The Girl Who Drank the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

best to convince himself that his job would one day get easier. He was wrong. It didn’t.
    The Elders barked orders at him during Council meetings and community functions and after-­hours discussions. They berated him when they ran into him on the street. Or when they sat in his mother’s dining room for yet another sumptuous (though uncomfortable) supper. They admonished him when he followed in their wake during surprise inspections.
    Antain hung in the background, his eyebrows knit together into a perplexed knot.
    It seemed that no matter what Antain did, the Elders erupted into purple-­faced rage and sputtering incoherence.
    â€œAntain!” the Elders barked. “Stand up straight!”
    â€œAntain! What have you done with the proclamations?”
    â€œAntain! Wipe that ridiculous look off your face!”
    â€œAntain! How could you have forgotten the snacks?”
    â€œAntain! What on earth have you spilled all over your robes?”
    Antain, it seemed, could not do anything right.
    His home life wasn’t any better.
    â€œHow can you possibly still be an Elder-­in-­Training?” his mother fumed night after night at supper. Sometimes, she’d let her spoon come crashing down to the table, making the servants jump. “My brother promised me that you would be an Elder by now. He
promised
.”
    And she would seethe and grumble until Antain’s youngest brother, Wyn, began to cry. Antain was the oldest of six brothers—a small family, by Protectorate standards—and ever since his father died, his mother wanted nothing else but to make sure that each of her sons achieved the very best that the Protectorate had to offer.
    Because didn’t she, after all,
deserve
the very best, when it came to sons?
    â€œUncle tells me that things take time, Mother,” Antain said quietly. He pulled his toddler brother onto his lap and began rocking until the child calmed. He pulled a wooden toy that he had carved himself from his pocket—a little crow with spiral eyes and a clever rattle inside its belly. The boy was delighted, and instantly shoved it into his mouth.
    â€œYour uncle can boil his head,” she fumed. “We
deserve
that honor. I mean
you
deserve it, my dear son.”
    Antain wasn’t so sure.
    He excused himself from the table, mumbling something about having work to do for the Council, but really he only planned on sneaking into the kitchen to help the kitchen staff. And then into the gardens to help the gardeners in the last of the daylight hours. And then he went into the shed to carve wood. Antain loved woodworking—the stability of the material, the delicate beauty of the grain, the comforting smell of sawdust and oil. There were few things in his life that he loved more. He carved and worked deep into the night, trying his best not to think about his life. The next Day of Sacrifice was approaching, after all. And Antain would need yet another excuse to make himself scarce.
    The next morning, Antain donned his freshly laundered robe and headed into the Council Hall well before dawn. Every day, his first task of the morning was to read through the citizen complaints and requests that had been scrawled with bits of chalk on the large slate wall, and deem which ones were worth attention and which should simply be washed down and erased.
    (“But what if they
all
are important, Uncle?” Antain had asked the Grand Elder once.
    â€œThey can’t possibly be. In any case, by denying access, we give our people a gift. They learn to accept their lot in life. They learn that any action is inconsequential. Their days remain, as they should be, cloudy. There is no greater gift than that. Now. Where is my Zirin tea?”)
    Next, Antain was to air out the room, then post the day’s agendas, then fluff the cushions for the Elders’ bony bottoms, then spray the entrance room with some kind of perfume concocted in the laboratories of