Dawnlark Plains all that summer was fire and rain

Something sparked in the mottled woman when she saw that she had been recognized; and the woman (her mother!) spoke words of quiet acknowlegdement. I am she; the one that made you -- even if the words that came out of her mouth were I'm not. And then, finally, she spoke her name. Daddy had always called her Akuti, but she knew both the names the woman had gone by in that past life. Easy couldn't help but feel she had inherited a lot more from the woman than her father had liked to say. It was implicit in her wording; she was not Khoe any longer.

"You called me Ishara," Easy told her with a small smile, and it was the first time in many waxing and wanings of the moon that she'd spoken that name. "I don't use it much, these days. Blackbear and Easy is what they call me." Which was not exactly what she wanted to say; how could she express all that was in her heart? Her mind was leaping like a fish upstream, from How often do we compare our differences when we should be trying to understand the ways we are the same? to When I was young, I thought about the things you took from me, but I never thought to thank you for all the things you gave me to I never stopped loving you; I just started loving other things.

"I'd like to get to know you," she said after a moment, when she found herself unable to say the rest. "Just you, as you are. Because you made me -- so much more than you could know."