My sister and I were among the few who looked like us and lived in these far villages. No, it is not that I was the most beautiful. That my eyes were dark as the pond at night.

That my skin held its brown even in winter.

That I had black hair while so many girls in the villages had yellow or red. (Many would tell you, with a fine sneer, that I most certainly was not.) It was more that I was strange, novel. It was not so much that I was the most beautiful girl in the village. The kinder ones insisted it wasn’t his fault, that of the lashes he’d taken for the theft of that first horse, at least one had caught his head, and he’d never been quite right after that.Īwful, a few boys said, changing the direction of their hands as they whittled their small love tokens, for now these things would be offered not to me but to the next girl who caught their eyes as she skipped down the lane. They lowered their heads, praying not only for my soul but for the soul of the boy who had killed me. Tragedy, the women said, shaking their heads as they pinned clothes to the lines, just enough sun touching them to bleach away the smell of the lye soap.Ī terrible thing, said our village priests, and priests as far as the gossip traveled. John Rand had been known as a horse thief since he was fifteen, so while the nearby villages may have been horrified to hear he had killed me, they were also unsurprised.

Wild beauty anna marie mclemore