Thursey smiled. The merchant had paid little heed to the stepsisters; and he had given them no gift. The only gift he made was the one he gave to Thursey and didn't know he gave. For as she had crouched in the shadows of the hall after supper and watched her stepmother, Augusta, and the two stepsisters simper and preen, the merchant had begun his story. And Thursey, curled in her dark corner, had listened with pleasure.
Thursey was not encouraged in the halclass="underline" the sisters said she was too common, that she would afront the travelers. But when a traveler looked as if he might sing a ballad or tell a tale, she would slip into the shadows after the platters were washed up, settle herself beside a friendly spider web, warm in the rushes, and wait.
The inn was small and had seen better days, but it was the only inn for a day's ride that would offer bed to the commoners on the high road. This wealthy merchant would have been welcome at the palace that gleamed atop the rocky hills to the west, but the king's entourage had not yet arrived from the southern villa where the king spent his winters, and the palace was closed and unwelcoming. When the king's party did come, it would come upon the high road in a bustling caravan. Everyone who traveled across the small country of Gies used the high road, from king's messengers to peddlers, from friars to jugglers to gleemen; and the robbers who preyed on them traveled in the shadow of the woods.
Travelers came to the village from all over Gies itself, and beyond, and they were the only source of news. They brought messages and gossip, ballads of wars, and best of all the stories. From Wales and Ireland and France and from countries so small one had never heard of them, came stories of the kind Thursey loved best. Tales of girls who, their feet grimed from the hearth, were banished to the kitchen and stables and treated cruelly by their elders. Each story was different from the next, each told with the flavor of its own country's ways. But in each there was a girl Thursey could not help but weep for, Cendrillon or Rushencoatie, Vasilisa or Hajnalka or Cari Woodencoat. She wept for Cinderella and for the Snow White Maid, for Tattercoats and Cap-O-Rushes, for the King's Daughter in the Mound, and now she wept for Aschenputtel. She had crouched in the rushes and listened to the tale, and she might have been twelve again and her father telling her stories before the fire at night.
The stepsisters would scoff and call her childish to be occupied with such frippery—-they listened not with interest, but for a night's entertainment. It could have been a list of supplies and accounts as long as it was a man's voice ringing through the hall. But the stories freed Thursey from her stepmother and stepsisters in a manner she could not explain; it hurt no one, the strength she took from them.
She turned the bacon and put some bread on the grate to toast; the fireplace was so big she stood inside when she moved the kettles, her cheeks flushed from the heat. Red cheeks made Druscilla and Delilah cross with envy; and Thursey took a perverse pleasure in that.
The kitchen was a plain room, with hewn timbers, a floor of rushes, and a plank for a table. Thursey kept the table scrubbed; the jars and ale jugs and crocks and platters shone from her care. The kitchen was the best room in the inn, though Delilah and Druscilla called it ugly. They thought the stable ugly, too; they never went there, except to the mounting block where they would step into their high black carriage behind Magniloquence, their bad-tempered black mare. Off they would go, the two overdressed sisters and the black robed, sour stepmother, to mass of a Sunday. The stepmother, Augusta, was as lumpish and square as a dung cart, great boxlike creature dressed in rusty black dresses that smelled of mildew and were stained with the drippings of ale and gravy—-she loved her ale, Augusta, but would let the sisters have none. She said it would spoil their complexions. As for Thursey, ale was too good for the likes of her. Off to mass the three would go, behind the mettlesome Magniloquence, while Thursey stayed at home with the old white mare for company.
There had been a time in the stepmother's younger days when she had ridden out in some style on the sidesaddle that now gathered dust in the harness room. That had been when Thursey's father was alive, and Augusta was not so haughty and set in her ungiving ways.
Occasionally even now in a strange fit of nostalgia, Augusta would bid Thursey bring the sidesaddle and bridle and polish them, and put them on the black mare —though Magniloquence would throw a tantrum until they were removed again.
And the white mare, of course, was considered far too common to carry such a saddle, certainly too common to carry Augusta. Poor ugly mare. She had great oversized joints, her knees and hocks were swollen and lumpy, and her ragged, splayed hooves were never shod. Her dirty white coat was so sprinkled with black hairs that she looked as if she'd been rolling in the pepper, and now, in the early spring, she was shedding her winter coat in ragged hanks so she looked altogether moth-eaten. "Tattercoats," Thursey whispered. "You are Tattercoats." But it was only an endearment, the old mare had no name. Thursey preferred it that way. If she called her by a name, the sisters would take note of it, take note of the mare, and discover that Thursey loved her.
The mare had loppy ears, one with a notch out as if someone had taken a bite from it (as indeed an ardent stallion had when she was a young filly), and she was kept only to haul fodder and dung. There were stalls in the stables for Magniloquence, and for the travelers' horses and donkeys, for it took a poor man, indeed, to travel the high road without some kind of mount. But the old mare was not allowed a stall; she slept in the stable yard winter and summer and got only the leavings of hay (or so she was supposed to do; Thursey saw that she got better than that).
It was to the old mare that Thursey went when she was lonely or hurt, or smarting from the insults Delilah and Druscilla gave or the tongue-lashings Augusta was so skilled at. Thursey could dream away the mare's misshapen legs and boney Roman nose, could dream her into a milk-white steed as delicate and fine as any lady's palfrey that came down the high road. A pristine mount with skin as pink as the magical roses that were said to grow in the swamp and legs as thin and smooth as Thursey's own ankles. And a silver saddle hung with white satin, and Thursey in a frock of scarlet like the cloth she had seen in the merchant's cart, and her hair braided in a great coil, with strands of silver woven in. Beside her would ride a prince, young and comely; she would be truly a woman grown, and beautiful.
She brought herself back from daydreaming with a quick shake of her head and rescued the bacon from burning. When she had served the meal, she went to the stable yard and fed and watered the fussing Magniloquence and the merchant's sturdy bay gelding. Then she curried them both, the gelding standing patiently and wrinkling his skin with pleasure at the feel of the brush, blowing his warm breath on her neck, then Magniloquence, as fidgety and bad tempered as if she had a bee under her tail. She would have swung around and kicked Thursey if Thursey had not kept her tied short. When both horses were groomed, Thursey took up the currycomb and combed out her own tangled hair, peering at her reflection in the water trough. The sun glanced off the fresh straw around her feet and made it shine like silver. She picked up a strand and when she turned it a certain way it did, indeed, look like silver. She held it to her hair and gazed down at her reflection. The straw sparkled up at her. The darkness of the water made her face look older, look almost mysterious. Deftly she wove the straw into her hair, wove another and another until a net of silver shone around her face.