been off in the far lands, herding goats. It’s not glamorous, but it spared me the attentions of local warriors who would fight each other for the right to make me their wife. My plan is to stay in the longhouse with Freya until she gives birth, then go back to the goats before any men get the very silly idea of trying to marry me.
“Assuming what she wants is to be picked by a warrior and have his babies,” Mila says. “It’s time she grew up. She can’t run around in the fields with animals forever.”
“Ha fucking ha.” I scowl at my older sisters.
Freya is cool about it, because it’s her second baby and she’s always been cool about most things. Mila, on the other hand, is having her first baby, and she’s acting like nobody else has ever done it, and everyone should do it immediately. According to Mila, if you’re not currently having a baby, you might as well throw yourself in the river. And don’t get her started on me not being married. She’s married, naturally, as is Freya, as is practically every female in Weltheim City, because it’s basically mandatory in an unofficial sort of way.
In spite of Mila’s occasional obnoxiousness, I’m excited. I love babies. Bjorn came before I left, and getting to hold him when he was small is a memory I will always treasure.
Right now, all three of us are staying at the old longhouse, our family home. My father built it with his own hand when he brought my mother here as a very young man, and helped found the city. It’s hard to believe that all of Weltheim was developed in the last thirty or so years, but technology means progress is swift.
Freya needs our help because her husband is a soldier and as such has been sent off to do soldiering. He’s not even on the planet, which is fine because he’s pretty useless by all accounts when he is around anyway. Freya is five years older than me. I was thirteen years old when she was selected by Ragnar.
I was not impressed by him then, and I’m not impressed now. He should have gotten leave to come home. Pregnancy is a fairly predictable affair. Nine months, and all that. His poor wife shouldn’t be waddling about trying to fend for herself as well as Bjorn.
“I’m not going to run around with animals forever. At least not Earth animals,” I tell them. “I’m going to be selected for the next expedition. I’ll be in another solar system by the end of the month.”
My sisters roll their eyes at me, but while looking at each other. I don’t know why nobody in the family takes me seriously when I tell them I intend to be an interstellar sailor.