Blood Ties (5 page)

Unexpected and dangerous and beautiful, the chasm was the wildest thing she knew, and she had come here all her life when she felt too enclosed in the village. The roan quieted under her hands and voice, and even put his head forward to inspect the chasm with interest.

Bramble took him back to the cave and groomed him thoroughly, reluctant to leave him. She finally tethered him for the night and ran home.

After dinner, the third evening after she’d killed the man, she leaned on the gate next to her granda and looked down the road that led out of the village.

“Don’t you miss it?” she asked him, meaning what Travelers called the Road, the wandering life. She meant all the things she yearned for but couldn’t describe.

“Why would I, with all that I love right here?” Granda replied.

It was the same answer to that question that she’d heard all her life. She’d been ten or eleven before she realized that he never answered her straight, but always with another question. And was thirteen, maybe, before she could read the look in his eyes when he stood at that gate and looked down the road to the horizon.

Tonight she wasn’t minded to accept his answer.

“If you had things to do over again,” she said, “would you have settled?”

He turned to look at her. Though his pate was bald, he still had a rim of dark hair around his scalp. He still walked strongly upright. Bramble could see the man he had been at eighteen, when he’d broken his hip and couldn’t walk for a season. His parents, who were drystone fencers, had paid for Bramble’s great-granny to board him until he could travel to meet them. But long before that, he and Bramble’s gran had snuck off to the haystack and made her da, so he ended up staying and learning to be a carpenter from her great-granda.

He searched her eyes. “You’re thinking of taking the Road,” he said with certainty.

“Been thinking of that all my life,” she said cheerfully, surprised by how well she could hide it. “No change there.”

He looked relieved. “It’s a hard life for a young girl, all alone. Travelers aren’t liked anywhere. Well, you know that.”

“I know it, but I’ve never understood why.”

“Some Travelers say the sight of us reminds them that they don’t really belong here, that what they have they stole. And that makes them angry. But I reckon it’s just that everyone likes to have someone to look down on. When the warlord rides roughshod over you, it’s good to be able to curse or hit or kick someone else, someone weaker. Makes you feel strong.”

“And the strong hate the weak,” Bramble said.

Her grandfather looked sideways at her, his brows lifted.

“That may be. No matter what the way of it, Traveling alone is dangerous. No warlord will give justice to a Traveler. Theft, beatings, even murder, it seems it doesn’t count if it’s a Traveler who’s hurt. That’s the worst of it. Even at the best, we’re treated like foreigners. Like we don’t belong anywhere. That can be hard, to be told you don’t belong in your own land. Especially if you love it.” His voice grew reminiscent. “You can’t help but love it. From the cold north to the southern deserts, it’s all beautiful. Travelers love the whole of it, not just the part they were born in.”

“You do miss it.”

“Sometimes.” He paused. “But in the end, it’s the people you love that matter. Traveling — it doesn’t keep your heart warm. Remember that, sweetheart. It may make your heart beat faster, but it doesn’t keep it warm. So, yes, I reckon I would settle, if I had to do it over again. Your gran was worth it, and I pray the gods give her rest until I join her, so we can be reborn together.”

It wasn’t, in a way, what she had wanted to hear, but it was reassuring nonetheless.

In the morning, Bramble washed and dressed carefully. She fed the goats and the chickens, carried water from the stream to the kitchen, swept out the cottage, laid her room straight and tidy, even weeded the front herb bed. At last it was time to go.

She walked down to the stream and turned east to follow it to the linden tree where his ghost would rise. Udall, the old thatcher, was gathering reeds in the stream and he nodded politely to her, though he didn’t speak. He only spoke when he needed to: a silent, gray man, who lived alone and liked it. No need to worry about him gossiping with the neighbors about where she was off to at lunchtime. He looked at her with no curiosity at all, just recognition, and she wondered what he could see in her face.

It wasn’t merriment, that was for sure and certain. She had a job to do, and the least she could do was show some respect. Just before noon, it would be three full days since she had kicked the warlord’s man. Killed the warlord’s man. And as his killer, it was up to her to lay his ghost when it quickened.

Udall’s story

I
T BEGAN
on Sylvie’s roof. My hands were cold. I blew on them to warm them, then gripped the ladder with my right hand, hoisted the third yelm of reeds onto my left shoulder and began to climb. My back was aching, low down, as it did those autumn mornings.

“Past my prime,” I said to the reeds, and the reeds whispered back, as they always did.

Balanced carefully, I walked along the ridge pole of the roof to the southern end of the gable, the high end where the ladder didn’t reach, and laid down the bundles of reed. My lashing awl was in my pocket. I sat astride the ridge pole and began to place the yelms so the reed lay snug and watertight, yelm over yelm. Then I lashed them with the crisscross herringbone pattern of the thatchers of Laagway.

“Getting too old for this,” I said to the reeds. “They’ll be cutting you and drying you and lashing you, too, for a long time yet, but I’m not sure I’ll be doing it.”

“Do they talk back?” A voice came from below me.

The stonecaster was standing in the room under me, looking up. She grinned. “It’s an odd thing, to have your home open to the sky. I think I like it,” she said.

“You always were an odd magpie, Sylvie. You wouldn’t like it open when the winter rains set in.”

“That’s why I’m paying you, old man.”

She stepped up onto a chest by the wall and stuck her head through the empty rafters to face me. “If you’re feeling old, Udall,” she said, “you should take an apprentice.”

“Pot calling the kettle black.”

“Ahah! But I’m taking a youngling on, soon.”

This was news. Sylvie had refused to take an apprentice for all the time I had known her. “Who is it?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone’s due to turn up any day now. That’s why I thought I’d get the thatch done. So it’ll be over and done with by the time he comes.”

“So . . . it’s a he. What else do the stones say?”

“You don’t want to know.” Sylvie shook her gray hair over her eyes and peered up at me, like a storyteller pretending to be a stonecaster, and spoke in a long, wavering voice. “Oh, good sir, you don’t want to know the future! It’s too terrible.”

I smiled. It was a very good impersonation of Piselea, a story-teller who’d drunk his way through the inn’s beer all summer. “Tell me anyway.”

“They say it’s time you got married,” she said briskly, shaking back her hair. “I did a casting for you this morning. I had a feeling in my bones.”

“Married. Me — married.” I smiled wider. “Very funny.”

But she was serious.

“The stones say it, and they mean it, my friend. Married before Midwinter’s Eve.”

Well, it was a shock. I’d lived alone for four years, since Niwe, my sister, had died. Married. Who? There was no one in the village, and though I traveled for my work throughout the district, still, I’d not met anyone who’d taken my fancy for . . . well, not since Merris married Foegen the butcher, over at Connay. And that was six years since. No, seven.

Married. Who?

I lashed and hooked the reed all day, and if Sylvie had a watertight roof come winter, it was because my hands knew their job better than I did, at times, and I could tie my herringbone lashing blind drunk and three parts asleep, if I had to. For certain, my mind was elsewhere.

All day on the ladder I went over the roll of women I knew, talking each one over with the reed and dismissing each. For Mathe was as ill-tempered as a vixen, and Sel was too young, and Aedwina much too old, besides having that young bull of a son living with her. I puzzled over it mightily, I can tell you, and as the short autumn dusk closed in, I climbed down the ladder and knocked at Sylvie’s door to ask for a casting. She sat me down on the rug.

“Who is it?” I asked, and spat in my palm.

She spat in hers and joined hands with me. As our hands locked I looked at Sylvie with new eyes, feeling the strength in her grip and the softness of her palm. Not her, surely?

She drew the five stones from her bag and cast them out. They were all faceup, plain as day.

“The Familiar,” she said, and raised her eyebrows. “Woman. Well, no surprise there. Child. Love. Death.” She brooded over them, touching them lightly. “So. A woman you know, with one or more children, someone you love or will love, brought to you by death. Accidental death, I think.” Her eyes grew compassionate. “It may not be who you think, Udall.”

“No?” I broke the handhold, and sat back on my heels. “Someone I love, or will love, with a child. It has to be Merris. Who else? So Foegen dies?”

“It may be. It may be not so. Don’t try to look further than the stones show you. Don’t try to change your future.”

“Are you saying the future’s fixed? That I don’t have any say in what happens to me at all?”

“Udall, I sit on this rug and cast the future. And I see folk try to avert what’s to happen to them. I see them frantic, trying to change what’s been foretold. And every time, the very thing they do to try to change things is what brings their fate to them. This is the way of it. Act selfishly, to change your fate, and it brings that fate rushing to your door.”

So I got up and walked out. I packed up the thatch and left all tidy, and next morning I was back to finish the job, though I’d had little sleep the night before. The lashing straw went over and under, around and between, and so did my thoughts. If I went to warn Foegen, would I merely arrive in time to comfort Merris in her grief, to have her turn to me at last? Or worse, would me being there actually cause the accident to happen? Would I have to bear the guilt of Foegen’s death and Merris’s love the rest of my life?

I had a job starting two days later in Pank, thatching a mill house. It was three months to midwinter. I could think about it later.

I spent the next day bundling reed into yelms and tying them firmly, ready for the mill. Each knot I tied made me think of Merris, whom I had taken for apprentice ten years before. I had taught her to tie each of these knots, her brown fingers fumbling at first and then surer, her soft hazel eyes intent on the reed so I could watch her unawares.

My sister had liked her, too. Niwe was always telling me to make a move, to say something to Merris. “Court the girl properly,” she’d said, and every time she said it something curled up tighter inside me, for the truth was that Merris was a girl, and I was too old for her. Too old, too set in my ways, too boring. I went to Sylvie for advice, and she had refused to cast for me.

“You know perfectly well what you should do, Udall,” she had scolded. “You’re just afraid.”

So I had been, and very afraid, too. I’d been afraid to shatter the growing pleasure of working with Merris, the rhythmic, side-by-side movements of bundling, laying, lashing, hooking, netting. Afraid of seeing pity or disgust in her eyes.

That hadn’t changed.

But — I thought secretly, and did not even say it to the reeds — she’d be a woman with two children to keep. She might be glad of a husband with a good craft, someone who would love her and be good to her and the children.

I stopped bundling in disgust at myself. To think that I’d take advantage of a woman’s grief, just to have her sitting at my table. Lying in my bed. I twisted the lashing straw so hard it cut my hand, but the thought remained, all the long night, and left me sleepless again.

I set out for Connay at daybreak. If Merris was going to be a widow and in need of comfort, it wouldn’t be because I hadn’t tried to warn Foegen.

The road to Connay ran along the side of a brown stream, bordered with rushes and reeds, so that their familiar whispering soothed me as I walked. I even whistled through the brisk autumn morning, and lopped the heads off milk thistles with my ash stick as I went.

It was dinnertime when I came into Connay, and the street was quiet. Foegen and Merris lived at the other edge of town, where the steers could be pastured until killing time, away from the shop in the main street and its charnel stink.

“I’ll just stop in the shop and have a quick word with Foegen,” I told the reeds growing by the stream. “Then I’ll turn back again. I don’t think I’ll see Merris this visit.” I stopped whistling at the thought of Merris’s smile.

The shop was closed. So I walked reluctantly to the house, past ten or more houses thatched with my own pattern of herringbone and Merris’s special under-and-over netting, and knocked on the door.

It was Merris’s oldest, Beals, who opened the door, but the others crowded around fast enough: Merris, her face alight, Broc, the toddler, grabbing my boot and trying to eat the ash stick, and Foegen, saying, “Udall, welcome, well come! We’re just sitting to dinner, come and eat!”

I didn’t want to worry Merris, so I said nothing, just sat at the table with Broc in my lap and ate as little as I could without it causing comment. My gut was clenched tight and I felt a kind of terror at what I was about to do. But in the babble of talk and questions from Beals — “Uncle, why is it always an ash stick? Why not some other wood? Uncle, how far is it to Pank? Why is it called Pank? What does Connay mean?” — my silence went unnoticed.

After dinner I grabbed the chance when Foegen said, “Come and I’ll show you the new draft of steers arrived yesterday. I’ve got them settling in the barn until I can get that stream fence mended. I wanted to take a look at them anyway.”

We went out alone, Merris calling Beals back softly, “Come help your mam.”

The animal barn, behind the vegetable garden, was a lofty wooden building with, of all things, a slate roof. It had been built by the last butcher, whose brother was a roof tiler. On the lookout for accidents, I foresaw a slate sliding off that roof and crushing Foegen’s head. Or one of the steers goring him, or . . . I decided I would warn him as soon as we got inside.

Foegen stumbled. I put out my hand without thought, steadying him upright.

“Swith the strong!” Foegen said, his voice shaking. “Look what you saved me from.”

On the path in front of him, half hidden by the seed-heavy autumn grass, a scythe lay, blade up and glinting.

“If I’d fallen I’d have cut my throat open on that. I was working here yesterday when the steers arrived. I meant to come back for it but . . .” Foegen was shaking, knowing too well what blade did to flesh. “Gods, if you hadn’t been here, Udall . . .”

We went back to the house, steers forgotten, and Merris made much of us both, but more of Foegen.

She kissed my cheek goodbye as I left, and thanked me. On the way home, I told the reeds, “Ah, it wouldn’t have worked, anyway. I’m too old for her.” But when the reeds whispered back, they didn’t sound convinced.

At the next casting, there was no sign of the Marriage stone. I tried to be glad, for Merris’s sake. And Foegen’s, too. He made her happy, after all.

“Try to avoid your fate and it rushes to you,” Sylvie said to me. “Selfishness draws disaster, they say. Me, I’ve never known a case where a man tried to avert another’s fate, for no better reason than love. But then, love breaks all fates.”