Description
Taji, whose name means Crown, wears her hair coiled and set the way her mother did, and her mother’s mother, and the village reads it the way you would read a mark of office, because that is what it is. She has borne it since she was old enough to sit still for the setting of it. Nobody asked her. A crown is not offered, it is placed, and the one it is placed upon learns to hold her neck straight.
She can go unseen. Not hidden, which any child can manage, but gone, standing in the middle of the gathering with the talk moving through the place where she is. She learned this young and she learned quickly what it was good for. She has heard what her people say about her when they believe her elsewhere. She has heard the doubts, and the kindnesses no one would say to her face, and the things spoken about her in rooms she was not meant to enter. She has never repeated a word of it. She knows this village down to the bone, and every soul in it believes she is the one who does not know things.
There is a cost, and she is honest with herself about it. She goes unseen most often on the days when she cannot carry it, when the weight of what they expect is heavier than she is, and she has told herself this is rest and knows it is not. But she comes back. She has always come back. Whatever she heard while she was gone, she returns and she puts her hands to the work and she says nothing about any of it. That is what the coiling of the hair has always meant. Not that she is above them. That she has heard the worst of it and stayed.
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