by Anya Josephs
“Leave her alone!” I shout, uselessly, I know.
The man just laughs. “Jealous? You’re not as pretty as the other one, but I figure we can find some use even for a fat little thing like you.”
I hear men’s voices booming from within the inn, and laughter too, that same sick laughter this soldier turned on me when I tried to speak. I see at once that there is no point in me raising my voice, though. He’s no longer even looking at me, just trying to force Sisi past us, through the open doorway and into the inn, to the laughing crowd of soldiers.
He stumbles close to me, and I smell the stale ale and foul meat on his breath. I can see Sisi, shaking slightly, and the wide-open terror of her beautiful brown eyes.
Something moves through me. I don’t know what, exactly. But I feel a strange surge of energy through my body, and I know I have to act.
On instinct, I push at the closest part of him I can reach, right at the center of his chest. I’m only hoping it will be enough to get his attention off of Sisi and on to me. It works better than I had expected—drunk and clumsy, he swings his fist back at me, still laughing. He has to let go of Sisi to do so, though, and she stumbles backward, rubbing her wrist where he’d grabbed her.
Sisi screams out my name as the soldier’s meaty fist moves toward me, but there’s no need. He’s slow enough that I can duck right underneath his blow, making him stumble off-balance. He lunges to grab me, but I dance one step backward. A lifetime of working in the treetops has given me grace, at least, surprising as it may be in a fat little thing like me. Clearly, he isn’t expecting it.
Grasping into the thin air where I was only a moment ago, he overbalances, trips, and falls face-first into the muddy ground by the inn’s entrance. It’s enough of a distraction that Sisi is able to get clear of him.
We have to move fast, but we’re back in the cart before he’s found his footing again. I gasp for air as Aunt Mae grabs the reins and drives us away. Even Maher seems to understand this is an emergency and moves with a speed I did not know he was capable of as we leave the inn behind.
A cloud of dust rises in our wake. I can’t stop myself from looking back, where I can see the soldier stumbling after us, still calling out, “Lady! Hey, lady! Pretty lady!”
None of us say anything. Sisi won’t look at either of us. We drive on into the night; by silent agreement, none of us stop, except to change out drivers long after the moon has risen, when Aunt Mae can’t stay awake even another second.
I volunteer to take the next turn driving. I’m tired too, but I don’t want to leave Sisi alone to drive while the rest of us sleep, not after what she’s been through today. I sit forward on the hard bench of the cart and shrug off my cloak so the chilly night air will keep me awake as I take my turn at the reins.
It doesn’t surprise me that Sisi can’t sleep. She sits beside me at the front of the cart, starring out into the darkness of the night. I don’t want to make her talk about it, so I just listen to the rhythm of Maher’s hoofbeats steady on the ground.
“Jena,” she says, suddenly, her voice barely above a whisper, “Thank you.”
“You’d do the same for me.” Although she’d never have to. I’ve never had to deal with what Sisi endures, men calling out to her on market day or even grabbing at her on the street. Although I envy her beauty in some ways, I’ve never been jealous of that.
“I was so scared. I couldn’t seem to do anything at all. It was very brave of you to stand up for me.”
There was nothing brave about it. I just didn’t want to see her hurt. But I don’t argue with her. I can only sit next to her, be here with her. We don’t look at each other or speak, but in the silence, I feel as though I finally understand her fear of what she’s facing, of what awaits us in the unknown City. I only hope that I can find some way to stand between her and danger once again. Though I probably shouldn’t push the Crown Prince into the mud.
But I probably will, if I have to.
We drive on into the darkness of the night. Aunt Mae sleeps soundly behind us. And I wonder how I can keep Sisi, the person I love most, safe from those who will never see her as anything more than a prize to be won, a delicacy to be devoured.
Chapter Eight
By the next morning, Sisi has four perfectly round bruises blooming on her wrist, red fingermarks standing out against her dark brown skin. Aunt Mae fusses over them, of course, but there’s nothing to be done. All she can really do for Sisi is have me take over her turn driving and let her rest.
Sisi tries to insist that she doesn’t need it, that she couldn’t possibly sleep, that she’d rather take her turn. And yet within five minutes, she’s snoring loudly in the back. I sit up front, near Aunt Mae.
As I suspected, she had her reasons for sending Sisi to rest. She wanted to talk to me alone.
“You were right brave yesterday. Not to mention cursed foolish.”
“Sorry, Auntie,” I parrot, though she must know I don’t mean it at all, any more than she means her scolding.
“Well, then,” she says, and I know I’m not in trouble after all.
The road goes by our cart for a while, neither of us speaking. We drive by another abandoned house, this one graced with two large glass windows like the one of which my father is so proud—both shattered and the space covered back over by lattice cobwebs and bird’s nests.
“Sad to see what the Kingdom is coming to. Used to be safe for a woman to walk this road alone, they say.”
“Do you know of anyone who has?” I ask tentatively. I always wonder where my aunt gets her stories from, especially those about the Kingdom beyond Prinnsfarm. She’s told me herself that she’s never traveled, but she still acts so wise. On the other hand, I’m afraid to ask—too much prying can shut her down entirely.
“Well, your cousin, for one, though Sisi wouldn’t remember it. Merri, may the Goddess soon restore her to the fullest of health, would have walked back and forth along much of it to come to where Sisi and Jorj lived, and then to return with them—though soon the trail she took branches off, I think not far from here, leading easterly toward the sea. But those days were long after the great era when the road was built, and when there were cities at all the crossroads, fed by trade from all the Four Corners of the Kingdom. Or so they say. The only person I can think of who might have seen it before the decline, or at least in the early years of its descent, would be your mother, Jeni.”
I don’t know if it’s because of the new circumstances, because I feel oddly adult in this unfamiliar place, or just because I know that for once in my life my father won’t swoop in from behind and in his quiet, firm way, silence any suggestion that such a person might have ever existed, let alone that she might merit discussion, but I find myself with the courage to ask about my mother for the first time. My heart races in my chest as I repeat, “My mother?”
“Aye.”
That’s not an answer. It’s barely even a word. However, it’s also more than I usually hear on this subject, so I decided to take the risk of prodding just a little. “When would my mother have walked along the High Road?” I venture.
“Why, when she came to live with your father, from wherever it is she came from. And I assume when she left again, although of that I can’t be sure. It’s hard to be sure of anything, where Ia is concerned.”
It’s the first time I can remember ever hearing my mother’s name spoken aloud.
I must have already known it—I know I must have. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, because I recognize the word, I remember it somehow. Such an unusual name, too, not like triple-syllabled True Names or the simple by-names most girls go by.
Yet, I know I’ve never heard my father speak her name aloud, and I wonder who dared to. In our house, Aunt Mae orders everyone around cheerfully, but it is my father who is always silently at the center, and who all my life, without ever quite having to command it, has always forbidden any mention of her.
Aunt Mae is looking at me w
ith a curious expression. I don’t say anything while I wait, wordlessly praying that she’ll continue. I can hear my heart hammering in my chest as she answers, benevolent as the Goddess Herself, “I suppose you’ve never heard the story, then, have you?”
“Never, Auntie,” I answer briefly, hoping that if I keep my answers short, she won’t remember that she’s not supposed to be telling me this. I also send up a little prayer that Sisi will manage to sleep peacefully through this conversation. If she wakes up, she’ll surely interrupt with a million questions, and then Aunt Mae will fall silent, and I’ll never find out what I need to know. I wordlessly promise the Goddess that I’ll tell Sisi everything as soon as we’re alone, as long as she stays quiet through this.
“Hmm. You mustn’t think too badly of my poor brother. It was very hard on him. Prinn as a boy, well, he was the same as Prinn now, just as you might imagine him. He was always quiet, always serious, always kept himself to himself. He opened up to Ia, though.” She shakes her head. “I’m going about this all wrong. Besides, this is too serious for a journeying tale. The old stories are better for a time like this, to keep our minds off the road. I ought not tell you at all. Or perhaps I ought to have told you long ago.”
“Why do you say that?” I ask. I’m worried that pushing too hard on this, that saying anything at all, will close the brief and precious window of opportunity I have right now to get this secret out of my aunt. Yet I am equally sure that if I fall silent too easily, I’ll never forgive myself for letting the story go untold, for losing what might be my one chance to learn my own history. “Why not tell me?”
“Your father wouldn’t wish it.” Then she laughs and snaps the reins. “Well, then again, he’s not here. It won’t hurt him if I tell a bit of the tale—though, mind you, not a word of this to him when we get back home.”
It’s an easy promise to make, since I don’t know if we’ll ever return home, and if we do, I don’t expect to be suddenly having a lot of heart-to-heart chats with my father. “You have my word, Auntie.”
“All right. This was—how old are you now, Jeni? Four and ten, is it?”
“Aye.” I’ll turn fifteen just after Midwinter, though I don’t expect anyone to mark it.
“So, it must have been just a little more than fifteen years ago, at Midwinter. That’s just when we’ll be arriving at the palace, come to think of it. Fifteen years exactly from the day that your mother walked off the High Road and into our lives. I wasn’t there when she and Prinn first met, but I wrestled the story out of my brother later on. Wasn’t easy, as I imagine you can imagine, knowing Prinn and how he is.”
My aunt is a fond elder sister. She always acts as if my father’s unbreakably sullen silences are nothing more than a rather endearing quirk.
“I do remember the weather the night she arrived. I couldn’t sleep that night, the wind and the snow were whipping by the house so. It felt like the very roof was near to being blown to bits. Our little window, of which my brother is so proud, was quite whited out in the storm. He had just had it put in that spring, and I was worried it would shatter before the next one. I wonder why that sticks in my head so, the way that window looked. I went off to bed soon after, but I couldn’t sleep. I could hear Prinn up, pacing about. I think he couldn’t sleep either, although when I asked later, he said something woke him in the night. He said he’d had a strange dream, but not a nightmare.
“Well, what he meant by that bit of nonsense I couldn’t ever say. The point is, he was awake, smoking his pipe, and carving a piece of wood for another one, minding his own business as he tends to do, when suddenly there was a knock at the door. Prinn was nervous, of course, as anyone would be—someone being at the door in the middle of the night in a storm when he wasn’t expecting any visitors, and his nerves already on edge what with that dream and being up so late.
“He told me later that he tucked his carving knife into his pocket before he went to answer the door. Just to be safe. He let the door creak open, and in the dark doorway, framed against the sky, saw the shape of a stranger. He was surprised to see neither a beggar nor a burglar, but a beautiful young woman. Despite the cold and the storm, she was wearing nothing except a thin white shift, yet she wasn’t shivering. She was barefoot, and yet she held herself as upright as any Numbered lady. Her skin was as golden as the firelight. She had midnight-dark hair, pitch black, that fell past her waist, and green eyes, just like yours. He’d never seen a green-eyed woman before—surely you’ve noticed, Jeni, there’s no one in our village with the same eyes you have, that unusual color you inherited from your mother.”
Of course I’ve noticed that. I’m the only green-eyed member of the family. Out of my passel of cousins, out of all the girls that live in the village, no one looks like me. Dark eyes, like my father’s, are the most common, but there are a few fair people with blue eyes. No one like me, though, fat and tawny-skinned and green-eyed. All my father’s kin have light brown skin, while Sisi and her brother are a gorgeous dark brown, almost black. I resemble neither part of the family, neither in my coloring nor in my body. Most folks in the town are slenderly built, like my family is, with Sisi’s voluptuous figure making her stand out as much as my heavy frame earns me scorn. I’ve always been odd because of my looks. It isn’t enough that I’m quiet and shy, or that I have no mother, but I also have to be visibly, obviously different.
Beautiful, Aunt Mae says my mother was. But no one has ever said that about me.
“He was captivated by those eyes at once, before she even began to speak. When she did, he was struck by her accent, one she never lost in the time she was with us—a strange one, I’ve never heard it anywhere else. It sounded like music when she spoke. I never quite figured out where she was from. If you asked, she’d dodge the question so you didn’t even realize she’d done it. You could always understand her perfectly, though—sometimes even before she said anything, you’d know what she meant. She had a way of looking at a person…Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. All she said to him that night was, ‘My name is Ia, and I come to ask shelter from the storm.’ He invited her in straightaway. I always suspected it was because, even at first glance, he’d taken a liking to her.
“Still, even if she wasn’t such a very beautiful woman—and she was—anyone with a heart would have taken her in out of that storm. The poor thing was hardly dressed and so frail-looking, and that storm was so terrible. So Prinn let her into the house, gave up his bed for the night and slept in his chair by the fireplace. In the morning, when he woke, he thought she’d be gone, disappeared back into the dream she seemed to have come from. Instead, she was standing over the stove, toasting bread and preparing tea to her special recipe. It was sweet and floral, like nothing he’d ever tasted before, and he says it’s the first thing that made him fall in love with her.
“She asked him what she could do to thank him for his hospitality in her hour of need, and he assured her there was nothing, except perhaps to take a walk around the farm with him and tell him a bit about how such a fine lady could have found herself knocking at his humble door in such a storm in the middle of the night. So she did. She said she’d leave that day and not trouble his generosity any further, but he asked her to stay for supper, and one thing led to another. She never did end up leaving, as she’d said she would—one more night turned into three, and then ten, and then a whole moon had waxed and waned, and before two more had done so, they were man and wife.”
“Where did she come from?” I blurt. “Did he ever find out from her?”
“If he did, he never told me. No, Prinn has always been too private for my liking.” Aunt Mae grins. “I’d rather know the gossip.”
Those words fill me with hope. If I am lucky, she means that she is enamored enough of being the storyteller, and with the thrill of sharing a secret, that she won’t remember her promises to my father in time to stop her tale before the end.
“They were married on the first day of springtime. The sky was b
right blue, and all the snows had melted away at last—although oddly, there were more to follow that year, late snowfalls into the spring months. But on that day, there was not a drop of either snow or rain, and some of the little flowers had started to bloom. I can remember how they looked, shoots of bright green and yellow crocuses in the brown earth. Lovely, and Ia was the loveliest thing of all.”
She pauses as if lost in thought, and I take the opportunity to slide in one shy, tentative question. “You keep saying that, Auntie. That she was beautiful. But you also said she looked like me.”
Aunt Mae nods. “It’s true, you haven’t the special grace she had, although you share all of her features. Well, maybe you’ll grow into it, as she had by the time I knew her. For she was a great beauty, in spite of that big nose and sallow skin you’ve both got. Beauty shone out of her always, and most of all, on that day.”
She goes on to describe how my mother embroidered the shift she’d arrived in to shimmer like the water under the sun, and so on, while I give in to brooding. I hate being thought of as homely, even though I know I am. It’s not like I’ve ever thought otherwise, like I imagined my aunt was so fond of me that she couldn’t see the fact that my many physical flaws are linked together by a total and profound lack of unifying prettiness. I suppose it doesn’t matter much. It’s not like a farmer’s daughter needs to be comely. Sisi does get a lot of praise for her looks, but it’s not the kind of attention I’d want. She certainly doesn’t enjoy it, and after what happened yesterday, it’s hard for me to hold on to any jealousy. I’d rather be mocked, as I was, than grabbed at and assaulted like Sisi. Besides, none of the women in my family are great beauties—though my aunts and cousins are more likely to be described as plain, being skinny and soft-featured, than outright ugly as I am. It really shouldn’t matter.
I wish it didn’t. I wish I were like Sisi, who is brave and clever and doesn’t care about petty things like looks.