A Turn of Light

by Julie E. Czerneda

  A moment’s hush, then Hettie, in a small voice, “I didn’t like the taste.” Then, in a rush, “I only missed a few days here and there, Mother. I didn’t know it would matter—”

  “With you ripe as summerberries?” Covie sighed. “By your dear mother’s heart, Hettie, I tried to protect you. It’s not as though I don’t understand. We’re flesh, not stone—”

  “I’ll let in the cows,” Devins offered hastily and set off.

  Heading right for her.

  Left without a choice, Jenn called a cheery “Good morning!” as if she’d just entered.

  “Jenn?” Devins checked, staring at Scourge, who hung his head over Jenn’s shoulder as if relishing the argument. A wave of shame passed over his face. “I—”

  She understood. Hettie’s revelation made his ambition to marry for curtains and a cook childish and shallow, which he wasn’t, not really. “Hello, Devins.” She gave a gracious nod.

  The lowing grew frantic.

  “My cows!” Devins gratefully escaped past them to the door.

  “What can we do for you, Jenn?” Covie’s eyes hadn’t left Scourge.

  “We—I came to see if you had curds to spare, please.”

  “Of course. Hettie?”

  Hettie went to the nearest bag and lifted it from its hook. She gave it a twist over the trough, shook off the remaining drops, and handed it to Jenn. She didn’t smile.

  Hettie always smiled, the little gap between her front teeth somehow making her smile that much happier and warmer and more precious than anyone else’s.

  Jenn held the cool bag in both hands, her eyes locked on the other girl’s. “I—”

  The breeze interrupted. “Hungry.”

  She ignored Scourge. “I heard, Hettie. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I won’t tell anyone.”

  “Do you know the father, Jenn?”

  Her shocked look must have been convincing, for Covie said dryly, “I see you don’t.” She turned to her stepdaughter. “Word will get out, Hettie. If not from our lips, then as the baby grows. If you intend to let it,” her tone formal; a healer offering that choice.

  Jenn felt the blood run from her face. Women knew such things; women decided them. Maybe she was a woman, but she hadn’t given the matter of babies and birthing any thought, till now. Oh, Peggs did. Whenever she minded little Loee, she’d cuddled her close and talk of having her own one day. Jenn would make a face. Loee was cute, like a piglet or baby rabbit, when she wasn’t red-faced and crying. But to care for her all the time? Her sister would shake her head, with a look to say there were things Jenn couldn’t understand yet, which almost always provoked a childish and highly satisfying pillow fight at bedtime.

  This? She understood and wished she didn’t. Being a woman was growing more complicated by the moment.

  From Hettie’s face, she was having similar thoughts. Her hands rested at her waist. “For my part, I do,” she said slowly, “but I’d like to be sure of the father.”

  “You don’t know?” Jenn blurted.

  Scourge snorted.

  Covie didn’t appear surprised. “Who might it be?” she asked calmly.

  Having experienced “tingly” from the touch of two different men herself, Jenn found herself confronted by the possibility of having—whatever sort of “having” one imagined—both. She hurriedly thrust the possibility as far from her thoughts as she could, having thought the thought of having being disturbing enough.

  “I wasn’t sure who I liked better, until, well—” A dimple appeared in one cheek.

  She was blushing, Jenn knew. Worse, Scourge knew and was entertained. She felt the light brush of whiskers against her ear and restrained the urge to smack his nose.

  “Who could it be, then?” Covie persisted.

  Hettie arched an eyebrow. “One of the twins.”

  “The—?” Jenn closed her mouth, but not before Hettie frowned at her.

  “I wasn’t second choice, Jenn Nalynn, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she stated, unwittingly echoing Scourge.

  “I know.” Jenn felt an odd pang in her heart. Every fall, Allin asked her to marry him for no better reason than the mill and to spite Roche. Every winter, Tadd pined over Peggs, for no better reason than her being the most beautiful woman in Marrowdell and who didn’t? “I hope they deserved your—” she floundered.

  Slowly, Hettie smiled her wonderful smile. “Attentions?”

  Relieved, Jenn nodded and smiled back.

  “With you and Peggs well settled, Jenn,” Covie said matter-of-factly, “it’s just as well both Emms are upcountry with the livestock.” She chuckled. “That should give you, Dearest Heart, time to pick one.”

  Something soft and tender appeared in Hettie’s eyes. “I already have, Mum, if he’ll have me, too.”

  Jenn held her breath, waiting . . .

  “Can we get some help here?”

  “The cows are stuck,” the breeze informed her.

  Jenn turned in haste. Devins had opened the milk gate but, despite superior numbers, and horns, the Ropps’ dairy herd jammed in the open door behind Scourge’s hindquarters, eyes bulging. They weren’t coming a step closer.

  The breeze turned smug. “Stupid beasts.”

  “Take Bannan’s horse out the back, please,” Covie said, her normally calm voice tinged with some of the cows’ desperation.

  “Of course. Sorry.” Blushing, Jenn took hold of Scourge’s chin with her free hand and tugged. “Are you always this much trouble?” she muttered under her breath as he docilely walked beside her through the barn.

  He feigned not to hear, his large eyes locked on the bag of curds she carried.

  Behind them, Hettie and her mother hastened to settle their now-impatient herd, ending any chance of her hearing the name. Doubtless, Peggs would know first.

  Jenn smiled to herself. She’d have her own secret soon, to share or keep as she chose.

  The morning dawned fair again, the fields coated in the lightest of mists, already burned away where touched by sun. Bannan feasted his eyes as he worked, filled his nostrils with the scent of growing things and fresh-cut wood, felt the cool earth of the barn through the soles of his feet. Little birds flitted everywhere he looked; they’d been his serenade upon waking and kept him company now. Much more beauty, he warned his little farm, and he’d be unable to work for joy. An unlikely outcome, of course. He’d never been so full of life and the need to be doing something with it. He couldn’t sit still if he tried.

  Tir yawned. Again. He’d hung his mask by the fireplace with his axes, so his yawning was impossible to miss. Every yawn whitened the scars above and below his mouth, and exposed what few teeth he had left. Bannan couldn’t help but take each as a mostly silent reproach. Yes, they’d had a decent amount of rest, but hadn’t his friend worked with him last night until they’d stumbled with fatigue, then roused with him at dawn to help empty the wagon and remove its plank sides and canvas cover?

  Wyll, who might have helped, lay curled on the bed they’d cobbled together for him last night. He’d taken to it as soon as it was ready, tucking his head beneath a blanket, and hadn’t left that shelter yet.

  Another yawn. “Did you not sleep at all?” Bannan demanded, feeling the guilt of the well-rested.

  “With those eyes staring at me in the dark, sir, like to bore a hole in my head?” Tir spat eloquently. “Ancestors Witness, that toad was waiting for me to fall asleep. It’d make off with the nillystones, given a chance, and who knows what else. I tell you, sir, the things mean no good. No good at all.”

  Bannan hadn’t seen a toad in the house last night, though lacking windows or working doors, he wouldn’t have been surprised by such a guest. One was in the barn with them now, squatting in the shadows of the first empty stall. It was, truth be told, giving Tir—who hadn’t noticed—its rapt attention.

  He tried to appease his friend. “They eat mice.”

  “So do cats,” Tir retorted, unimpressed. “What’s wrong w
ith a cat? What kind of village doesn’t have cats? Or dogs? Mark my words, sir,” he said darkly. “They’ve all been eaten—same as the mice. It’s not natural.”

  No, it was Marrowdell and another puzzle, one Bannan doubted had anything to do with toads. He didn’t attempt to argue. Tir grumbled most mornings until breakfast; he’d outright snarl after a late patrol. Meanwhile, there was another, more pressing mystery to solve.

  Who was, or had been, using his barn?

  He brushed his fingers lightly over one of the marks in the floor. “Wagons?”

  Tir didn’t let go that easily. “You can’t,” he pointed out, “pet a toad.”

  Thinking of the warrior-like demeanor of Marrowdell’s toads by night, Bannan judged any such attempt unwise at best. “No one’s asking you to,” he said mildly. “Tir. Wagons. Am I right?”

  His friend crouched to look, muttering something rude and unlikely about toads under his breath Bannan hoped the creature watching from the stall wouldn’t understand.

  Tir tilted his head, eyes following the tracks. He gave an interested grunt.

  “What?”

  “Too far apart for Rhothan.” The other spat on the packed dirt and smeared the moisture with a thumb. Whatever he saw made him rock back on his heels. “Not Ansnan, not any that I’ve seen or heard of. Look here, sir.”

  Bannan knelt to peer at the drying spot, seeing lines, no wider than his smallest finger, as evenly spaced as tines on a fork. Together they formed an overlapping pattern, like so many fish scales. “What sort of wheel leaves such an impression?”

  Tir shrugged his bafflement.

  “There are sets of tracks,” Bannan mused. “The same wagon, do you think?”

  “Three wagons, sir.” The former guard’s hands described how the vehicles would have stood one behind the other, his voice slipping into the cadence of a report. “Good-sized—half again ours, at a guess. With loads, too. They’ve been here more than once, but I’d say months since the last. Maybe a year.”

  Bannan gave a slow nod. “Puzzle solved, then. The tinkers we’ve heard of, the ones who come to help with the harvest. They must have seen how the barn sat empty and put it to good use.” He dusted his hand on one leg as he rose, perversely disappointed.

  “If so, likely yon chests are theirs, too.” Tir fingered his scruff of a beard thoughtfully. “What sort of tinker leaves belongings?”

  “None we know,” Bannan acknowledged, happily curious again. He joined Tir at the nearest chest.

  Tir had found them in the storeroom, after solving the trick of its stubborn door latch with an ax. There were seven, more boxes than chests, square and knee-high. With no time yesterday for a closer inspection, they’d put them against the barn wall across from the stalls. It hadn’t been easy work; it required both of them to lift one.

  The boxes were of the same rough wood as the barn, though their planks were cunningly fitted and some effort had been made to round the outer edges. The lids were secured by metal locks, two per side, the black hardware pocked by rust and badly dented, as if each took a hammer to free its hinges as well as a key.

  But that wasn’t true. He looked deeper.

  Bannan’s lips parted in wonder as the sides of the boxes faded from rough wood to palm-sized pieces of stone, smooth and pale yellow, fused one to the other. The lids weren’t wood—or stone. He thought the blue, shimmering material some sort of glass or crystal, but no crystal of his comprehension could melt what looked like thick fingers into the stone of the sides, nor could he imagine how anything could unlock such a grip. “If these belong to the tinkers,” he breathed, “I can’t wait to meet them.”

  “What do you see, sir, that I can’t?”

  Startled, Bannan looked up to find Tir’s eyes boring into his. “I see the truth.”

  “And what truth is that?”

  Roads that flowed and forests that bled and moths with tiny boots . . . where to start?

  “I’m well used to your oddness, sir,” Tir went on, determined. “You’ve been my captain and friend these many years. Closer than blood. I’ve seen to it no one learned of your gift who shouldn’t. You know that.”

  “I—” Bannan closed his mouth and gave a grim nod. He wouldn’t have lasted a month in the border guard, not in the beginning, without Tir’s protection.

  “Here, it’s different. Since we arrived, you’ve been getting this look, like you’re somewhere else. Like you’re under some kind of wishing. Which,” his friend said almost lightly, “I didn’t believe more than my grandmother’s tale of pearls in spoilt plums till we met him.” A nod to the house where Wyll presumably still slept.

  “Rest easy. I haven’t changed—or been wished, or cursed. It’s this place.” Bannan took an unsteady breath. “Marrowdell. I see more here than I ever have. Things—maybe that don’t exist anywhere else.”

  Tir looked decidedly unhappy. “Sir. Things that don’t exist?”

  Bannan carefully didn’t smile. “They exist here. Take these chests. Wood and plain, aren’t they?” He rapped on a lid. “Sounds like wood. Feels like it. But when I look deeper—the way I would to catch a lie in a man’s face—I see a masterpiece of polished stone, surpassing any skill I know.”

  “Heart’s Blood.” The furrow across Tir’s brow was deep enough to shadow his eyes. “Like the wings you saw when you looked at Wyll.” He gave the squared timbers of the rafters a suspicious look. “What’s the barn, then?”

  “A barn.” Bannan chuckled. “The house is a house. The trees—most of them,” he amended, “—are trees. But the road is at times a silver river and your toads, believe it or not, are sentries. By their kit and demeanor, I’d judge them doughty fighters, not to be lightly crossed.” He turned serious. “Two Marrowdells, Tir. The one everyone sees, and another whose truth I glimpse.”

  Tir swallowed. “How can that be?” he asked with great care.

  “I wish I knew,” Bannan admitted, unable to contain his delight. “Here, it just is.”

  “But only one’s real.”

  The former border guard valiantly tried to make sense of the incredible, to put boundaries around it and keep them on the safe, familiar side; deep in his heart, Bannan knew it couldn’t be done. “The water from the well’s real enough,” he countered. “I found it looking at that other Marrowdell, not this one. Then . . .” he couldn’t help but smile, “. . . there’s Scourge.”

  “The bloody beast?” Tir’s eyes narrowed. “What about him? Don’t tell me he looks other than ugly here, because that’d be stretching things, sir, well past my following.”

  “He looks the same.” Of course he did. The sole constant in his entire life, Bannan thought nostalgically, had been the strange, dark not-horse. He’d measured his growth against Scourge’s unchanging leg, his becoming a man by finally being accepted as Scourge’s rider. The notion of a different Scourge . . . ? He shook his head. “Scourge is the same, but here, my friend?” Bannan tapped his ear. “He can speak.”

  Tir burst out laughing.

  “As well as you or I,” the truthseer insisted.

  “From anyone else, sir,” Tir said, mirth fading, “this’d be madness.”

  Was it? Bannan left his friend and walked the length of the barn, coming back to stand near the stall with the toad. He rested his shoulders and head against the upright beam, feeling its strength. What had Wyll said? That neyet had died to become this wood, to make the buildings of Marrowdell. Hadn’t he’d glimpsed living neyet, leaning over the road as if curious about the smaller beings who used those buildings?

  No, he thought. Not madness.

  Wonder.

  “I’ve spent my life enduring false smiles and promises,” he said, as much to himself as Tir. “Spent my gift finding liars for a distant prince—and for what? So he could give away the city we protected and free those we caught. I swear to you, old friend, there were times I’d beg my Ancestors to blind me—to make me as other men. There were times I didn’t think I could
bear any more truth.”

  Tir’s eyes turned bleak and his lip twisted above the hollow where he’d had a chin. “I asked mine for you, sir, some nights.”

  Moved, Bannan rested a fond hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Not here,” he promised, warm and sure. “Here, for the first time in my life, I rejoice to be a truthseer.” A laugh bubbled from his chest. “Madness? If it’s madness, Tir, to delight in beauty and mystery, to see wonders wherever I look, then I’ll happily be mad.”

  “Be happy.” Tir snapped a finger against his ear. “Just don’t be careless,” he advised gruffly as Bannan rubbed the sting. “Wonders are all well and good till they bite off your feet.”

  He looked past Bannan to transfix the watching toad with a glare of his own. “As for you. Call yourself a sentry?” in a parade ground snap, “Get to your post!”

  Huge brown eyes blinked in astonishment, then the toad, with the immense dignity possible only to the warty and very round, hopped from the stall, hopped along the tracked floor and out the barn door, then, with one prodigious leap, disappeared into the uncut grass beyond.

  Oh, the look on Tir’s face!

  Bannan grinned. “Ever made a recruit jump like that before?”

  Jenn sat on the gate and stared at Scourge in disbelief. “You ate the bag.”

  “Hungry.” His dark-red tongue fastidiously removed lingering flecks of curd from his slobbery lips.

  The Ropps mightn’t miss one, Jenn decided, though if he made a habit of this, they would. “Can we go now?”

  He gave a shuddering sigh worthy of Wainn’s old pony. “Very well.”

  She settled the plump saddlebags over his shoulders. Having been made for a pony, they looked ridiculous on his grand back. She probably would too, Jenn thought ruefully. “Come closer.”

  The breeze tickled her ear. “Jump.”

  She rose, balanced on the second highest rail, and hesitated. If he didn’t move, and she didn’t slip, she could do it.

  If.

  Jenn eyed Scourge with misgiving. He stood with seeming patience, but his tail slapped lazily back and forth. The creature enjoyed gossip. How much would he enjoy watching her fall flat on her face, at least here where the grass was soft?