I hauled the skin-cape bundle to the door, briefly rested my forehead against the wall’s wattle and daub. I squatted at the quern, anticipating the comfort of a familiar task, but I felt my father’s eyes and looked up. His thoughts came into my mind at that moment. Like a thunderclap, I knew his frustration that my face appeared as blank as snow, his disgruntlement that I appeared unable to prophesy the futility or necessity or folly of a scheme about which I knew nothing beyond a sharpened blade.
Early this morning, before the sun had fully risen, that scheme became less opaque. “Hobble,” my father said, “the tribute vessel needs to be emptied.” His concern with chores seemed out of place on such a morning, but after a moment, I understood the task was an excuse to direct me away from the roundhouse and Fox. Then, sure enough, as I tipped the slop into the communal pit, my father appeared. From beneath the waist of his breeches, he slid the dagger. “No harm will come to you,” he said. “You have my word.”
“You’ll kill him?” My head wagged wariness. “But the gods?” Somehow a dagger drawn across a druid’s throat seemed a greater offense than a goblet of tainted mead.
“I forged them a thousand daggers.”
I stared a moment. Did the gods even know about those daggers? Did they care? And what was the point of wondering when no number of forged daggers could make up for the single one concealed at his hip?
“I can’t see that there’s any other way,” he said.
I threw my arms around him and felt his fingers thread my hair, the palm holding me close.
* * *
—
Fox hoists himself into the crotch of the ancient oak, severs a globe of mistletoe with the sickle, lets it fall to the linen a pair of maidens hold open below. He fashions a wreath from the mistletoe, sets it on his head, and puts both hands on the altar. “We have become diseased, a people that turns away from our ancestral ways, that wrongly collaborates with our enemies. The whole head of our people is sick, and the whole heart faint.”
He pauses, scowls his loathing for the lot of us, and we shift, minutely drawing away.
“But the gods are merciful,” he says. “They have breathed into the ears of my brethren, instructing us in making amends. We will earn their favor and then, on the battlefield, rid ourselves of the plague that has brought us low.”
Fox knows my prophecy and yet he proceeds. For a year now, the tribesmen’s small resentments have been fed by the druids, transforming a breeze into a gale. Would any druid put himself in the path of that gale, that seething multitude of incited tribesmen? How much easier to proceed—eyes shut, hands over ears—than to take on the tempest they themselves have made. I suppose early on the words were measured, sincere, that with each retelling the story of our enslavement grew more deeply etched into the speaker’s mind, that at some point it became impossible to conceive of that gale as anything other than a righteous opportunity to sweep Britannia clean. To put themselves in its path is an idea as inconceivable as a hatched chick returned to inside its shell.
“With blood spilled onto stone altars,” he says, “we wash clean our corrupt souls and earn benevolence.”
Not a single chin nods in shared opinion. We stand united, leery of spilled blood when there is no ewe.
“On occasions, such as now, when the situation is dire and we have sunk low, the sacrifice demanded of us is of real consequence. Not a boar with a deformed hoof. Not even a ewe with a record of twins.”
I look from Hunter to Tanner to Carpenter, from clenching jaw to pursing lips to narrowing eyes. My father’s hand shifts to his hip.
“On this day,” Fox says, “our offering will be of the highest worth.”
My father grips the dagger at his hip, and I feel a shift among the others—bodies tightening.
“The gods demand the firstborn of your First Man,” Fox says.
Heads turn in my family’s direction. My father pulls the dagger from his hip, holds it out in front, both hands wrapping the grip, the glinting blade cutting the air without the slightest quiver of uncertainty.
My mother’s eyes gleam in terror. Her mouth gapes open, shuts, a fish gulping for air.
The bog dwellers part for their First Man, clearing a path to the stone altar, to Fox on the far side.
“Kill him,” I whisper.
My mother pitches forward, cries, “Wait, wait!”
She throws her arms around my father’s waist. She clings to him, clings with all her might, holds him rooted to earth slick with black moss.
“He means to slaughter our daughter,” my father hollers, though she surely understands.
He wrenches his torso to free himself, but still she clings. “My daughter.” Her voice breaks. “Mine and Arc’s.”
My father halts.
She unwraps herself, slower than a drifting cloud. Then she beckons, quaking fingers calling me.
I shuffle near, and she reaches. As she touches the pair of clasps securing the front of my dress to the back at one shoulder, the crescent on the small of my back pulses its strange beat. She unfastens a single clasp, and then the remaining three. I keep my arms tight against my chest to hold the wool in place as the back of my dress falls, revealing a reddish-purple crescent—that long-held secret between my mother and me.
Necks crane. Bog dwellers look from my back to my mother. She draws a fingertip over her cheek in the shape of a crescent. I swallow dumbfounded and wonder how, with my tendency to wonder, to prod, to surmise, I had never thought to ask the reason my mother’s first mate was called Arc. With that reminder of the stain that marked his cheek, the bog dwellers swallow and nod recognition, agreement. Yes, that reddish-purple crescent on the small of my back exactly matches Arc’s.
My mother collapses to her knees. My father reels. His arms drop. The dagger hangs inert at his side.
32.
DEVOUT
Devout took Young Smith as her mate three days after Truth divined that she would bear a child in Growth. She had noticed Smith’s gait lighten over the moon since, noticed, too, that he seldom put down the hammer to massage the shoulder that seemed now to bother him less. When they walked together, he called out to Young Hunter or Singer and put his hand on the small of her back, as though to remind them, and perhaps himself, that he had succeeded in taking her as his mate. He laughed often and wholeheartedly, and streaks of white now radiated from the corners of his eyes, marking the tiny crevices of skin hidden from the sun.
She put her fingers on the streaks and told him they were there. It was the sort of thing a mate should do, and he reached for her as he often did, pulling her close. There was a fleeting moment of regret that she had touched the streaks. She whisked away the realization—as she did when she caught Arc’s name nearly fallen from her lips, or when she lay in Young Smith’s embrace, still warm with exertion, and knew she had closed her eyes to him and let herself believe he was Arc.
At mealtimes Cook served Young Smith, then his mother, and then the two remaining mates of his brothers, after that their broods. Devout was served last, for she was a hand by birth and a hand she remained. It might have meant she chewed gristle and sucked marrow and pried scant meat from bones, that those meals when Cook was careless doling out the portions, she went without a spoonful of chickweed. But Young Smith passed from his plate to hers drumsticks and thighs, tender slices of loin, the thickest fillets. She told him that it was unnecessary, that even marrow was a treat. “You’re my mate,” he said. “You’re a Smith.”
Once she said, “Your mother doesn’t scold anymore when you give me the choicest cuts. She gave me a length of cloth—woven from dyed wool. She went to Old Hunter on my behalf.”
His mother had petitioned Old Hunter, saying that Devout was Black Lake’s healer, a prize the bog dwellers could not do without. It was not right, her in the fields daybreak to nightfall, without a moment to prepare her remedies
. How would Old Hunter manage without the dandelion draft that kept his face from bloating red like a ewe’s forgotten teats? Eventually, he relented, and Devout was told she could leave the fields midafternoon.
“Has she changed toward me?” Devout said.
Young Smith took Devout’s hand, enclosed it in the envelope of his palms. “Only the Hunters are above us and only because my father and brothers had the courage they lack. I owe it to my father and brothers to earn back the title of First Man. You can help by having the bearing of a Smith.”
“I’m a hand.”
“And so you must stand taller.”
The bog dwellers would not be fooled by squared shoulders, a long neck. She would work in fields as was her lot, until she grew weak and Old Hunter decided her time of rest had come. It was a possibility, now that she had kin to feed her. Unlike Old Man, she would not take her last breaths in the fields.
“The Smiths will rise again,” Young Smith said. His gaze was steady, his focus beyond her.
She slid her hand from between his palms. She could not explain herself if she were asked, only that an uneasiness had come to her that he should want more, that he should plot. “We have enough.”
His gaze persisted, steady on some moment that was not now.
“Our pallet is heaped with furs. I have a length of fine cloth. We eat meat.”
“You’ll have more.” He took her hand back into the envelope of his palms.
* * *
—
She went often to the bog, more often than was right, and always at nightfall, when the bog dwellers stayed close to their fires. She went without rushlight, prodding roots and rocks with the toe of a shoe and curled into a ball at the causeway’s farthest reach, weeping and shuddering no different from the earliest days after Arc disappeared, no different from the nightfall before. Eventually she collapsed onto her side and stared into the mist’s thick murk. The exhaustion that accompanied the blubbering had become a prerequisite to her desired state of being neither awake nor asleep. She navigated the narrow band in between, a liminal place where Arc fully inhabited her mind—his long face and watchful eyes, his pale lashes and eyebrows, the gentle curve of the crescent marking his cheek, the fine hairs that matted against the damp of his neck. She could conjure him and with her mind so weary, she knew the heat of his breath on her cheek, the lightness of his palm on her back.
Nightfall came earlier, an infinitesimal progression, unremarkable for days, and then the cumulative shift, when she realized it, was as astonishing to her as waking to the earth blanketed in white. It was like that on the causeway, too. She looked into the mist, recalling the minutia of his face one nightfall. The next it was his hands. After that she remembered the weight. She felt quite distinctly the mound at the base of his thumb.
By daylight she understood that the weight, the mound were remembered from an earlier time, but on the causeway, the texture of her skin altered to gooseflesh beneath his palms. How vivid. How very nearly real. How she wanted more.
She began to construct her days around a gap at nightfall. She rose before the cock crowed and built up the fire and milled the wheat to flour and made the cheese if Cook had put out milk laced with nettle juice to curdle overnight. With both hands, she plucked chickweed and sorrel from the earth, her eyes always a shade ahead, flitting to the next clump. She gathered alone, unhindered by a child’s gait, a sister-in-law’s desire for talk. Her privacy was complete as she indulged in her daily habit of taking a nettle leaf into her mouth, of saying “Today I receive Arc.” At mealtimes she savored little, so busy was she swallowing her meat, in order that she might scour the cauldron with a handful of sand and then, with a clear conscience, leave the soiled plates and bowls. Late afternoon she collected white bryony, hung lesser celandine, ground dried comfrey root. She had become meticulous in monitoring her supplies. Nightfall was for the causeway, and she planned against the duties that could keep her pinned to the hearth, the heartache of needing to unearth comfrey as night fell.
She said nothing when she left the Smith household, neither that her stash of raspberry leaf was low, nor that Sullen’s baby needed a dose of meadowsweet rubbed into her gums. If Young Smith wanted to look, he would not know where to start. Crone’s shack? Her mother’s roundhouse, where she often prepared her drafts and salves? She thought it good fortune now that Young Smith’s mother had barred Devout’s stinking vessels and rotting herbs from the Smith roundhouse. If he was determined and called but did not find her at her mother’s, there were still seven more roundhouses where she might be patting chickweed balm onto a rash or applying a purple loosestrife poultice to a wound. He would not suffer the humiliation of going door-to-door asking for his mate.
Something shifted. The number of evenings Young Smith’s mother wanted company increased. Perhaps her mind was in fact altered toward Devout. She had made a gift of the cloth and recently said Devout’s cheese was better than Cook’s. Once when it poured rain, housebound Devout sat among the others gathered that nightfall—like most every nightfall—in the fire’s flickering light. When she looked up, Young Smith’s mother was watching, her hands stilled from trimming a cape with fur. “Living among the Smiths suits you,” she said. “Your paleness has grown becoming.”
Most likely, it was only that she disliked her son so often without his mate at the fire. He sharpened a blade on sandstone or removed burs using a leather strop without the comfort of a mate’s light touch on his shoulder, without a cup of water fetched on his behalf. Whatever the reason, the moment Devout pushed herself up from the low table, Young Smith’s mother began to make it difficult to do anything other than stay put in the roundhouse. She complained that the ache in her big toe was like a nail pierced through the bone. Might Devout apply the magic so an old woman could be spared? She needed assistance rinsing her hair with chamomile or untangling a skein of wool. The nightfall she announced Devout’s needlework as lacking and said she would teach the girl the skill, Devout grew dismayed. How many nightfalls on the causeway would she miss? She turned to Young Smith, hoping he might read disgruntlement in her face and remind his mother that his mate was a hand who worked in the fields in a dress unadorned with embroidery, or that with her drafts and balms her days were already full to the brim. What she saw were eyes full of pride that she would be taught something as noble as needlework.
She missed three nightfalls in a row, then four. She held a bone needle, licked the wool, passed it through the eye. She rushed, and it meant her stitches varied in length or were wide of the line scratched into the surface of a scrap of hide. She slowed down, held out her work to Young Smith’s mother, and though each stitch was of equal length, Devout missed another nightfall on the causeway. The running stitch was but single stitch, Young Smith’s mother said. There was the backstitch to learn. Devout learned the backstitch, and another nightfall passed before Young Smith’s mother gave a satisfied nod. But then there was the split stitch after that and the stem stitch, the chain stitch. “How many more?” Devout said, jutting her needle into the hide.
Young Smith put a hand on her shoulder, as though to say he understood her weariness, and then disappeared behind a woolen partition. Devout heard a chest creak open, and then he was back, holding out a tiny hide cap. “For our child,” he said. “Decorating it might help the needlework feel useful.”
Tears brimmed, rolled onto her cheeks, joyful tears that their promised child should wear an adorned cap, sorrowful tears that she was not a better mate, mournful tears that eleven nightfalls had come and gone, that she would sit in the firelight and make the cap a thing of beauty, that she would rush, that her mind would be on completion, the causeway, ridding herself of the task keeping her away.
Devout took the cap from Young Smith, gave in to a sudden urge to touch his cheek.
She selected yarns—the deep yellow of goldenrod, the rusty red of bloodroot, the blue of woad. The runn
ing stitch was quickest, the stem stitch best for curved lines, and the chain stitch most pleasing to the eye. She drew her needle around the cap’s edge, scoring the place where her first round of stitches would lie. She tied a knot, poked her needle up though the hide, hesitated a moment before arranging her yarn in the way that committed her to the running stitch and less time in the flickering light. Then she poked her needle down and back up again though the hide.
She realized one day she had neglected to take nettle, to say “Today I receive Arc.” The next occasion, she could not remember with certainty whether she had forgotten once or twice. Sometimes as she squinted across the clearing to Young Smith in his forge, she glimpsed deep affection, profound tenderness. She had known love as a fever that took hold independent of will, and she gathered might against the unbridled force of it. She plucked a handful of nettle leaves; let the hot throb spread over her tongue, inner cheeks, and gums; denied herself the relief of the dock growing nearby. How could all that had been between her and Arc slip away? How could she let it? Love was not as fleeting as that—ever present one moment, gone the next. She would not retreat from him, fail him. He would not disappear.
She began to lie. With the new moon almost arrived, she said she had valerian root to prepare for the bog dweller women whose menses brought cramps, when in fact her store was ample. Young Smith’s mother cocked her head, drew her lips into a tight ring. The night was bright, Devout said. She knew a patch not far from the clearing. Another time, she said Old Man needed a poultice for his knee but stopped short of saying the poultice was already made, that he knew the routine, that she need not slip away.
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