Emmett

The time has come. For the first time, I’m revealing a male character. I don’t draw guys as much yet, in case you hadn’t noticed. I’m getting better at them though! I really am!

Meet Emmett!

He’s Freia’s brother (if you'll notice — they have the same nose), and both one of the most annoying and most fun characters I’ve ever worked with. He took a lot of doing to get him where I wanted him, and he fought me the whole way, but we made it work. And now he’s really one of my favorite characters to go back and revisit, and occasionally I even miss him.

I picked a scene that’s classic Emmett, and one of the ones that was a bear for me to write. It also happens to be a classic Raivyn scene. Classic all around!

Oh, and have you made any guesses as to what excerpts I'll be showing you next week? ;-)

Excerpt #3 from Cedwig: People in the Vines by Rani Divine

©Copyright RAD Writing, 2016

 Emmett did his best to keep from shouting his frustrations as he was once again turned away from helping the others. The afternoon’s end was nigh and he’d hardly been able to do a thing. Father had brought him to this place so that he could learn to be a man, and he was doing the best that he could, but it would have been easier if some of the other men would’ve allowed him to help.

True, he wasn’t the strongest man in the group. In fact, he may very well have been the opposite. But he’d never wanted to be strong. It wasn’t who he was. All his life, he’d known exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to study. He wanted to learn as much as he possibly could, and he wanted to pass the information on to everyone around him. The problem was that everyone saw it as weak. There were no teachers, even in the plains. Girls were taught by their mothers, boys were taught by their fathers. There was no crossover, traditionally.

Father had been different.

He’d encouraged Emmett to seek new information, to learn everything that he wanted to learn. He’d encouraged it all. And so Emmett had done as he thought his father wanted and gone into the field of study—a field in which there were only about a dozen others in all of the plains—and he hadn’t looked back. Until father had brought up the idea of coming on this expedition, Emmett hadn’t even paused to notice how much his family was ridiculed for him and his sister. Freia had borne the brunt of it. The other girls didn’t like that Freia knew how to handle a blade, that she knew how to defend herself, that she knew how to make a sword or an ax, or even that she’d been taught to read and write. They were jealous of her, Emmett had always thought. Only when they were older, when she’d come of age, had he noticed how much it hurt her. She was a woman, after all. She wanted someone to think highly of her.

Emmett had kindly taken on that role. She was better than him at almost everything.

But in all his life he’d never even noticed how much she’d borne on his behalf. Since they’d left the plains, he’d heard every name in the book—and he’d read more than his share of books. They all thought he was useless, simply because he had been allowed to pursue his own career. He hadn’t wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, to become a blacksmith. But apparently that was even what mother had wanted of him, before she died. That was why father had decided to uproot and bring them here. Everyone said so.

Now, he sighed and walked back to where everyone was stacking the supplies they’d brought in from the forest. Father still hadn’t joined them, even though it was late in the day. Jonas said that it wouldn’t be a problem—but only for today. If father kept it up, he would be punished despite everything Freia had done to keep it from happening.

She’d done this for them. Deep down, Emmett believed their father understood that. Freia had left and renounced them for their sakes. She didn’t want them punished for all she had done, for the fact that she didn’t feel as though she fit in here.

In times like this, Emmett imagined he would’ve been better off to have joined her. These people certainly didn’t want him here.

“They told me to come see if you needed help,” he said to the nearest man. He couldn’t remember his name. The only one he really knew was Shawn, and that was only because Shawn had actually spoken to him. He hadn’t put him down, hadn’t called him names, had said anything about Freia or her choices. He’d even seemed to understand when Emmett wept at the sight of her leaving.

But he didn’t know that anyone would fully understand. Freia had kept much from him. She’d shielded him from the name calling, the harassments. She’d taken it all on herself, and she’d hardly complained. She’d only picked on him in return.

She’d even helped carry his things on their trek through the woods, and she hadn’t said another word.

“No,” the man replied, almost angrily.

“Maybe you should go see if the women need any help,” one of the others said, laughingly.

Emmett bit his tongue and walked away. It wouldn’t matter, but he knew very well that he held more knowledge than they. He knew, in his vast stores of information, that the house they were going to build was bound to failure. They weren’t even checking the trees before chopping them down—they only went out to find large trees, and took them down. He highly doubted that any of them, even Jonas, truly knew what they were doing. But they wouldn’t care that Emmett did, because he was too physically weak to help them do it.

He smiled to himself as he thought of all the things that he could call them, without them even being able to understand. If he was the type of person to seek revenge, he might go back and start calling them names. They might all look at him and laugh, or they might grow angry and ask what his words meant, but he knew that they would never really know, unless he found it in himself to explain it to them.

“Hey!” a woman shouted from down by the river, waving toward him. “Get over here!” Her eyes stared into his, and he knew she was speaking to him.

Emmett shook his head and wiped the smile from his face as he walked toward the river, hands in his pockets.

“Do me a favor?” she asked when he was close enough. She looked very young, younger than he’d noticed from a distance. Her skin was light, fragile, and he could see her bones in many places. She’d obviously been malnourished. Maybe that was why she’d been brought here, to get her the help she needed. Her big brown eyes looked straight up into him, beneath short straight hair that fell over her forehead and just covered her ears.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting for her to continue.

“Tell the other men to do their business downstream from now on,” she snapped, throwing a piece of fruit in his face. “We can’t feed you food that’s been washed in your own piss.” She huffed and turned away, and Emmett stifled a laugh.

The men hadn’t thought of that. He’d seen some of them relieving themselves upstream of the women, in the forest where they couldn’t be seen. And he’d tried to explain to them that their clothes would end up with at least trace amounts of urine, and that it could poison their food, but again they hadn’t cared. No one wanted to listen to reason and logic when their was muscle around with things to be built.

“I’ll tell them,” he said softly.

“See that you do,” she replied, her voice barely louder than the rush of the river.

“How did you know?” His brow furrowed.

“It smells like urine,” she said as she turned to look him in the eye, an exasperated look on her face. “We’re going to have to rewash the clothes, unless you’re all okay smelling like piss.”

He couldn’t help but laugh this time. Never in his life had he heard a women speak a word like that. It wasn’t proper of them. “We don’t have to tell them.” He winked.

“Do whatever you want, as long as you all stop pissing in the river.” She seemed to enjoy the way he reacted when she spoke that word.

“What’s your name?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Raivyn,” she said as she knelt at the water’s edge. “Go tell them what I said.” Her eyes glared up at his, and he knew better than to ignore.