What a time it was, that evening when I arrived home. Birdie put skills of a different kind to work and produced a feast to rival the spring festival. My sisters were called in from the nearby farms where they lived with their husbands; Hespa was there, of course, and the Grentrees, who would take Tamlyn into their home again since there would be no room in ours.
There was sorrow as we told of Nerigold’s death, and there were tales that we kept to ourselves, especially about the mosaics uncovered in Nan Tocha. To my surprise, there was laughter, too, and from an unexpected quarter. Ryall was tucked up comfortably on his pallet in the corner, and despite his pain and exhaustion he entertained everyone with stories of how he had stolen food to feed us during the journey to Ledaris.
‘At one farm, a woman caught me filching milk from her larder, but it was dark and she thought I was her husband coming home late from the tavern. She whacked me on the back with a broom. Poor man, he was in for it when he did turn up. I’m glad I’m not married to her.’
The stories tired him out, and by the time the Grentrees departed, and Tamlyn with them after no more than a brief touch of our hands, Ryall had been asleep for an hour.
In the morning, he was pale and feverish. I opened the shutters to let in as much light as possible and helped Birdie with his bandages again. When she removed the largest one from around his left arm, a foul stink wrinkled my nostrils. I knew what that meant.
Birdie stood and led me outside. ‘The wound has festered. Its poison will quickly spread through his body if we don’t stop it now.’
‘Stop it? How?’ I asked, but I already knew what she was going to say.
‘His arm must come off.’
‘No, he’ll never let you do it. Isn’t there another way? If we wait a day or two, it might begin to heal after all.’
‘Don’t fool yourself, and there’s no point filling his mind with soft-hearted hopes for the impossible. The gods are never so generous, not when the wound is as bad as his. If he wants to go on living, it will be without his arm, and you must help him see that, Silvermay.’
‘Me!’
‘You brought him here to me, to save him, you said. That’s the only way I can do it. I’ll tell him the truth, but you have to play your part, as well, to make him face it.’
We returned to Ryall’s bedside, reluctantly on my part, it must be said. His head rolled slowly from side to side in the first stages of delirium, but he stopped to show he was aware of us back at his bedside.
‘Ryall,’ said my mother in as gentle a voice as I have ever heard, ‘there is nothing I can do to heal your arm; nothing even the great doctors in Vonne could do. If there was magic in my hands I would use it, but I doubt you believe in conjurers’ tricks any more than I do. To go on living you must give up your arm.’
‘No,’ he breathed immediately. ‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘You have no chance at all, I’m afraid. You’d be choosing to die.’
‘Then let me die. You can’t cut off my arm.’
Even in his weakness, there was steel in his voice, prompting Birdie to look over her shoulder. It was my turn.
I knelt beside the bed and took hold of his good hand. ‘My mother is telling the truth, Ryall,’ I said, doing my best to keep the tremor out of my voice. ‘This is the only way to save your life. That’s why we brought you here, to save you. Three are so much stronger than two. We need you in the search for Lucien; we’ll need your help once we find out where he’s being held.’
‘What use will I be with only one arm, and what life will I have afterwards? How will I make my ropes and strings, set my traps? Take away my arm and you take away who I am. I would rather die.’
It hurt to hear him speak this way, because it was true. I knew all too well how he loved his freedom in the woods of Nan Tocha. No older than me, he was already a master of his craft. Now, until the day he died, he’d have to live on the charity of others. He didn’t really want to die, I was sure, but he didn’t want the life that would be left for him, either. What a terrible choice. And, somehow, that choice had become mine, too. I felt the burden of it like a boulder strapped to my back.
‘Ryall, you are only young; you haven’t lived long enough to choose death over life. You want to live, I know you do. You’re not ready for eternal sleep.’
He looked at me, his face pale and sweating, his lips still.
‘Say it,’ I urged him. ‘Whatever comes, you want to go on living, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered and, even though he was too weak to raise his head from the pillow, he squeezed my hand hard enough to bring pain. ‘Find a way, Silvermay. Find a way for me to stay alive.’
I stood up and hurried out into the open air, with Birdie only a few paces behind me.
‘You can’t walk away, girl. There’s more for you to do. He must be convinced.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He’ll never agree. That’s why I made him say how much he wants to live. We must make the decision for him. You must cut away the poisoned part of his arm whether he agrees or not. He asked me to find a way and that is the only one.’
Birdie stared at me for a long time before she said, ‘I was right. You have grown up in your time away from us, Silvermay. I worried you would cling to soft-hearted hopes, earlier, but I was too hasty. What you’re proposing seems hard on Ryall, but it’s the right decision. Call your father, and that young man, too. They’ll have to hold him down while I do what has to be done.’
‘I can’t be there when you do it.’
‘I understand,’ she said. ‘You’ve done enough. You have saved a life, and not for the first time, I’d guess.’
7
Desolate Days
Ossin and Tamlyn were mending a net on the banks of the stream when I found them and explained why they were needed. Neither hurried, nor even said a word on the walk back to our cottage, until, just before they disappeared inside, my father muttered, ‘Poor Ryall.’
Then they were gone and I certainly wasn’t going to follow.
Ryall guessed what was to happen as soon as he saw two strong men at his bedside. ‘Silvermay!’ he shouted, and kept bellowing my name over and over.
I ran along the lane, away from the cottage so that I couldn’t hear him any more. Even this wasn’t far enough once the knife cut into his flesh. There was no potion in Birdie’s bag to dull that kind of pain and his screams could be heard throughout the village, in my own ears especially. It was horrible. I never want to live through a half-hour like that again.
Finally, there was silence, blessed silence. It was done. I’m sure there were more whimpers of pain, but these didn’t reach to the edge of the village where I had sought refuge. I didn’t return until the afternoon, and by then the bloody rags had been burned, clean sheets spread on the bed, and Ryall lay sleeping with a pristine bandage wound tightly around his arm just below the elbow. Where the rest of his arm had been, there was nothing.
‘Oh Ryall,’ I whispered. ‘What have I done to you?’
I wished I’d never left Haywode, never gone to Nan Tocha, and Ryall had never stumbled across us on the trails where he set his traps. Then he would still be happy, with two strong arms and ten nimble fingers for his handiwork, and lively eyes that looked ahead to a life spent carefree and content.
The second night of my homecoming had none of the excitement of the first. How can there be joy when something so devastating happens to a young man you care about? My only comfort came from the colour that was already returning to Ryall’s cheeks now that the festering wound no longer poisoned his blood.
Birdie had dosed him with as much of her sleeping potions as she dared and so he didn’t wake as I helped with the dinner, nor when we spoke in low tones at the table. Tamlyn joined us once again. Without a word being said, it had been accepted that he would eat the evening meal with us so that he wasn’t a burden on the Grentrees. After the religo’s visit at the end of the harvest, every mouthful had to be carefully rationed
so that no one starved during the coming winter.
When it was time for Tamlyn to return to the Grentrees’, I blurted out, ‘I’ll walk you there.’
I sounded foolish because the journey was barely fifty paces and he hardly needed my protection. I was hoping for a few minutes alone with him, of course. But even after dark, there were figures going about the lanes between the houses and eyes watching through the many windows. I would have liked to feel his arm around me, or, better still, shared a kiss as we had done aboard the ship. But if we had shown our affection in these ways, news of it would have reached home before I did.
‘Some days just have to be lived through, Silvermay,’ Tamlyn said when we stopped short of the Grentrees’ door. ‘I spent many days in my father’s house when I wondered what was the point of being alive. It was worse after he’d blinded my dogs — I had to watch their misery and suffered along with them. I wonder if that was why Hallig didn’t kill Ryall immediately — to punish us as much as him?’
‘The Wyrdborn make me sick,’ I said, without thinking.
‘Their ways make me sick, too.’
My thoughtless tongue had done it again! ‘I didn’t mean —’
He stopped me with a finger to my lips, which hopefully nobody saw. ‘Tomorrow, Silvermay. That was how I dealt with the nights seeing my dogs suffer: I turned my eyes towards tomorrow.’
It sounded so wise, but all the same I slept that night with no eagerness for the next day. As it turned out, I was right to dread the morning.
Ryall was awake when I slipped out from behind my curtain dressed in a night smock. I hadn’t washed or dressed for the day yet and I felt half-naked when his eyes followed me. He said nothing, though, and I quickly ducked behind the curtain once more. It wasn’t fair to my mother, but I took a long time to get ready that morning. By the time I emerged a second time, she was feeding Ryall from a bowl.
‘Take over from me here, Silvermay,’ she called immediately.
I finished spooning the porridge into Ryall’s mouth, and when it was done he asked for more.
‘That’s a good sign, isn’t it?’ I said to Birdie when I returned to the pot.
‘Very good.’ Dropping her voice, she added, ‘When he first arrived, he could barely keep a thing down. It was the fever. It’s all but gone now. There was no doubt his arm had to come off.’
Years ago, Birdie had made a doll for my sisters, which eventually became mine. By then, it had grown ragged from too much love and the shredded rags that filled its inside were escaping through the seams. One day, when I’d been too rough, an arm had ripped away from the shoulder. ‘It just came off,’ I’d told my mother, and now she used those same words about Ryall. I shuddered.
My mother left soon after to check on another of her patients, taking with her the embroidered sack that was as familiar as it was welcome in every house throughout the village. Tentatively, I returned to Ryall’s bedside.
His body might have been on the mend, but not his spirits. ‘You should have let me die,’ he said when he’d finished the second bowl of porridge. I noticed that he kept his head deliberately turned to the right so that he wouldn’t glimpse the bandage and what it meant.
‘You were lucky in a way,’ I said. ‘Birdie was able to leave your elbow.’
At this he stared directly into my eyes, not saying a word, and I realised what a stupid thing I’d said. I doubt I had ever seen such coldness before in the eyes of anyone but a Wyrdborn.
‘I never let you down, Silvermay, not even when Hallig got hold of me in the woods. I thought I could trust you to do the same. Instead, you betrayed me — you let them do this to my arm.’ For the first time since I’d come to sit with him, he looked at the bandage. Then he turned away as though he would never speak to me again.
I fled into the open air and burst into tears like a silly girl caught cheating in a game. I needed Tamlyn. He wasn’t hard to find: a tall and busy figure in the fields. But when I reached him, there were three other men close by and my father was not far away, watching him as promised.
Tamlyn listened as best he could through my sobs and offered sympathy in words, since that was all we could share.
‘Of course Ryall’s going to be angry, Silvermay. He will say foul things to your mother, and to me when I visit him. It will take time for him to accept what had to be done.’
‘He blames me, and he’s right.’
‘You saved his life. He will see that one day.’
The other men were standing idle now, waiting for Tamlyn to do his bit. I tramped back across the stubble left by the harvest, hoping my mother would be finished with her other patient by now. Instead, I spotted Hespa.
‘I can’t face Ryall like this,’ I told her. ‘Birdie will insist I stay close to nurse him while she makes her rounds. Will you take my place, Hespa? Please, just for today.’
She’d been my closest friend since before I could remember and she saw how much I needed her help. ‘Of course,’ she said without hesitation.
There was a trade-off, as you’d expect. I had to take on her chores for the day, and it was just my luck that it was washing day. I hated washing. All of the villagers’ clothes were cleaned in a large stone trough fed by a channel diverted from the stream. The trough was covered by a roof supported by four sturdy poles. Beneath its shade, the women of the village tucked up their skirts and waded barefoot into the knee-deep water, where they slapped wet clothing onto the stones and rubbed soap into stains.
It was lunchtime before we spread the wrung-out sheets on nearby shrubs to catch the sun and the midday breeze. Returning to our cottage, I found Hespa sitting in the sun, giving its autumn rays one last chance to brown her skin before it faded to the snowy white of winter.
‘Don’t worry, I haven’t left Ryall alone,’ she assured me when I sat down beside her. ‘Your mother’s with him now; she said I should come out for some air. How are your hands?’
‘Wrinkled and sore,’ I said. ‘How do you keep yours so soft?’
‘By getting my friends to do the washing for me whenever I can,’ she said with a barely concealed smirk and held her arms at full stretch with the palms of her hands facing downwards to show off the uncreased skin and perfectly shaped nails.
‘Mind you, I was about to rake my nails across that boy’s face when Birdie came back,’ she said, no longer teasing me. ‘He’s the rudest, most bad-tempered human being I’ve ever come across. And immature.’
To Hespa, that simply meant he was younger than her and therefore didn’t count in her world.
‘He’s in there moping and feeling sorry for himself, but lots of men lose an arm in accidents around the farm,’ she went on. ‘What’s so special about him?’
‘He’s a trapper,’ I explained. ‘And very good at it. It was what made him special, and it’s not as though life has been very generous to him since the day he was born. His parents died when he was only a baby. He used his skill to make something of himself and now we’ve taken it away.’
Hespa still didn’t look very sympathetic.
‘Try to understand,’ I said, laying my hand on top of hers. ‘How would you feel if some boiling fat splashed onto your face when your mother was making soap? The burns would leave scars for the rest of your life.’
Her eyes widened in horror. Her face was her most precious gift. ‘That’s different. How you look matters to a woman.’
‘And for a man, it’s what he can do with his hands that earns him the respect of other men.’
I’d obviously hit a nerve: behind her eyes I saw regret that she hadn’t been more patient with Ryall. Perhaps it was the twinge of guilt in herself that made her sense it in me.
‘You blame yourself, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Well, just remember, Silvermay, it wasn’t you who caused the damage to his arm. It was that Wyrdborn monster, one of Coyle Strongbow’s sons.’ She shivered as the name passed her lips.
I shuddered, too, for what she didn’t know — that I was
in love with one of Coyle’s sons. She was right about who the real culprit was, of course, but there was still no peace in my soul. Ryall had suffered in my name and I hadn’t kept my part of the bargain.
After the midday meal, Hespa’s job, which was now mine, was to help her mother stew and bottle plums to preserve them through the winter. It suited me more than washing — a lot more than washing — especially when the afternoon clouded over and light rain fell, making the warmth in the kitchen a welcome bonus.
Hespa flounced in soon after the rain stopped. ‘He’s impossible. I hope you don’t expect me to do this again tomorrow, Silvermay. Do you know what he said to me this afternoon, when Birdie left me alone with him? “You’re the snootiest girl I’ve ever come across,” he says. He called me a girl, like I was a twelve year old! And then he had the gall to say I was too proud of my own beauty to be any help to a man, as though he was one himself instead of the boy that he is. What would he know?’
I would have laughed at the way she was letting him get under her skin if the episode hadn’t reminded me of my own response to Ryall when we’d first met on the back trails of Nan Tocha. When he’d talked about coming to Haywode to live, I’d secretly sworn to make sure it never happened. I didn’t want his boyish face around me every minute. A great big puppy, I’d called him in the privacy of my own mind.
Well, like me, he’d grown up quickly in the weeks we’d spent together, and because of me he’d been cut down. It wasn’t right to wish him away as I’d done in the mountains.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. Remembering the bittersweet days when Nerigold had nursed Lucien in my bed, I did what I’d done back then: I went out under the stars. And there was Tamlyn, keeping watch just as he’d done during his first stay in Haywode.
Tamlyn Page 6