Maiden, Mother, Crone
Ann Leckie and Rachel Swirsky
The mule nipped at Marjan’s hand as she burdened it with her packs. She pushed its nose away, careful not to hurt it. She needed the mule to be well. Her life — and her unborn child’s — depended on it.
She led the mule outside the stable and carefully latched the door behind them. She didn’t want the other animals to suffer from the cold. Bad enough she was stealing the mule. She didn’t want Iresna and Gavek to lose anything else.
She mounted and kicked the lazy mule into motion. Its hooves crunched slowly across the snow, step after step, into the endless night. Marjan could have walked faster, but didn’t have enough endurance for the long descent through the icy mountains.
Her whole body felt tight and tense. Her belly cramped. Relax, she told herself. She couldn’t allow herself to start the ride so weak and weary.
She stared into the dark, wishing for a thicker moon to strengthen the light. Dense clouds obscured the needle-pricks of the stars. The air smelled crisp and vacant. New, wet flakes tumbled across Marjan’s cheeks, and she realized it was snowing. She pulled her hands into the sleeves of the too-large furs she’d stolen from Iresna’s chests.
The snow came faster and harder, whipping little pains of ice. Wind hissed and howled. This wasn’t just winter’s cold, she realized with increasing dread. It was a storm, a powerful one.
Her stomach cramped with fear. She twisted to look behind, but she couldn’t tell how far they’d come through the cold and the dark. She thought about turning back to the stables and sheltering there, but she couldn’t. Gavek and Iresna would find her. They’d want to know why she’d fled. Afterward, they’d watch her. She’d never find another occasion to slip away — not before the baby was born.
Her stomach cramped again. Cold and fear and pain — she moaned. The sound came back to her on the driving wind. As she heard it, she realized that just as this wind was not an ordinary winter wind, her pain was not an ordinary winter pain.
She cursed. It was too early.
The mule plodded onward, step after heavy step. Marjan trembled against its neck, terrified of the next contraction. What would she do? She was alone. There was no help for her. Ever since her mother abandoned her as an infant, leaving her with a stranger, her life had always been like this — one moment of desperate isolation after another, with no one familiar to turn to. The Mark burned on Marjan’s hip like the brand it was, the only spot of heat in the cold.
The old rhyme was all Marjan had been able to think of the day before as she went with her brother-in-law, Gavek, and her mother-in-law, Iresna, to the mortuary hut and consigned her husband’s body to its eternal rest.
Vatska had died while working with Gavek to fix the roof. Marjan watched them out the window as they labored, two big men with thick beards and thick arms. She felt grateful for them both, but particularly for her enormous, gentle Vatska. She’d just turned back inside when a rope broke from the pulley and Vatska fell. The ice cracked. Vatska’s spine snapped. He lingered, unconscious, for nearly a day before his breath stopped.
If it had been warmer, if the ice had broken, neighbors and relatives would have come to help. But the snows had fallen early, and seemed determined to remain until the last possible day of winter, and so the three of them labored alone.
Gavek stood atop of the ladder that led into the mortuary hut. He levered Vatska’s body while Marjan and her dour mother-in-law steadied the corpse.
“Careful, girl,” Iresna scolded. “Don’t drop my Vatska.”
Iresna had never liked Marjan. Since the moment she came into the house, Iresna had nothing to say to her but criticisms and stinging retorts. No matter how hard Marjan worked, Iresna resented her. She didn’t know why she’d expected Iresna to put aside her anger today, just because they were mourning Vatska.
Marjan’s eyes stung with her own grief. She would not let the old woman goad her into further tears.
“He won’t fall, Mama,” said the good-natured Gavek. “Besides, he’s with the Solitary God now.”
They laid Vatska’s body in the stilted hut, safely beside his father’s. They trudged back to the house in silence. Even the extra warmth of late pregnancy couldn’t protect Marjan from the knife-sharp wind and her own loneliness. She pressed her hand against the concealed Mark on her hip that would mean death for herself and her child as soon as Gavek or Iresna discovered it.
She may do it all, but it all goes awry.
Marjan had been living with Gavek, Iresna, and Vatska for five years, ever since Vatska found her working as a maid in an inn on the southern trade route where winter was not quite so bitter. He’d courted her over the course of his annual stays, buying gifts and sitting late after the other customers so he could chat with Marjan alone. He told her that he headed a small family estate in the mountains where he lived with his unmarried brother and aging mother. It was a hard life, he said, but there was food enough and more, and he would like a wife.
Marjan was not a fool. As a Marked woman, she knew that she was lucky to be alive in times when the priests of the Solitary God killed any witches they found. She did not plan to make her mother’s mistake and become pregnant. If she bore a Marked girl, she would be forced to flee with the child until she found someone who cared more for the old ways than they did for their own safety — someone like her own foster mother.
Still, she’d lain with men while working at the inn. She’d always been careful to use the midwife’s herbs to keep their seed from catching. Vatska’s offer woke a stirring in her that she’d thought long buried, the yearning for a hearth and family of her own.
“We’ll never have children,” Marjan told him, leaving him to make his own assumptions.
That was all right, Vatska said. So Marjan packed her meager possessions and followed him into the mountains.
At first when Marjan’s flow didn’t come, she thought it was simply late. She couldn’t be with child. She’d taken the herbs faithfully whether she laid with Vatska or not.
She began feeling sick to her stomach. Her waistband grew tighter. She checked her herbs, and found them safe, dry, and uncompromised by vermin. How could this have happened?
It was deep into autumn when she finally conceded the truth. She could think of nothing else to do except convince her husband that she needed to return to her old village. Once there, she could consult with the midwife. She went to Vatska and pleaded. He frowned; she’d never shown any interest in going back before. Still, he was a good man, and he agreed. Even though it was unseasonably late, they would go next week when he had goods.
But the snows came early that year. They crippled the crops. A girl child went walking the night before a blizzard and was found in the morning, stiff and blue. Vatska promised to take Marjan to the village in springtime. By then it would be too late.
Marjan had no choice but to try trusting the man she’d married.
There was no privacy in the farmhouse during winter, not with four people trapped in two rooms, so Marjan asked Vatska to meet her in the stables. He sobered when he saw her sitting on a bale of straw, her face pale and grief-stricken. “What is it?”