The little girl, Emry, was the daughter of Marna Nydderwaic’s dead sister. Emry was Marna’s darling, and as spoiled as I had been. She threw a fit when Wille dragged her upstairs to bed. Then Wille, who liked to explain things, explained to Marna about a poultice the miller needed for a bite on his arm.
The village was called Milodygraig. Marna Nydderwaic was Milodygraig’s leech, though she spent most of her time running Milodygraig’s inn in the absence of her dead husband. I soon found a place for myself as the orphan of Milodygraig, Floy became a sparrow of Milodygraig, and Mordan became very scarce in Milodygraig, as he was helping his brothers poke around the more exiting regions of the country.
That first night Marna strew me some bedding by the hearth. Sleep didn’t come for a long time––the people in the next room spent half the night loudly downing their beer, and thoughts chased around my head like a cat after a bird.
***
At first light Marna woke me and gave me a big basket. She told me not to come back until it was filled to the brim with palendries, and thrust me outdoors.
Palendries, water-loving plants that sprouted silvery fronds year-round, carried no useful properties to the best of my knowledge.
Nevertheless, she seemed pleased when I came back with a goodly amount. Sneezing something fierce, she placed some above the door lintel and put the rest in the brewing shed. The palendries above the door kept the torkies away. I asked Emry what a torkie was.
“Crag wraiths,” she said. “They sneak through cracks, crawl into your head, light your eyes up like torches, then make you up and slaughter everyone in the house.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“They can’t abide palendries for some reason.”
“I told you these people were superstitious,” said Floy from a rafter.
It was true. Marna had rituals and remedies for everything from curbing libido to driving snakes out of the outhouse. When I suggested a remedy for sneezing (which involved sitting on a stone outside Carderford Barrow and howling like a wolf towards Glasgenny Peak while eating the heart of a newt), she gave me a clout to the ear.
Floy found me in the larder, sobbing between the apples and potatoes. “She’s just another frazzled old bat,” she said.
“Nilsa didn’t hit––” I stopped myself.
“Nilsa didn’t hit you. When they’re in a temper, you keep from the room. That’s all.”
I stopped my crying, and resolved to make Floy’s job easier.
“Careful Reyna,” she said two days later as I stewed laundry in a cauldron. “When the water’s bubbling like that it’s hot.”
“I know.” My face dripped with steam.
“Have you even put any soap in?”
“Ten bars.”
Later that day I made friends with the leach barrel.
“The water burnt me.” I showed her my red hand. “It wasn’t even hot.”
“It’s not water. It’s lye water. Pour the vinegar over your hand, it’ll feel better.”
“I’m never touching soap again,” I said.
“You never touched it anyway.”
***
Washing the sheets wasn’t something I had to worry about much––Marna did her utmost to scrimp. The meat in the pie was always mutton, no matter the rodent skulls you picked out of it; the porridge was so watered down you could wash in it; the bread was mostly holes; and the ale possessed a peculiar quality I was to find more about later.
I couldn’t give my name, of course, so the folk who wanted horses watered, more beer, or the fire built up, took to calling me Sprout. A timid little drudge, I was threatened, harassed, and beaten into trying simply and constantly to please Marna. She inspired admiration, throwing equal effort into her immoral work habits and mollification of the outdated and resentful mountain spirits.
Wille Illinla inspired admiration, too. One afternoon Marna sent us to collect flour from the miller. The miller’s wife had a lame ankle, and her maid a broken nose––from fighting wild dogs, she said. This was clearly a tale, and Wille told everyone in the common room she’d tripped in the broom closet and fell on top of her husband, who was already on top of the maid. “Then there was a glorious brawl,” he said, “where she took a big bite out of him, and they all started whacking each other with broomsticks.”
Wille spread lies thicker than a thief at a theophany. I didn’t care. When the village boys ran after me throwing rocks, he would catch them and rub dung in their hair.
Nobody knew Wille’s age, so he switched between being young enough for dung throwing and old enough to get pickled off the ale Marna kept for special guests. (Nobody knew my age either, but I only ever got small beer and river water.) Everyone said Wille was going to out-drink his tippler father, who’d run off to be an insurgent in Ellyned. Wille was keen on insurgency, too.
“The city garrison almost strung Nat Breldin up by his neck,” he told me as soon as he got me alone, “but before they dropped the hatch a mob of White-Ship rebels overran the scaffold and rescued Nat and six other fellows in the name of the real Lauriads that’s gone missing. Then the nobs got angry and a rebellion broke out when they tried to confiscate weaponry and enforce a bunch of horrible new laws.”
It took me a while to realize he was reporting current events.
***
“Who’s enforcing a bunch of horrible new laws?” I asked.
“Lord Turncoat, Commander Blackguard, and Lady Odious. They’re stirring up trouble,” said Leode. We sat in a round maple deep in the woods, hidden in the shadow of a mountain the locals called Glasgenny and took extra trouble to avoid. It was two weeks after I’d become an inn-girl.
“Bless you, Leode,” said Mordan. “They are stirring up trouble. Bloated laws lead to a bloated guard leads to angry people. Ellyned’s like to go off like a firecracker. I can hardly wait.”
“You want a rebellion?” Tem swung his head down to Mordan’s.
“I don’t know. Yes.”
“A government is an inconvenient necessity, Mordan.”
“This one’s really inconvenient, then. Especially since the humans overran it.”
“Humans?” I said, not really interested. “It’s only been, what, two––”
“They’ve been pouring in from Lorila since before Father died,” said Tem. “Refugee nobles, mostly. The Queen has been very accommodating.” It struck me how frustrated he was when a new maple leaf yellowed and fell into my lap.
“Most accommodating,” Mordan agreed.
I was becoming antsy. “Who’s Lord Blackguard?”
“Turncoat,” corrected Leode. “Chancellor Daifen turned his coat.”
“How?”
“Used to be Gralde. Didn’t he, Tem?”
“He’s still Gralde,” Arin said. “Just a stupid one, rewriting laws, getting all matey with Faiorsa’s people, leaving our uncle to fix things by himself––”
I started from my doze. “We’ve got an uncle?”
“Blood of the earth, Reyna,” said Arin, “where’ve you been for ten years?”
“She’s too young to remember,” said Mordan, “and so are you. The Queen has discharged Commander Ackerly. She’s blaming Father’s death on him, I expect. And meanwhile she’s promoted human Herist to Commander, and he, she, and the ex-Gralde have made an industrious triangle devoted to the implementation of nefarious plots.”
“Have you brought the paper, quill, and ink?” Tem asked me.
“Yes.” I shifted my weight to wrestle them from my apron pocket. “What do you want with them? You can’t write with those.” I looked at his long legs.
“You’re writing the letter, silly.”
“To who?”
“To whom. Prince Ederach, the uncle you didn’t know about.”
And so I transferred Tem’s message about Mordan’s industrious triangle onto a page torn from a record book, for the illumination of my uncle Ederach. I understood very little of it.
As I wrote, Mordan looked at my hands. “Your hands look horrible.”
“I’ve been working.” Underneath the ink stains they were blistered red. “I like to work.” Work made me too exhausted to cry. Except when old Mandy Olen hobbled down to the inn to play tunes limber as trumpet vine on her silver flute. She filled me with a terrible longing to dance. I wept because I refused it.
I felt untethered, as though the earth no longer held me down. I couldn’t trust myself not to float away.
It was a blessing I hadn’t the energy for darker bouts of self-pity. I was kept busy working, as well as dictating and tying letters to Mordan’s leg. I sealed the letters with Father’s ring, and until much later, wasn’t sure what my uncle did with them, let alone what he must have thought receiving all those letters stamped with his missing brother’s rosette seal and tied to the leg of a raven.