“You are the most jealous person in the land, and it makes sense?—”
I nearly threw my tea to the ground in rage.“It makes sense?”
“Yes, you are what she cannot be.She is what you cannot be.She is jumpy and…” He waved his hands around.“She feels like the sun.You are steady, mysterious; you feel like the moon.”
I could have found it flattering.Instead, I chose to battle him with my words.“You think she is like the sun?”
He laughed.“You cannot make me dislike her.Look!She gave me mushrooms—” Fell pulled from his tunic pocket dried mushrooms.They had red caps and little white spots.“I did not even ask for them.She said I will have a glorious evening one night soon, and this must be part of it.”
“Rowan says those are bad for you.”
“Ah, Rowan knows everything in the world, does he?Should we let Arik know someone has beat him to it?”
I huffed.
He grinned.“She is not as pretty as you are.”
Whether or not it should have, this did make me feel better.
And the tea, when it began to take effect, made me feel even better than that.We found some of Fell’s friends, and laughing was easy, and the heaviness in my stomach did feel lighter, like the tea was carrying the weight of my womb for me, making it easier for my muscles and skin and hips to stretch.I lay on the grass, my head in Fell’s lap as he played with my hair, someone’s donated furs over my stomach, the breeze keeping my face cool while the rest of me was warmed.
Rowan was given many a free drink when people found out he was new to Aalt, and though he was resistant to the offerings, he sipped enough to relax.From where I lay, I studied the release of his performative misery as conversations took place around us, and I remembered my own struggles upon arriving.How rigid I must have looked.
How different I am, I realized, nuzzling my head further into Fell.How different Rowan will be.
Fara had been chatting somewhere else around the fire, but she came upon us then, right as I had that thought, and sat cross-legged beside me.Fell was speaking to someone on his other side.
“I am sorry I spoke of healers before,” she said.
It took me several moments to remember she might mean leeches.
She said, “You have a relationship with these animals.”It wasn’t a question.
“I felt this, too,” Fell said.“You became ice for a moment.”
I hadn’t known he was listening.
I decided to become ice again, but it didn’t work.Perhaps from the tea she’d made… I cannot say.I nodded, and a tear slid down my cheek, and I knew somehow that it had been waiting there my whole life to come out and be seen coming out.And just like the weight of my womb was easy, my memory was easy.I couldn’t avoid recollecting.
“When I was a girl, I dreamt my sister fell from a horse and broke her arm.I woke up crying… My mother came to me, and I told her.Even though it was against the law to dream, she did not admonish me.She held me and told me it was only a dream.She was not this kind of mother.But that time she was.The next day, my sister fell from her horse and broke her arm…”
I could remember the look of Elfrith as she held her arm gingerly against her chest, trying not to cry, but mostly failing.
“My mother took me to the orderlies to have the evil sucked out of me.They held me down and covered me in leeches.The creatures had to go on my tongue too because I had spoken the evil.”
Fell stilled entirely beneath me, looking down at me from above, his face splashed in pink from the firelight.Unreadable to me, which was most unusual.
“Yorunn witnesses all that happens inside homes,” Fara said.
Fell nodded.“Yorunn witnesses all that happens inside homes.”
I smiled sleepily.“I do not know what that means.”
“Yorunn is fire and hearth and ash,” Fara said.“Goddess and witness to the home.I am happy to have met you.If you come to me again, I will make more tea for you.”
“I will take that under consideration,” I said.
She laughed, high-pitched and nasally.“I like the words you choose.”
