The little boy sat down. He had been called to the main room because one of the women had heard him speaking in a tongue which was not the accepted one.  The women—all of them, not just the one that heard him—didn’t care it was his tongue, and the tongue of his parents, and his grandparents he was speaking. They didn’t care he missed his family, crying himself to sleep every night. All they wanted was for him to forget that life, those people, that tongue.

He expected to be chastised and punished, like they did to the other boys, striking the back of their hands with a long stick until blood dripped to the floor, or made to stay for days without food or water in teh little room outside. He was surprised, then, when the oldest woman, the one they called Superior, asked...

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