Had I improved with those intensified efforts? Within a few moons, I was able to divine a stone once out of every eight or so attempts. Years would pass before we wearied of the game. By then, though, Sliver and I were inseparable, and we had turned to spending our spare time speculating whether this maiden or that bled with the new moon or deciding that sprouting Minion’s name would one day shift to Stretch. Twice Sliver asked me to tell her future: Would she make the collection rounds with the other maidens at the next Feast of Purification? Who would she take as her mate?
The first time I had said, “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t decide what I know.”
“But the stones?”
I shrugged.
The second time, I knew the answer. She would take Minion. I had seen it in a vision, plain as day—the pair of them kneeling on the causeway as they joined in union, the nettle they fed into each other’s mouths to attract fertility. But to reveal this great unknown seemed almost certain to spoil the thrill of the coming years. I wagged my head without committing to whether I was unwilling or unable to name her mate. She did not push, and it made me think, same as me, she sensed the downside in denying the speculation, the longing, the discovery that would come.
* * *
—
As Seconds and I stand in dappled sunlight, the buzz of the hive filling our ears, excitement ripples through me and I know I was right not to have named Sliver’s mate.
“You see more than stones,” Seconds says.
I nod, because I understand that Seconds wants mystery and magic. I can tell this boy is open to the astonishing.
He breaks into his wide smile.
* * *
—
At long last, the work of seeding the wheat is complete and Hunter dismisses the hands from the fields midday. “Enjoy your afternoon,” he says, daring to sound generous when he is not, when he is only upholding tradition because a druid lurks at Black Lake. Even the hands too young to have toiled under Old Smith know Hunter’s tightfistedness. “Miser,” they say and, “stingy coot.” When my father’s father was First Man, he suspended fieldwork three days and allotted each hand a cask of mead from his private store once Mother Earth held the seed. Still, with our storage vessels near empty and the extra mouth of a greedy druid to feed, my mother and I need the afternoon.
We roam from the clearing in pursuit of sorrel, dandelion, and nettle, even ramsons—if Mother Earth wills it—so delicious stirred into soup, mixed into hard cheese. I think of how I want the Romans to descend, how I count each passing day. I wonder, has it occurred to Fox that, with his threat, he planted in me a fierce longing for the very men he so loathes? Just this morning, he leaned close, as though I might have forgotten I have only until the end of Hope. He knew to keep his voice low as he said, “Another day come and gone, Hobble. That leaves seven.” I hate how well he deciphers me, how he knows I have not breathed a word to my parents about his threat of eighteen days.
As the distance between Fox and my mother and me lengthens, I breathe in sunshine, breathe out worry. I lighten, loosen among the waking earth—shoots just poking through leaf litter, leaves unfurling tender and yellow green.
“Hunter doesn’t like Fox staying with us,” I say.
“Hunter clings to his position, his wealth,” my mother says. “It makes him unwell, the way he clings.”
“You can see it in his flushed face. Sign of a strained heart.”
She nods, and then a few steps farther, she says, “Always striving, always fraught, always scheming. It’s the way of ambitious men.”
At the border of the woodland, I spy a span of ramsons—white, starlike flowers and elongated greenery. I crouch, touch my lips, the earth, and then ease a narrow bulb from moist soil. My mother rests a hand on my back a moment, and I know she seeks the warmth of me, the life of me—her daughter, both her worry and her joy.
She squats beside me, and as we unearth the bulbs, I feel an urge to say Seconds’s name, even to hear it said, and that urge nudges me to say, “Did you hear that the Carpenters have fleas?”
“I saw Carpenter this morning. He said that without your help, Seconds would’ve been up half the night.”
“I’ll bring him more balm.”
My mother hesitates in her gathering, and I await some comment about Seconds, but she says, “You’ll outdo me as a healer.”
Though she has dropped the topic of Seconds, I feel a warm glow.
“When I was your age, Crone had only been teaching me for three years.” She puts her palm on my cheek. “And you have your gift.”
According to my father, her eyes—blue and just now as steady as a hive’s hum—exactly match my own.
“Come,” she says. “We’ll climb Edge. I want to show you something there.”
* * *
—
At Edge’s summit, I scan the purple-gray highlands in the distance. The wind gusts, and I spread my arms wide, trapping the burst of air with my skin cape, and feel as though I might be lifted from Edge. I leap, glance back over my shoulder, wondering if my mother feels it, too. She opens her own cape, lets it billow. She shuts her eyes, tilts her face into rushing wind.
Eventually we move on and come to a stand of beech shadowing a tremendous bed of sweet violets. We sit on our heels, my hands drifting through the heart-shaped leaves and lobed, purple blooms, the miracle of so large a bed. And then suddenly I grow aware of a shallow sort of pulse on the small of my back, almost like the crescent there contains a heart beating out the passing moments of a life. Then the pulse retreats.
“Arc planted them for me,” she says.
I twist on my haunches so that I am facing her. She does not speak of Arc. That time I dared to prod, she said, “Never mind,” and left to collect wood from under the eaves.
“It was the Feast of Purification,” she says. “It was a gift.”
If ever I am to solve the riddle of her—the way she holds herself distant from my father—I must wade carefully. “Everyone says he was nice.”
She nods.
“What was he like?”
“Observant. Humble, too, like your father.” She grows quiet.
“What else?”
“He liked long walks and quiet nights beneath the stars.”
She smiles, and I feel uneasy, as if by encouraging her I am being disloyal to my father. “Were the sweet violets from the same year as the amulet?”
She nods.
She chose Arc over my father, then. I suppose it is hurt on his behalf that drives me to say, “You made an offering of it at the bog,” and, in doing so, remind her of the lie she lets me and everyone else believe.
How do I know the truth? It came to me in a vision when I was a small child, so long ago that it seems something I have always known.
In the scene that had opened before me, a boy on the cusp of manhood—my father—stirred the debris of the woodland floor with the toe of his shoe. The red gritstone of Edge soared behind him, also the black, yawning mouth of the old mine. His gaze was downcast, scrutinizing the leaf litter and twigs he overturned. He and I have often searched for the nuggets of blue-green ore left behind by the old people who mined Edge. And so it was with good reason that I knew the boy was looking for the ore. He searched, without diversion, until a small patch of light glinting from a low branch of an elm caught his eye. He took a few steps and saw the light was reflected sunshine, that it shone from a magpie nest. He walked closer and reached into the nest. By feel alone he knew what he had found. Even as he freed the glinting thing from yellow grass, twigs, and mud, he collapsed inward, surrendering to the belly wallop of having found the amulet. My mother had not thought the amulet precious and offered it to Mother Earth. No, she had tossed a worthless trinket to the rot of the woodland floor for a magpie to find. He raised an arm to hurl the bit of silver, then lowered it and put th
e amulet inside his pocket where the silver would no more glint in the sun.
* * *
—
My mother keeps her focus on the sweet violets, her lips a thin line. I teeter on pressing, on telling her what I know, but she tents her fingers on the earth as though feeling faint. In the end, I say, “Mole gave me a dragonfly last Feast of Purification.” It was not unusual—a youth not yet old enough for the feast giving a token to a maiden.
“Practice,” my mother says, “for the years to come.”
“Moon gave me a feather.”
“Oh.”
“Seconds gave me a spoon for measuring, just yesterday though, in return for the chickweed balm.” I slip a small wooden spoon with a deep bowl from my pocket.
She takes it, turns it over in her hands. “You have admirers.”
I smile. “Seconds is the fastest.”
“He was close behind you at the Harvest Feast games.”
“He slowed down at the end.” Seconds and I had finished well ahead of the pack, a near tie.
“On purpose?”
I had wondered myself, at least until we had walked together to the honeycomb. “Yes.”
“It’s sweet, really, letting you win.”
“He’s nice.” I run a finger along a violet stem, keep my gaze lowered. “He said I should be called ‘Swift.’”
“You’d like that?”
I look up, shake my head. “I like being Hobble.”
“I like you being Hobble, too.”
That pretty day among the purple blooms, I had momentarily forgotten the uneven gait that decided my name, also that a druid called Fox waited at home. But neither the glory of the waking earth, nor the uplift of caught wind, not even the promise of a wooden spoon can obscure the fast approach of Hope for very long. “I have this memory,” I say, “or maybe I made it up. I don’t know. I have this idea that you told me something once.”
She nods slowly, carefully.
“It’s about the harvest when the wheat rotted, when you were a girl.”
Her whole face stills, then falls.
“It’s true, then.” I feel my skin prickle and my heart begin to race. “A druid sacrificed a blind boy to the gods.”
“We called him Lark,” she whispers and the pain in her face is like a hundred sighs. “He was Walker’s son.”
“It’s why she walks,” I say, “why she doesn’t sleep.”
“We used to call her Willow.”
“No one says a word?”
“We made a pledge afterward—each of us. We would not dwell on it, would not speak of it.”
My shoulders lift that this story stays in darkness. How can no one have made the smallest mention of Lark to me?
At Black Lake we do not say human sacrifice. Instead we use the phrase old ways, as in, “Those old ways are long gone from our traditions.” And I had found comfort in that phrase—proof that such brutality belonged to a distant time, proof that my mother had never claimed a blind boy’s throat was slit. But the phrase, it now seems, was preferred because it helped the bog dwellers pretend.
“Hobble—” She takes my hands.
I make the smallest nod, sparing her the heartache of having to explain what I have just now figured out: Only a cruel person would needlessly divulge to me the slit throat of a runt. It is why I do not know the story of Lark and Willow, who became Walker after the slaughter that would keep her restless until the end of time.
I had said, “I like being Hobble,” and I want it to be true. Just now, though, I feel only the terror of being Hobble—a prophetess yet to produce Romans, a maiden who clip-clops unevenly through the fields.
9.
HOBBLE
As night falls my mother and I attend to remedies and my father to ironwork. We grind and mix and sharpen in silence while Fox remains on his knees beneath Mother Earth’s cross, his eyes pressed shut. But then suddenly they flick open and he cocks an ear. I hear it, too—the distant rumble of hooves thwacking earth. He leaps to his feet. “The Romans!” Then, eyes lit on me, he commands, “Hide my horse.”
When I do not immediately budge, he says, “Now!” and I drop my pestle. He conceals his robe with a skin cape and dashes through the doorway. I follow, a step behind, intent on preventing the easy discovery of so fine a horse—evidence of a druid nearby. He heads for the cover of the woodland, and I to the sheep pen out back of the Shepherd roundhouse, where the horse is lashed. As I run, I hear a new sound in the approaching rumble—the clang of metal on metal. Swords clapped against shields, I think. An effort to raise alarm.
The beast’s ears are pricked. He whinnies, paws the earth. As he sniffs the air, he pulls the slack from the reins securing him to the pen. I unlash him, and he eagerly keeps pace as I sprint the several hundred strides to Sacred Grove, that secluded place where we carry out the sacrifices that appease the gods. I knot the horse to a rowan there, pat his hindquarters twice, before racing back to the clearing.
I count eight Roman warriors, just as my vision foretold. My eyes dart from bronze helmet to chest armor to the hobnailed sole of a leather-encased foot, all of it appearing exactly as I had seen that day the sorrel blazed green.
I skim the bog dwellers filing into the clearing and dropping to bended knee as though they consider the Romans emissaries of the gods. I find my parents at the same moment my father sees me. He pats the earth beside him, and I skitter to the spot.
The warriors speak to each other in a gentle language at odds with their rigid faces and limbs. One of them—swarthy like the rest, except that a fresh scar extends from behind his ear to the base of his neck—bellows orders in our language: “Keep your hands in front. Stay on your knees.”
He circles the kneeling bog dwellers on his horse and calls out, “First Man, show yourself.”
Hunter continues kneeling, head bowed, until the Roman bellows, “First Man!”
As Hunter rises, I look away from his quaking knees.
“A pair of prisoners escaped from Viriconium last night,” the Roman barks.
I wonder if those escaped prisoners might have been rebel tribesmen rounded up in the western highlands. If they are, I hope they have slipped far beyond the Romans’ reach.
“We are loyal,” Hunter says. “We send the wheat we owe your emperor.”
“My emperor?” The Roman raises a spear. “Not yours?”
Hunter shuffles backward. “My emperor.”
“Name him!”
Hunter’s mouth gapes open.
The Roman touches the point of a spear to Hunter’s chest.
My father lifts his face. “Our emperor is Emperor Nero,” he says.
The crack of a smile appears on the Roman’s mouth.
“We harbor no rebels here,” my father continues. “We have no quarrel with the Romans. We live in isolation, content to harvest wheat for our emperor.”
Hunter puffs up his chest and blurts, “I am First Man.” He glares at my father. “He does not speak on our behalf.”
With that, the Roman’s eyes narrow, sweep the breadth of us. “Return to your homes!” he commands, and then, as we scurry toward our roundhouses, “Search them!”
Warriors dismount, head first to the Tanner roundhouse, which stands at the far edge of the roundhouses from my own.
As my father pulls the door nearly shut behind the three of us, I hurl myself against his chest, but he eases me away. “There’s no time,” he says.
My mother glances around the room, indicates Fox’s spare white robe, hanging just inside the entryway of the alcove where he sleeps, and I understand that we must hide the evidence of our unwanted guest. I pause mid-reach, hesitant to touch a druid’s robe, then lift it from the peg. She opens the chest at the foot of the sleeping pallet, then thinks better than to stash the robe in a place large enough to entice a
warrior to look inside. We stuff the bundle into a small cauldron instead. My father peeks around the door into the clearing. “They’ll be a while yet,” he says.
I hear pottery shatter.
“They’re leaving the Hunters,” my father says. “They’ve helped themselves to a pair of pheasants, set nothing aflame.”
My mother puts the heel of her palm against her forehead, says, “Hear me, Protector,” as is our tradition in beseeching the god.
“Devout,” my father snaps.
She lowers her hand.
“Build up the fire,” he says. “Hobble, fill eight mugs with wheaten beer.”
As my mother tops embers with kindling and blows, I assemble mugs and pour beer. My father slides the dagger from his belt, runs his thumb across the blade, returns it to his hip. I hear a rhythmic sort of whooshing. I strain, trying to hear more, to decipher what the source might be. But the sound is only fear—my pounding heart, the rush of blood.
The clamor of eight warriors grows near, and my father shifts to our open door. They push past him, oblivious to the extended arm ushering them inside, twice circle the roundhouse, peering behind faded partitions and, in two instances, yanking them from the rafters. My father gestures toward the benches around the fire, and my mother brings the men the mugs I filled. Their comfort as they settle suggests that sitting around a tribesman’s fire and drinking his beer is nothing new. They speak in their strange tongue, laugh, drain the mugs, hold them aloft as my mother pours a second round, and I am struck that they seem little different from the men I have known all my life.
In time, the scarred Roman notices the herb-hung rafters and indicates that my mother should inspect the festering abscess tucked behind his ear at the far reach of the scar. He keeps his gaze on her as she prepares the purple loosestrife poultice that will draw the pus from the wound. In her small movements and rolled-forward shoulders, I see her uneasiness with the way he watches. Suddenly, my father lifts his dagger from his belt. He thrusts it into a tabletop with such force that it remains erect, quivering over the lodged tip. Dark eyes flicker to the knife. Hands flit to sword hilts. The scarred Roman makes as if to get up.
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