I met the wives and concubines during my first evening in the palace: beautiful women—some pregnant or with infants at their teats—and not a few bayaks, young and old. Either group was adorned in pearls and gold and quite a few foreign-seeming trinkets in flashing colors that I knew not the names for. Many were starved for a new distraction from the monotony of their lives; perhaps living in a space so majestic and yet so closed off from the rest of the world did strange things to their minds, for many had no qualms about approaching a bald woman rumored to possess supernatural powers the way bees singlemindedly aim for nectar.

They prodded, poked, and stroked and cooed over me as if I were a beloved doll or a dog guaranteed not to bite, and spoke to me in Kailogan as if were a small, slow child. To my great consternation, half a dozen of them immediately hauled me off to another room and scrubbed and bathed me in dizzying oils and strange herbs. They cast off my old blouse and skirt, made ragged by the journey and discolored by the changing seasons, and put me in a deeply cerise cotton dress that covered my arms and swathed my legs and feet and draped a sash the color of purple yams over my shoulder. Golden monkeys and crocodiles chased each other at the hems and sleeves, and my limbs and neck and waist were weighted down by a magnitude of gold rings, bracelets, necklaces, anklets, and belts--truly, I was arrayed in a grander fashion than a servant (the livery of which also had gold at the hems) but only slightly less fine than the attire of the wives, for I was still a witch, after all. This would only last until the first day, for jewelry and excessive amounts of fabric were of no use to me in climbing trees.

Eventually, they asked me if I could sing. I admit that I allowed smugness to roll my shoulders back and open my mouth and make my voice drop and swell over the words of a planting song. It may have seemed a strange choice, I know, but I wanted these women who to know of the superiority of the steady, soaring rice terraces to the infernal sea. I wanted them to know, too, that I had a voice and that it--I--had power far beyond my stringy features and calloused palms let on. I was not their plaything, and by the song’s end, their silence told me that they knew it.