by Jane Yolen
She glared back and with her knife cut off his bloody sleeve.
“Don’t do that again,” she told him. “We’ve got to get through this together. Agreed?”
What she could see of the arm in the moonlight showed a wound that was deep—had gone all the way through, actually—but had somehow managed to miss all muscle and bone. If cleaned and bandaged, the wound shouldn’t give the prince too much trouble.
Aspen began to sit up. “Agreed.” He said it as if he meant it, as if there were no chasm between them, no deep gaps of birth, of class, of education, of futures.
“Then . . .” she began.
But there was a terrific thud behind them. The ground shook and a baby with an enormous pair of lungs began to cry nearby. It was the kind of crying that could knock birds from the trees and make grown men weep. It could curdle milk and make cows’ udders go dry. It could . . .
“Huldra?” Aspen said.
“Og?” Snail said.
They both turned at once.
Huldra was stretched out on the ground, blood flowing freely from a deep cut in her leg, probably as far as the cloaked man’s sword could reach. Snail knew that such a cut, if it had hit a major vein, could make the troll bleed out in a minute.
Or maybe two. Snail tried to remember what she’d learned about blood loss from the midwives.
Then she had it:
One minute royals,
Two minutes lords,
Whether from breakage
Or tusks or broadswords.
Three minutes Red Cap
Who pays the blood tolls,
Four minutes boggarts
And ogres and trolls.
There were four more verses, of course. But it was clear that she had but a little time to save Huldra. Less than four minutes if the rhyme was true. Aspen’s wound was minor in comparison, so she would have to let him be on his own for now.
Midwives, like all carers, knew the rule:
Who bleeds the worst,
We care for first.
That worked for new babies and their mothers as well as their husbands or mates who may have hurt themselves in the aftermath of the birth by celebrating too much or fainting at the sight of either birth blood or the after-clots.
“Amazing,” Mistress Softhands often said, “how men who have wounded or killed in battle pass out when their womenfolk bleed.”
“Here . . .” It was Dagmarra at Snail’s right side. She handed Snail a bunch of the white wooly fluff from a clump of lamb’s shear growing nearby. “You can use this to staunch the wound, and save a bit for putting in your ears. In fact, you should probably do that first.”
Instead, Snail used the entire two hands worth of the fluff on Huldra’s wound and then wrapped it tight to her with strips torn from her last petticoat. It would do until Snail could stitch together the vein.
She suddenly recalled how she’d used the top petticoat when delivering baby Og. This is getting to be a habit. But she’d never liked those petticoats anyway, silly useless things. Well, she thought, not so useless when used as bandages.
Baby Og! He was no longer bound to Huldra. But she could hear him screaming. “Where is he?”
Dagmarra said, “The minstrel?”
“The baby. Where’s the baby?”
Dagmarra pointed dramatically toward the wood where Aspen had gone hunting for the deer. “Don’t worry. Prince Noble is off saving the baby!”
“But he’s . . .” Snail spun around to look at where Aspen had just been lying on the ground behind her. He was gone. “Just injured,” she ended lamely.
Dagmarra had squatted down and was plucking more of the white cotton fluff. “This time put these in your ears.”
“We need to help Asp . . . Kar . . . er, Prince Noble.”
“Maggie Light will take care of that,” Dagmarra said, stuffing her own ears. “Best you do this, too.”
Suddenly, Snail remembered when the soldiers had first come looking for them and she’d watched through the strange window in the cart. Obviously, Maggie Light’s voice held some kind of magic spell. So she stuffed the cotton in her ears and walked around the troll to see if she could find Aspen.
He was standing near the first wagon, both of his arms wrapped around Baby Og, whom he’d apparently just pulled away from the cloaked man.
She wasn’t worried until she saw that the cloaked man’s right arm was around Aspen’s neck. Aspen, who didn’t dare let the baby go to fight his enemy, didn’t seem to be faring well.
In fact, his face was darkening. Probably turning blue. In the half-light of the Seelie night, it was hard to tell.
Dimly she could hear the cheers of the dwarf brothers behind her, through the stoppers in her ears. Running over to the two struggling men, she grabbed the baby from Aspen’s hands and held it close to her chest, where it wriggled and kicked and was not at all happy. She hoped that having a free hand now would give Aspen a bit more leverage in his fight with the bigger man, even with his arm wound.
“Og! Og!” she said loudly to get the infant’s attention. “I’m not here to hurt you but to rescue you.”
Not seeming to be at all convinced, Og kept on kicking and flailing his arms. Snail spun around, found Odds and Maggie Light, who were standing by the trees.
“Sing!” she shouted. “For Mab’s sake, Maggie, sing!”
Maggie Light nodded, held her arms up, opened her mouth, and began to sing.
Snail could hear only a bit of it, garbled through the wool, but with her one free hand, she pushed the wool even deeper into her ears to shut the rest of it out.
Already Aspen and the cloaked man had gotten strange looks on their faces, and both had begun to sink to the ground, though they were still clutching each other. The minute they landed, their hands dropped to their sides.
Og had stopped wriggling in Snail’s arms, and began to smile the way all babies do when fast asleep, a bit of milk drool falling off of his bottom lip. The drool would have filled a flagon.
At that moment, Dagmarra came strolling over with a long rope in her hands and bound the cloaked man’s hands behind him. Then, with a vicious twist, she tied the longest end around his ankles as well. Grinning, she turned to Snail and mouthed, “Hobbled!” before pulling him over on his back.
At which point Maggie Light stopped singing.
Despite her wound, Huldra came haltingly toward them, plucking handsful of white fluff from her ears.
Not so deep a wound, then? Snail mused, remembering what Mistress Softhands had warned about birthing trolls: A troll is never more dangerous than when she’s bloodied. It’s why the magic rule about not eating midwives was first laid upon them.
Huldra bent over to get a good look at the captured man. She prodded his belly with a massive forefinger. “Good for ribs,” she said. “I eat.
“You can’t . . .” Snail began, her own stomach roiling at the thought.
“I eat,” Huldra said again. “Builds strength. Will make me strong. I must be strong for Og.”
“We . . . we . . .” Snail tried to think of what to say, but Odds spoke as he came out of the wagon.
“We shan’t be barbarous,” he said, pushing his thin, grey hair back against his scalp. “Though we could use someone to barber us. No one is eating anyone.”
He approached the prisoner as if he expected everyone to move out of his way. And they did, even the hungry Huldra, who eyed him with a mixture of anger and fear as she shuffled off a little distance.
Odds stood over the bound elf and for a moment stared down before nodding to Maggie Light.
“Wake him.”
She gave a short whistle and the prisoner woke. Aspen, too. The prisoner tried to shoot to his feet, but was caught up in the knots Dagmarra had tied and fell, catching his face a scraping blow on a tree root. As
pen just lay there looking exhausted and in pain.
“You alone?” Odds asked the prisoner.
“Of course not, you fool!” the prisoner shouted as he struggled to a seated position. “I have troops waiting for my signal. If they do not receive it soon they will swoop down on your encamp—”
Odds nodded. “He’s alone. Such boasting comes from fear.”
Snail watched the cloaked man slump, all the bravado leaching out of him like wine from a burst wineskin. She wondered how Odds could have known for sure, wondered if it was just a good guess. Knew it wasn’t the moment to ask.
Odds went on. “You came for the prince?”
The prisoner nodded agreement.
“What do you know of me and my company?”
“Nothing.”
“Truly?”
The prisoner shook his head. “You are not what you seem. But what you are, I do not know.”
“Yes,” Odds said, though what he was agreeing to Snail couldn’t tell.
Odder and odder, she thought. She had a few questions of her own she wanted to put to the cloaked man. And to the professor as well.
But Odds nodded to Maggie Light, who immediately knelt beside the prisoner and sang a short, sharp note into his ear. He fell back limply, his face relaxing for the first time since Snail had stomped on his foot.
It took her a moment to realize that he would not be moving again. Ever.
“You killed him!” she said, too stunned to do more than whisper.
Odds looked at her blankly. “What else would you have had me do?”
“Question him more.”
“I know all I need to know about him,” the professor said. “More than I want to know. He was a small thing. With a small mind. And we should mind him no more. Besides, he would have been a constant thorn in our sides as we travel on and would have had to be watched day and night. You pluck thorns out, not shove them deeper into the skin.”
“But . . .” Snail began, “you can’t just kill a tied-up person like that.”
“They do it to us without giving it a thought. Without thinking what we’re due.” He glared at Aspen. “Isn’t that right, Prince?”
Snail stared at Aspen, who didn’t say anything aloud. But he gave a single short nod toward the professor, clearly agreeing with him.
She glared at him and then at Odds and finally at Maggie Light, who looked back at her with a sad expression.
“Dear one,” Maggie Light said, “there really was no other way.”
“Maybe so,” Snail said, “but you two didn’t even try.”
“I wasn’t made to try,” she said. “I was made to do.”
Nothing makes sense, Snail decided. She stomped over to Huldra and handed her the baby, then, suddenly sick to her stomach, she ran to the bushes, afraid she was going to throw up.
Once she was in the bushes, the sick feeling went away, but all Snail could think of was how empty her arms felt now. And how empty her heart felt, too.
Without a word more, she made her way back in the wagons, and went into Maggie Light’s room. There she picked up the silver box puzzle and flung it against the wall.
Let the professor pick up the pieces, she thought. I’m through with them all.
ASPEN FACES THE ODDS
Aspen followed Snail into the wagon, hoping she would dress his wound. But when he saw her smashing Maggie Light’s stuff, he backed out before she saw him and headed to his room. The twins were gone—perhaps helping to bury the cloaked man.
His arm aching, Aspen sat on the floor, and the bowser sidled up and put a corner in his lap. He scratched its golden fur idly as he tried to puzzle through what had just happened with Snail.
I do not understand why she is so angry about the watcher’s death. He tried to kill her. And me! She should be glad he is gone.
But when he had nodded his head agreeing with Odds’s decision, her reaction had certainly not been one of gladness. Nor was it her usual summer-storm fury that came on swiftly but passed just as fast. The glare she had shot him was more regret than anger, as if she finally saw him for who he truly was and was deeply disappointed.
But clearly there was no other logical solution! We did not torture the watcher, nor let the troll eat him—all niceties that the people he was going to sell me to would not have bothered with. He died quickly and without fear or pain, and we can all go about our business with clear consciences.
Still he felt uneasy, as if his conscience did not actually feel all that clear.
“Why is she mad at me?” he said aloud. “I did nothing wrong.”
“Come,” Maggie Light said, “let me bandage your wound.”
Startled, Aspen looked up. He thought he had been alone. Well, alone except for the bowser. “Um . . . thank you, my lady.”
She knelt next to him and began wiping the puncture in the front of his arm with a clean, damp rag before working around to the wound in back where the rapier had come out. It should have hurt as she scrubbed, but she hummed a light tune that made him feel disconnected from his body. Also, he realized, being this close to a woman so heartrendingly beautiful was distracting as well. Especially one who seemed to value him, as Snail did not.
He sniffed her hair surreptitiously, but smelled nothing. Where most women would have doused themselves in an attar of aromatic flowers, bathed in the smoke of burning herbs, or glamoured themselves up a pleasant scent, Maggie Light seemed to have no scent at all. Not the earthy musk of a peasant girl who worked the fields all day, nor the soapy cleanness of a midwife’s apprentice, nor the artificial but usually more pleasing scents of the aristocracy.
His arm twinged as Maggie Light pulled the newly applied bandages tight around it. The pain made Aspen snap out of his reverie and back to himself.
“So,” he said, not wanting her to leave, “where did you learn to sing that way? And who taught you the songs that . . . um . . . do those things?”
Maggie Light stood and looked down at him quizzically. “I didn’t learn anything. I am klebarn.”
“What is a klebarn?”
“It is what I am.”
This is starting to feel like talking to the Sticksman, he thought, the one who had told him: You will travel far and you will meet creatures old, odd, and powerful. You will ask each of them these three questions. But when he had asked the questions of the twins, they had known nothing.
Maggie Light didn’t seem all that old, but she was certainly odd and powerful. And he had never had the time to ask her the questions before. Perhaps this was the right time.
“Tell me, Maggie Light,” he began, “do you know what the Sticksman is?”
Eyes closed, she thought for a moment. Then her eyes opened and she said, “He is the Unseelie boatman who ferries passengers from the Water Gate at Unseelie Castle to the Unmastered Lands.”
Finally, someone who knows what I am talking about, Aspen thought. Though I do not think that the Sticksman is Unseelie.
“And how did he come to be?”
“I was not given that knowledge.”
“Do you know how he would come not to be?”
Maggie Light shook her head. “That knowledge would flow from the knowledge I do not have. How is the arm? Better?”
He flexed his arm. Wiggled his fingers. “It will serve.”
“Can you use a bow?”
He pulled his hand back to his ear as if drawing a bow and immediately pain and weakness shot through his arm. “Doubtful.”
Maggie Light cocked her head momentarily as if listening to a distant voice. “Then Professor Odds will want to speak with you.”
“How can you—”
“When I am given knowledge, I do not question it. I only do.”
Aspen was not sure whether that was a good philosophy or even entirely what she meant, but he took
her hand when she reached out to him and pulled him to his feet. He let her lead him outside and around to Odds’s office.
• • •
“I KNOW YOU noticed we have no musicians,” Odds said without preamble as Aspen entered. Maggie Light waited outside. “That’s how you thought to burrow your way into our company, stealing what you couldn’t borrow. A wolf in a mole’s skin.” Pausing, perhaps awaiting an answer, he sat at his desk, a thin sheaf of papers in his hands.
“We didn’t mean to burrow or borrow,” Aspen said, “only to seek shelter.”
“No matter, no matter. But to get to the meat of the matter, it matters that we’ll soon have no meat.”
For the first time when talking to Odds, Aspen thought he knew what the man was talking about. “I cannot hunt, so Huldra will soon eat us out of supplies.”
“To wit: Being out of supplies, Huldra—who is too weak to hunt—will soon eat us. So we need to kill the troll or get supplies.”
Aspen knew Snail would never forgive any of them if they killed Huldra. Especially so soon after killing the watcher.
Odds nodded as if Aspen had spoken the thought aloud. “We need a way to get supplies before we become them. A way your kind is most unfamiliar with.” He grinned. “We’ll have to work for it.”
“That is unfair, professor. Did I not just hunt two deer and wash the bowser and . . .”
He stopped. And what else? Before that, what else have I ever done that could be considered work? My food was cooked and served to me. My apartment and clothing kept clean for me. My bath drawn for me. A horse saddled for me. In truth, until I escaped the Unseelie castle, I had done nothing for myself, nor was I expected to. But perhaps as Hostage Prince, his was a special case.
Be honest! he warned himself. No nobleman or toff—even he was beginning to think of them by that name—was expected to do anything like work.
What about soldiering? War is upon us, and the lords are expected to lead their soldiers into battle! Mouth open to say this to Odds, he stopped again. And then the lords bravely watch from the rear as the conscripted—the poor, the unlanded, the farmers and laborers armed mostly with spades and scythes—slaughter each other. Yes, if things went very badly, the toffs might be expected to wade in and take a distasteful swing or two of their bejeweled weapons at the shuffling hordes. But even in warfare they were not expected to work.