His name was Bilabo, But Abema had always called him Billy Blue. Because even though his hair was the same thick, curly black as everyone else in the village, his eyes were a bright, piercing blue, like the pale men from the far north. And his skin was almost the same colour as the bronze necklaces the desert traders sometimes brought. And so, when they were both just little kids, Abema had decided that he looked far too interesting for a boring, common name like Bilabo. Nobody knew who Billy’s father was. Or, well, presumably his mother, Sensi, knew. She had left the village for a year and a half and returned heavily pregnant. One could reasonably assume it was a northern man, but Sensi refused to answer any questions on the subject. Abema had only been a year old when Sensi returned to the village, so she didn’t have any memories of the event, but she’d certainly heard the other women in the village mutter about it enough. Never where Sensi could hear, though, because she was the best midwife in the village these days, and no woman wanted to get on her bad side. Abema and Billy had grown up together. They played together, they ate together, they even bathed together and slept on the same mat whenever they could get away with it. Basically the entire village took it for granted that the two of them would be bonded before long. Some people said it was a shame that a talented young pot-maker like Abema would be saddled with someone like Billy, but Abema thought that was rather stupid. Sure, Billy might not have any particularly impressive skills or talents, but he was quick-witted and could do just about anything at least somewhat competently after being showed how just once. Besides, a skilled pot-maker could easily support an entire family, and Billy was great with kids. So Abema had been saving up basically from the moment she first produced a pot worth selling. As soon as Billy came of age, she intended to be bonded with him and use her savings to have a new hut constructed on the outskirts of the village, near the clay field and the kilns. There, Abema would support the family with her pottery while Billy saw to their home and took care of the children. That was basically the only future Abema could imagine. Which was why it came as something of a shock to learn that Billy imagined something very different. “What do you mean, ‘leaving’? Where would you even go?” “Out there! Where there’s things I’ve never seen. People I’ve never met. I want to see the world!” “But what about me? Don’t you love me?” “Of course I love you! I love you more than anyone I’ve ever met. But we both know that if I stay here, this village will be all I ever know for my entire life. That’s not what I want out of life, Abema. I need to be free!” A small, rather irate part of Abema’s brain noted that Billy had met fewer than twenty women close to his own age in his life, so, loving her ‘more than anyone he’d ever met’ might not be that big of a statement. But most of her was too stunned to think much of anything. She didn’t know what to do. What to feel. When Bilabo left the village on the very day he came of age, she didn’t even go to see him off. Several days passed in a daze as Abema tried to figure out what her life was even supposed to look like now. For a good ten years, she’d known exactly what her life would be like. Now, she didn’t know anything. It was like she was a kite on a windy day, and someone had just cut her string. The one solid point she could always come back to was gone, and now she was falling into the endless blue of the open sky. But as the days passed, one thing kept popping into her head over and over again. She missed Billy. She wanted to see him again. She didn’t like the fact that he wasn’t by her side, the way he had always been. The way he was supposed to be! And so, once her mind stopped running in erratic circles for long enough to do anything useful, she came to a decision. But she wasn’t the type to act rashly. She spent twenty days learning to ride from Billy’s mother, and another twenty learning to carve and throw spears from her grandfather, who used to be a hunter back in the day. Then she spent twenty more days out in the woods with the current hunting crew, learning the basics of how to survive in the outside world. Finally, she spent much of what she’d saved up to start her bonded life with Billy to purchase a strong, well-trained horse and all the tools and supplies the hunters and the traders said she needed to travel. By the time she finally set out along the same road that Billy had taken out of the village, almost ninety days had passed since Billy left. But Abema wasn’t worried in the slightest. After all, a young man with the hair of a southerner, the eyes of a northerner and skin that gleamed like bronze would definitely stand out anywhere he went. He couldn’t possibly be that difficult to track down. “Just you wait, Billy Blue! You can be as free as you want, but if you think you can do it without me you’ve got another thing coming!”