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“You said the same thing yesterday when you retched behind the bushes. No village as small as ours takes well to strangers, but even less so if they come with a pestilence.”
I took my starched wimple off, placed it on the rock beside me, and wiped the thin layer of sweat from my forehead. “It’s no sickness.”
It was worse.
For days, I’d woken nauseous, unable to keep much down, lest I nibbled on stale bread. It got better as the day grew older. Combine that with the fact that I was late on my bleeding, and you didn’t need to be a midwife to figure out just from what condition I might suffer.
Joy.
Dread.
Two emotions warred at my core, pulling my mood from cheerful to scared. For so many years, I’d prayed for a child. The answer couldn’t have come at a worse time. But how, if Enosh had sensed nothing? Perhaps it had been too small then?
“Maybe it’s a sickness after all.” Maybe I was finally going mad, my mind stuffed with head-spinning confusion about this entire ordeal. “I’ll have to cut the rope, then see if my father can mend it. Take your fish from the cages.”
She didn’t.
Rose only stood there, her stare fixed to the dark streaks and onyx discoloration painted across the white cotton on the inside of my wimple.
Sheathing my knife, I quickly grabbed it with my other hand. I placed it back on my head and shoved escaped black wisps into it, forcing my gaze to look at her basket, a nearby oak, the crow in its branches. I looked at anything but her, anything but how her eyes narrowed on me in the corner of my vision.
I took my knife out once more and ran the blade along the fraying rope. “You don’t want ’em?”
“Sure I do.” She blinked out of her thoughts, then retrieved three fish from my cages, leaving only enough behind to feed Pa and me for perhaps three days, four if I made stew again. “I better hurry. Nobody trusts fresh fish once the sun stands too high, no matter how cold it is.”
While Rose filled her basket and eventually left, I ruined the last of Pa’s ropes. I detangled the corpse and took off the cages. Once I gutted the few fish I’d caught, I loaded everything onto my groaning old handcart and headed to the village, leaving the dead man behind.
The wooden wheels of my cart creaked along the muddy path that led through Elderfalls, a village with too many fishermen and not enough fish. A woman emptied a bucket of scraps into the pigpen beside her hut, the air ripe with the stench of piss and poverty.
When I passed the iron-studded hutch to the cellar, a biting odor crept into my nostrils, but it was gone at my next step. Instead of a pit, Elderfalls kept the dead in a dungeon beneath its courthouse. We no longer released them during a full moon. High priest’s order.
“Elisa.” Thorsten dipped his head as he raked a flake of straw from the pile beside the stables. “Come to haggle with me again?”
I sighed and waved at my basket. “Only if you’ll take the coin I offered last week and four small fish.”
He chuckled, but the sound held a tone of kindness. “I want double the coin for the mule now.”
I clenched the rough cart handles. “Are you joking? We both know the animal is lame on the right hind.”
“Afraid not. All stablemasters raised their prices in the other towns and villages; why not me? We might be far out, but someone will find the mule. Temples are giving out coin so the militia can buy horses and mules.”
My pulse throbbed at the tips of my fingers. “Such a fuss, still, even though they caught the King?”
He shrugged. “They’re looking for someone… a woman.”
I’d figured as much, but that didn’t stop my heart from racing and a new layer of sweat to break at the nape of my neck. “What woman?”
“Can’t say. Heard no name. No word of who she might be.”
Still, a shudder chased across my skin, but it stayed the longest around my exposed neck, where my collar had been. On reflex, my fingers wandered there, rubbing, searching for the comfort of it, only to find it gone. Strange how the absence of something that had once made me feel like a prisoner now caused panic to settle at my core.
Where are you, Enosh?
My fingers itched to reach into my pocket for the stone Pa had cut from my collar, but I thought better of it. Yes, it would buy me a mule—a lame one, right along with a new set of problems. Even if Thorsten didn’t ask how I came by such a treasure, others would once he traded it for coin. Might even think I had more of it. And if that happened faster than I could escape on a mule with teeth as long as my thumb…? The way my luck went with mules, the old thing might just die underneath me halfway across the stretch.
I took a deep breath. “Just… let me know if someone comes and wants the mule, and I’ll see what I can do.”
Maybe I needed to offer my services as a midwife, after all? But wouldn’t that put me in even greater risk of being found out? How much longer until that woman the priests wanted had a name? A description? An occupation?
