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No, Eva wasn't eaten, but the herb brides do bite!
The brides shove and they play and they dance and they cut one another, sometimes, with fingernails and shale!
Wild women, even if they are worms!
Oh, but they do treat her preciously. When she is pushed and tussled with, another will pull her partner away and whisper in her ear before they go so far as to hurt her.
To them, she is a city wildflower peering through pavement: delicate, and foreign. They poke and prod at her constant little bruises, on her shins and knees and thighs and buttocks and wrists and breasts and elbows and shins. Did she say shins? So many on her shins! Little coins of raised blue and green, like a bird. She is speckled!
Of course they teach her to dance before they teach her to speak the language of the steppe! What else is she there for?
It hurts, at first. Her feet are not shaped quite like a bride's, and the skin there is smooth, newborn from her sedentary life indoors. She bleeds so much, those first few weeks barefoot in the steppe! The flesh on her soles and her heels opens, closes, and re-opens to pebbles and switch-grasses, insects tread on.
Her blood runs into the earth! As it is meant to! And they laugh, and care and kiss her feet when they rest at night, the ointment they rub in smelling vaguely like calendula and petroleum.
Mother Boddho only knows her pace and blood for but two weeks before she allows her flesh to part, sprouting out flowers and shrubs and twyre and other herbs in her wake while her teachers whoop triumphantly, scooping her up in their arms and kissing her body while they twirl.
She makes the world lush by the trace of her foot! She, a flaxen daisy, did prove her worth: She too can smack the earth with both hands and be surrounded by a gust of sand pest, grass in her fingers and dirt in her hair -- it soothes!
They adore her, she thinks! The Stillwater becomes a remnant of the old colonizers, and they let her keep her relics from the city and let her collect it from the abandoned houses of the dead. This place fills up with fine china and pianos, chairs and tables stacked precariously on each other such that it becomes a maze, a museum, an oddity. There are books, there, some of which she would've been so desperate to read before all this -- but she doesn't want nor need to read anymore!
They bathe naked in the waters of the Gorkhon, and they splash and dunk each other under the water and eventually she tries too, even if their arms are wired while hers are soft!
For the monthly bath, the herb brides bathe each other in three parts bull's blood to one part milk, and they glisten in red as they rub the water into each other's hair and skin, hands over each other's bodies as she'd sit aside. Like eels in the water, slick and writhing!
She's never felt jealousy in her entire life, though, and it's so much sweeter when she gets her lone bath of three parts milk to one part blood. They'd reach in to bathe ten hands at a time to run the pink solution around her body with hands and a woven pad. She couldn't help but giggle when they'd dip under her breasts or between her thighs, and they'd all marvel at her smoothness when she'd lift herself out, and they'd dry her down.
Even the baths and the monthly ritual did not stop her skin from browning in the heat of the steppe, and her hair from turning into the tangled sweaty mess token for a bride ( perfect for sticking flowers and herbs ). She still wears the tattered rags of the old world, though, but she looks now -- wild, just like them!
"I belong here!" she yells as the sprints down the streets, waving handfuls of white and red and orange flowering herbs.
To the Mother of Bulls, first, her friend! The girl is so wily and so wise, flanked by butchers and kin and bulls and creatures of all sorts, on a little wooden step adorned with painted flowers and intricate patterns. The delight in her eyes when she gives her a massive flower, peony-like -- cute! How proud they all are, of their little mother! Eva looks up when she leaves admiring there's a massive Bos aurochs, a buha-noyon, looming above protectively. And even Aspity bows her head in bewildered thanks when Eva shoves green twyre into her chest.
This world is wild, and so is she!
She runs next through pits of mass graves, wrinkling her nose as the stench still raises above the soil and the pest, to the graveyard nestled in-between. Sweet Grace, Mistress of the Dead! Eva doesn't miss anyone anymore, but she could only assume it must've been hard for that poor child: The Stamatins left like everyone else, minds blank even to Grace tugging on their sleeves in tears!
She hands Grace bundles of these pale little stalks, white flowers as fine as baby's breath but thrice as rough. Grace, as kind and poor as she is, asks if she owes her anything for the kind gift; she means a seance, of course, as if she needs to look back! She tells her she doesn't owe her anything, but a hug would be nice!
She does see the Impostress ( or at least one of them ) perched on the side of the abandoned station as she runs through, her feet dangling over unused tracks. Eva can nearly feel her gaze burning a hole into her as she passes, but she pointedly ignores her. No flowers for that mistress, not until she gets an apology!
Flowers for all the children of the town, their precious treasures who survived the plight! The town is theirs, wandering through the districts cared by all kin -- new mothers, new fathers, in hundreds to their deceased one or two! Flowers of all colors, as Boddho gives more to each of her steps!
Sticky doesn't seem to care for the little bouquet of wild red stars that she gives him, but she smiles when Murky snatches them from his hands and takes a big, full whiff of them and remarks how they smell of honey, and the bergamot in Eva's old teas. She adores the children of this town, now! ( She didn't always! )
The kin of this place do stare at her as she passes, especially at her first sprouting into this new life, but they learn to warm to her and tolerate her role in the world, the same as any bride. She does belong!
The town began a new cycle, and she learned to start anew with it!
The first few days saw Burakh the younger become the elder of this town, the de facto leader to Taya's little play role. Eva barely saw him at all in this time. When she did, she'd see him obviously upset and exhausted -- head bent low and walking at a quick pace, only maybe listening to the kin hurriedly trying to keep up and throwing requests for infrastructure, organization, and ritual in his ear.
He still managed to find a spare second to shoot her a dirty look as he passed, which wasn't particularly nice. She'd put her thumb on her nose, wiggle her fingers and stick out her tongue in return: It's only polite!
So, when she does bother him again -- and she knows she does -- it's months later, when the uproar of a town taken from man to earth with creatures abundant finally dies down to a daily chaos. Even the brides speak highly of Artemy, as he cares for bull and man while mentoring a new ( large! ) cohort of little emshen, so the town will grow supplemented by beef and blood. He looks wiser now ( she sees those little gray hairs at his temples! ), and looks only a little bit sad.
There is no better surgeon in this town than he, and the kin don't think there ever will be. He heals through his little knives, of which the town's smiths make him the most detailed and ornate ones, little patterns of birds and flowers on the hilts. He helps with difficult births now, too, of both the bovine and human variety. He is one of the few trusted to cut a woman's womb if necessary, and can sew her back up just as well -- much like Boddho herself.
The day she seeks him out, already adapted well into her role of an adopted bride, he's clearly coming back from one of those events. His leather pouch of tools is dangling across his body, and in his hand he carries an ornate little birthing stool, dripping wet from a recent cleaning.
Of course he scowls when he sees her, both alone in the Skinners on this starry evening. So when he starts to walk in the opposite direction from her approach, she sprints up and -- tackles him, from the back! Or tries to; he obviously is annoyed and still standing, but at least he's wearing her like a backpack, now.
"Oh, you can't walk away from me, silly man!"
Artemy gives the longest sigh ever, as she forces a wreath of ashen swish and blood twyre onto his slightly overgrown hair. Which is silly -- she chose the most useful herbs for him, and they look lovely!
He basically reaches back and twists her off him like a bottlecap; she lands, then, gracefully on her bare feet. Artemy, she notes, is now wearing a more traditional pair of thin leather slippers rather than the industrial western boots she saw before. He actually looks much nicer overall, his heavy gear replaced with traditional clothes -- yes, a leather apron, but underneath it a pale tunic embellished with burgundy and navy floral and paisley patterns. His beard is full, now, nearly an inch away from his face and moustache growing into it; he looks so much like his father!
The wreath suits himself very well, and he does glance up and reach to touch it, thoughtfully, for a moment.
She grins, and says, "Oooh, I knew you'd like it," and smiles even more when he remembers to frown at her again.
Artemy's gaze scans across her mostly bare body; not romantically, of course, but more like an inspection of a newborn calf. He points to her left bare breast, at the long jagged pink scab healing on the edge of her nipple. "I told you they'd bite," he says, clearly so full of himself.
She rolls her eyes in response, taking her silken pink scarf ( dotted with holes from the steppe moths, at this point ) draped behind her and flings it in front of her shoulder, covering herself from his scrutiny. His pointed hand retracts back to rest on a leg of the chair he's clinging to. He cooly says, "I don't know why, of everyone else, you're here."
"Like who else?" she asks, curiously.
He feigns a serious pause of thought, but then blurts: "Anyone else, Eva. Anyone." And then, more seriously, in a way that she can tell is a little hurt: "Shouldn't you have left with your beloved Bachelor Dankovsky?"
"He's not my beloved," she says, and then corrects herself: "Well, I mean, I have plenty beloved-s. But why would I look back on just one?" Which is true; it was never her prerogative to long, though some memories were sweet. With him in particular, it was mostly just stressful; better forgotten.
Of course, she can't help but tease him back with the obvious: "But I think you're just projecting, aren't you?"
Artemy's brow lowers, and his lips press together, annoyed. She stands still, curious, as he puts the stool down, turns to approach. She's not afraid of him even if he's a few heads taller than her; she looks up, smug as ever.
He shakes his head, looking down at her in disbelief. "You can't tell me that you're fine with what happened. Everyone, gone. Not just the Utopians. You had a life here, with all the others. Are you really just the same, playing with the pest and the brides?"
"Of course I am. Why wouldn't I be?" she echoes back, but Artemy shakes his head and looks even more bothered by it.
He doesn't believe me, she thinks. She tries to jerk her head away when Artemy's hands reach out, grab the sides of her face. She tries to pull her head away when he uses a thumb and forefinger of each hand to pry her lips open to peer at her mouth -- as if she were cattle!
When he stares at her teeth, his eyes widen and his jaw drops as he sees something, something he recognizes. She doesn't know what it is.
He swallows, and clears his throat. He says, carefully: "I'm not sure if you were ever human to begin with."
She tries to smile around his fingers, but can't. Artemy only makes a little sound of surprise when she opens her mouth, and bites down hard on his top knuckles.