“Yes, Good Mother,” Ethwin said, and I could tell from his tone that he did not call her “Mother” in the same sense as he called the man “Father.” “They are Jereth, Hwyn, and—and—”
“I am the Lady Trenara of Larioneth,” the lady said as he stood stammering and blushing beside her.
“May the gods smile on our meeting,” said the woman. “I am Halred, priestess and healer. Ethwin, thank you for the time you've spent bringing them.”
“It is our part to thank Ethwin for rescuing us in distress,” Hwyn said, “and you for calling us your guests.”
“It was never the way of my people to turn aside strangers,” Halred said over our shoulders at Ethwin's father, whose angry glare I could almost feel burning the back of my head. “You are welcome to Folcsted on St. Arin's Lake. Edwach,” she spoke past us again, “you disapprove of this welcome?”
“Mother Halred, you know how it stands with us in this lean year. Priestess though you are, even you cannot act as one alone. You must bring them before the Assembly.”
“I will, Edwach. Tomorrow,” said the healer. “Now let me do my work. You strangers, come with me.”
She led us to a round cottage of gray fieldstone, its door and windows open to the air. Ethwin helped me dismount and went to tether the donkeys as the rest of us followed the healer into her home. It was nearly as bare as my cell in the Tarvon Monastery: two plain pinewood chests were the only furniture, their tops smooth and flat to double as worktables. The low sun slanting in the westward window illuminated pots, cups, and bowls piled on the stone floor to one side of the cold hearth, a pair of well-worn boots to the other.
The healer opened one of the chests, took out a sheepskin bedroll, shook it out, and spread it near the hearth. At her gesture, I sank gratefully down on it. “Thank you, Good Mother,” I said. “I am sorry to cause you trouble—”
“Edwach is causing me trouble,” she said sharply, but then sighed, “and the late spring, and the poor soil, and the leanness of the flocks—I am not insensible to these things, whatever Edwach may believe. But turning away wounded travelers will not restore the land.”
“I am loath to burden you in hard times,” Hwyn said. “But for Jereth's wound, I would take my chances in the hills, foraging like the wild goats. But I can work while he mends—weed fields, tend beasts—”
“Tomorrow,” Halred told her. “Tonight we will tend to your friend.”
She took flint and steel from the hearthstones and lit a lamp, for the russet glow of the setting sun was dying to embers. Then she knelt on the floor by my side and, holding the lamp over me with one hand, she pulled the bandage away from the wound with the other. It stuck to the wound, crusted with blood; as it tore free, I gasped involuntarily.
“What are you doing?” Hwyn said, hovering anxiously nearby.
Ignoring the interruption, Halred explored my swollen head with her fingers, making me flinch again. “Hold still!” she chided, prodding at the wound all the while. “How did you come by this wound?”
“An arrow grazed my head,” I said. “It may have been poisoned, or the sore may have festered of its own.”
Halred nodded approvingly. “You answer well, Jereth. You've passed the first test, for if you'd pretended it was anything but an arrow-wound, I'd never have trusted another word from your mouth. You do not look like a soldier, nor yet like a huntsman. What brought you in the path of that arrow?”
I glanced at Hwyn, who looked uncertain, then back at Halred. And not a movement of my eyes had escaped the healer. She turned to Hwyn and demanded, “Why does he look to you for words? What secret are you holding between you with your conspiratorial glances?”
“None that mean harm to you or to any of your people,” Hwyn said. “But as St. Ligaiya said, all things have their secrets, whether for good or ill: a white hare hides in the snow or a brown toad in the mud like an innocent heart in the world.”
Halred regarded her with a bemused smile. “Are you that innocent heart, then?”
Hwyn looked abashed. “Who is wholly innocent? Trenara, perhaps, in her way; not I. But my secrets, at least, are innocent ones, and I have reasons for keeping them that bind me like the laws of your order, Good Mother. Or at least they ought to bind me. But now I am at your mercy, and cannot cling to principle: Jereth is hurt, and I will tell what I must to pay the price of his healing.”
Halred stiffened. “I did not say there was a price. Keep your secrets, then, snow hare.”
She turned to me again with a professional eye, like my father sizing up merchandise. Ethwin crept in with a bucket of water, but Halred paid him no heed. After some moments of silent scrutiny, she said, “There is some impurity in the wound; all your flesh is struggling to push it out. You would not think this swelling a sign of health, would you? But it is your body fighting back. Heat may help it along.”
She moved along the wall to a series of hooks, from which bundles of herbs hung drying, and chose a leaf here, a bulb there, an ominous-looking bit of white fungus. She put the herbs into a hammered metal bowl poised on a tripod, ladled a little water over them, then set her lamp under the bowl so its flame heated the bottom. The smell that rose from this brew made me queasy.
She turned, then, to my friends and Ethwin. “There's been no fire in this hearth for a month or more, but we will need a fire tonight. You three may as well set about getting fuel and kindling. Ethwin, you might show Hwyn where to find some.” So the hunter and Hwyn went out, and Trenara drifted after them.
Halred stared after them until they were well out of earshot. “Well, I wouldn't have believed it,” she said then. “That great lady with her rich clothes and refined manners—gone to help them fetch peat or dung to burn!”
“Trenara's simple,” I explained. “She may not actually help. But where Hwyn goes, she goes.”
“And you too?” Halred smiled slyly at me as she knelt on the hearthstones, stirring her concoction.
“When I can,” I said, staring off through the dark door where my friends had disappeared.
“I confess, I sent Hwyn off for more reasons than to fetch peat,” Halred said. “She's protective of you, which is of course a good thing, taken by itself—but she also seems distrustful by nature or habit, and I can't be distracted with questions and protests during a delicate task. And it will be delicate: I will have to reopen your wound. Do you understand?”
“You said something needed to be pushed out,” I said. “But the wound has already opened more than once. I caught a fist half as big as my head right on the sore, bursting it open. It bled a fountain.”
“I'm sure it did,” Halred said. “But since then, it looks as though you've been sleeping in the dirt, and keeping the same foul rag on your head till it crusted to the sore. It's had plenty of chances to fester since then. And Jereth, you must know something has to be done. If not, you wouldn't have been lying on that hillside, helpless, till Ethwin carried you here.”
As she spoke, she opened one of the chests and drew out her materials: a little clay jug with a stopper, clean linen cloths, and a delicate knife, its blade bright in the lantern light. “I will open the wound and wash it with sour wine, and I warn you, the washing will hurt more than the cut itself. Then I will put the hot poultice on the sore and bind it with linen. After that, I may have to let you drink the rest of the wine to dull the pain. Will you consent to all this?”
It did not take much thought. “Yes,” I said. “It can't be worse than going on as I am.”
“Good,” the healer said. “The mixture's bubbling; let's begin before your friends come sticking their heads in the way. First,” she poured off a bit of broth from the heating flask into a clay cup, “drink this.”
Of all the unpleasant things she'd promised to do, none stands out in my memory so horribly as that mouthful of herb broth, which stank like the hold of a ship that has been calmed for too long with too many people aboard. After that ordeal, the quick burning cut of the flamed knife on
the old sore, the acidic sting of the wine in the open wound, and the hot poultice slimy with the sediment of the heating-flask were nothing to complain about. I had meant to refuse the wine, for I doubted she could easily replace her stock and I had already taxed her resources more than I wished. But in the end I weakened and drank a little, not only to numb the pain but to wash the taste of the broth from my mouth. The wine was nearly vinegar, but it was a cleaner sort of bad taste than the herbs. Fortunately, with nothing in my stomach all day but a few mulberries and a strip of willow bark, a quick swallow of wine was enough to send me to sleep.
I woke once during the night to find Hwyn sitting on the floor by my side. I reached out, clumsy with sleep, and felt her thin, strong fingers clasp mine.
“Peace, now,” she murmured. “Rest.”
“Will you sing to me?” I said. “Sing what you sang on the way.”
Softly, softly she sang to me, as to the summer grainfields we had passed in the last leg of our journey, and though the goddess called the grain to awaken, before the song was done I was blissfully asleep.
8
THE ASSEMBLY OF THE FOLC
When I woke again to the full light of afternoon and saw Hwyn slumped against the stone wall, asleep sitting up, her straw-colored hair disordered as an abandoned nest, I wondered whether her night singing had been real or a dream.
“She kept watch over you all night.”
I turned toward the voice. Halred stood on the hearthstones, looking down at us. She pointed toward Hwyn with a long-handled spoon before crouching back down to stir a pot over the fire. “A very tenacious woman, that one. She only fell asleep well into the morning, and then not by design, as you can tell by the way she's propped up.”
“She'll get a crick in her neck from sleeping like that.” I pulled myself up onto my knees, feeling a slight lightness in my head, but nothing compared to the day before. There was a shadow in the corner of my left eye, but the very fact that I noticed it meant I could see with both eyes again. I crept toward Hwyn without any of yesterday's half-blind fumbling, and slid an arm between her back and the wall, shifting her weight onto my shoulder to ease her down onto the end of my bedroll. I was not careful enough, however, for she woke.
“Jereth!” Her head on my shoulder, she looked into my face with her one good eye, then reached up to touch my left temple with cool fingers, light as dreams. “It's less swollen. Do you feel better?”
“Yes. Weak, still, but the hammering pain is gone. Whatever Halred did to the sore was well done.”
“With the gods' help, lad,” Halred crouched nearby, “you're past the crisis.”
“When I came back,” Hwyn said, “you were already asleep with a poultice on your head. We built a fire, and then Ethwin went back to his clan's house, while Mother Halred put herbed water in the tripod to heat.”
“For the healthful steam,” Halred explained, and indeed, there was a comforting scent in the air, overpowering even the dung-smoke and the smell of the sheepskin.
Hwyn went on, “Then she cast other herbs on the fire as a sacrifice and began invoking the Four Great Ones.”
Trenara wandered in from the front garden and knelt near me, reaching out to stroke my face. I had recovered well enough that her touch did not make me flinch. Nonetheless, her gesture surprised me: for the most part, after the first night of our acquaintance, Trenara had ignored me entirely, behaving as though Hwyn were her only companion—as I suppose I too did, in my own way.
“My Lady,” I said to her, “why this tenderness?”
Trenara, as usual, only smiled inscrutably.
“You knew Jereth was in danger, didn't you, Trenara?” Hwyn said to her, and Trenara nodded solemnly—though she might have done so regardless of what was said to her.
Halred put in, “All the while I was chanting the prayers of healing, she knelt by your head with her hands open before her. I half expected she would begin chanting with me—but I take it she doesn't speak much.”
“Very little,” Hwyn admitted. “I don't know how much of these ceremonies she understands, but someone raised her to be reverent. And I sometimes think she has sat by many sickbeds and stood by many graves in her young life.”
“Here I thought she had always been in your care! You speak as though you had not known her long.”
“Not above a year or so,” she said.
“And yet she follows where you go—even to this lonely land,” said Halred.
Hwyn shrugged. “I defended her once. I doubt anyone had done so before.”
Halred shook her head. “No, I doubt they had. It's always the weak who defend the weak—if you'll pardon my calling you so.”
Hwyn stretched her long mouth in a crooked smile, sweeping her arms out as if to lay bare all her smallness and brokenness. “Truth needs no pardon, Good Mother. And even if it did, I would be loath to blame you, when you have spent your precious herbs, your labor, and your prayers for us, vagabonds unwelcome in your land.”
“There would have been a time,” Halred said, “when no one would have questioned your welcome here. When strangers were sacred. When they would have been clustering about you for news instead of debating your right to stay in my house and share my portion of bread.”
“But these are lean times,” I said, “and bread is hard-won. I can understand them well.”
Halred frowned. “No one has starved. But we have had three years of dry summers and poor harvests, three years of thin forage for the animals, three years when we had to live off the meat of our flocks, not the milk, slaughtering more than the year's births could replace. Now the flocks are dwindling, not growing.
“And now we have had another late spring with too little rain; the meadow grass is thin, and the crops are not as high as they should be now, in the prime of summer.
“As if that were not enough, some among us have grown grasping, saying ‘this is mine,’ not ‘this is ours.’ One shepherd quarrels with another, ‘The ewe that miscarried was yours; mine has the live lamb. If some must starve, that is the will of the gods, but it shall not be my household.’ That was not always our way. We held flocks in common, and marked them only with the mark of the valley. Now the heads of the four clans each have their own marks, and some of the sons of each clan have begun devising their own variations on the clan-mark, so brother can hoard sheep from brother and cousin from cousin—as if all were not needed to drive the wolves from the flocks together!
“At this rate they will take to building fences and enclosing pastures, like the outlanders our ancestors fled from; the flocks will not be free to move to untasted pastures as summer grows old, and all will have less so each can guard his own. Thus the blight of the land is matched by a blight on our ways that may starve us even if the land's sickness does not.”
I smiled bitterly. “And here we have come in the midst of this quarrel over wants, with our hands empty. Will it save you strife if we leave at once? You have been kind to us, and I hate to cause you more trouble. Though I would rather repay you, if it's better to leave I may be strong enough to go on my own two feet.”
Halred shook her head. “No, Jereth. As my guest and my patient you may not go. Though you feel stronger now, you have not yet tried to walk as far as the door; I doubt you are ready to cross the hills afoot. And besides,” she said, “I want to challenge the naysay-ers among us, not hide from them. After all, I am their priestess.”
I nodded, my eyes drawn again to a sight that had piqued my curiosity on the wall across from where I sat: a broad shield-shaped icon of the Hidden Goddess, depicted as a woman looking away into the starlit distance, the flow of her straight black hair merging into the stark slopes of a dark mountain with a blue lake at its base. It was artfully drawn, though the paints looked like the same simple colors found on the doors of the Folcsted houses, blue, berry-red, green, black, and lime-wash white.
“You are given to the Hidden Goddess?” I remarked, gesturing toward the icon. “All the healing or
ders I know are vowed to the Bright Goddess.”
“Look above you,” Halred said, pointing. I turned to crane at the wall I'd been leaning on, and there indeed the Bright Goddess smiled down on us, trailing a cloak of summer flowers over the green hillsides. On either side of her, a white goat followed her up the hill. I gazed long, then turned from the rejoicing goddess's face to her dark sister's back and Halred's smiling eyes.
“Why not both?” the priestess said. “After all, Night too is a healer. Are you not strengthened by your long night's rest and quiet? Could the sun do more for your wounds than darkness did? And though the sun ripens the herbs that soothe and heal, they begin in the dark earth. The wine I use to cleanse wounds begins in sunlit fields, but is completed in dark casks. Who can heal without one or the other?”
Hwyn looked up at the priestess with new appreciation. “If that is the custom in the Hills of Penmorrin, then it is high time the people of the flatlands came to the mountains for wisdom.”
Mother Halred smiled ruefully. “It was never the way of the Folc till I made it my own way. Indeed, many called it unseemly when I would not choose between the priestesses of the Bright and Hidden Goddesses, but remained the acolyte of both. Well for the Folc that I was so stubborn, for no other priestess is left in this valley. The other acolyte of the Bright Goddess ran away with a handsome stranger in our youth, and the young priestess of the Hidden Goddess died soon after our teacher. I alone preserve the teachings of both orders in this valley.
“I am teaching two acolytes now—you will meet them later; I left them with my other patient, for they are well able to handle a simple childbirth without me. I call them Day and Night, and though I teach them both all I know, I hold each one to the test for her half of the lore, Bright or Hidden. In another year or so, they will be ready to change places and learn the other half of wisdom, both from me and from each other.”
Halred's eye seized on my cassock. “Your garb has a clerical plainness to it, though your hair is not tonsured. You would not be a priest of the Turning God, would you?”
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