“Do you mean you would teach me?” Hwyn said, putting down her bit of honeyed cake to turn all her attention to the priestess.
Halred said, “I would take you on as both my student and my teacher. There is much you could learn from me: the art of healing; the rites of the goddesses; the lore of the saints—not to mention book-reading. But I am no prophet, and we have had none among us for generations—till you came.”
I saw Day raise her eyebrows, but she said nothing.
Halred continued, “Each of my acolytes is now on the verge of becoming a priestess and teacher to each other—and to me, too, for each of them has her own way of knowing, and may see what I miss. But you bring a fourth kind of wisdom. You would make the circle complete. Stay among us a while and learn with us.”
Hwyn looked at Halred hopefully, and my heart sank, for I had lost the chance to say to her what I had meant to say, and the words were floating fast away on a tide of beer and blood-loss.
At last Hwyn said, “I don't know how long we can stay.”
“You travelers are truly of the Folc now,” said Drict from a little way down the bench. “After the Rite, I think none would dare challenge your right to stay.”
I noticed a slight frown furrow Day's fair face. Jealousy, I thought. For all that she stood before the people, atop the Assembly Stone, with Hwyn hidden from sight; for all the beauty that made the eyes of every man follow her; for all her laughing command of life, she fears to lose her prominence—to Hwyn of all people, the scarred outcast. And Hwyn, so used to the cold corner farthest from favor, may slip dutifully away and lose her one chance to shine. That goaded me to speak: “Well, Hwyn, we have to stay a little while at least. We promised to work beside the Folc for a time before we move on. Surely you'll have time for some learning while we stay.”
Hwyn looked at me quizzically, then back at Halred.
“Surely you never meant to leave so soon,” Halred said.
What Hwyn might have answered was lost in a din of pipes and drums as the shepherds' piper, the farmers' drummer, and Ethwin with a shrill whistle marched into the room. They made their way to our corner and demanded the participation of Hwyn and Day in particular, and all in general, in their music.
To my astonishment, I saw a multitude of instruments appear from the pockets of rough-handed herders and from storage-chests in the hall: reed pipes, flutes, harps, a lute, a gittern. Music, like work, was the birthright of all the Folc, and if the feast of food was not great, the feast of music more than compensated. Even dour Anlaf sang with abandon.
Hwyn and I joined with the rest when we knew the songs, and were urged up onto a tabletop to perform a few of our own, not just once but over and over till the others could sing them.
We sang until the work of the Folc could no longer be postponed, feast or no feast. As the gathering broke apart, Paddon called me to follow him. “Come on, traveler. You're one of the Folc now, as I am, and that means tending the livestock. I'll claim you as my apprentice for the evening. I tend the Red Oak Clan's cows. You can learn to milk, while you're here.”
Hwyn came along as well. “I've wondered before—it's strange to see cows here,” she said. “It doesn't seem quite the countryside for them.”
“It's not, really,” Paddon admitted. “I brought the cows. When the blight started, and many of the goats died, I made a foray out to a farm in the Kreyn holdings and raided their cattle. I just took a few—as many as I thought I could drive to St. Arin's Lake without losing any. I gave most to Guthlac, and the rest to the Linden Clan as a peace offering so I could marry Edwach's niece. Other than marrying Sigrun, though, the raid doesn't seem to have been such a good idea,” he admitted. “They're a nuisance. They have to be pastured apart from the sheep, you know.”
I didn't, but let it pass.
“And they eat more than the goats, and besides, they're not thriving here. But I'm more used to keeping them than sheep or goats. And what else was an outlaw to do for his adopted homeland in times of hardship?”
We reached the cow-byre then, and even to my inexpert eye, the cows looked stringy and miserable, like beggars on four hooves. Nonetheless, Hwyn and Paddon made a merry enough time of the milking, laughing at my awkwardness till they could scarcely show me the right way, as Trenara hovered about making friends with the cows.
After that there were harder chores, the stalls to be cleaned, the manure to be hauled out for mulch or set to dry for fuel. At the end of it, when we dove in the lake, clothes and all, to wash ourselves, I was too exhausted to pay back their laughter with the sort of water-tricks my seafaring youth might have made easy. The climb back to the Red Oak house seemed long.
“You're still recovering,” Hwyn told me, when Paddon had left us to confer with his wife about a salve for fly-bitten beasts. “Time enough tomorrow to learn other tasks. You should rest now; I'll see you in the morning.”
“Won't you be in the Red Oak house tonight?” I said.
“No,” she said, “I must rejoin Halred now; there are other rites to be performed in the darkness, and then we spend another night among the flocks.”
“Oh,” I said, brought up short, for I had counted on having time to talk to her at night. “I should have expected that. I knew you were more a priest already than I ever was.”
“Do you think so? I had expected something to happen in the rite, more than a few ghostly words in the cave.”
“Something happened. Did you not feel it? When you sang the words of the goddess, I believed you.”
“The lament for slain lambs,” she mused. “I have always felt that I knew it from the inside, knew how the goddess must feel, if I dare say so. I have wept for the deaths that nourish life. I knew I could sing her part.”
“Not just the lament, not just the Hidden Goddess,” I said. “Halred is right. They are both in you. Go to your evening rites, and may they bear fruit for this land.”
I fell asleep to the drumming of rain on the roof of the Red Oak house. I dreamed of the rain washing the blood over the fields and down to the sleeping roots in the stony ground.
When Paddon woke me at dawn, the rain was dwindling away. We went out into the silvery mist to meet Hwyn and Trenara in the cow-byre for the morning's milking. I expected it to seem easier the second time. When the first encouraging stream of milk came foaming into the pail, I thought I would soon be done. But I kept on until my hands ached, and the cow showed no sign of drying. “This seems to take forever.”
“It's more than we had yesterday,” Paddon said, busy with another animal. “At this rate, I may even prove my raid worthwhile.” True enough, the milk we brought in that morning was half again what we'd had the evening before.
We had no time to marvel on it, though, for in my eagerness to learn the tasks of farm and herd that would earn my keep, I'd promised to help Hwyn clean out the Red Oak Clan's chicken-shed and then help Godrun in the kitchen-garden before returning to the byre for the second milking. These were children's tasks, both women had told me teasingly. Still, I had to start somewhere.
Hwyn managed to find a great deal of hilarity in my tentative way with the hens, and we both laughed to see Trenara skipping after the ungainly birds like a child after butterflies. The cleaning was dirty, mucky, hot work in the humid morning, but there was the lake to cool us afterward and the satisfaction of carrying a good-sized heap of eggs back to the kitchen—Hwyn juggling three of them, to the alarm of Girnhild and the delight of the children.
In the afternoon heat, Hwyn went off to the wooded hillsides with Halred to gather wild herbs and learn their virtues. I spent the afternoon learning when and how to pick and store beans, peas, radishes, cucumbers, onions, and strawberries. My teachers, Godrun and a gang of her nieces and nephews, were even more amused by my ignorance of the obvious than Hwyn had been by my first attempt to find an egg under a hen. Nonetheless, when we sat shelling beans into a bowl, I could recuperate some of my dignity by telling them tales of faraway places I'd saile
d to: the ancient cities of Magya, the flowery islands of Iskarron, the rich ports of the Kettrans on both sides of the western sea— the wicked Kettrans, as the children of the Folc would say, historical memory being unforgiving.
As I reached the end of a particularly satisfying tale of a tempest we'd sailed through when I was fourteen, I noticed that Ethwin had been standing by listening for some time. Over his shoulder he carried a chamois carcass; he'd shot two, he said, and thought it only right to offer one to our household after our hospitality at the feast. Still, after handing over the chamois to Godrun to present to Girnhild, he lingered about until at last he asked to speak to me apart.
“I thought your friends would be with you,” he said. “I was so glad to be done early, so I could steal a moment here.”
“Hwyn is gathering herbs with the priestess, and Trenara goes wherever she goes,” I said. “They should be back for the evening milking—I don't think they'd pass up another chance to laugh at me.”
“Will they take supper with the Red Oak Clan? Having brought the meat, I could easily stay.”
“I don't know,” I sighed. “They've been spending so much time with Halred that you might do better to feign sickness and call for the healer.”
“I was so hoping she'd be here,” he said, worrying at the slight dark down of new beard on his chin. “Ah, well. I shouldn't weary you with my complaints. You're in love with her too, aren't you?”
“What?”
“Every man that looks at Trenara must be.”
“Ah, Trenara,” I chuckled. “Don't worry, lad, I'm not your rival—not that such a poor rival as myself would worry you if I were. I grant you, she's beautiful—”
“Oh, but there's so much more than her beauty,” he said. “Her tenderness for all creatures—the way she'll touch Seeker, or one of the lambs, as gentle as—as—as starlight.”
Hidden Goddess, I thought, he's got the worst case of Trenara I've ever seen. She's turned him into a poet. Small wonder, when he's seen precious few women before that he couldn't call “cousin.” Poor boy; I'd encourage him to marry her and solve both our problems at once, but his father would kill him if he bred the elder-line of the Linden Clan with an idiot. Could the lad really be too love-struck to notice she was simple, even after so many days? Unable to think of a kind or tactful way of raising the issue, I only nodded sympathetically.
“I guess it's no use,” he said. “You three are not here to stay, and she will be off to lands I'll never see.”
“Sometimes that's the best thing that can happen to the beautiful ideal,” I said, remembering my older brother's ardent courtship of a nearly inaccessible lady he only saw in a certain port, and the mutually disappointing marriage that had come of it. “Starlight isn't made to be touched.”
“You don't understand. I could grow to be worthy of her,” he said desperately.
I gave up all hope of talking sense to him. “Ethwin, I certainly never meant to say you were anything but worthy. Contrive an excuse to drop by at milking time, and Trenara should be there. Now I must get back to the pea-pods, or Godrun and an entire clan of children will come after me.”
He returned for the milking as I bade him, just as Hwyn and Trenara came herb-scented from the cool woods. Paddon raised an eyebrow to see him mooning about while we worked, but smiled tolerantly and said nothing. Soon enough we were all too busy to mind Ethwin, for the milk seemed practically endless.
“This isn't natural,” Paddon said flatly as he set aside another pailful. “How could she be giving so much? She was nearly dry on the eve of the Rite of Increase.” He stopped, his eyes wide as full moons. “Gods on the Wheel,” he breathed.
“The rite,” I completed his thought. “What else could it be?”
“What's this?” Ethwin said, startled out of his rapt contemplation of Trenara.
“Linden Clan or not, you'd better stop loafing and help us, Ethwin,” said Paddon. “These cows must be relieved of their milk, and there seems to be no end of it.”
And so even Ethwin the Hunter sat down to the milking with us and worked diligently, scarcely raising his head to contemplate Trenara as she fed the cows bits of clover she'd stowed in her pockets.
“Where's an empty pail?” Hwyn said after a time.
“Gods, they're all full,” said Paddon. “Go in to Girnhild and put some of this milk in jugs, churns, anything.” And so, soon enough, Girnhild and Godrun were rushing back and forth, wide-eyed, stowing the milk wherever they could.
When there were no more jugs, Girnhild said, “Ethwin, why don't you run back home and have your kin bring jugs to fill? There's enough here for two houses today; it shouldn't go to waste.”
“What if they're in the same situation?” mused Hwyn.
But when Ethwin returned, he came in a knot of people, each with an empty jug: his mother, Sibfrith, his cousin Holdwin, and two skinny Linden children. “Is it true?” Sibfrith burst out. “Did the goddesses free your cattle of the curse on the land?”
“More than free of the curse,” Girnhild said, “they're flowing like spring thaw in the mountains. Have some milk, neighbor, or we'll never be through with the cheese-making.”
“Will Guthlac agree to this?” Sibfrith frowned. “He and my husband—”
“If he doesn't agree, he'll have the rough side of me to deal with,” Girnhild said. “Besides, your son has been generous to us with his extra game, and my husband swears by the return of hospitalities. I have no fear of giving this. Have you of accepting it?” She looked shrewdly, and perhaps a bit pityingly at the Linden elder's wife. Sibfrith had a defeated look about her, like a faded banner, like my mother. But she shook her head, and began filling her jugs.
“Lady Sibfrith,” Hwyn said hesitantly, “forgive my curiosity, but I thought—are not all the cattle of the Folc affected by the rite?”
“Hardly,” Holdwin answered for her. “Ours are as bad as they've ever been in the green time of year. Uncle Edwach will run mad when he hears of your good fortune.”
“Halred will love it,” Paddon muttered very low.
“I wonder,” Hwyn mused to herself, but she did not finish the sentence, nor could I catch her eye to see if her thoughts matched mine.
“I knew we should never have turned you travelers away,” Sibfrith said to Hwyn and me. “But there's no speaking to my husband at these times, no speaking to him at all. Will you forgive us and lift the curse?”
Hwyn and I stared at her, then looked at each other. Finally Hwyn spoke. “My Lady, we can surely have no ill will against you or your house after your son rescued us in the hills. Nor do we know what makes the milk flow so freely here and not from the Linden cattle. It may only be that what started here must spread slowly outward; the Red Oak holding is, after all, closest to the place where the rite was performed. Your house may not have long to wait.”
“Your words are kind,” said Sibfrith, “and yet my heart misgives me. I must speak to Mother Halred about this.”
“May I go with you?” Girnhild said.
Sibfrith smiled. “Of course, cousin. We have been too much apart these twenty years or more.”
“It's a sin that we have let it be so, and I mean to reform my ways,” Girnhild said. “Before the summer is out, we'll make our stubborn husbands sit down like neighbors at the same table, and end this foolishness.”
“If that happens, I will truly know the gods have not forgotten us,” said Sibfrith. And so they left together with Holdwin and the children, each carrying a jug of milk. Godrun dashed off to tell the rest of the household, leaving the same little gathering that had come for milking.
“Well,” Paddon said as he returned to cleaning the stalls, “I think it's time for me to eat my words: the rite had more power than I guessed.”
“I wonder whether anything else will have increased since the rite,” Hwyn said, picking up a spade to help him.
“Nothing at our house had increased,” said Ethwin without rancor.
�
�Hwyn, I would bet all my money, if I had any,” I said, “that the hens you worked among will be laying more eggs than seems quite normal, and the groves where you searched for herbs will be flourishing. The kitchen-garden where I worked without you, however, will be much the same as it has been.”
Paddon leaned on his spade. “Hwyn—you?”
“Not me, but what I carry,” Hwyn said. “I have not told anyone but Halred, and she seemed to think it unwise to tell the others. But I trust you two, Paddon and Ethwin—and I think you are not inclined to distrust me.”
“What is it?” said Ethwin.
“I carry the Eye of Night,” she said, “the Sky-Raven's Egg. I am taking it into the North, where it will hatch and change the world—in what way, I don't know.”
Paddon let out his breath slowly. “You're lucky I'm not easily given to believing old legends. I have heard dark tales of you since cradle days, Bearer of Night. Somehow, I expected you to be eight feet tall, with an army at your back and blood dripping from your claws. How much is true? Is this the end of the world?”
“I don't know,” Hwyn said. “Sometimes I think that if I don't take this egg where it must hatch, the world will burst like an overripe fruit. Then again, the world might not end outright: we might all go on living, but with the spirit dead inside us like an undelivered stillbirth. I scarcely know which to fear the more.”
“I thought you were supposed to bring the world's end, not avoid it,” said Ethwin, then hastily added, “Not that I believe it now, you know.”
Hwyn shrugged. “What do we mean by the world's end? When three tribes left their valleys to join the Linden Clan at St. Arin's Lake, it must have been the end of the world to them. Now Mother Halred sees the world's end in the dying of the customs born in that union: the shared flocks of the Folc. And if the Folc now leave Penmorrin, that will be the world's end for many of you.”
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