A Knot in the Grain

by Robin McKinley

  Erana straightened her spine, and held up her bundle in her two hands. She turned to her supercilious guide and said, “I will need hot water and cold water.” She gazed directly into his face as she spoke, while he looked over her head. He turned, nonetheless, and went out.

  Erana approached the bed and looked down; the man sitting by it made no move to give her room, but sat stiffly where he was. The prince’s face was white to the lips, and there were hollows under his eyes and cheekbones; and then, as she watched, a red flush broke out, and sweat stained his cheeks and he moaned.

  The guide returned, bearing two pitchers. He put them on the floor, and turned to go. Erana said, “Wait,” and he took two more steps before he halted, but he did halt, with his back to her as she knelt by the pitchers and felt the water within them. One was tepid; the other almost tepid. “This will not do,” Erana said angrily, and the man turned around, as if interested against his will that she dared protest. She picked up the pitchers and with one heave threw their contents over the man who had fetched them. He gasped, and his superior look disappeared, and his face grew mottled with rage. “I asked for hot water and cold water. You will bring it, as your king commanded you to obey me. With it you will bring me two bowls and two cups. Go swiftly and return more swiftly. Go now.” She turned away from him, and after a moment she heard him leave. His footsteps squelched.

  He returned as quickly as she had asked; water still rolled off him and splashed to the floor as he moved. He carried two more pitchers; steam rose from the one, and dew beaded the other. Behind him a woman in a long skirt carried the bowls and cups.

  “You will move away from the bed, please,” Erana said, and the man who had not made room for her paused just long enough to prove that he paused but not so long as to provoke any reaction, stood up, and walked to the window. She poured some hot water into one bowl, and added several dark green leaves that had once been long and spiky but had become bent and bruised during their journey from the witch’s garden; and she let them steep till the sharp smell of them hung like a green fog in the high-ceilinged room. She poured some of the infusion into a cup, and raised the prince’s head from the pillow, and held the cup under his nostrils. He breathed the vapor, coughed, sighed; and his eyes flickered open. “Drink this,” Erana whispered, and he bowed his head and drank.

  She gave him a second cup some time later, and a third as twilight fell; and then, as night crept over them, she sat at his bedside and waited, and as she had nothing else to do, she listened to her thoughts; and her thoughts were of Touk and Maugie, and of the king’s sentence hanging over her head like the stone ceiling, resting on the prince’s every shallow breath.

  All that night they watched, and candlelight gave the prince’s wan face a spurious look of health. But at dawn, when Erana stood stiffly and touched his forehead, it was cool. He turned a little away from her, and tucked one hand under his cheek, and lay quietly; and his breathing deepened and steadied into sleep.

  Erana remained standing, staring dumbly down at her triumph. The door of the room opened, and her uncooperative guide of the day before entered, bearing on a tray two fresh pitchers of hot and cold water, and bread and cheese and jam and meat. Erana brewed a fresh minty drink with the cold water, and gave it to the prince with hands that nearly trembled. She said to the man who had been her guide, “The prince will sleep now, and needs only the tending that any patient nurse may give. May I rest?”

  The man, whose eyes now dwelt upon her collarbone, bowed, and went out, and she followed him to a chamber not far from the prince’s. There was a bed in it, and she fell into it, clutching her herb bundle like a pillow, and fell fast asleep.

  She continued to assist in the tending of the prince since it seemed to be expected of her, and since she gathered that she should be honored by the trust in her skill she had so hardly earned. Within a fortnight the prince was walking, slowly but confidently; and Erana began to wonder how long she was expected to wait upon him, and then she wondered what she might do with herself once she was freed of that waiting.

  There was no one at the court she might ask her questions. For all that she had been their prince’s salvation, they treated her as distantly as they had from the beginning, albeit now with greater respect. She had received formal thanks from the king, whose joy at his son’s health regained made no more mark on his expression and the tone of his voice than fear of his son’s death had done. The queen had called Erana to her private sitting room to receive her thanks. The princess had been there too; she had curtseyed to Erana, but she had not smiled, any more than her parents had done.

  And so Erana continued from day to day, waiting for an unknown summons; or perhaps for the courage to ask if she might take her leave.

  A month after the prince arose from his sickbed he called his first Royal Address since his illness had struck him down. The day before the Address the royal heralds had galloped the royal horses through the streets of the king’s city, telling everyone who heard them that the prince would speak to his people on the morrow; and when at noon on the next day he stood in the balcony overlooking the courtyard Erana had crossed to enter the palace for the first time, a mob of expectant faces tipped up their chins to watch him.

  Erana had been asked to attend the royal speech. She stood in the high-vaulted hall where she had first met the king, a little behind the courtiers who now backed the prince, holding his hands up to his people, on the balcony. The king and queen stood near her; the princess sat gracefully at her ease in a great wooden chair lined with cushions a little distance from the open balcony. It seemed to Erana, she thought with some puzzlement, that they glanced at her often, although with their usual impassive expressions; and there was tension in the air that reminded her of the first time she had entered this hall, to tell the king that she knew a little of herbs and fevers.

  Erana clasped her hands together. She supposed her special presence had been asked that she might accept some sort of royal thanks in sight of the people; she, the forest girl, who was still shy of people in groups. The idea that she might have to expose herself to the collective gaze of an audience of hundreds made her very uncomfortable; her clasped hands felt cold. She thought, It will please these people if I fail to accept their thanks with dignity, and so I shall be dignified. I will look over the heads of the audience, and pretend they are flowers in a field.

  She did not listen carefully to what the prince was saying. She noticed that the rank of courtiers surrounding the prince had parted, and the king stepped forward as if to join his son on the balcony. But he paused beside Erana, and seized her hands, and led or dragged her beside him; her hands were pinched inside his fingers, and he pulled at her awkwardly, so that she stumbled. They stood on the balcony together, and she blinked in the sunlight; she looked at the prince, and then turned her head back to look at the king, still holding her hands prisoned as if she might run away. She did not look down, at the faces beyond the balcony.

  “I offered my daughter’s hand in marriage and half my kingdom to the leech who cured my son.” The king paused, and a murmur, half surprise and half laughter, wrinkled the warm noontide air. He looked down at Erana, and still his face was blank. “I wish now to adjust the prize and payment for the service done me and my people and my kingdom: my son’s hand in marriage to the leech who saved him, and beside him, the rule of all my kingdom.”

  The prince reached across and disentangled one of her hands from his father’s grip, so that she stood stretched between them, like game on a pole brought home from the hunt. The people in the courtyard were shouting; the noise hurt her head, and she felt her knees sagging, and the pull on her hands, and then a hard grip on her upper arms to keep her standing; and then all went black.

  She came to herself lying on a sofa. She could hear the movements of several people close beside her, but she was too tired and troubled to wish to open her eyes just yet on the world of the prince’s betrothed; and so she lay quietly.

&n
bsp; “I think they might have given her some warning,” said one voice. “She does have thoughts of her own.”

  A laugh. “Does she? What makes you so sure? A little nobody like this—I’m surprised they went through with it. She’s not the type to insist about anything. She creeps around like a mouse, and never speaks unless spoken to. Not always then.”

  “She spoke up for herself to Roth.”

  “Roth is a fool. He would not wear the king’s livery at all if his mother were not in waiting to the queen … And she’s certainly done nothing of the sort since. Give her a few copper coins and a new shawl … and a pat on the head … and send her on her way.”

  “She did save the prince’s life.”

  A snort. “I doubt it. Obviously the illness had run its course; she just happened to have poured some ridiculous quack remedy down his throat at the time.”

  There was a pause, and then the first voice said, “It is a pity she’s so plain. One wants a queen to set a certain standard.…”

  Erana shivered involuntarily, and the voice stopped abruptly. Then she moaned a little, as if only just coming to consciousness, and opened her eyes.

  Two of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting bent over her. She recognized the owner of the second voice immediately from the sour look on her face. The kindlier face said to her, “Are you feeling a little better now? May we bring you anything?”

  Erana sat up slowly. “Thank you. Would you assist me to my room, please?”

  She easily persuaded them to leave her alone in her own room. At dinnertime a man came to inquire if she would attend the banquet in honor of the prince’s betrothal? She laughed a short laugh and said that she felt still a trifle overcome by the news of the prince’s betrothal, and desired to spend her evening resting quietly, and could someone perhaps please bring her a light supper?

  Someone did, and she sat by the window watching the twilight fade into darkness, and the sounds of the banquet far away from her small room drifting up to her on the evening breeze. I have never spoken to the prince alone, she thought; I have never addressed him but as a servant who does what she may for his health and comfort; nor has he spoken to me but as a master who recognizes a servant who has her usefulness.

  Dawn was not far distant when the betrothal party ended. She heard the last laughter, the final cheers, and silence. She sighed and stood up, and stretched, for she was stiff with sitting. Slowly she opened the chest where she kept her herb kerchief and the shabby clothes she had travelled in. She laid aside the court clothes she had never been comfortable in, for all that they were plain and simple compared with those the others wore, and dressed herself in the skirt and blouse that she and Maugie had made. She ran her fingers over the patches in the skirt that house building had caused. She hesitated, her bundle in hand, and then opened another, smaller chest, and took out a beautiful shawl, black, embroidered in red and gold, and with a long silk fringe. This she folded gently, and wrapped inside her kerchief.

  Touk had taught her to walk quietly, that they might watch birds in their nests without disturbing them, and creep close to feeding deer. She slipped into the palace shadows, and then into the shadows of the trees that edged the courtyard; once she looked up, over her shoulder, to the empty balcony that opened off the great hall. The railings of the ornamental fence that towered grandly over the gate and guardhouse were set so far apart that she could squeeze between them, pulling her bundle after her.

  She did not think they would be sorry to see her go; she could imagine the king’s majestic words: She has chosen to decline the honor we would do her, feeling herself unworthy; and having accepted our grateful thanks for her leechcraft, she has withdrawn once again to her peaceful country obscurity. Our best wishes go with her.… But still she walked quietly, in the shadows, and when dawn came, she hid under a hedge in a garden, and slept, as she had often done before. She woke up once, hearing the hoofs of the royal heralds rattle past; and she wondered what news they brought. She fell asleep again, and did not waken till twilight; and then she crept out and began walking again.

  She knew where she was going this time, and so her journey back took less time than her journey away had done. Still she was many days on the road, and since she found that her last experience of them had made her shy of humankind, she walked after sunset and before dawn, and followed the stars across open fields instead of keeping to the roads, and raided gardens and orchards for her food, and did not offer her skills as a leech for an honest meal or bed.

  The last night she walked into the dawn and past it, and the sun rose in the sky, and she was bone-weary and her feet hurt, and her small bundle weighed like rock. But here was her forest again, and she could not stop. She went past Maugie’s garden, although she saw the wisp of smoke lifting from the chimney, and followed the well-known track to Touk’s pool. She was too tired to be as quiet as she should be, and when she emerged from the trees, there was nothing visible but the water. She looked around and saw that Touk had laid the path around the shore of the pool that he had promised, and now smooth grey stones led the way to the steep steps before Touk’s front door.

  As she stood at the water’s edge, her eyes blurred, and her hands, crossed over the bundle held to her breast, fell to her sides. Then there was a commotion in the pool, and Touk stood up, water streaming from him, and a strand of waterweed trailing over one pointed ear. Even the center of the pool for Touk was only thigh-deep, and he stood, riffling the water with his fingers, watching her.

  “Will you marry me?” she said.

  He smiled, his lovely, gap-toothed smile, and he blinked his turquoise eyes at her, and pulled the waterweed out of his long hair.

  “I came back just to ask you that. If you say no, I will go away again.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t go away. My answer is yes.”

  And he waded over to the edge of the pool and seized her in his wet arms and kissed her; and she threw her arms eagerly around his neck, and dropped her bundle. It opened in the water like a flower, and the herbs floated away across the surface, skittering like water bugs; and the embroidered silk shawl sank to the bottom.

  Buttercups

  There was an old farmer who married a young wife. He had been married once before, in his own youth, but his wife had died of a fever after they had been together only a year. In his grief the farmer forgot about all other human creatures and set himself only to his farm; and because there was both strength and fire in him, his farm bloomed and blossomed, and he himself did not know that his heart held its winter about it.

  But all winters end, and the farmer’s heart was secretly warm within its winter, and one day it melted: at the sight of a young girl at the town well. The girl was nothing like his first wife; it was not memories she aroused, but something new. Some green spring woke in him in a moment, and yet he had had no warning of it. He thought that he felt no different than he had for twenty years; that the coldness under his breastbone was an old scar, with nothing living and stirring beneath it; that some things only came once in a man’s life.

  And yet it was not the girl herself that had first caught his eye, but her horse. He was driving in to market as he did at this time every week, from spring through autumn, and his road lay past the town well, where there were very often people. Sometimes there were people he knew, and he would speak to them as he passed; for he seldom paused. But this day the well was almost deserted, and his eye swept over it and made to go on, but for the curve of a chestnut neck and the prance of chestnut forelegs. A beautiful young mare, he thought, looking at her appreciatively, with a sparkle to her and a kind eye. And then his eye was distracted, and then caught firmly, by a long chestnut braid of human hair falling over a human shoulder, as the girl bent to reach her brimming bucket. And she glanced up at the sound of the farmer’s wagon wheels, and their eyes met, and she smiled.

  He could not think of anything but how he would see her again. He was a polite man, and he knew nothing of this girl; he knew
he should not have stopped or spoken, but he did both. He had enough sense remaining to him not to ask bluntly and immediately what her name was and where she lived; but he was unaccustomed to making conversation at any time, the use of speech was reserved for weather, crops, prices, and occasionally health; and he was confused and distressed by his own wish to speak to this girl he knew nothing of, but that she was as beautiful in her way as her mare, and had as kind an eye. Awkwardly he offered what he might have said to an acquaintance he had no immediate business with, that it was a fine morning, wasn’t it, preventing himself with some difficulty from jumping down from his wagon and helping her with her water bucket, which she needed no help with. She fastened it to a knot on her saddle-skirt with a deftness of long practice that he knew he could not have matched, even had he been able to recognize how it fastened at all; and he watched her take down the long thin-lidded bucket from the other side of the saddle and dip it in its turn. He was dumbly grateful for the extra moments of her company, but desire to make a good impression and frustration at his inability to think of a way to do so made his hands close anxiously on his own reins, till the placid beast between the shafts of his wagon put its ears back and shook its head to remind him of its existence.

  She agreed that it was a fine morning, but went on, easily, as if conversation with tongue-tied old men were pleasant and natural and ordinary, almost as if she were as glad of him as he was of her, that the land here was so much different from the mountains to which she was accustomed that all weathers seemed to lie differently against her skin; that a really fine day here in the lowlands seemed to go on forever because you could see so far away. The farmer, bemused by such richness of response to his gruff opening, grasped at an opportunity as it sailed by and said that he had not seen her before. No; she was recently come with her parents and younger brothers and sisters; but they had been travelling for some time, and everyone liked this town, and her father had been offered work almost at once, and so they thought they would stay for a time.