"Special class momma?"
"You will serve your new master as I served Master Nivaron, but that is not important. What is important is that you'll have good food and at least something of a life of ease, which you won't get as a field hand."
"No Momma! You can't tell me to do this!"
"Krista, I know what I ask is terrible, but in this way you will at least be given good food, shelter, and protection from too much abuse, as long as you please your new master. You will not last long in the firan cane fields as a manual laborer!"
"I would rather die in a firan cane field and keep myself respect than be a soulless whore like you've become to ask such a thing of me!"
Slap!
"Krista you will not speak to me like that again! I've done what I've had to! I've survived to care for you and your brother, after your father died!"
"You mean murdered! Besides what good has surviving done you? Look where we are mother! And he's not my brother!"
"Yes he is, and as for what I've done it's been to keep food in your belly and of all the choices left to us this is the safest route for you to take! You will do as I say tomorrow Krista and that is final!"
Leaning back against the damp wall behind me, I had shaken my head slowly in empathy for the girl. My world had been completely overturned and I was without comfort to turn to in any form. I had never experienced anything in life to prepare me for the harshness of either what I was hearing a mother tell her daughter or the personal loss I had already experienced with the loss of my family.
Who knew what was yet to come, the knowledge of that yet unknown fate ate away at me like a preying animal in the darkness. Silent tears had coursed down my cheeks and I had been grateful for the darkness around me that hid my tears from the others.
I hadn't wanted to appear weak to anyone. I had sympathized for the girl, as much as I had for myself at the time. My mother would never have asked me to do what her mother was asking of her. How blessed I had been and not even known it! And now that I knew what I had lost, it was gone from me for forever.
A crow cawed loudly breaking my remembrance of the past momentarily. I glanced back the way we had come, but it was still clear of any visible threat to us.