Page 98 of Valpar

Calliope

As I settled ontothe soft bed, feeling the smooth sheets against my skin, I admired my hair, meticulously brushed and intricately braided into stunning designs. The room filled with laughter, echoing off the walls, as Valpar, a master storyteller, weaved his tales. My sides ached from the sheer hilarity, and I couldn’t recall a moment in my life when I had laughed so hard.

Thorn, Valpar and Sugha were troublemakers as children. Their age differences were large, and Thorn became the leader of their brood. Thorn told Valpar what to do until he was oldenough to understand. Each respective seeded father took care of that child, ultimately, but all the fathers took care of each orcling. They worked as a team because apparently orclings have a lot of energy, and his mother had to spend time with each male.

I couldn’t imagine going to another cabin to spend time with another male and leave your baby behind, but Valpar said when the babies were young his mother took the babies with them. Once they were no longerfeeding from the titas Valpar said,the seeded father would take over while his mother spent time with another male.

No male felt jealousy toward any orcling when she had to take care of it. They all loved the little babies that came into their home. When they got older, though, once they went through their change to become adult males, there was a shift. They had to fight, earn their keep and move out of the cabins, but that was much later after their mother had passed on.

Thorn and Valpar were older, had spent a lot of time together and knew their mother very well. How she smelled, her likes and dislikes, they remembered the foods she would cook and the desserts she would make.

Valpar remembered that his mother would often sleep when he was a child, while Thorn said she didn’t sleep as much when he was young. Then, when Sugha was born, it was like it was too much for her body to handle. She wanted that baby so much for Eman, though. He wanted an orcling for him as much as she wanted Sugha for herself.

Once she was done feeding Sugha from her body, she got worse until she went to sleep and never woke again. It had me in tears to hear the story, as he finished my bath, but he didn’t once cry. He told me it was how the gods wanted it, that she was one of the stars looking down at all of them and helping the Moon Fairy find mates for her children.

I did my best not to cry after that, especially after he said he was the one in charge of taking care of Sugha’s hair.

Valpar was apparently good at braiding hair. He proved it just fine after doing mine. It wasn’t too tight, and he even made it so it would stay without the help of any bands or cuffs. My hair was in its own wrappings. All he used was some oil in his bag and a comb and brush to make me feel like an orc princess.

I guessed if I turned green, the braiding part wouldn’t be so bad.

Valpar loved to braid, which I found a complete surprise. He would do Sugha’s hair every day. Sugha got so sick of it that one day he chopped it all off and shaved the sides. Valpar was so upset, he said that was when he started to get really grumpy.

I bit my lips and tried so hard not to laugh, as he told me the story about how mad he was at Sugha. It was an intimate thing to braid someone’s hair. A mother or a father would do it to an orcling. To help him get over the grief of losing his mother, his fathers had let him do theirs, but when it was over he was just devastated because he had no one else’s hair to braid. To demonstrate how angry he was, he never braided his own hair.

Talk about a grumpy orc.

I asked if he ever would braid his hair again and he grunted in reply, crossing his arms.

Which he doesn’t. He learned how to do it on others, but not himself.

“What if i braided your hair?” I asked him.

He narrowed his eyes at me and looked away.

“Maybe.”

I touched my hair again, feeling how soft the ends were.

Valpar braidedmyhair.

The rest of the afternoon I asked him to tell me more about his life as a child. I became obsessed with it. I wanted to know, not just about the life of an orc in the Wood but, what it was like to have a family at a young age.

Because I didn’t know mine.

Why didn’t I know it?

I’ve never thought about it before. I didn’t care to, didn’t want to know because part of me felt like it hurt.

From time to time, as he told me the tales of when his fathers took them on hunting trips, giving them life lessons on how not to get your foot chopped off or not to get sick by eating the wrong fruits or roots in the forest, a pang of hurt would hit my chest.

I—don’t think I knew my real father.

There was no image that came to my head, there wasn’t a warm feeling that flooded my chest. There was emptiness when I tried to search inside myself, and the more I looked the more disappointed I grew.

I listened, though, I listened whole-heartedly because I liked the stories he told. He was different when he was small. he would smile when he talked about his mother and how soft she was and different from his fathers, and I tried to remember what my mother was like.

Theresa said that my real mom was not a very good one. I trusted Theresa, because she had always taken care of me. She fed and clothed me and, overall, tried to keep me safe. I’d known nothing else.

---