Normal, Pelufer thought. Act normal. People are all around.
“Here,” she said before Elora could ask her where in the raving spirits she’d been, and deposited on a corner of their cloth the contents of one pouch—glared buns, no longer square, with a cluster of berries crushed into them.
Elora screeched, plucking at the sticky mass. “You’ll stain it, Pel—oh, look, you idiot—
“I’ll clean it, I always do.” She kept her voice reasonable. Normal. Elora went dead stubborn when she was cranky. Say, Pack up, we have to go, we have to go home and stay there for the rest of the day, and Elora would set her jaw and sit tight until she’d had the whole story. It wasn’t safe to tell it here.
“And all those cleanings will add up and it will fray and look dingy and be no good to us at all—it’s our last linen, you know that, why do you do these things?”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“Do not.”
“Do too.”
“All right I do. Don’t you like what I brought? Caille likes it. Look, there’s dourberries, and bannock, we hardly ever get that—
“It’s all squished together.”
“So? It’ll still taste good.”
“It’s disgusting.”
“It all goes together in your stomach!” Real annoyance ground in her. Elora was such a pest, and this was important, they couldn’t afford to be cranky right now.
“Berrybread,” Caille pronounced, with a beatific smile. She separated one sticky bun from another, rotated it so that the berry-smeared side was toward her, opened her mouth wide, and shoved the whole thing into her pudgy face.
Elora should have softened, sharing a smile with Pelufer at their cute little sister. Caille was cute on purpose, to effect just such a softening. But neither had a smile to share. “Not a thing we can set out on the pitch,” Elora said. “You haven’t brought us a single new thing in a nineday.”
“I’m feeding us, Elora, that’s more than I can say for you. Did you shift any of this lot today?” The paltry selection of junk on the linen didn’t look any smaller, only rearranged to make it seem that [51] there were new wares. It was artfully done; Elora was good. But it was not enough.
“Custom isn’t moving as it should. Something’s wrong today.”
You don’t know the third of it.
“Come on, then,” she said. “Let’s close up. Let’s eat at home. We never eat at home anymore, like a proper family.” A calculated appeal: Elora, the oldest at nine-and-four, was always trying to make them the proper family they could never be again.
Elora squinted at her, then shook her head. “We’ll eat here, while we work. We can’t lose even part of a day, not when custom is thin.”
Panic edging in, Pelufer cast about for inspiration, and found it in the wary, envious eyes of the downtrodden traders around them. Folk who’d be waysiders themselves soon enough. Most of them had no shack to go to, no remnant of shelter left. They slept on the blankets they laid their wares on during the day. Come winter, they would freeze. They were always hungry.
“Look,” she said, tension giving the word a nasty bite. “Look at what else I brought.” She tossed two more pouches on the cloth, shook out the contents of one, and began to empty her pockets. A blatant display. A keeper’s tithe of bounty.
“Pelufer, stop it!” Elora scooped bruised peppers and squashed loaves back into pouches, glancing quickly around from under her lashes. It was too much, she said in the secret way, with her fingers, hands held low. The others would know she’d stolen it.
And they’d be wanting it for themselves, Pelufer fingered back, merciless. “So let’s go home and eat.”
Elora hissed in frustration. But she acquiesced. She pressed the filled pouches back into Pelufer’s hands, then cleared Caille off the edge of the cloth so she could bundle it into a sack, which she then slung over her shoulder. They rose as one, from long habit. All their wares, a hodgepodge of nails and ribbons, tapers and tacks, buckles without belts and laces without shoes, jumbled into a sack that a slim young girl could sling with ease.
“I don’t know what’s got into you,” Elora growled low, for Pelufer’s ears only, “but you’ll pay for it later, you mark me.” They looked at no one as they walked. They did not have to negotiate the lot’s patchwork of pitches when they closed up; they crossed the tail end of Copper Long and disappeared into what seemed a tangle of thickets and thorn bramble, up a track that only they remembered and no waysiders had yet found. At the end of that track, half a mile on, was a shed that had once stored a crafter’s tools. A cozy place tucked away in the thick brush that separated town and forest, far enough above the Heel Road to work in isolated peace. The rot had not [52] touched the shed, though mites and borers were eating it now. It had been their mother’s workplace. They had bartered the tools away four years ago, and come home sobbing after, to a cottage whose contents went for the drink that killed their father two years past. A year ago, in winter, they had bartered the cottage itself for clothing and footgear and blankets; now they lived in the shed, a ninefoot-by-ninefoot space where they slept on mite-pocked boards, one of them always tucked up against the boltless, out-of-plumb door to keep it closed.
If Caille did not relent—and Pelufer knew she would not, she could best Elora to get her way but never Caille, not on something like this—the shed would fall to the mites and borers, and they would have only the pitch left then. The space of their world had decreased in a slow agony of subtraction, season by season, since Pelufer was five. Caille’s age.
They would leave this town. They would. And then the world would open to them, instead of closing down, year by year, foot by foot, person by person, until only one of them was left, or none.
As they made their way along the faint trail, escorted by clouds of midges, careful not to let the only clothes they owned snag or tear on thorns, Pelufer was already in the shed in her mind. She would sit cross-legged against the door while Elora and Caille ate. The only light in the shed came in filtered shafts through the holes where their chinking had crumbled. They had not yet traded their battered old broom, but no amount of sweeping kept the molds at bay, and the close air was choking. But it was their place. They would be safe there while she told her sisters what had happened, while they figured out what to do. Elora would eat slowly, pretending to savor every bite, to be sure that Caille was full before she finished what was left. Caille, Pelufer knew, always stopped before she was full, pretending to an attack of pickiness after the edge of hunger was off, and Elora always believed her. She’d long ago ceased trying to get Pelufer to eat. Pelufer ate what she could cadge when she cadged it, and if she didn’t cadge enough for all of them, she went hungry, and that was that.
She would not partake of the keepers’ tithe. That was for waysiders. Refugees. Beggars. She saw to it that her sisters were fed well enough to disdain it, too.
“Tell me now,” Elora said, moving sidewise through a place where brush had grown nearly across the track. “While we walk. We’re far enough.”
Pelufer smiled. She knew Elora had been dying to ask.
She told her—all but the fit.
“For spirits’ sake!” Elora cried. “Is that it? That’s why all your [53] antics today? Gossip and a run-in with smelly strangers? When does a day pass that we’re not up to our necks in both?”
Elora thought she was so bloody hardheaded and practical. “You better listen to me, Elora! You said yourself something’s wrong today. I can feel it! Everything’s wrong!”
“You had a scare, that’s all. You don’t want to admit it because you don’t like to admit you get scared. You’re making it into more than it is so you won’t seem a fool. But we all get scared. Don’t we, Caille.”
Caille was having none of the argument. She returned Elora’s gaze, blinked impassively, and said nothing.
Pelufer burst out, “I had a fit of names. In the middle of Tin Long. That flowery woman put her hands on
me and names came out.”
Elora stopped dead in the track, but didn’t turn. “That’s never happened before.”
“No. It was her. She was wrong somehow. They came off her. And the way she smelled ... she ...” It came together in her mind, the horrible thought. “But it can’t be,” she breathed, refusing the idea. “The man said he was a healer. Maybe that was it. Maybe they were the names of the ones they couldn’t save.”
“So maybe they’re not wrong. Maybe they’re right, and good, and have never hurt anyone, and you were just upset because you’ve never been touched by someone who touched death.”
Their eyes met, both minds spinning.
“They weren’t wearing white,” Pelufer said. “And that man’s no healer—he’s a fighter if I ever saw one, he wore a blade even though he didn’t.”
“And the keepers don’t feel wrong like that, do they,” Elora said, “and they haul the dead to the bonefolk, and they touch you sometimes when they’re trying to catch you, and names don’t come out. Nolfi doesn’t feel like that, and his brother died in his arms. Everyone in this town has touched death. They don’t feel wrong.”
“Father never felt wrong like that,” Pelufer added softly. She didn’t look at Caille, but Elora understood. Mother had died in birthing Caille. Caille herself had come from death.
Names didn’t come off people who had touched death. They could only have come off people who caused it. “We’ll have to hide you till the keepers forget what they saw. And the gawpers.” Elora’s shoulders slumped. “Oh, Pel, how could you?”
“I didn’t mean to. I never mean to. It just happens.”
“Yes. I know that. I’m sorry. But if we have to go ... spirits, Pel, Mireille saw you, she’ll never forget something like that ... I can’t go, Pel ... I can’t leave Mamma and Padda. ...”
[54] “They left us!”
Elora stared. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“Well, they did.”
“They did? Then why did we have to trade the cottage? Why did we have to give our home away for the price of a winter’s warmth?”
Pelufer clamped her teeth. That wasn’t what she’d meant. She knew they were still here. Mother had died in that cottage. Father had died in that cottage. That was why she couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t bear it, having them so close yet not really there. And that was why Elora couldn’t leave.
She had lost her advantage. It was always like that, with Elora. She could force her, sometimes, but on even ground she could never outnegotiate her. Elora was their father’s daughter, their father the trader, who’d tended a copper stall his life long, who’d pledged a woman who’d made copper sing in her hands. A fair man, but canny. You’d come in sure you had the stones to outplay Elora on any table, and she’d turn the game upside down.
She wanted Elora to decide. But she wanted Elora to decide the way she wanted her to.
The rest of the argument unrolled in her head like a carpet whose weave never changed. Then let’s find somewhere else to live, she’d say. We can’t afford anywhere else to live, Elora would say. Then I’ll go to the spirit wood, Pelufer would say. You will not, Elora would say. You will not steal from the dead. But they were dead, they didn’t care anymore about whatever had been in their pockets and around their necks, the things the bonefolk left behind. It’s stealing from the living if it’s anything at all, and I do that all the time, she’d say, and Elora would say, This would be worse. This would be things with sentimental value. Things people would recognize. They’d know where you’d been. That ground is sacred. She’d say, Then I’ll travel to another town and trade them there and come back, I’ll hitch a ride with carters, and Elora would say they must never split up, and she’d say Then we’ll go together, and Elora would say We’d lose the pitch, we have to be there every day or squatters will have it. Around and around, for every solution an obstacle.
She felt suddenly, deeply, desperately tired. “I wish Mamma was here,” she said. She knew she shouldn’t say such things in front of Caille. It just came out. She was so tired.
“So do I, Pelufer. But she’s not. And I’m the oldest.”
“Only by two years, that’s not so much.”
“I’m the oldest, and I’ll decide.” Her face was grim, pained. It was as hard for Elora to walk through the dying brush as it was for Pelufer to walk through the places where people died. “We’ll lay low [55] for a few days. You’re not to go out anywhere, for any reason. That man and woman were traveling through. They’ll be on their way and then we just have to hope that nobody understood what they saw on Tin Long today and they’ll forget about it.”
“Mireille will tell.”
“Mireille won’t know what happened. She wasn’t close enough to hear you say the names, right? And she wouldn’t understand what that meant anyway.”
“The woman understood. And the man. They went dead pale.”
“And if—” Elora glanced at Caille, who was listening patiently, but continued, because there was never any point in trying to keep things from her; there was only one thing they had ever successfully kept from her, and it was the only thing worth worrying about. “If that woman did kill those people, and that’s why the names came off her, then she won’t be announcing it, will she? She won’t be going to the keepers and saying, ‘I must find that child, she knows the names of everyone I’ve killed.’ ”
“The keepers wouldn’t know me anyway.”
“Maybe not. But some trader would.”
“Traders don’t tell tales about their own to strangers.”
“No? Not even hungry ones? Or threatened ones? Or the ones you steal from? And it’s not the point anyway. The point is that the woman will probably leave here as fast as she can. You scared her. She’s probably already gone.”
“Or she’s asking about us. Searching for us. Telling people she’s worried about the little girl who had a fit in Tin Long today, and does anyone know where she lives?”
This frightened them both into silence. Then Pelufer whispered, looking down the track, “No one knows where we live now.”
Elora followed her gaze, but neither of them moved to continue onward. “Can we be sure?”
Caille squeezed between them, pressed close, eyes wide. Sensing their fear? Or something else?
Pelufer twisted to look behind them. This path was the only way to the shed. The dangerous man and the flowery woman would have gone to their pitch first. That location would have been easy enough to get out of people if Elora was right. It would take them longer to find out about the shed. If someone knew to tell them.
“Come on,” Pelufer said. “We can still get there ahead of them.”
Elora stopped her. “And what? Hide? They’ll knock that door down with a breath.”
“Get our things,” Pelufer replied, struggling past her.
[56] Elora took her by the shoulders as if to shake sense into her. “What things, Pel? We haven’t got any things left.”
Pelufer went still, searching Elora’s face, amazed that Elora might not know that she knew about the faces under the floorboards, more amazed that she would be willing to leave them behind. She put a hand slowly into her left tunic pocket, felt down past seeds and nuts and the remains of a season’s stolen food, brought out the two stones she’d nicked from Mireille’s stall, displayed them on soiled fingertips. Even grotty with crumbs and lint, they sparked with green fire.
“Eyes,” she told her sister. “I brought you eyes.”
Elora’s mouth worked, but nothing came out. Then she said, “You stole these.”
“Well, yes,” Pelufer said. Didn’t Elora care that she knew about the workings? “But only from Mireille.”
“And that’s supposed to make it all right? Because no one likes that poor lonely woman, it’s all right to steal from her? She hates us already, Pel, you’re only making things harder for us. Have you done anything today that wouldn’t make things harder for us?”
“She’
s not a woman. She has only four years on you.”
“I’m nearly a woman.”
“You’re not.”
“I am. Oh, this is stupid, Pel, we’ve got to run, we can’t go home now. ...”
“We can. We have time. We’re going back for your things.” She paused. “I’ll go, if you’re afraid.”
Elora went first. She quickened the pace, took less care about skin and clothes. They kept Caille close between them, Pelufer’s arms out to shield her face from sharp branches, and the old dead tough vines that could cut you just as deep. Pelufer tried not to shy at the dry rustle of startled birds, the quick start-stop-start of startled rodents. There was a rise at the end, to the shed on higher ground. They came sweaty and breathless into the fly-haunted clearing.
Pelufer knew the man and woman could not possibly have headed them off, but she gave a quick glance to either side as they emerged, checking the periphery of brown grass. She blundered hard into Elora, who had stopped cold, and Caille, between them, cried out in protest.
Then Pelufer and Caille looked, too, and none of them moved for many short breaths.
The shed had fallen.
The rot had not touched it because Elora had strengthened the old wood. That was something she could do, though she’d been exhausted for a day after. But the mites had tunneled deeply, gorged themselves. All they needed was warmth and moisture and wood, and there was [57] plenty of that in the musty shed. The woodworms were slower, you could collect them and put them out, but that only enlarged the holes and the moths only laid more eggs, and there’d been nothing to trade for the camphor that would ward the place against them. They’d chinked the holes with earth and twigs and ivy and prayed to Eiden the shed would stand through winter.
It was only sowmid. Eiden had not obliged them.
“Oh, why now?” Elora breathed, shutting her eyes tight, clutching Caille to her side with one hand, the other reaching out toward the jumble of boards that had been their home.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 6