A Turn of Light

by Julie E. Czerneda

  It was going to be, Jenn decided, a very long afternoon.

  Bannan Larmensu and Tir—the newness of the names made her tingle—were in the parlor, sharing what peace remained with Aunt Sybb, their father, Horst, and Dusom. Peace and the contents of a dusty bottle Old Jupp had brought with him when he’d wheezed through the door. Whatever it was, it had created quite a stir.

  Wisp lay, injured and unconscious, in the mill. Oh, in no danger. Battered and bruised, was the sum of it. Peggs said Covie had grown strangely evasive after that. As if there was something else, something she wouldn’t say.

  While she hunted eggs.

  If Jenn’s greetings to her curious, cheerful neighbors were a little terse, she felt she should be forgiven. The most exciting day of her life would doubtless contain more cooking, followed by endless hours of dish washing. At least she’d been able to nibble when Peggs wasn’t looking and, given the excitement, Aunt Sybb had postponed her departure by a day. Perhaps two.

  Given the cause of the excitement, Horst had pronounced himself satisfied to remain in the village as long as she required, where he could keep an eye on the strangers.

  “Jenn.” Roche Morrill peeled out of his conversation with Davi and fell in step with her. “We need to talk.”

  No, they didn’t. Convincing him being impossible, Jenn sighed to herself. “What about?” At the hedge, she squatted awkwardly to protect her dress, and reached, finding the burrow at her first try. Aunt Sybb loved a hard-boiled egg with her tea and professed Marrowdell’s better than any in Avyo. Just as well, Jenn reminded herself, she hadn’t noticed the lack of chickens.

  Roche crouched beside her, annoyingly near, green eyes aglitter. Recently, he’d taken to wearing his hunter clothes all the time, the dark leather vest with its pockets and stains, dark leather pants. Knee-high boots, rubbed black with grease for waterproofing. She supposed he’d start carrying his bow next, for all that it was old and twice-repaired. Anything to be different. Anything to be difficult.

  As now. “You know what,” he said in an annoyingly reasonable tone. “That stranger.”

  “Which one?” Ah. Her fingers touched something smooth and warm. “There are three.” She pulled out a brown egg.

  “The one with the ugly mount. The one who grabbed your hand.”

  “Scourge isn’t ugly.” Jenn retrieved another egg and put it in her basket. She kept her voice down, trying to contain her temper. “And I grabbed his, not that it’s any of your business, Roche Morrill.”

  “You should be more careful,” Roche said, cold and quiet, stark amid the laughter and excitement around them. “It doesn’t look right, you and a stranger. People are talking.”

  When she’d been a child and Roche picked a fight, something he’d always done despite being eleven years older, she’d push him into the nearest puddle or snowbank, hardly something Aunt Sybb would approve of now.

  Being adult had such disadvantages.

  “People always talk,” Jenn told him with as much dignity as possible. She put her back to him and went after more eggs. She found four, which emptied the nest, and carefully replaced each with a pebble, adding one of the rare white ones for good measure. Something in the civil exchange kept the toads laying, which was certainly good for the villagers.

  Roche hadn’t left. She could feel his eyes on her.

  As she started to rise to her feet, he clamped his hand around her wrist and pulled, almost making her drop the basket. “Listen—”

  “No.” Jenn tugged free and glared back. “You’ve nothing to say to me.”

  “There you are, Jenn.” Kydd Uhthoff smiled pleasantly, appearing not to notice either Roche’s tension or Jenn’s embarrassment. “Your sister’s looking for you.”

  “We’re not done,” Roche said, his eyes never leaving Jenn’s.

  The older man’s voice became a knife. “Yes, you are.”

  For a heartbeat, for no reason, Jenn wasn’t sure what was about to happen.

  Roche turned with a jerk and stomped away, in his haste—or on purpose—bumping Wainn with his shoulder as he passed.

  “I don’t know what gets into him,” Jenn muttered, grateful Wainn looked more startled than offended.

  Kydd’s troubled gaze followed Roche. “Neither does he.” A shrug dismissed Roche and his tempers. The beekeeper smiled down at her. “You’ve had quite the morning.”

  He had, Jenn decided, a very nice smile. Not so old after all. She tentatively smiled back. “It’s a blur,” she admitted.

  “This doesn’t help.” A nod to the busy crowd.

  “It’s all right. Peggs needs me. She’s making the lunch.” As if he didn’t know.

  “A feast, without doubt.” Kydd gazed toward the kitchen. “I suppose she’ll be in there all afternoon.” He looked wistful.

  Jenn took a guess. “My sister didn’t send you after me, did she?”

  A not-old smile, and now a shy admission, “I haven’t been able to get near the kitchen.” This with such transparent woe Jenn fought to keep from smiling in triumph. So. She’d been right. The interest went both ways, as did the inability to admit it to one another.

  Hadn’t Aunt Sybb suggested family assistance? Jenn thrust the egg basket at Kydd, who accepted it with a puzzled look. “Peggs needs these,” she explained. “Desperately.”

  His eyes lit, answering every question. “You don’t mind?”

  In no sense, Jenn thought to herself, feeling her own glow. She made the little shooing motion their aunt used to such effect. “Go. I’ve another errand to run. Tell her I’ll—” No point continuing. Kydd was gone, his long legs making short work of the distance, the humble basket clutched to his chest with both hands as he stepped around those sitting on blankets.

  She smiled. No telling what would become of lunch now.

  Before anyone else could accost her, Jenn nipped behind the privy. She hung her apron on the hedge, smoothed her dress, and patted her hair.

  Then she looked toward the mill.

  Finally.

  He awoke and lay without moving, taking shallow breaths, and hoping in vain the pressure on his body came from the walls of his sanctuary and the memory of the river had been a dream.

  Voices came and went. Soft, whispers. Voices like hers. He refused to understand the words. Sometimes he was touched and the violation made him want to tremble, but he would not. To react to them was to believe what he’d become.

  And he would not.

  There was pain. He’d felt pain for so long he didn’t remember being free of it. Sometimes, he was touched and the pain tried to fade. He clung to it, afraid to forget himself. He would not.

  Like the voices, darkness came and went. He lay along its edge, preferred it. Time passed, clocked by breaths he had to take.

  “Wisp.”

  Air warmed by the word moved across his flesh and defined it beyond all denial. Ear. Cheek. Jaw. Eyelid. Something chill escaped the eyelid and ran down the cheek. Tear.

  “Dear Wisp. I’m so sorry.”

  More words, more breath. Defining lips. Nose. Chin. Stirring hair. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  She was making him and he could not refuse.

  He could not.

  Wisp trembled and took a deeper breath, one that hurt ribs and back and stomach. He moved his free hand and found fingers, thumb, palm and wrist. Shifted, and found legs and feet.

  “Wisp!” So full of joy it gave him blood and heart and skin, though still a whisper. “Wait. I can’t call you that here. Wyll. That’s your name. Wyll.”

  Neither was, but it didn’t matter. He must answer to whatever she named him, no matter what he was.

  Wyll opened his eyes and found Jenn Nalynn.

  EIGHT

  HIS EYES WERE SILVER.

  Silver with bronze flecks.

  A shock, those eyes, open, staring at her from what was otherwise a plain, ordinary face, pleasant enough. It might be any young man’s, save for the eyes.

  A bli
nk, and the eyes were a plain, ordinary brown.

  Like the glimpses she’d catch in the meadow. How quickly he’d hide himself again. More than anything else, this convinced Jenn who lay on the pallet. “Oh, Wi—Wyll. You’re all right.”

  His mouth moved before words came out, then motion and sound caught one another. “What have you done?”

  The question from the meadow.

  She looked over her shoulder. Covie’d been grateful to have her take a turn watching her sleeping patient, especially once told of the party developing behind the Nalynns. She’d wanted to collect more supplies—and check on her children—but she’d be back soon. Riss sat by the window, a hoop of fine work on her lap; she’d greeted Jenn with a peaceful smile, then gone back to her needle and thread.

  A needle and thread that weren’t moving. She’d nodded off in the warm sun. Good.

  Jenn rose from her knees and took the barrel seat Covie had used. She folded her hands together and sat very properly, her aunt’s voice in her head. Dignity avoids disaster. Good posture conveys confidence.

  He waited for her to settle, his head on the folded blanket they’d given him as a pillow. His face was bruised along the right side; the eye encircled in swollen purpled flesh. A beard, russet brown and neat, covered his chin. His brows and lashes were darker and thick, his hair lighter, its brown streaked with red. Hair that would hang to his shoulders, like Bannan’s, but straighter.

  He’d been air and sunshine. Whispers and tickles. This . . . he was too real. She didn’t dare touch him, didn’t know what to do.

  All the while, he watched her, as unmoving as the millwheel.

  Finally, faintly, Jenn found words. “I wished you could be—like me.”

  “A wish did this?”

  She grimaced. “A wish with a little help.” What had Aunt Sybb called it? “Pagan magic. There was a book . . .”

  “I see.” Now that his voice worked, it sounded ordinary. Pleasant. A bit like Dusom’s, for that matter. “You wished this upon me without my permission. Was that fair?”

  Her eyes dropped to her folded hands; her fingertips pressed until the skin beneath turned white. “I did ask.” Hadn’t she?

  “Dearest Heart.” The familiar endearment shouldn’t sound the same, from this mouth. It shouldn’t—should it?—have the same tolerant note of much-abused patience. “You remade me at your whim, not mine. Tell me, please, why I lie here. Like this.”

  Only the truth would do. “I wanted you to be part of my life. Not just in the meadow—to come with me wherever I went. To leave Marrowdell and see the rest of world with me.” How much did he know about people? How much could he know? Her cheeks flamed, but she forced herself to finish. “I didn’t want anyone else. I love you.”

  “How blind the mighty,” he said, making no sense at all, then made a peculiar rasping sound. She looked up as the rasp became a low chuckle, the kind that invited anyone who heard it to smile. “And how this—” He lifted the hand that was above the blanket and gestured downward. “—must disappoint.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.” His eyes closed. “Go home. Stay home.”

  Jenn stood, but hesitated. “Will you be all right?”

  “Is that also your wish?”

  “Of course!”

  “Then I will.” As if they played in the meadow, and she’d asked a silly question on purpose. “Let me rest, Dearest Heart, and learn what you’ve made of me. Go.”

  And there was nothing else she could do.

  Jenn didn’t go far. She went down. Down to the main floor of the mill, then, knowing the last thing she wanted was to see anyone else, down the narrower stairs to the basement.

  It was cool here, cool and quiet and alone. Light filtered through gaps in the riverside wall. Water gurgled on the other side and she followed the sound across the dirt floor to the wheel within its dry raceway. She eased around it, the stone lining chill underfoot, to where small pieces of wood jammed between the wall slats made a crude ladder. She climbed above the wheel to the ledge made by the beams supporting the second floor and roof, and walked around to her window.

  Not that it was hers. She just liked it. Her father took down the shutters for the warm months and no one else came up here. Jenn sat on the thick windowsill, dangled her feet over the riverbank, and sighed.

  “I say ‘I love you,’” she explained to the bluebirds perched on the eave by her ear. “He’s supposed to say it back.”

  All the stories said so.

  Maybe Wisp was more honest. She loved Wisp; did she love Wyll? They were the same—but they weren’t. A man lay on the pallet. A man she’d met today.

  Uninterested in her loves, the birds dove away and down, swooping to the water and up again. “‘Patience is rewarded more richly than haste,’” Jenn informed them haughtily. Aunt Sybb’s sayings were quite reassuring.

  She wished she’d paid closer attention. She wished, most of all, that Aunt Sybb wasn’t about to leave. If ever she’d needed her wisdom, it was now. “What am I to do?”

  Whatever Wyll looked like, he’d shared all the years of her life. He’d always been there, to play, to listen, to protect. He was as close as anyone in her family, wasn’t he? He was family. Aunt Sybb always said family should look after one another. “I should be taking care of him,” Jenn decided.

  And she was, wasn’t she? First, she’d helped save him from the river. Now . . . her chin firmed. Now she would help him be happy with what he was, and where he was. He needed rest, that was all. Rest and time. There was no rush to leave before the harvest, so long as they were away before the snows threatened the road.

  Besides. She loved the harvest. The tinkers were old friends, especially Mistress Sand, whose pockets would bulge with toys she’d made over the winter for the village children and who always remembered her birthday, and Master Riverstone, whose piping made everyone want to dance. She thought of them as Mistress and Master, since the two were in charge of the others, but in truth, all the tinkers preferred plain names as they did plain clothes. They’d helped celebrate Covie’s wedding to Anten Ropp, it being the custom to have as many as possible bear witness for the Ancestors, though they hadn’t dressed up like the rest. It wasn’t their way.

  When Jenn had been very little, she’d believed the week’s excitement—the heavy wagons of grain passing through the village, the cheerful tinkers, the busy mill, the evenings of feasting, song, and laughter—was a celebration for her, since the last and best day was most often her birthday, or close to it. The minor disappointment of learning in Master Dusom’s class that the harvest happened when it did simply because the tinkers insisted the grain be gathered and milled by the fall equinox, which they called the Balance, and then being teased relentlessly on the subject by Roche Morrill until she’d rubbed snow in his ears, had been eased by knowing she’d been born on such an auspicious day. She’d kept track since then.

  This year, her birthday would be the equinox again, seventeen days from now. It wouldn’t be the same, of course, without Aunt Sybb. Or without the tinkers. The sunset on the day of Balance held special significance for them, not that they’d say what, and meant they would leave Marrowdell while the sun remained in the sky. The village would still dance that night, but without Master Riverstone and the tinkers’ music, it wouldn’t be as good a dance.

  Still, Jenn felt a tingle of anticipation. This year would be the most special birthday of all. Usually she looked forward to the party and, of course, to presents, it being the custom for each household to give one. In Marrowdell, such gifts were most often something received the year before by someone in that family. There was a lovely purple scarf that she might get this year from the Ropps, since Hettie’d received it last year from the Treffs and knew how much she liked it.

  This year, though, presents didn’t matter. This was her being adult birthday. Jenn was sure it would be the best ever.

  Because she’d have Wyll to share it. She hope
d he liked to dance as much as she did.

  So. After the harvest and her birthday. They’d need a wagon. From this vantage point, she could see Bannan’s, tucked beside Horst’s home. It wasn’t as big as Aunt Sybb’s coach, who preferred to ride inside, but big enough for two. A wagon like that would be perfect.

  Thinking of Bannan, Jenn drew up one knee and leaned against the side of the window. Her lips curved in a smile. They’d have moved outside for lunch by now. He’d be surrounded by eager villagers, he and his companion. She imagined what he might say about her. How brave she’d been. How determined.

  She toyed with the ribbons of her second-best dress. The skirt was sky blue, with little white birds embroidered along the hem; the bodice, also white, had a strip of delicate Avyo lace from one of their mother’s dresses around the neckline. The ribbons were the best part. They were bright yellow, like sunshine.

  Would he think it pretty?

  Something moved in the distance, under the old trees beyond the hedge and gate. Bannan’s great horse. Instead of grazing, he walked onto the road and stood in the sun.

  Then looked up at her.

  Whatever he was, Scourge wasn’t a horse. Not like Horst’s gelding or Davi’s team. His head reminded her of the animals who pulled the tinkers’ wagons, though he was taller at the shoulder and leaner. To be sure, Master Riverstone called their powerful beasts “horses,” and it was only polite not to argue, but every child in Marrowdell was carefully taught the difference. Offered an apple, a tinker’s horse would take little fingers instead.

  “What are you?” she mused aloud.

  A voice softer than feathers warmed her ear. “Forgotten.”

  She leaned forward, hands on either side of the window. “You can hear me? You can talk?”