The Safe-Keeper's Secret

by Sharon Shinn

  Fiona shook her head. “I’d rather stay right here.”

  The next few days passed quite quietly, considering how many people were in the house. Thomas and Reed were mostly outside, doing heavy repairs to the shed out back and reframing one of the windows on the upper story of the house. Angeline took over Reed’s job of sitting with Damiana most of the day. Fiona, who continued her tasks of cooking and cleaning, could occasionally hear their voices as she passed the doorway to her mother’s room. Often, it was Angeline talking, telling light, meaningless stories designed to make Damiana smile; but sometimes Damiana was the one speaking, her voice very faint and low. Fiona did not need to ask what Damiana was telling her sister. She was passing on the secrets that needed to be kept, that someone must know even though the Safe-Keeper was gone. Angeline listened gravely, and nodded, and added the words to her own stores of secret knowledge.

  One afternoon while Fiona was rolling out a pastry crust to make a meat pie for dinner, Angeline came from the sickroom. “Your mother would like a glass of water,” she said. “And she’d like you to take it to her.”

  Fiona looked up, inquiring. “Is she feeling worse?”

  Angeline shrugged. “Well enough to talk for a while. I think there are things she wants to tell you.”

  Fiona did her best to brush the flour from her hands. “All right. Can you finish this?”

  A few minutes later she carried the water into her mother’s room. Damiana was sitting up in bed, looking pale but determined. Her dark hair was pulled back into a braid and her skin looked white and exposed. Her eyes were dark and hollowed, just now glittering with a hint of fever. But she smiled when Fiona came in.

  “Something smells good,” Damiana said. “You must be making dinner.”

  “Meat pie,” Fiona said, handing her the glass and sitting on one of the two chairs pulled up next to the bed. “Elminstra’s recipe. Maybe you’ll be hungry enough to eat some later.”

  “I might just be,” Damiana agreed. “You’ve turned into such a good cook. And gardener. I’m amazed at everything you know and do.”

  Fiona smiled. “Be more amazed at Reed and everything he’s learned. Who’d have thought it of such a restless boy?”

  Damiana sighed. “I wish I knew,” she said, “what you will both choose with your lives. That’s what I regret most—having to leave before I have seen you both settled.”

  “I’ll be a Safe-Keeper and Reed will be—something different every year,” Fiona said. “And we’ll both be happy and we’ll both think of you every day.”

  “Even if you don’t choose to become a Safe-Keeper,” Damiana said slowly, “there is one secret you need to know.”

  “Something I can never tell?” Fiona asked.

  “You’ll be able to tell it one day,” Damiana said. “And you’ll know when.” And she leaned forward and whispered the secret in Fiona’s ear.

  Fiona listened and nodded, and then they both sat back. She tried to keep the expression on her face unchanging, but inside she was amazed and full of churning wonder. “And I can’t even tell Reed?” she said.

  “Not yet.”

  “But I’ll know when I can?”

  “If you don’t, Thomas will know.”

  Now Fiona couldn’t keep the displeasure from showing on her face. “Thomas knows this secret?”

  Damiana shook her head. “Oh, no. I would not trust him to keep such a thing. But he’ll know when it should no longer be a secret.”

  “Thank you for trusting me,” Fiona said formally.

  Damiana smiled and reached over to squeeze Fiona’s hand. Her grip was pitifully weak. “I would trust you with any secret,” she said.

  Four days later, Damiana died. It was as if, after sharing all her information with Angeline and Fiona, she had nothing very important left to do, and so she began dozing for longer and longer hours and waking up for shorter and shorter periods of time. Angeline, Reed, and Thomas took turns sitting in the room with her, holding her hand and watching the deepening serenity on her face. Fiona kept busy with the chores of the house, dropping by the sickroom now and then to see if anything was wanted, but not able to bear the idea of staying for longer than a few minutes. She did not understand how the others could wait with such patience for such an unwelcome guest; she did not want to be nearby when Death made his visit.

  Elminstra came by twice a day, bringing teas and potions. Every time she left, she was quietly crying. The evening of that fourth day, while Angeline and Thomas sat with Damiana, the witch called Reed and Fiona together.

  “It will be tonight,” she told them, her voice calm even though tears rolled down her smooth cheeks. “Say your good-byes to her, make it plain to her that you let her go. Or she may try to linger another day or two, and there’s no purpose to that.”

  “Is she still awake?” Fiona asked. “Can she understand us?”

  Elminstra made an equivocal gesture with one hand. “Not really awake, not really sleeping. Can she hear you? I don’t know. But I firmly believe she can sense you, can catch the echoes of your emotions. And she will know if you’re not ready to let her go.”

  Fiona looked to one side. “I’m not,” she said.

  Reed put his arm around her. He was so tall now that she felt tiny next to him, a kitten protected by a playful but occasionally ferocious kitchen dog. “Yes, you are,” he said, and his voice was comforting. “We both are. You can do this.”

  She looked up at him. “You’ll have to do it,” she said.

  The two of them ate dinner alone together, saying very little, then Fiona fixed plates for Angeline and Thomas. Hand in hand, she and Reed slowly walked to Damiana’s room.

  “We’ll sit with her a while,” Reed announced. “You two go eat.”

  Angeline stood up, her face apprehensive. Thomas rose to his feet more slowly. “Did she—what did Elminstra say when she left?” Angeline asked.

  “She told us to make our good-byes,” Reed said gently.

  A little sob escaped Angeline. Thomas nodded at them, his shadowed face looking stark with grief. “We have already done so,” he said, and wheeled and left the room. Angeline, crying silently, followed behind him.

  Reed pushed Fiona forward and they took their places in the two chairs positioned beside the bed. Fiona took her mother’s hand, since she was sitting closest to where the thin fingers lay, and Reed reached up to brush the dark hair from Damiana’s forehead. He nodded at Fiona, as if she must be the one to speak first.

  “Elminstra told us—Elminstra said it was time to say—say good-bye,” Fiona said, her voice faltering. “You have taught us—everything you can—and we are grateful for all that. Every word. Every whisper. Every secret.” She tried to say more but the words wouldn’t come. She looked over at Reed and shook her head. Her eyes burned and her chest was tight, but not a single tear would gather and fall.

  Damiana stirred just a little. Fiona could feel the sticklike fingers tighten on her own, and her mother’s lips gathered as if she would speak, but no sound came.

  “Ssshh,” Reed whispered, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead, on the closed eyelids. “No words now. Nothing more to tell. Time for you to rest now.” He kissed her again, forehead, cheek. “Magical sleeping kisses. Here’s another one. You’ll rest now, with no dreaming. Another magical sleeping kiss, and another—”

  It took only a few more kisses before Damiana sighed and relaxed. Fiona felt the clenched fingers uncurl, saw the calm expression come to her mother’s face. With a smothered cry, she struggled to her feet and blundered through the door. Angeline caught her before she had gone three steps down the hall.

  Part Three

  Chapter Ten

  It was clear that it had never occurred to Angeline that there would be any resistance to her plan. “But of course you’re both coming back with me to Lowford,” she said blankly over breakfast three days later. The funeral was over, Thomas was gone, and the house was a still, sad place. “You can’t stay
here by yourselves.”

  “I’m not leaving Tambleham,” Fiona said quietly. She was too tired to argue or even be particularly polite. “Reed can go if he likes.”

  Just moments ago, Reed had expressed a willingness to come live with Angeline and continue his apprenticeship with Robert Bayliss, and Fiona’s decision had surprised him as much as it had surprised Angeline. “I’m not leaving if you’re not,” he said.

  “Of course you are! You both are!” Angeline exclaimed. “You can’t possibly—two sixteen-year-old children living alone—it’s unthinkable.”

  “There’s the house and the garden,” Fiona said calmly. “They have to be cared for. And someone in town needs to be Safe-Keeper.”

  “The house can be sold, and Safe-Keepers can be found in villages half a day’s ride in any direction,” Angeline said firmly. “You’re coming back to Lowford with me.”

  “Actually,” said Fiona, “I’m not.”

  She had worked it all out, and by dinnertime, with Elminstra’s help, she had convinced them all. She would stay in the house by day, tending the garden; she would go to Elminstra’s in the evenings, so that no one needed to worry about a young unprotected girl sleeping alone at night.

  “And, you know, my granddaughter Allison has been planning to come study with me next year,” Elminstra said. “She’s nearly twenty now. The two of them can live here together and do quite well.”

  “But still! Two young women alone!” Angeline cried.

  Reed shrugged. “Fiona’s pretty good at handling things. And Elminstra is just down the road.”

  “So you see I’ll be just fine,” Fiona said. “I won’t be alone and I’m not afraid.”

  “It still seems wrong,” Angeline said, but it was clear her arguments were exhausted. “Any time you change your mind, of course, you just catch the fastest coach heading west. I’ll always have a room waiting for you.”

  “I’ll be back all the time,” Reed said. “You won’t have a chance to miss me.”

  Fiona looked at him with a little smile. “You,” she said, “nothing will keep you in Tambleham—or Lowford, either. I’d miss you even if I was going to live there with you and Angeline.”

  “He’ll settle down someday,” Elminstra said. “You’ll see.”

  “Well, I’m settled already,” Fiona said. “Nobody needs to worry about me.”

  Thus began Fiona’s first year as a Safe-Keeper. The first few weeks were unbelievably quiet and a little lonely, since no one needed the services of a Safe-Keeper and Fiona had rarely spent any time in her mother’s cottage by herself. But she found she liked the silence, the chance to operate just exactly as she chose. She might sort through her seeds one day, and spend the next day doing nothing but reading. She took in piecework from Lacey and sewed when she felt like it, and didn’t sew when she didn’t feel like it. Now that the house was empty, she rarely bothered to cook, just opened and ate from one of the jars of vegetables that she had canned during the fall.

  She did some rearranging in the house. Angeline had helped her clear out some of her mother’s things, but Fiona redid the room from top to bottom, sewing new curtains and putting down a new rug and moving the bed to the other wall. Then she made this room her own room, and turned her upstairs bedroom into a guest room, with new sheets and curtains of its own.

  Reed’s room she left exactly as it was.

  She cut back an overgrown hedge in the front yard and planned where she would lay in new flowerbeds in the spring. She trimmed the kirrenberry tree, grown quite ragged, and buried a lock of her mother’s hair under its soundless shade. On one of his many visits, Reed brought her the roots and half a foot of truelove, so she planted it at the front porch to see if it would take this late in the season. It did, and its heart-shaped leaves were soon sending spiraling tendrils around the lintel of the door. When the first frost came, all the hearts turned red, and soon held drifts of white snow against their vivid skins.

  A week before Wintermoon, Fiona had her first customer. It was late afternoon and she was standing at the front gate, checking to make sure that a recalcitrant latch was working better now that it was oiled. She didn’t look up at the sound of the approaching wagon until it came to a halt and a passenger alighted. Then she realized that Calbert Seston was holding the reins of the wagon and Megan Henshaw was coming toward the gate to see her.

  “Good afternoon,” Fiona said, her voice civil and neutral. It was unlikely that this was a purely social call; she encountered these two all the time in the village, and they always said hello, but it wasn’t as if either of them would claim to be Fiona’s friend. Still, they might want nothing more than a leaf of truelove to add to a Wintermoon wreath. Fiona had already handed out a dozen of them.

  “Good afternoon,” Megan said in a low voice. The pretty girl had grown into a lovely young woman, but she did not look like a happy one. Her face was puckered from cold, and her expression was anxious. “Could I—do you have time to talk to me?”

  “Certainly,” Fiona said. “Would you like to step inside?”

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” Calbert called. Megan didn’t bother to answer him and he didn’t wait for a reply, just set the horses in motion.

  “Yes, inside,” Megan answered.

  “I’ll make tea,” Fiona said.

  They were seated at the table sipping mint tea before Megan spoke again. “You’re—I came to see if you could give me a potion,” the older girl said. “You cultivate herbs and plants that no one else in this part of the country can grow.”

  Fiona stirred her tea. “I do, but I don’t have everything Elminstra has, and I don’t know as many recipes,” she said slowly. “You might be better off to go to her.”

  “I can’t ask her this. She’s my mother’s second cousin. I can’t get any potion from her.”

  Now Fiona looked at her, very direct. “What is it that you want this drug to do?”

  The answer was really no surprise. “I want to make sure I don’t become pregnant with Cal’s baby,” she said. “Not now. Not yet. We aren’t to be married for at least another year. You must have something that I can take that will—that will keep such a thing from happening. And you must keep it a secret.”

  Fiona nodded. “I do. I will. But there is also—you know that there is one sure way to not conceive a baby.”

  Megan gave a wild little laugh. “Oh, but I can’t say no to Cal. He is—he is very insistent. He is so used to having his way. It is much easier just to do what he wants.”

  “Well, I have some herbs I can give you. You have to make sure you take some every day, and never skip a day. But if you do that, you should be protected.”

  “And you won’t tell anyone?”

  Fiona shook her head. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  Megan dropped her eyes to her teacup and cradled her hand around its delicate shape. “Cal was so angry with me last night,” she said. “I refused him. I had thought, a week ago, that I might be … and I did not want to risk it. But he said he would not marry me next year if I would not do what he says now.”

  “You came to me for potions, not for advice, but let me offer some advice anyway,” Fiona said. “Don’t marry Cal Seston next year, or ever.”

  “I have to,” Megan said, still whispering. “My father said—”

  “Someday your father will be dead, and Cal Seston’s father too. And you’ll still be alive and married to Cal. Think about that when you’re thinking about how much you want to please your father.”

  Megan looked away again. “But where would I go? What would I do?”

  Fiona shrugged. “Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?”

  Megan laughed on a soft exhalation of breath. “Go to the royal city and meet the king. I’d marry one of his courtiers and live in the palace and be rich.”

  Fiona grinned. “Sounds better than marrying Cal Seston.”

  Now Megan gave a real laugh. “But much less likely!”

  �
�That’s what we have dreams for,” Fiona said.

  They talked a while longer and then Fiona went into the pantry where she kept her dried herbs. She brought out two kinds, one with a harsh taste that was easy on the stomach, one with a sweeter taste that sometimes made the patient sick.

  “I prefer the bitter one,” Fiona said. “But it is up to you.”

  “I will try them both, and see what I like best,” Megan said, standing up quickly. Outside, they could hear the wagon pulling up before the gate and the sound of Cal’s impatient voice raised. “Thank you,” Megan said and threw her arms around Fiona’s neck. “I can’t … thank you.”

  “Come back if I can help you with something else,” Fiona said.

  She saw her visitor to the door but did not escort her out to the gate. It was getting dark and a little chilly and she did not particularly want to see Cal Seston again.

  When she returned to the kitchen, she was to be even more surprised than she had been by Megan’s embrace: The other woman had left two gold coins on the table next to her teacup.

  Payment for a Safe-Keeper’s services.

  Isadora was the first to arrive for Wintermoon. “Is it all right that I’m here?” she asked as she climbed down from the carriage and waved good-bye to her benefactors. “As I started to come here, I thought—well, it’s all different now. I thought maybe you were all at Angeline’s and maybe I should go there, or find somewhere else to go, and I can, even at this late date—”

  But Fiona was hugging her, pulling her toward the house, laughing as she had not laughed in days. “No, I am so glad you’re here! Angeline and Reed are arriving tomorrow, but I had no way to get in touch with you—no one ever knows where you are. Oh, it is good to see you!”

  They talked late into the night, for this was one evening Fiona would not have to trudge down to Elminstra’s to sleep in that crowded house. Isadora was grieved that she hadn’t been able to make it to Damiana’s funeral, but there had been tragedy in her own life just then, her sister dying after a sudden illness.