by Sharon Shinn
“I swear, there are times I don’t think I can carry this burden another day, let alone another year,” Isadora said with a sigh. “And then I pass through Movington, as I did yesterday, and I discover that the little girl who was so sick last time I was there grew well two days after I left. They had been afraid that she would lose her hearing and they brought her to me. Well, I don’t know how to cure a child—I don’t know why I have the power in me that I have, or how it works, or why it chooses to grant one wish and not another. But I kissed that little girl on each of her ears and I rocked her for a while and sang a lullaby. And when I passed through yesterday and they spotted me in the coach, we almost could not make it down the street. The whole village mobbed us and called out my name, and cheered when we were finally able to pull free. And I thought, ‘Well, perhaps it is worth it after all.’”
“You might be able to help make a dream come true here in Tambleham,” Fiona said. “And you won’t need any magic to do it.”
“Why, how’s that?”
“Do you know anyone in the royal city who needs a young woman for a companion? An old woman, maybe, with connections at the palace. I know a girl here who is bright and pretty and eager to get away. If you had someone to send her to—”
“I can’t think of anyone at the moment, but I’m going to Wodenderry after Wintermoon,” Isadora said. “I’ll inquire and see what I can discover. So you are playing intriguer as well as Safe-Keeper here in your little cottage!”
“And wood witch as well, since people come to me now and then for potions.”
“Does Elminstra mind?”
Fiona smiled a bit sardonically. “Most of the ones who come to me for elixirs would not trouble Elminstra with these requests.”
“Well, you’re young to carry all these burdens,” Isadora said. “Don’t forget to be a girl yourself while you can.”
Fiona shook her head. “That time is past,” she said quietly. “And this is who I am now.”
Angeline and Reed arrived in the morning, along with the first snowfall of the season. Impossibly, Reed seemed to have grown another inch in the two weeks since Fiona had seen him, and he instantly filled the house with his happy presence. They left the two older women to bake the bread and begin making the sweets, and they spent three hours tramping through the familiar woods, gathering branches.
“And Robert? How’s he?”
“Wonderful. You can tell Robert anything and he understands.”
Fiona felt a twinge of alarm. “Why, what have you told him?”
“Oh, that I’m not sure I want to spend the winter in Lowford. It’s too far from you, for one thing, and I’m tired of the work, for another. It’s not that it’s too hard, it’s just that—I don’t know! There are so many other things I haven’t done! I haven’t been to Merendon to see the great boats, I haven’t gone north to the mines to watch them haul out copper. I haven’t—I haven’t been anywhere, I haven’t done anything. I don’t want to settle down and be a merchant my whole life until I know for sure that’s what I want.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ll be any closer to me if you move to Merendon or the northern cities,” Fiona observed.
Reed grinned. “No, but I might stay in Tambleham for the winter, and head down to Merendon in the spring. By then you’ll have remembered how quiet the cottage is without me, and you’ll be glad to see me go.”
“I’d be happy to have you, even for a season,” she said seriously. “But I hate to see you leave Robert on bad terms—”
“No, truly, he was as nice as could be. Said I could come back in the fall and work again. Every fall, until I figured out what I wanted to do next. So I said I thought I would.”
She shook her head. “How can you be so restless and I so settled?”
“Different fathers,” he said with a smile. “Different mothers, too, though we forget that. Not a single drop of blood in our veins that we share.”
“Strange,” she said, smiling back, “when we share everything else.”
Not until the morning of Wintermoon itself did Thomas arrive at the door. No one had asked about him, though Fiona noticed that both Isadora and Angeline lifted their heads to listen every time a wagon seemed to slow down as it went by the house. She knew they thought she had told him to make other plans for the holiday, but they did not want to ask the question outright, preferring to hope that it was not true.
That morning, while they were still at the breakfast table, there finally came the sound that they had all listened for—a wagon coming to a halt at the front gate.
“Is that—I wonder who that could be?” Isadora said.
Fiona stood up. “I’ll go see.”
But it was, as she had known it would be, the Truth-Teller. He sat in the front of the wagon, the reins wrapped around his hands, waiting for her to step from the house. She pushed through the gate and came to stand right by the wagon, her hand resting on the footrest on the passenger’s side.
“We were afraid you weren’t coming,” she said.
He looked down at her with no smile. “I was afraid I would not be wanted.”
“You will always be welcome in this house,” she said. “And it would not be Wintermoon without you. Come in.”
“I must go stable the horses,” he said. “But you could help me carry in my packages first, if you like.”
The others were spilling out of the front door now, calling out Thomas’s name in excited voices. “Let Reed carry them,” Fiona said with a smile. “He’s the strongest.”
“I’ll be back within the hour.”
It was a strange Wintermoon, but not so sad as Fiona had expected. There was surprising comfort in the mere fact that other people moved through the house, other voices were lifted in the outer rooms. She had put Isadora on a bed in her own room, Angeline upstairs in the guest room, and Thomas on the sofa out front, and they were tripping over each other and their piles of half-woven branches any time more than two of them were awake. But that was fun. Meals were sometimes riotously merry, and the time spent making the wreaths companionable and quiet. Even though only two people in the house were related by blood, they were, in the most important sense, a family; and Fiona had only recently realized how much a family should be cherished.
They plaited their bonfire wreath with oak and rowan and truelove, as well as ribbon and lace from Angeline’s stores. Reed contributed a length of twine from one of Robert’s warehouses, saying it would represent wealth and commerce. Thomas tied on a strip torn from an old canvas sail and said, “There. Now we’ll all go traveling.” Fiona added a few leaves of lark’s breath, a plant she had brought home from Kate’s greenhouse and used to relieve her mother’s greatest suffering. For she thought it would be a good thing to have a year without pain, if one could only get such a thing by remembering to wish for it. They threw their wreath on the great fire and watched all their hopes turn incendiary, branding the night sky. Fiona assumed that she was not the only one to silently add her own litany of desires, and wish that they might be fulfilled in the coming year.
They stayed out till dawn, feeding the fire, taking turns going inside to warm up. When they finally went in for good and took to their beds, Fiona found she could not sleep. She listened to Isadora’s gentle snoring and thought of her mother and the things that might happen in the year to come. No way to predict, she realized, what the following months might bring. No way to guess if she was now as happy as she would ever be, or if the world held great joys that she would only stumble across by living. There was only this moment, and in this moment, these people, and there would never be any more certainty than that.
She turned on her side. But there were still things to hope for, to reach for, without letting go of what she already possessed. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and let her fingers close and curl, as if catching on to something that had, until now, stayed just outside her grasp.
Chapter Eleven
Elminstra insisted that her granddaug
hter come stay at the Safe-Keeper’s cottage, though neither Reed nor Fiona wanted her. Allison was a cheerful girl, nineteen and big as any peasant’s daughter, with a round, smiling face and curly dark hair. She was easy-tempered and good at anything she put her hand to, though she didn’t like to think too hard and was always happy to see the workday end.
“She’ll learn a lot from you,” Elminstra said.
“Yes, and I’m sure I’ll like her a great deal, but I—can’t she stay at your house and come up in the mornings?” Fiona replied.
Elminstra shook her head. “No one’s said anything yet, but people will notice, Fiona! A young man and a young woman living together out here all alone—”
“A young—you mean, Reed and me? But we’re brother and sister.”
“Not by blood you’re not, and everyone knows it,” Elminstra said with a certain grimness. “People do unsavory things, and so they think other people do, too, and they wouldn’t like to see the Safe-Keeper’s daughter and the king’s bastard living together in a house without a chaper-one. There. You say it’s silly and it may be, but that’s the truth of it, and Angeline would tell you the same. So fix up a room for Allison, and everything will be fine.”
Just spiteful enough to make things a tiny bit difficult for the unwanted guest, Fiona gave Allison the upstairs bedroom and kept the big one downstairs for herself. Allison didn’t mind, though. She liked the house, liked the room, liked working in the warm indoor garden that Reed had built for Fiona just off the pantry. She liked the meals Fiona cooked, liked the laughter Reed brought to the dinner table. It was, in turn, impossible not to like Allison, and the three of them grew to be fast friends within a fortnight.
Reed was gone most days, having taken a job down at the tavern, now run by his old friend Dirk. He did a little brewing, but mostly waited tables, and came back every week or so with an extra loaf of bread or a pheasant pie that was left over after all the guests had been served. Elminstra often joined them for dinner, bringing a side dish or a fresh-baked cake. All in all, late winter was a much more convivial season for Fiona than early winter had been.
She started to have more visitors during the day as well, people who had secrets to tell and dark thoughts to reveal. She had trained Allison to leave the house when these visitors came calling, to put on a cloak and walk out the front door, so guests could see she was leaving the house and would not worry that she was listening at keyholes to words that were hard to utter. Only a few of these visitors were able to pay in any kind of coin, but they all brought something in exchange for the Safe-Keeper’s services—a round of cheese, a bolt of fabric, newly laid eggs. Fiona accepted everything with equal civility.
“It must have been an awfully dreadful secret,” Allison said happily one night as they ate very fine beefsteaks brought by a caller. “We never had meat this good in my father’s house.”
Fiona smiled. “Not so bad, as dreadful secrets go.”
Reed was grinning. He seemed to have stopped growing taller this winter, though at just over six feet he was already quite tall enough, and now he was starting to fill out. Fiona had realized with a start the other day that they no longer looked alike. She was still very fair, with fine skin and that silky blond hair they had both had as children, but his complexion had darkened and his hair was now a light brown. And she was so much smaller than he was. No wonder the villagers no longer believed they were brother and sister.
“I bet I know who told it and what the secret was,” he said.
Fiona raised her brows. “How could you?”
“I was told a secret myself down at the tavern the other day. I didn’t think it was so dreadful either.”
After dinner, when Allison had walked down to her grandmother’s to share some leftover meat, Fiona demanded, “What do you think my secret is?”
Reed was smiling again. “But if it’s a secret—”
“I can’t tell it, but you can!”
“Megan Henshaw’s father. He’s the only one with enough head of cattle to pay you off in beef. And he’s thinking about marrying again—a girl as young as his daughter!”
Fiona was at a loss. No one had ever told her what to do if someone guessed the truth of a secret she was holding. But she felt certain that confirming it would be the same as repeating it, so she said, “If that’s true, then it won’t be a secret much longer. Was Ric Henshaw announcing such things to everyone in the bar?”
Reed shook his head. “Just to me, just after his third or fourth glass of ale. I gather he’s not a man who’s used to making decisions that come from the heart, and he doesn’t know how to think this thing through.”
“You’d be amazed,” she said dryly, “how many people that describes.”
Fiona could tell that Reed enjoyed his job at the tavern, because Reed liked people and he liked to be in constant motion, but she could also tell that it was starting to pall within a couple of months. So she was not at all surprised, when spring first made a few feints at greenery, to find him impatient to try something new.
“The copper mines?” she asked him one day when she found him restlessly chopping more wood than they would need for the next two months. “The great ships at Merendon? What’s calling you now?”
He laid aside his ax and gave her a rueful grin. “There’s a horse breeder in Thrush Hollow,” he said. “He was at the tavern a week ago. Said he’d train me if I wanted to come out.”
“Did you warn him that you wouldn’t stay?”
“I did tell him that I’d like to try a variety of jobs before I settle into any particular one.”
“I’ve never even seen you so much as unhitch Thomas’s wagon.”
“No, but, see, that’s why I want to learn!” he said eagerly. “I’ve never been around horses! I might find I like them better than anything. But I won’t know unless I go there and find out.”
“Just as long as you’re here at Summermoon,” she said.
“Oh, I’ll be back to visit a dozen times before then. You’ll scarcely realize I’m gone.”
But she did realize it. His absence emptied the house, made even Allison’s cheerfulness seem whispery quiet. There were distractions, of course, foremost among them being spring itself, with its demands of digging and planting and watering. Fiona found Allison’s willing energy much more useful than she’d expected to, and the two of them dug a bigger garden than Fiona had been able to maintain in the past. Elminstra visited every few days, exclaiming with envy and offering some of her own cuttings.
“We’ll become the showplace of the southern region,” Elminstra predicted. “People will journey for a hundred miles to buy herbs and potions from us.”
“I might make more money from this than from Safe-Keeping,” Fiona said with a smile.
“Well, a late freeze can ruin a garden, and a drought can burn it, so there’s no real safe money in planting,” Elminstra said. “But people will always have secrets, no matter what the season.”
That turned out to be even truer than Fiona had expected, for she was busier during spring than she had been all six months before. She thought some of it had to do with the fact that people in Tambleham were beginning to trust her, to realize that she had not repeated any of the details told to her so far, and they were bringing to her secrets they might have otherwise taken to a Safe-Keeper in Thrush Hollow or Marring Cross. Or perhaps they were too busy, now that it was time to plant crops and breed livestock and make repairs on the barn, to travel so far just to relieve their minds of pressing burdens.
Whatever the reason, every week someone came knocking at the door, asking for a little private time with Fiona. Allison seemed perfectly content to continue working in the garden while Fiona served tea in the kitchen. For the most part, the tales were not so shocking, though now and then Fiona was hard-pressed not to react with anger or disgust. Only once, though, was she told a secret that she did not think she would be able to bear.
“Let’s go outside and sit under the k
irrenberry tree,” said her visitor, a thin, tired woman named Janice. “The day is so pretty, and I like to listen to the silence.”
So they brought a blanket and sat under the spreading branches and watched the limbs sway and rub together and make absolutely no noise at all.
“My daughter is bearing my husband’s child,” Janice said with no preamble. “I thought to come to you for a potion that would—that would—make the child go away, but I waited too long and it is too big in her belly now. And then I thought, he will not bother her so much when she is with child. This gives her a little break from him.”
Fiona was filled with such rage that it was almost more than she could do to sit there and be quiet. She clenched her hands into fists and listened to the silence of the kirrenberry tree. She wondered if, in their own mute way, the very bark and branches of the tree were screaming in soundless agony.
“How old is your daughter?”
“Going on fifteen.”
Fiona thought. “Was she in school when I was? I should know her if she’s only a year or two younger than I am.”
Janice shook her head. “We kept her at home. But she learned a lot! She can read, because she taught herself, and she can cook and clean. Well, you’ve seen our house, there right off the road on the south edge of town. A big place, and she can run the whole thing without my help. I’ve been sickly,” Janice added apologetically. “I can’t do so much. And I know that’s why my husband has turned to Jillian. If I could have done all my duties, he would not have—”
Again, Fiona kept her hands tight and her outrage stilled. “And your own sickness?” she asked quietly. “What is its nature? Perhaps I have some medicines that could help you. I have a little skill with healing.”
Janice shook her head and sighed. “Oh, I’ve had potions and potions. Nothing gives me any strength,” she said. Fiona did not have to try too hard to guess at another story: The woman preferred the comfort of helplessness and a make-believe disease to dealing with the harsh realities of her life. Fiona could not keep from directing some of her silent fury at someone so weak.