“They are not always as bad,” he said. “I cannot observe myself while I am sleeping, of course, so I don’t know what you saw.”
His lip had knitted itself back together, and there was nary a trace of where his teeth had severed it. I glanced down at myself, and the blood had vanished from my clothes as well.
“And do you remember them?” I pressed. I knew I was being nosy, but who would blame me? After what I had seen, a bit of nosiness was natural, surely.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his temple with a weariness I hadn’t yet seen in him. “I do.”
Even I wasn’t ill-mannered enough to ask any more. I did let the silence stretch out between us for a moment, though, just in case.
“It helps to think of other things, afterward,” he said. “Perhaps you could talk to me.”
“Talkto you?”
“What is it like, where you come from?” he asked, surprising me again. He seemed to be demanding a bedtime story. He even had his head propped up on one hand, ready to listen.
I sat gingerly on the bed beside him, leaving as much space between us as I could, and smoothed my skirt down before folding my hands in my lap like a well-behaved schoolgirl, lest they reach out to him involuntarily.
What sort of story do you tell the sorcerer who holds your heart in his hand? I decided to keep it as prosaic as possible, for my own sanity. As he lay down again, I told him about the butcher’s shop in the square, about Da with his gentle hand that could yet wield a cleaver like no other, and about the blood and the mess that a butcher’s shop makes.
I told him about plucking chickens and turkeys, and skinning larger game. I told him about the poachers who snuck their prizes in for butchering by the back door, and to whom Da turned a blind eye. It was both a bloody and a rather tedious tale, at least to me, but he seemed fascinated.
It was odd, seeing him fascinated by me, but I knew he was fascinated by my commonness, my ordinariness, and not by me myself. Despite my brain’s good sense, however, my body responded, and sent a flush to my cheeks, a brightness to my eyes, and made me gesture more than I would normally.
He asked to hear more about Da, and I told him. My grandfather had been a butcher, and my great-grandfather, and all before him, as far back as anyone could remember. My Da had been a dreamy boy, from what he told me, prone to making contraptions out of wood and metal, and sometimes even the cleaned-off bones from the butchered carcasses.
When you’re born with a name like Butcher, though, and a shop with its doors open and inviting, and an apron with your name embroidered on the pocket, there’s not much else to do but pick up the cleaver and resign yourself.
“And your mother?” asked the sorcerer.
The word “mother,” so cozy and rounded, sounded odd coming from his perfectly formed mouth. It was too ordinary. Still, it was the same mouth that had been wrapped around my very ordinary meatloaf, so perhaps it was the very ordinariness that fascinated him.
“I didn’t know my mother,” I told him. “Da told me she was very ...” I hesitated. “Beautiful.”
The sorcerer didn’t react.
“Beautiful,” I repeated, the word sitting oddly on my tongue. “All the lads were after her, Da said, but she liked him, because he folded the paper we wrap the meat in into little shapes for her. Animals and such. She liked his blue eyes and his dreaminess.”
“You have blue eyes,” said the sorcerer.
I thought I was getting used to him, living in his house, and used to my ailing heart. I had started to treat it something like a fungus on my toe; it bothered me occasionally but was largely out of my control.
Now, however, I realized that my detached assessment of it was a pile of shite, because I could have died on the spot right then and there when I realized he had noticed the color of my eyes. And then, a split second later, I was furious at my own heart for its gullibility. I sprang to my feet, ready to race out of the room before I did something to embarrass myself.
“You’re probably wondering how I turned out so ugly,” I said, chewing on the word as if it were a bit of gristle. I didn’t wait for his reply, nor look at his face. “I don’t take after Da’s side of the family, and I certainly don’t take after my mother’s.”
I rarely talked like this. Perhaps that was what made me hate the sorcerer most, despite my love—that he had woken in me again the desire to be pretty. To hold hands with a sweetheart. To wear the stupid white dress and carry the fresh ears of corn, as tradition dictated, and marry in front of a holy man. All that rubbish.
The sorcerer stared at me. “Ugly?” he said.
Like he’d never heard the word before. I waited, but he did not look as though he wanted to say more.
“My mother died when I was born,” I said at last.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, but ...” I was doing my best not to look at him. “Part of the sorceresses’ protection—your protection too, I suppose—is that everyone is born healthy. Almost everyone. It’s rare for anyone to lose a pregnancy or have a stillbirth. And it’s rare for a mother to die in childbirth.”
“So I have heard,” he said.
