As I walked past booths hung with lengths of fabric, coils of rope, and tin pots strung together, mats covered with raw, staring fish, wagons of fruits and hay, and pens of squawking chickens, thickening clouds devoured the sun. I shivered in the sudden chill. Halfway down a lane of food vendors, a hunchbacked old man doled out soup to anyone with a copper coin and a mug. I felt hollow. Empty. But when the old man held out his ladle to me, I shook my head. “I’ve no money, goodman. Nothing to offer you. Nothing.” And then the world spun and fell out from under me…
Scents of damp canvas and mildew intruded on my chaotic dreams. A scratchy blanket was tucked under my chin, and the surface under my back was hard and uneven. As I dragged my eyelids open to murky light, my neck was bent awkwardly, and a warm metal cup, quivering slightly and giving off the scent of warmed wine, was pressed to my lips. A few tart drops made their way to my tongue. A few more dribbled down my chin.
“Poor girl,” said a voice from the dimness, a cracked, leathery voice of uncertain timbre.
“Who could she be, dearie? She don’t have the look of a street wench, for all she’s dressed so plain.” This second speaker was surely an aged man.
“Nawp. No street wench. Look at the hands.” Two warm, rough hands chafed my fingers. I was so cold. “It’s a lady’s hands. What’re we to do with her, Jonah?”
“Can’t just leave her, can we? She’s just—” The old man’s words quavered and broke off.
“Just the age would be our Jenny.” So the sighing one was a woman. “Let’s keep her for the night. Don’t look as if she’ll care this is no fine house, nor even that she might not wake up where she went to sleep.”
“Aye, then. We’ll be on our way.”
While I drifted between sleep and waking, the bed on which I lay began to move, rocking and jogging over cobbled streets. The old woman stroked my hair and my hands, and crooned to me gently, while rain plopped softly on the canvas roof.
“How did you discover it, my dear?”
“She was shivering so, and terrible pale. I thought she was fevered. But when she held her tits just so and wept in her sleep for the pain of them, I knew. It’s been less than a day, and she’s lost a river of blood, and I don’t know if it’s been too much or no. If we’d left her in the market, she’d be dead for sure. ”Twas a good deed you did, old man.“
“Ah. This adds a worry though. Fine ladies don’t dress in working garb and take a stroll through the market after they’ve dropped a babe, live or dead. There’s trouble here someways. We’d best get her afoot as soon as can be, and put some leagues in between us.”
A hand gouged my aching abdomen, forcing me to cry out as I stumbled out of sleep.
“There, there, child. We must knead your belly a bit to stop the bleeding. You’ll do better in a day or three.” The hand pressed and squeezed again, then took my own hand and forced me to do it, too. “Feel your womb harden. That’s the way it must be.”
A worried face hovered above me in the dust-flecked light. Unlike that of the turbaned physician, this face was connected to a body—a small and wiry woman with broken teeth. Her gray curls were tied up in a red scarf, and her face was gently weathered.
“Here, my man Jonah’s bringing summat to perk you up.” A flap at the end of the wagon flopped open to let in soggy sunlight and the hunchbacked soup-maker from the market. The old man had wispy white hair and soft brown eyes that seemed to embrace the old woman when he looked at her.
“Thank—”
The old couple shushed me with a spoonful of soup. While they fed me, they gabbled about everything: business in the market, good prospects for the coming season, too much rain for the early crops. “We’re headed south for Dunfarrie. It’s planting time. If you’ve a place we can leave you on the way… friends who’ll care for you?”
I shook my head. All our friends were dead. Like the books and the pictures, the few who had shared Karon’s secret had been destroyed. He had been forced to hear them die, one by one: Martin, Julia, Tanager, Tennice, everyone he cared about. It had almost undone him. His tormentors told him he wasn’t to know my fate, and they would taunt him with a different cruel story every day. But they never knew he could read my thoughts, or speak to me without words, or bury himself in my love so deeply that what they did to his body didn’t matter. Until the end—until the fire.
“I didn’t mean to cause you more grief,” said the old woman in distress. “We’ll take you with us until you can see your way, little girl. Old Jonah and Anne will have you up, if for nothing but to get away from our foolish prattle.”
“Vengeance is my right,” I said. “My duty…” But not on that night.
The old woman gathered me in her arms and rocked me softly, for at last weakness overwhelmed me, and I wept until there could have been no tears left in the world.
But I would never weep again. I was a Leiran warrior’s daughter, and by the shields of my ancestors, I would not weep.
CHAPTER 4
When I woke, I was startled to find Aeren’s face an arm’s length from my own. He sat on the floor cross-legged, peering at me quizzically, his finger poised to touch my cheeks. I sat up abruptly, and he jerked his hand away.
“Keep your paws to yourself,” I said, straightening my shift and running my fingers through my tangled hair, wishing he would point his eyes in some other direction, wishing I knew some way to banish dreams.
Aeren knitted his brow at my words, as if working at it hard enough would make the syllables fall together in a way that made sense.
Was it was worth the trouble to keep talking to the man? Could the sheer number of my words somehow alleviate his lack of understanding? I grimaced at him. “How am I to get rid of you? I’d hoped you were just another bad dream.”
He tried his best to speak, but again produced nothing beyond hoarse croaking. As his attempts grew more desperate—and remained fruitless—his knuckles turned white and his face scarlet.
“Calm yourself. Like as not you’ve had a blow to the head and it’s unsettled you.” I tried to mime the words. Ineptly, as it appeared. He waved a hand as if to clear the air of my foolishness, while kicking savagely at a chair that toppled onto my woodbox, scattering twigs and limbs all over the floor and leaving my lone glass lamp in danger of tumbling off a shelf.
“Get out of here!” I said, pointing at the door. “Go and introduce yourself to Darzid.”
He didn’t go, of course, but I swore I would not attempt to communicate again. I ignored him and went about my morning’s work, stepping over his long legs when I needed to, controlling the temptation to drop an iron kettle on his head.
When I peeled my flat round of bread from the iron plate in the hearth, I expected him to pounce on it. But he remained seated on the floor, his back against my bed. He dug the heel of his hand into his temple, squeezing his eyes shut as if the bright sunlight that streamed through the door pained them.
“Are you ill?” Dismayed at the thought, I broke my vow of silence. “Curse you forever if you’ve brought fever here.”
Whether or not he understood my clownish gestures, he shook his head as if to clear it, got to his feet, and stumbled out the door into the sunny morning. Before I could even wish him good riddance, he crumpled to the dirt. I hurried to his side, experiencing a perfectly idiotic wave of guilt, as if by wishing him away so fervently, I was somehow responsible for his collapse. Moments earlier, I had been wishing him dead.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said, tapping his cheek when I could get no response. He still didn’t move. But when I shook his left shoulder, his eyes flew open, and he cried out with bloodless lips, almost rising up off the ground. “All right, all right. Let’s get you inside.”