Born in 397 in the land of Qikerre, her father died to
protect her mother in the escape with the others, and her mother died shortly
thereafter of serious wounds she received during her escape. The baby was taken from the womb only
moments after her mother’s death. A
husband and wife took her as their own to raise with their other children. The family wandered with the others for two
years, the parents doing their best to keep the sickly baby alive, and the two
children growing to resent the baby for taking all their parents’ attention.
Named
Ecarrie, after her mother, given her father’s last name as a second one, the
other two children called her "Ecarrie’s child" to say that she was not their
sister. As settlement finally began in
399, the parents discovered their three children gone one afternoon. The older sister and younger brother left
one morning and took the now two-year-old with them. The evening of the following day they left her asleep at the foot
of someone’s door. And so ended her
stealing away their parents’ attention.
Stumbling
over her one morning, a man read the broken writing labeling her "Ekarre’s
child." That day he took her to a
barren woman he knew who desperately wanted children. Delighted, the woman didn’t question or search for the child’s
parents, but kept her as her own.
Cursing
himself three years later, the now wealthy man wanted to marry to woman, still
did not want the child, and the woman would not give the child up. So the man stole the girl away one day,
pinned a piece of paper to her shirt, gave her a grown-up handful of metal, and
told her each time she went to a new home to give one piece of metal to the
family and the very last piece would bing her home to her mother. The man then gave her and many more pieces
of metal to another man. The two
traveled many days without stopping.
One night they finally met another man.
The child was told she was now at her first home. She promptly gave the new man a piece of
metal and he took her in for a while.
The paper had "Ekerre’s child" poorly written on it.
Left at the
foot of a door, she was passed from one home to another without knowing who
came before, other times she was handed over during the day, each time she gave
a piece of metal to the person or family, and each time she stayed a different
amount of time. She was fed, she was
forgotten, she was clothed, she was beaten, she was taught, once she was beaten
until she finally ran away. Once a
woman discovered where the child hid her pieces of metal from everyone, stole
them, and threw the child out when she tried to get the metal back. The child got away with all but two pieces.
Upset over
her loss, for how would she get back to her mother without enough metal?, she
moved on to another home. By now she
had become known in the area, she was the one passed from home to home and
family to family, she was the one who paid each with precious metal, it was 404
and she was the one anyone would take in so as to get a piece of that metal.
And then
the metal was gone.
Crying by
herself, the girl was afraid, she walked sadly around, and she knew she would
not get back to her mother unless she had two more pieces of metal to use. When she saw down the road pieces of metal
lying on a table which were similar to those she had, she saw she could get
back to her mother. Moving close to the
table, the girl watched the adults talking and walking by, and when no one was
looking she grabbed two pieces off the table.
She went back to her current home and waited. Soon she would back with the mother she vaguely remembered.
Waiting for
more than two years, the girl finally handed her last piece of metal to a
woman, looked in her eyes, and asked if she was her mother. The woman smiled sadly and told the girl no,
that she could only stay a couple months before she had to go to another
home. The seven year old was confused,
the woman assured her that her next family would be nice, and the girl assumed
that the woman was referring to her mother.
Opening the
door, the girl saw a family she had already lived with, one man that had beaten
her, and one woman she knew was not her mother. Something had gone wrong.
The two took her home, demanded the piece of metal, and threw the girl
out to the road beaten that night when she did not have anything to give. The girl was found the next morning by a
healer who recognized her and tended to her.
Once healed, the girl left to find more metal, for obviously she had
lost more than she thought in all her travels, but eventually she would get
enough to bring her back to her mother.
And so began a life of thievery.
Passed many
times, so too was her name, from town to town, from people who didn’t care, to those
who did, and back again, then forgotten.
No one knew it for sure, no one knew where she came from, no one knew
where she would end up, she was a child of the people. The paper had been pinned to her so many
years ago, she had kept it, it had blurred and ripped over the years, almost
unreadable, some tried to use it to make sense of all the different yet similar
names the girl was called, and one person now read it as Qikerre’s Child. The girl that was passed among the people as
if community property quickly became known as Qikerre’s Child. It was easy to remember.
Grown older now, Qikerre’s Child had begun to realize she would not be again with the mother she couldn’t remember, had begun to realize she had been lied to by the man she would never forget, and at age ten she stopped going from home to home in hopes of finally ending up with her mother. QC lived on the streets, stealing what she needed or buying it with pieces of metal she stole, sometimes she would be given food or clothes by those who felt a responsibility for society’s child, sometimes she received lessons. Sometimes she would seek shelter from the bad weather at a home, each time giving the person or family a piece of metal, as she had grown up doing. Some may have known she stole to live, she was never caught, so no one mentioned it, she was known in so many towns, most she had lived in for some portion of her life, and all said QC did not steal. She was provided for.