But Dav said nothing. Whenever he was asked—and he was, subtly at first and then more insistently when he vouchsafed no details—he started to cry like a child, his face open and loose and wet, so that the other men looked away in embarrassment.
He would cry for hours into his ale, himself as free of shame as a baby, but it made everyone else sit at the edges of the room and eye him sideways. After a while, they stopped asking.
Dav never spoke about his time with the sorceress. Nor did he ever marry, nor have a sweetheart. I heard the rumors and saw him often as he passed before the shop window, looking lost and bereft, searching the crowd as if looking for someone.
I didn’t think to talk to him myself about the sorceress or ask him about his time under her spell. Back then, I thought I would have nothing to do with the magic ladies besides watching them pass through—more fool me, as it turned out.
2
Da and I lived right in town, behind our shop, in the mess and bustle of it all. Da was a butcher, and a good one, with arms that looked like legs of lamb themselves, and a way with a cleaver that could make a carcass grateful to be boned.
I worked in the shop with him. It suited me all right. I liked being behind the counter, able to watch the happenings of the village square through the big window while being partly hidden myself, and I liked the work itself.
Most of the running of the place fell to me. Da did the butchering, while I took the orders and the money. Every day, I stood beneath the disapproving portrait of the king that hung on our back wall—every business had to have one, by law—and counted up our coins, doing all the calculating in my head, which I liked, because I took pride in my skill with numbers and the quickness of my mind.
As I’ve said, our village was pretty much like any other. A few shops, including our butcher shop and the smithy, clustered around a market square where smaller vendors set up stalls once a week, with houses spiraling outward to the farms and the fish market by the river.
For a village where no one really traveled and where few moved away entirely, we were a diverse lot, as the land had been settled and resettled over hundreds of years—by nomads and hunters and farmers first, then by armies in long-past wars.
Despite all the intermarrying that had no doubt occurred, there was still a fair amount of variation in the people. You could look at Goodwife Meg’s nut-brown skin, for example, and see that her ancestors had come from somewhere with a good deal more sun, or notice the high cheekbones and near-giant limbs of Big Cully and see that he had some tall warrior race in his family tree—although Cully himself was a gentle man who walked half-bent over to make himself smaller and unthreatening. As for me, my mother had skin that was almost golden, and hair as dark as good tobacco, but somehow Da’s paleness had won out in me.
For as long as anyone could remember, though, or their grandparents and great-grandparents, we had lived under the king and sorceresses’ protection, and no invading forces had ventured into our kingdom. The idea of war lingered only in stories of blood and death, seldom told.
I had always been somewhat of an outsider. Mam had been a merchant’s daughter, wealthier than most, and surprised everyone—including her own parents, whom I had never met—by marrying a humble butcher. She died giving birth to me, her first and only child, and I couldn’t help thinking it had been my fault somehow.
Death in childbirth in our kingdom was almost a curse—not for the mother, but for the child. An old belief, but one that lingered.
One of the benefits of having the sorceresses harvest our hearts, or so we were told, was that mothers survived childbirth, and babies were born healthy. Children, and the offspring of animals, too. It was one of the loudly touted advantages of having the sorceresses’ blessing.
Before their magic protected the kingdom, or so the stories went, ewes would regularly lose their babes in lambing season; calves would sometimes be born dead, pulled from their mother encauled and unbreathing.
Under the king’s rule, however, hardly any babe was stillborn, and rarely did a mother pass from the strain or exhaustion of birth. Fewer babes were born all round, but that was a small price to pay, even if it meant the elderly in the kingdom outnumbered the young significantly. So many elderly and so few sprouts gave the villages a slightly sleepy, ponderous air—but then, we were a sleepy, ponderous type of people anyway.
My Mam was one of the few who lost her life while bringing another into the world. When I was a sprout, the others would taunt me, tell me I belonged with the abandoned children who wandered the streets of the city or who disappeared entirely.
After all, on the rare occasion that a cow or an ewe or a mare died while laboring, there was presumed to be something wrong with the calf or lamb or foal. Rather than waste time and good feed waiting to find out what it was, farmers usually just had the animal’s offspring slaughtered right off. Saved trouble later.
The other sprouts’ parents didn’t agree with them, not outright, but they didn’t tell them to stop, either. They never did it where Da could hear. They knew what he was like, how fiercely he loved me. And I never told him; it would only have hurt him.
He had married above his station, and some speculated that my mother had been too delicate for the life of a butcher’s wife, our simple life, and lodgings.
As I grew to adulthood, I developed strong arms, as suited a butcher’s daughter, a round face, and a figure that could best be described as “solid.” My hair was a carroty red, barely long enough to touch my shoulders, no matter how much I combed it through with honey. Because I tucked it under a mobcap while working, however, it was rarely visible.
I wore an apron every day that started out pristinely white when we opened, and ended up crumpled, damp, and blood-stained by the time we closed. It was always hot in the front of the shop, with all that meat and chopping and activity, and I looked a sight, but it didn’t matter. Da didn’t care, and in the shop, everyone expected sweat and red cheeks, and didn’t look at me in any way odd.
It was different when I had to dress to go out, to services or for visits, and squeeze into hose and dress myself up in ribbons and such. In the shop, people knew what to expect, and they expected me, and they got me, as I was, no trussing up. I usually didn’t trouble myself with all that nonsense either.
True, sometimes I would see girls, girls with whom I’d gone to the schoolhouse, walking arm in arm with their sweethearts, and I’d feel a twinge.
Sometimes the girls became wives, and then they came into the shop to buy a nice pair of chops or steaks to make a nice dinner for Ned or Niall or whoever was waiting for them at home. And then, usually not much later, they’d be coming in again, this time for practically a whole hog, or the guts to boil up for soup, and I would know they had spawned other little Neds or Nialls.
I had my own Ned or Niall at one point, I’m embarrassed to say. Well, I didn’t have him, but I wanted him, and it never occurred to me that women like me—plain, forgettable,sensiblewomen—aren’t allowed to want things, although that seemed clear as cold water to everyone else.
I thought I was allowed to moon after a boy, as the others did, and to have fantasies of posies dropped on my doorstep and pebbles thrown at my window at night. That was when I was younger, before I realized I was not really a woman but something more like a mule or a laying hen—for use but not for adoration.
It hurts to remember it even now. I had smiled and simpered when he came into the shop for his cuts of meat—the youngest Hodges boy, Aron, with ears that stuck out and chapped lips. Men are allowed to be ugly, you see, and it doesn’t make a smack of difference. I had stood and talked to him with my head cocked to one side like I had seen the other girls do.
Now I look back and picture my red, sweaty face under the bloodstained mobcap, staring at Aron like he’d hung the moon, and it’s like someone poking me in the ribs with a pointed, malicious finger.
