I could see how a man might find her soft to lie upon. Her thigh was the size of both of mine.
We were silent for a moment. The baby suckled and Sunup scratched the hound’s back until his tail thumped. There was a certain smell of milk and damp dog under the awning, which gave me comfort. The girl peered at me again and smiled.
“She’s a rank vixen,” Mai said.
“Who is?”
“That Caelum. She should let him win. This is unseemly, to defeat the king before all his clans.”
I’d given the tourney barely a glance in my circuit around the field. Now I saw that there were less than two hands of fighters left, and most wore the queenmother’s colors. One of the king’s men toppled off his horse and lay still as the dead.
I sat up straight, staring at the field. “Is the king down there?”
“Of course he is—there in the gilded armor.”
His wooden sword was also leafed with gold, but in the dull light it shone without glittering. He was flanked by two of his clan, the only men of his left on the field. Together they battled twice as many of the queen’s party. He lost one man but she lost two. Then his last cataphract fell, taking another with him. King Thyrse fought on alone. A thrust, and one man slumped over his saddle. The king clubbed another to the ground with the weighted hilt of his sword. He ducked, came up on the last man from below, and dispatched him too. Then he was alone on the field, and the sound from the crowd filled the bowl in the hills to overflowing.
I cheered too, but Mai said, “She left it too late. So he’d know she gave it to him.”
“But he fought well,” I said.
“No one fights that well. Look, here she comes.”
Queenmother Caelum rode out on the field to meet the king. Her horse was pure white, caparisoned in unmarked white leather. She wore a crimson gown. Yards of velvet spread over the horse’s flanks and trailed to the ground. Her face, in all this crimson, looked pale as a blanched almond. She surrendered a sword, bowing deeply, and the king leaned from his horse to give her the kiss of peace.
The crowd roared, stamped, whistled.
Mai’s boy had fallen asleep, oblivious to the noise. She settled him in the valley between her thighs and leaned back on her elbows with a groan. “This one coming is a boy for sure,” she said. “He’s riding high and he kicks like a hare, right under my heart.”
That burden she carried in her great belly was not all fat. I must have been blind not to see it before.
“Every campaign, another baby. I lost the last one bearing it, and so much blood I thought I’d never get up again. I’m afraid this time will be worse, with winter coming and midwives scarce.”
“Then why did you quicken again?”
Mai snorted and looked at me in disbelief. She poked her right thumb through the hole in her left fist. “I thought even country girls knew about that. Didn’t you watch the bulls and cows go at it?”
“Of course I know how it’s done,” I said, “but why didn’t you take childbane?”
Mai gripped my arm and whispered, “If you know something that stops a baby being planted, you’ll be the most sought-after woman in the Marchfield. I thought I’d tried everything—I weaned my children late, I prayed, I put bungs in my bunghole—I did everything but keep the man from my bed, and that I’m unwilling to do! Once I drank a decoction a miscarrier gave me to get rid of a baby when I was three months along. It nearly killed me, but she lived.” She nodded her head toward Sunup, who was listening to every word. “I guess I’m good fat soil,” she added with a coarse laugh. “Plow me and the seed will come up every year. I never go fallow.”
I said, “I thought everyone had heard of childbane. All the women where I come from use it if they don’t wish to bear. I have some here.” I took a leather packet from my belt and unfolded it to show her the gray powder. “I ground the berries so I could put a pinch in my wake-me-up in the morning. It hides the bitter taste. But you can eat them whole.”
“How much do you have?”
“Enough for me. Enough for a while.”
“Can you get more?”
Mai spoke in a whisper again, so I lowered my voice to match. “Maybe. I haven’t seen it around here. It likes wet feet, so there might be some in these little bogs or in the marshes down by the river—I can’t believe you don’t know of this! Haven’t you seen those little white berries with the black eyes? Squirrels won’t eat them, nor bears. They cling to the shrub till the next year’s leaves come. But they’re not so potent after a few months, and you have to take more.”
Mai said, “Find some for me. I know plenty who’ll pay dear for it. And then you shall be able to buy your own shoes, and with better coin than bruises.”
I told Mai I would look out for it, and furthermore that she should send for me when her time came; I was not a midwife, but I’d helped at childbirth and I knew an herb that would slow the bleeding and more than a few for pain. Then I told her I should be going. Our clans were forming their battle lines and I ought to be back with my own people.
“Or what?” she said. “Catch another bruise?”
I shook my head.
“Is it his habit to hit you?”
I said, “No, just the once. That night I met you—because I was off alone and he went looking for me.”
“Hmm,” said Mai, as if she didn’t entirely believe me.
What a mooncalf I was, springing to Sire Galan’s defense when he’d dealt me a blow far worse than a slap on the cheek. Her shrewdness—her kindness—touched where I was most sore. Tears began to fall, hot and shameful. I rubbed my face with my skirt, not wanting to sully my new headcloth. Before long my story spilled out too, all about Sire Galan and his wager.
Mai let me talk until I was out of words before she said, “Some would have sold your tale to a rumormonger before you’d finished the telling. I won’t—but you’re too trusting by far. I hope you haven’t come to me for wisdom. I’m more cunning than wise. I know what the wise would say: don’t be greedy. What you have is enough and more than you deserve.”
I looked at her, stricken.
She grinned back. “Didn’t I say I wasn’t wise? I know a few things, though, and some to the purpose. I know a hexwoman. She sells curses at tourneys—you know, those little men made of lead that you name after some fighter you’re wagering against and throw into the fire. But I heard she had something more potent in her cat-skin bag—something like invisible wasps that sting your enemies and make them ill. She could send a curse to take the bloom off the maid.”
I made the ward sign. “Never. I don’t hold with ill wishing. It’s a foul thing—and besides, it comes back to you, they say.”
Mai shrugged. “Some say. Well, there is something else—but a curse would be cheaper.”
She said I should not try to stop Sire Galan from his course. He was bent on it, had staked more than a horse, more than his life on it—had staked his pride. He’d have the girl if she could be had, without reckoning the consequences. What I could do was to make sure that Sire Galan, whether he won the wager or lost it, would cleave to me and take no other (or if he did, not for long, she said). And she told me how I could bind him, what to do and when to do it.
Before I left Mai passed me a waterskin. “Wash your face, if you must go. You don’t want the clods to know you’ve been crying, do you? It’s plain as the dirt on your cheeks.”
She was there under a canopy, that maid of Ardor. She sat on a little stool of wood and leather with her skirts spread about her. The gown was of a fine iridescent silk—rose if you looked at it one way, blue another—that I’d only seen pictured in tapestries before. She was not quite as beautiful as I remembered: face as pale, yes, but aided by a little starchroot, which failed to hide the smudges under her eyes. Though she watched the warriors line up on the field below, her thoughts seemed far away. She yawned and lifted a hand over her mouth. There were rings on every finger, even the thumb. Weren’t those jewels sufficient
to buy her a husband? The neck of her bodice was cut low and bordered in ermine. The thin gauze of her underdress made a pretense of covering what her gown revealed. Egret plumes were braided into her hair. The sea wind ruffled the plumes, lifted locks of her hair, and set the banners flapping above the canvas roof. I didn’t see her father, but there were other men of Ardor’s Blood standing under the shelter, and jacks and foot soldiers on guard around it.
The maid leaned toward a dame sitting next to her whose garments were severe in comparison: an unmarried aunt, perhaps, kept like a farmyard dog to guard the hen coop. She said something and the woman nodded and beckoned one of the jacks to her.
She sent the jack over to us. He pushed Noggin and put a boot to his backside, saying, “Get, get, get!” as if he were chasing a goat out of a garden. Noggin squawked and dodged out of his way. The jack took a little more trouble with me. He unslung his baldric and struck me across the back with his leather scabbard—the sword still sheathed in it—saying, “And you! Keep your eyes off your betters. Mend your manners or your skull will need mending.”
I spat on the ground and he cuffed my ear.
She never turned our way.
I didn’t presume to think the maiden had recognized me from the meeting in the marketplace, when I’d stood behind Sire Galan stealing glances at her while she stole glances at him. She had us chased away because we marred her view. We should not be allowed to occupy even the corner of her eye. Whereas I’d set out to fill my eyes with her, maybe in hopes she would prove older and uglier than I remembered. Now I knew she was fair. “Scratch an itch and catch a fever,” Na used to say when I was too curious for my own good.
Before I saw the maid again, I had pitied her. She was stalked from a blind and didn’t know she was hunted for a foul wager. She was young and slight and I didn’t see how she would bear up under a woman’s sorrows, for she was bound to suffer—as I was suffering now—if Sire Galan hit his mark and stopped courting as quick as he’d started. I’d even had a little notion, which I’d kept in the back of my mind because it did not bear a closer look, that I might go to her on the sly and warn her about the wager. I’d fancied her grateful and Sire Galan the loser and no one else the wiser. But I quailed fast enough when I saw her in her finery with her guards about her. No warning would be welcome if it came from the likes of me.
To be sure she was well guarded—from the likes of me. Her jack had hit me just hard enough for show, but I smarted all the same.
And then I thought: even if she knew of the wager, she might still let Sire Galan come courting. She was gambling too, staking her reputation against his hard heart that a smooth brow and round cheeks and all the rest of her beauty, what I could see and what was hidden, would tangle him in such a net he could not escape. Who was quarry here, after all?
I had not hated her before this.
Whore. What was she but a high-priced harlot, and her father a pander?
It was just shy of dishonorable for a woman of the Blood to contract as a concubine if she did not have the dowry to get a husband. But such arrangements should be made quietly, not flaunted like this, paraded about the Marchfield. Her offspring would be bastards; they would carry her name, not her mate’s, and if they inherited anything, it would be at their father’s whim. But they could claim God’s Blood; they’d be part of a clan. Unlike any children of mine.
Mai had told me how to bind Sire Galan, but it was not until that moment that I made up my mind to do it. The Dame had always scoffed at such arts. But she never had need of love charms, and I did.
There was no feast that night and no boasting. The clan had lost the tourney and captured but a single sword. The Crux was strangely full of gaiety, as if he did not care, or worse, was glad of it. He taunted his men, saying he’d expected no more from a herd of geldings.
Sire Galan had been unhorsed in the first charge and forced to yield; in the tent he was tight-lipped and grim. Divine Xyster, the priest of Crux Moon who served as the men’s carnifex, pronounced one rib broken and nothing to be done but bleeding and binding. The priest left after drawing a bowlful of blood with a cut quill. I poulticed Sire Galan’s bruises, both new and old, and Spiller wrapped him tightly round the ribs in a long sheet of coarse linen.
I was as glad as the Crux seemed to be, but didn’t show it. That Sire Galan had lost was good: surely the maiden would scorn him now. That he was injured was better: perhaps he would not go roaming that night.
But he called for his best surcoat; he strapped on his sword. He left the tent, taking Sire Rodela and Spiller with him as if he expected trouble might lie in wait on his path. And he didn’t return till sunrise.
The binding charm Mai had taught me would have to wait till dark-of-the Moon, when Crux Moon is somnolent and lazy. When he is full he’s apt to turn spells and wishes topsy-turvy. But I was already preparing. I’d plucked three hairs from Sire Galan when I cleaned off the sticky poultice: one hair from his head, one from over his heart, and one from his groin. He’d yelped and cursed me for clumsiness, but I’m sure he suspected nothing. I’d saved the hollow quill the carnifex used to take his blood. Mai said these things, along with a few strands of my own hair, thread spun of lamb’s wool, and a womandrake root, would be sufficient to plait a strong binding.
I knew well enough what the womandrake looked like and the kind of place it liked to grow. We named it bryony and used it several ways in season: the spring shoots for eating, the fall berries for a weak dye, the stinking fleshy root to cure gravel in the piss. When the root is forked, as it sometimes is, it’s called womandrake because it resembles nothing so much as a naked waist and thighs, dirty yellow in color and wrinkled as if with folds of fat. I thought I might find it in the bottomlands by the river, if I could get there. Its vines had grown rampant by the river near the Dame’s manor, sending out tendrils to strangle shrubs and saplings.
That night and the next were long. Of the day that passed between them there’s little to tell. I waited upon the outcome of the wager. There was nothing to do but wait, until it occurred to me that it could do no harm to pray. I asked Sire Galan’s leave to go to the public shrines that flanked the king’s hall. I told Sire Galan I’d pray for him; if he was surprised by my piety, he showed no sign of it. Perhaps he thought my prayers were his due.
Each of the twelve gods had a shrine marked by a small standing stone set under the wide eaves of the circular hall. Before this stone another was laid flat for an altar. Each altar, tended by priests of the god’s clan, held a brazier and bowl for sacrifices and carved images of the avatars. I visited them in turn and made obeisance, but at the shrines of Ardor, Hazard, and Crux I offered such sacrifices as I could afford, burning locks of my hair to ash and pricking my arm with thorns to let a few drops of blood fall into the bowl. It seemed to me that these three gods held sway over the wager and its outcome, and further, that they were at odds with one another and we were caught up in their rivalry. There could be no way to propitiate them all, if that were true. Still, I tried, and with my paltry offerings and poorer prayers, I asked for their favor, though all I truly desired of them was that we should be left out of their quarrels. I also sacrificed to Wend Weaver, for the Dame’s sake, though I no longer felt her hand on the threads.
If the Blood need an oracle, they go to the priests. Drudges must rely on filthy god-bothered revelators who squat on their heels in the marketplace, killing songbirds or lizards and reading their entrails for a fine fee. Any man trying to catch his wife with a pricksman can scratch the itch of his suspicions there, and any maid can learn whether her swain-yet-to-be is dark or fair and what manner of clothes he wears, so she can recognize her good fortune when he walks by.
I stayed away. I had questions enough, but no trust in the answers and no coin to buy them. I tried the bones again, but they didn’t speak to me; or if they spoke, I didn’t know how to listen.
On the fourth and last night of the wager, I could not bear to stay in the tent wit
h the stench of men and mildewed heather. I wrapped myself in my cloak and lay down before the door flap. Light rain fell on and off and low mists drifted over the ground, mixed with the smoke of banked fires. The air smelled of the sea and the turning of the year.
I kept thinking of what the Crux had said, how I was nothing but a bit of mud that Sire Galan could scrape from his boot any time he wished. I thought also of how the maid had looked in her ermine and her egret plumes. I slept a little, but it was no better than waking, for my dreams were addled and disquieting.
Sire Galan returned an hour or two before dawn, accompanied by Sire Rodela. He asked why I slept in front of the tent and I told him it was warmer outside since the bed had lately grown cold.
Sire Rodela gave me a look that spoke clearly, a smirking half smile that showed how he looked forward to my comeuppance. He stared at me long and boldly even after the lamp was lit in the tent. I could see he thought his master was ready to cast me off and that I would fall into his grip as a matter of course, like some hand-me-down mail shirt.
Spiller was awakened with a kick. He ministered to Sire Galan, unwinding the cloth from around his chest; his whole right side had gone livid with a plum-colored bruise over his cracked rib. Sire Galan sucked in his breath while Spiller rubbed on a salve he’d gotten from the priest. It smelled like horse liniment. Spiller wrapped him again, pulling the bandage as tight as he could.
The tent was quiet. Sire Galan said nothing much, his jaw being clamped against the pain. Sire Rodela told Spiller to fetch this and fetch that and scurry for it, you clod! and other orders so that the jack, brimming with questions, didn’t dare spill any. And I kept my peace, if you can call it peace. I felt such a pain in my chest, such a shortness of wind, it was as if my own rib had broken. I could read the signs clear enough. Even if Sire Rodela had not smirked so, I would have known Sire Galan had won his wager by the disarrayed laces of his hose and by the very smell of another woman that rose from him when Spiller pulled off his clothes, a cloying scent of rose attar and lavender and also, I swear, the musk of her quim.
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