“Milkmaid, have you nothing to offer me?”
I shook my head slightly so as not to disconnect from him.
“You are not to take my cows in trade! Gods know what you Gentry would do to them.”
It was he who drew away, laughing, and I almost whimpered at the loss.
“Much good they’ll do you where you’re going.”
“Eh,” I shrugged, pretending a coldness I did not feel. “Da has probably already sold them off for mead.”
“Perhaps he did,” my friend agreed. “Perhaps he sold them to a hunchbacked beggar whose worth seemed less than a beating, but who offered him, in exchange for the fair Annat and the dulcet Manu, a wineskin that would never empty.”
For that alone I would’ve whapped him, had he not tucked a wedge of cheese into my mouth. The finest cheese from the finest cow that ever lived. It was like being right there with her, in that homely barn, where I sang Mam’s songs for hours and Annat watched me with trustful eyes.
“You have my cows already.”
“Aye.”
“So I can’t trade ’em. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t.”
“Nay.”
I smoothed my silk dress. Three days worth of wrinkles smirked back at me.
“Time moves differently, you said, in the Veil?”
He nodded carefully, smiling with the very corners of his mouth.
“It does indeed.” He sounded almost hopeful.
“Well. That being so, would you take in trade a piece of my future? See,” I rushed to explain, “if he gets that gold, Jadio means me to wear his crown. Or a halo, I can’t tell. When that happens, you may have both with my blessing, and all the choirs of angels and sycophants with ‘em.”
“I do not want his crown,” the little crooked man growled. For all he had such a tortuous mangle to work with, he leapt to his feet far faster than I could on a spry day.
“You’re to wed him, then?” he demanded, glaring down.
Oh.
This needed correcting—and quickly.
“He’s to wed me, mister, provided he deems this night’s dowry suitably vulgar. Oh, do get on going!” I begged him. “Let us speak no more of trade. Leave me with this tinderbox and caper on your merry way. For surely as straw makes me sneeze, I can withstand Jadio’s torments long enough to die of them, and then it will all be over. But if he marries me, I might live another three score, and that would be beyond bearing.”
He snorted. A single green flame leapt to his finger, dancing on the opal there. The light lengthened his face, estranged the angles from the hollows, smoothed his twists, twisted his mouth.
“I’ve a trade for your future.” His voice was very soft. “I’ll spin you a king’s ransom of gold tonight—in exchange for your firstborn child.”
“Jadio’s spawn?” I laughed balefully, remembering that hot, dry hand on my neck. “Take him! And take his father, too, if you’ve a large enough sack.”
“You barter the flesh of your flesh too complacently.”
“No one cares about my flesh. It’s not mine anymore. I’m not even me anymore.”
“Milkmaid.” He stared at me. It was strange to have to look up at him. How tall he seemed suddenly, with that green flame burning now upon his brow. “Some of my dearest friends are consummate deceivers, born to lie as glibly as they slip their skins for a fox’s fur. I was sure they were lying when they told me you were sillier than you seemed, soft in the head and witless as a babe. Now, I must believe them. To my sorrow.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Your flesh,” he murmured, rolling his eyes to the ceiling. “How can you say no one cares for it, when I would risk the wrath of two realms to spare it from harm?”
My heart too full to speak, my eyes too full to see, I lifted both my hands to him. When he grasped them by the wrists, I tugged gently, urging him back to the floor, and to me.
He fingered the ribbon of my bodice. Triple-knotted as it was, it fell apart at his touch. The sleeve of my shift sagged down my shoulder. Our eyes locked. There was a pearl button at his collar. A black pearl. I unhooked it. For the first time I noticed the richness of the black velvet suit he wore, its fantastic embroidery in ivory and silver, the braids and beads in his hair.
“Were you courting a Deep Lord’s daughter?” I asked. “Is that why you were in the Fathom Realms? Did the distant sound of my sneezes interrupt you mid-woo?”
The sound he made was maybe a “no,” more of a sigh, slightly a groan. Then I was kissing him, or he me, and we were both too busy happily undressing each other to do much talking, although when we did, it all came out sounding like poetry, even if I don’t remember a word of what we said.
Of my wedding three days later I will say nothing. That brutal night of consummation, and all nights following until Jadio marched east with his armies to meet the Archabbot at the drowned city of Lirhu, I will consign to dust and neglect.
Though I would not have wished Jadio near me again but we had an impregnable wall spined in spikes between us, I did regret the loss of the page boy Sebastian. Upon taking his leave, he told me with his usual feral insouciance, “I’ll probably not return, Gordie. You know that?”
I knew the look in his yellow eye—that of a fox in a trap, just before he chews off his paw to escape. Not long was that rusty iron bracelet for Sebastian’s wrist. Nor would too many months pass, I guessed, before King Jadio learned this cub would never again come to heel.
“Luck.” I clasped his arm. “Cunning. Speed. Whatever you need, may it await you at the crossroads.”
“Same to you, Your Majesty,” he said with a cheeky grin. (He had no other kind.) “If I can’t stick around to see you hacked apart and flung about, you may as well live a few years yet.”
I flicked the back of his russet head. “So young and yet so vile.”
“You’ll miss me.”
“More than I can say.”
“Gordie?”
“Aye?”
“When he comes to claim his own, ask yourself, ‘the One-Eyed Witch lives where’?” I blinked. That was the name of an old children’s skip-rope rhyme. But Sebastian did not let me catch up with my thoughts. “Go to her. She’ll have a notion how you’re to go on.”
Gentry pronouncements are often cryptic, indefinite, misleading, and vacuous—which makes them, amongst all oracular intimations, the most irritating. But just try to interrogate a fox when everything but his tail is already out the door.
In my neatest printing, I wrote, “The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where?” on a thin strip of parchment. When this was done, I whittled a locket out of ash, the way Mam had taught me, shut Sebastian’s advice up safe inside it, strung the locket with a ribbon, and wore it near my heart. It had not the heft of ivory, but it comforted me nonetheless.
After Jadio’s departure came nine months of gestation, the worst of which I endured alone.
I was facedown in a chamber pot one morning when a messenger brought me news of the Archabbot’s victory at the Cliffs of Lir outside the drowned city. Heavy losses to both sides, after which Jadio’s soldiers retreated, regrouped, and launched several skirmishes that further decimated the Archabbot’s armies.
Some weeks later, another messenger came to shake me from my afternoon nap. The Archabbot had found the lost heir of Lirhu wandering the ruins of the city. The prince, dead King Lorez’s only son, was still enchanted in the form of a great black bear and a wore a golden crown to prove it. The Archabbot had goaded the bear-prince into challenging Jadio to hand-to-hand combat on the field for the right to rule Leressa.