Blood Ties (18 page)

“Talking mills no corn — they’ll still wonder. They’ll wonder if you’re shagging her, too.”

He was still. “
You
don’t think —”

She looked away. “Oh, no. I see how you treat her, just like Zel. Besides, your tastes don’t run to young and dark, do they?”

He didn’t know how to reply, there was so much bitterness in her voice. There was satisfaction in her eyes as she saw his discomfiture. She pushed her advantage.

“They’ll all think she’s a Traveler, with that hair and eyes.”

“They don’t think that about you.”

“Of course they do! I’ve been asked who my folks were, where I come from. Not all of them believe what I tell them, either. Not by a long shot.”

He hadn’t realized that. They lived such separate lives now, he and Osyth. He was out on the farm, she was in town, absorbed in town doings, gossip and alliances, births and marriages, and getting fish for the best price, buying in bulk to save silver. He knew what they said about her: “Counts her change three times, she does.” Maude had told him. But they’d not gone hungry since the day she took over the finances, and without her management he’d never have saved enough to buy the farm. He’d done it to please her, but now he realized that she’d known him better than he’d known himself; the farm was where he belonged. And he liked staying out there because he was away from the accusation in her eyes. Love, regret, shame and annoyance mixed equally in him, and hot. He needed to escape it.

“I might just go out for an ale . . .” he said.

She looked at him. He saw the anger rise in her, and saw her tamp it down with iron-hard control. “You can’t go out with that girl staying here,” she said. “You’re her host. It wouldn’t be fitting.”

He was flummoxed.

“You wouldn’t be back before breakfast,” she said. “You never are. What would I tell Bramble?”

It was the first time she had ever alluded to his overnight absences. He thought resentfully that she’d use anything against him, but what could he say? They were skating on thin ice, here, neither mentioning where he’d really be going, neither prepared to acknowledge the truth. If the truth were ever said aloud, they couldn’t go on as they did, getting through their days with at least a little dignity and calm. Besides, he couldn’t bear the fight that would erupt. He just wanted some comfort, some easygoing laughs and a cuddle or two. With Osyth, everything was so intense. Everything mattered, everything was life-or-death. She was too much for him, and that was the real truth. That was why she had always been disappointed when she looked into his eyes.

She was standing rigid, clutching a wiping cloth in both hands, with knuckles white. Waiting.

“Well, then, I suppose you’re right,” he said slowly, and he saw her relax, watched triumph curl at the corner of her mouth.

He let go of an image of Maude snuggling down with him on the rug in front of her fire, and managed to smile at Osyth. He wasn’t strong enough to be what she wanted, but that wasn’t her fault. And strangely, there was still love in that curdling mixture of shame and disappointment. So there he was, caught in her eyes and her grace and her fine-boned beauty, just as he’d been caught the first time he saw her juggling and tumbling with her sisters, out on the Road.

He walked over and touched her cheek. “Come on then, love, let’s go to bed.”

Her face flushed and she turned within his arm to walk up the stairs to the bedroom.

Osyth’s story

T
HE SUMMER
I was seventeen was a disaster. It rained three weeks before haying, and the hay rotted in the fields. More like lakes, they were, so the hay rotted from the bottom up, and stank like marsh gas. It rained for so long that the wheat lay flat and the grain sprouted on the stalk. The fruit swelled and turned rotten on the trees, and the few pieces that were harvested grew mildew overnight. Even the mushrooms washed away.

The grandams shook their heads and prophesied a desperate, hard winter, lean and hungry. Farmers decided which of their animals to kill, for they’d not have enough feed to last them through winter, and it was better to smoke some of the meat now and have enough left to keep the breeding stock going till spring.

The crafters in the town shook their heads and bought in as much as they could — barley and oats and lentils — till the price went up and the town councils argued bitterly over whether they had the right to set a price limit on staples. Some did, and some didn’t, and where they didn’t, the folk looked forward to a killing winter.

It frightened me. Life on the Road was hard enough in the good years, when the fields bloomed and farmers were hopeful enough to part with a few coins for the pleasure of seeing me juggle, or hearing my sisters sing. In a year like this there’d be no free food at farmhouse doors, no extra firewood for the price of a juggle and a tumbling run. And in the towns it’d be just as bad, with no prosperous farmers to commission work and no happy merchants with spare silver looking for ways to spend it; the crafters would be sitting idle. Even the innkeepers would have a bad year, for the barley was looking to be twice last year’s price and hops worth their weight in coppers.

In high summer I looked forward to a cold, hungry winter, and it frightened me as naught had ever done before.

Me and Rawnie and Rumer had been on the Road for four years on our own, since we’d cut loose of our mam and da in Foreverfroze, way up north. Da had taken a liking to the cold air and white sky of the north, and Mam had a mind to try fishing the way the Foreverfroze women did it. She was ever a good angler, was Mam, with a passion for whitefish and yellowback, which none of us could understand.

So my sisters and I took the Road and did pretty well, all told. We were Road children, after all, and all our life’d been spent following the drum on Da’s back, along the high roads and the back roads, with Mam whistling behind to keep our spirits up on the long stretches.

I was the youngest and was used to being looked after. But it didn’t take me more than two months to realize that neither Rumer nor Rawnie could handle silver without letting it slide through their fingers like water, just like our da. I was as hard-headed as Mam, and I took that purse out of their hands and doled them out copper like it was gold.

Soon enough it was I who was deciding where we should go and what we should sing, and it was I who made them keep ten silver bits in reserve, even when it meant shagging for our supper. ’Twas better to lie down for ten minutes, I said, and have food where we knew the innkeeper’d feed us for a shag, than find us one day stone broke in an inn with a woman keeper. “I’ll not go hungry,” I said, “and I’ll not sleep in the rain. What’s good enough for Mam and Da is good enough for us.”

Don’t mistake me, I spent time on my back, same as them, though I hated it worse, I think. I hated the blank look in the innkeepers’ eyes and the scorn on their faces, the smell of them — the old-man smell more often than not, or else that dirty stale beer smell, and the leather smell from their jerkins — for it wasn’t often they’d bother to undress, not for the price of a supper.

Rawnie and Rumer were even-tempered girls, light as thistledown in body and mind, as tumblers should be. They practiced as often as I wanted without begrudging it, but they were more interested in the young men than anything else. Once they earned their place for the night, if they had to, they washed and brushed their hair, put on their bright performing smiles, and sang and tumbled like nothing had happened. But they seldom had to, no more than once every two or three months, with us taking it in turn as we did. But I remembered every forced time like it was my right hand I’d lost, and I brooded on it, even though it was my idea.

Jugglers don’t have to smile — it’s better to pretend frowning concern to heighten the tension: will she drop a pin, will she catch on fire? In the town squares, sometimes I would send flaming batons up into the summer night sky, like distress beacons or warning fires, but to whom, I didn’t know. On those nights the copper rained into our hands, and sometimes silver, too.

Rumer reckoned it hurt me worse than them because I’d never done it with a sweet young man, a douce young man with long fingers and soft lips. My first time’d been in Mickleton with a fifty-year-old innkeeper, who had two daughters older than me, and wanted me to call him “Da” all the way through it. Rawnie and Rumer hadn’t known till it was over and they found me puking hard behind the horse barn, my fingers blue with cold and clutching onto the barn wall for balance. They’d have taken my place, wanting my first time to be soft and sweet, like theirs’d been, but I wouldn’t let them. It wouldn’t have been fair.

I remembered that time, and others, as the fruit rotted on the trees that summer, and the prices rose steadily in the towns. I could see a long winter ahead, and I couldn’t face it.

We was in Carlion in the late days of summer and it was warm and dry and beautiful now, though it was too late to do any good. Among the townspeople worry bred a need for entertainment, and they walked the streets of an evening, and stopped in the green near the well to watch me juggling the shining silver-painted balls, and to hear Rumer and Rawnie sing sweet songs. “Keep it happy,” I’d said. “They want to be taken out of their cares, and they depend on us to do it. They’ll give us more that way.” But even so, copper was scarce and silver was as rare as balls on a gelding.

There was one evening like that, no different from any other, when I saw a young man, a comely man, watching from the back of the crowd while the three of us tumbled and rolled, balanced and spun.

The crowd applauded. Panting, I saw the young man grin at us and clap heartily himself. Brown-haired, he was, with gray eyes like agate and a tall body that was only just free from the gangliness of youth. He had a pack on his back and he was clearly a Traveler, like us, but he was dressed as well as any merchant, and he had muscle, the kind you only get with regular food and work.

His name was Gorham. He came over to us at the end of the performance, after we’d finished collecting the few coins from the ground. That moment, his eyes rested on all three of us with equal pleasure, I think, but I moved forward to greet him. Rumer and Rawnie smiled at each other and slipped into the background, for, as one of them said to the other later, “It was the first time she ever did so much as look at a likely lad, and it’s about time, too!” Of course they were thinking, the both of them, that me taking pleasure with a man would make their lives easier, and mine.

Gorham was a horsebreaker, so his pay didn’t depend on how generous an audience felt: he set his prices and the owners paid. No one killed off a horse because of a bad winter; they just sold them to someone who could afford them. And young though he was, Gorham had a reputation already. He’d traveled all his life with his mam, who was a horsebreaker of great fame. Even Rumer had heard of Radagund the Horse Speller, who was said to use enchantments from the Western Mountains to bind the horses to her with chains of affection.

Gorham laughed at the stories. “Aye,” he said, “it looked like that, with my mam. Come to that, it looks like that sometimes with me, though not so often. See, I reckon my mam was half a horse herself.”

“That makes you a horse’s grandson,” I said, grinning.

“Aye,” he said, “that’s me.”

He laughed, as he often did, then kissed me. That was his way, to laugh and then reach for what he wanted, as a man reaches who’s rarely been refused anything. Radagund had reared her son the way she’d reared horses: with endless kindness and a firm hand on the reins. At nineteen, he was as honest and comforting as bread, and he smelled to me of safety and harborage and solace. I wanted him.

Not in the way Rawnie and Rumer wanted their young men, with a light lust, a giggle in the hay at the back of a barn, and a “wind at your back” the next day and off again — no one the worse and everyone better for it. No, I wanted Gorham the way the winter wind wants to get indoors, moaning at the cracks and crevices, rattling the panes of the window. I could see that after a week or so in Carlion he’d be off to his next yearling, and maybe he’d remember me with a smile in the long winter nights. Or maybe not.

“Oh, he’s head over ears in love with you,” Rumer said, pushing me on the shoulder as I stretched and warmed up for practice, so I fell over on my backside. “What’s he like, eh?”

I shook my head and blushed, and that was enough to give Rawnie and Rumer the giggles. They got on with practice but, truth be told, I didn’t know what he was like; I had been playing a teasing, waiting match with Gorham, knowing all too well that to keep him in Carlion a few days more was life and death to me, and knowing how often the young enjoyed and left.

So I went to the stonecaster, but not for a casting.

“A spell I want —” I said, my hard-won silver clutched in my hand.

The stonecaster laughed. “To make a young man fall in love with you,” she said with certainty. She had a strange voice, strong and precise, not like a Traveler’s lilt, nor a town dweller’s burr.

“Aye,” I said, without shame. “Love and need, I want, and certain sure and no wearing off.”

“Don’t we all?” Her voice was mocking and, underneath, pained. “But you won’t find that here, girl. The tanner will help you — if it’s help you call it. On Leather Street, where the juniper bush grows.”

I nodded and made to rise, but the stonecaster stopped me.

“Wait. You interest me, girl. Let’s see what the stones have to tell you. No charge.” She laughed again, bitterly, drew five stones from the bag, and cast them across the blanket. I watched them fall with keen interest. “All facedown,” the woman said. “Unusual.” There was no trace of laughter in her, now, she was all serious eyes and pursed lips. She turned the stones over, one by one. “Magic — there’s your spell, girl. And Pain. Silver. Children. Frost.” She was silent a moment, then raised her dark eyes to mine. “A mixed blessing, you get with your spell, and all facedown, which means secret.”

“Aye,” I said. “Secret and sure. Silver and children.”

“Pain and Frost.”

“Nothing’s without pain, dam, thou knowest that. Frost . . . well, with enough silver, you can protect yourself against frost. This’ll suit me fine.”

The stonecaster watched me out the door with a foreboding frown, but I shrugged it off. It was Gorham I wanted and Gorham I would have.

The tanner was more businesslike and much less pleasant. He stank like his tannery, and his spell powder stank even more.

“Give it to the young man in his cha, and sugar it well,” he said. “He’ll never notice if you’re touching up his leg the while he drinks.” He sniggered to himself and his hand brushed my breast as he handed it over. “Hope you treat him well,” he said. “That stuff’ll bind him to you for all his breathing days, and no mistake.”

“It ought to,” I snapped. “It cost enough.”

Gorham drank it down like it was sweet cider, while I slid my hand up his leg and whispered in his ear. He was sleeping in the hayloft of a livery stable in return for grooming and cleaning tack, and later that night we snuggled in the hay and I opened myself to him body and soul, sure of him at last. For there was no doubt that his eyes were resting warmer on me than they’d ever done before, and his hands were more urgent and his words were all of love and staying together, forever. I had no doubt it was the spell. I drowned happily in the scent of him, the clean, rich smell of horses and hay, and if there came a moment or two when the memory of the old innkeeper slid between us, it was soon over and forgotten.

When he went on to Sandanie at the end of the week, I went with him. Rumer and Rawnie wailed like cormorants as we left, but it may be they were not so unhappy to see me go, when I’d given them two-thirds of our silver and left them free to go where they pleased and sing where they liked, without a baby sister scowling disapproval at them.

And with Gorham, Rawnie had said that I’d be safe and well looked after: “For he worships the ground you walk on, and has done since he laid eyes on you that first day!”

“He’ll learn,” Rumer grinned. “First time he tries to spend his silver for something she don’t approve on. He’ll learn.”

I turned my nose up at her and we laughed.

But it seemed he never did. It seemed he liked the way I organized our lives, bargained with his customers, insisted on earning as much of my own keep as I could in the inns and on the town greens. I traveled with more pleasure than ever before, and I rounded out with good eating and warm living until I could only juggle, not tumble no more, for tumbling needs you thin and wiry.

The first babe was a girl, Hazel, that we called Zel, and the second, a boy. The years they were born, Gorham took on with a horse dealer for two whole seasons and we stayed planted in one place longer than either of us had ever done in our lives. Mitchen, that was, both times, where we lived in half a cottage that belonged to the horse dealer. The other half was rented by the dealer’s farrier, Flax, who became the second child’s namesake and taught Gorham all he knew of farriery in recompense, not having any young ones of his own.

I loved the long winter nights by the fire in a good sound cottage with food on the hob, and Gorham’s big feet stretched to the blaze. Gorham teased me that I loved the cottage more than him, more than the babies, which wasn’t so far from the truth, for I was never a motherly girl, not even when I was nursing. But I treasured those babes, for they were two more ties that kept Gorham bound to me, and not by no spell. For it seemed to me that the spell had worked too well, and had trapped me, too.