Forest Mage (36 page)

And then she was gone, flesh and bones sinking into a swamp of rot that was not the healthy compost of a living forest but the stink of too many dead things left heaped in a pile. I tried to get away, but my feet and legs sank into the muck. I struggled wildly, wallowing deeper. It reached my thighs, and with infinite loathing I felt it close around my loins and lap against my belly. I tried to open my eyes, knowing that I dreamed, but no matter how I contorted my face, I could not waken myself. I gave a sudden wild cry of absolute despair.

I think my own shout awakened me. It was small comfort at first, for I was sprawled in mud and leaves and surrounded by ghostly stumps. Rain was falling all around me. I was wet, cold, and completely disoriented. How had I got here? The moon glided briefly from the shelter of the clouds and granted me a gray wash of light. I staggered to my feet and wrapped my arms around myself, shivering. I was barefoot, and my clothes were coated with mud and dead leaves. My hair, long grown out of a soldier’s cut, dangled wet on my brow and dripped into my eyes. When I pushed it back from my face, I smeared my forehead with muck from my wet, gritty hands. I cursed myself for an idiot for making it worse. I stumbled back through the storm and the treacherous stump field to Amzil’s door. It was closed tight, with the latch string pulled inside; I wondered if I’d shut it behind me when I went sleep walking, or if Amzil had wakened to a draft and closed it.

I wanted to pound on it and gain swift admission to the dry fireside. The thought of waking not only Amzil but also her children dissuaded me. Reluctantly, I sought the shed. I was glad we’d tightened up the roof. It was dry inside, and Clove’s huge body radiated warmth into the small space. In the darkness, I found the saddle blanket and made a rough bed for myself until dawn. Then I rose, cold and stiff. I took Clove out and hobbled him in deep grass
near the river’s edge so he could graze. I went for a walk along the riverbank until I was sure that Amzil would be awake. Then I returned to her cottage.

“You’re up early,” she observed softly. The children were still sleeping.

“Fish are jumping after mosquitoes in the shallows of the river. If we had fishing tackle, you could have a nice breakfast on mornings like this.”

She smiled sourly. “If I had fishing tackle. If I had a net. If I had seed, or a loom, or yarn, or fabric. There are so many ways I could better our lot, if I had even the most basic tools to begin. But I don’t, and I’ve nothing to trade or sell, and even if I had something to trade, it would take me days to walk to a marketplace, and I’d have to take the children with me. I’ve had months to think my situation through, over and over. There’s no reason for a town to be here. There’s nothing to make people come here. It’s just a place to pass by on your way to somewhere else. I have no way to acquire even the most basic things I’d need to make a life here. Perhaps if my husband had lived, we could have managed, for one of us could make the long trip to Gettys while the other stayed here with the children. But I cannot take them so far alone. Sometimes I think that was what the king intended. He took all the poor folk who broke the laws to live, and sent us out here to die.”

Her words nudged my dormant loyalty to the king. “I don’t think that was his intent. I believe he truly thought you could make a new beginning here. He spoke of the road becoming a great river of trade between west and east, and of towns springing up along it and becoming centers of commerce. When more people begin to travel the road, there will be trade opportunities. Even as it is now, any sort of an inn here would be welcome by travelers, I’m sure.”

“An inn.” She looked at me with tried patience. “That’s an old idea. There
was
an inn here, for a very short time. You’ll find the burned timbers at the east end of town.”

“What happened to it?”

She sighed with exasperation. “It was burned down by angry patrons who claimed they had been robbed while they slept.”

“Were they?”

She shrugged one shoulder and looked almost guilty. “I don’t know. Perhaps. Probably.” She poked at the fire angrily, stirring the coals to flame as she added a small piece of wood. “Do you forget who we are here? Do you forget why the king chased us out of Old Thares? When you make a town of pickpockets, thieves, murderers, and rapists, what do you think will happen? What happens when a family of thieves opens an inn?”

That silenced me for a time. I had not stopped to think about what it would be like to settle in a town where the entire population consisted of criminals and their families. Unwillingly I asked, “Your neighbors. Were they…?”

“Of course. Why do you think I live apart from them? That old man Reeves? He was sent from the city for raping young girls. His wife will tell you they all tempted him, if you let her speak to you for more than five minutes. He strangled the last one; that was how they caught him. Merkus, who you plowed for? He murdered a man in a tavern fight. Teme and Roya, up the hill with their youngsters? They were both in the jail. He stole from the old woman he worked for, and Roya helped him sell her furs and jewelry.”

“But you are not a criminal. And travelers do pass this way. Merchants, new recruits for Gettys, the soldiers, and the prisoner workers they escort. Even if there is not yet much traffic, there are enough people going by for you to make something from their passage.”

She glanced at me. “Pretend, for a moment, that you are a woman alone with three small children. Some travelers might be glad of a clean bed and a warm room, even if I have no food to sell them. Some would pay for it, with coin or barter. But others would simply take whatever they wanted from me and be on their way. If I was lucky. Don’t you see that I’d be tempting danger by opening my door to strangers? When the soldiers and the long prisoner trains pass, do you know what we do? We run down to the river and hide there until they have gone by. The soldiers who guard the prisoners know that this was a town made for criminals. They don’t trust anyone who lives here, and they don’t respect the lives of anyone who lives here.”

“You have a gun,” I pointed out.

She hesitated, opened her mouth to speak, closed it, and then said abruptly, “And they have many guns, and far more ammunition than I do. How do you imagine they would treat us if I killed one of them trying to defend what we have from them? Would any of my children survive? I doubt I would, and I don’t like to think what their suffering would be after I’d died.”

I had no reply to the grim picture she painted. She seemed to take angry satisfaction in my silence. She mixed two handfuls of coarse meal into a pot of cold water and set it over the wakened fire. Breakfast would be the same thin porridge she had cooked every morning since I arrived. I’d been intending to tell her that I’d be leaving that day. Suddenly, it seemed that I couldn’t just yet, that there had to be something I could do for them before I went. I went out to check the snares.

We had one rabbit. But one of the other snares looked odd to me. A moment of considering it proved all Amzil’s suspicions of her neighbors’ were correct. The thrashed ground around the snare showed me that a rabbit had been caught there. Someone had come, taken it, and awkwardly reset the snare. Anger flamed through me. I wondered who would stoop so low as to steal from a woman and three small children. The answer came to me: anyone who was hungry enough. I moved the snare, and took our catch back to Amzil’s cottage.

As I skinned it, my mind was spinning with thoughts. There was so much I could do if I stayed here. I could teach her to use a sling. That would work on birds as well as rabbits. I could make a fish spear and show her how to use that. I was far from the wide plains where I had grown up, and I did not know as many of the plants here as I would have at home. But there were still some I knew. The roots of the cattails along the river; did she know she could dig them and grind them into a sort of meal? And the cottage next to her shed was not in terrible shape; I could patch the roof of it and tighten the walls. It would not be an inn, but it would be shelter she could rent to travelers in need, without bringing them under her own roof.

I suddenly understood my friend Spink’s restlessness when he
watched his elder brother run the family holdings and suspected that he could make a better job of it. I looked at Amzil and her children and her situation, and knew that with time and the strength of my hands, I could better things for all of them. I wanted to do that, in the same way that one wants to right a crooked picture on a wall, or smooth the upturned corner of a rug. To me, the tasks were relatively simple, and the benefits to Amzil and her children might be the difference between starvation and well, not prosperity, but at least less want.

For the first time in my life, I felt I might be free of the fate that the good god had decreed for me. I felt sinful even to consider that idea, and yet there it was. If, through no fault of my own, I could not find a place for myself in military service, then what was I to do? Become a beggar on the streets? Or make a place for myself somewhere, a place where I could be useful to others and take some satisfaction in my own achievements? The children were awake. Kara came out and squealed gleefully at the sight of the skinned rabbit. I gave it to her to take to her mother. Little Sem stood under my elbow and nearly got nicked by my knife as I scraped the hide clean and then added it to the other skins. He followed me as I walked past the shed to the next cottage. It was as poorly built as Amzil’s, and had a decided lean to it. I walked all the way around it, the little boy at my heels. There was another cottage built just off the corner of the first one; it would be fairly simple to build a room to connect them into one, larger structure. The idea of an inn had taken hold in my mind, and it now seemed the inevitable answer to Amzil’s situation. It was easy to dismiss her naysaying. She was a woman alone, and thus it had all appeared impossible to her. But if I stayed on, I could show her how it could be done. And with a man in charge, other men would be less prone to attempt to take advantage of her. I could do it. I could become her protector.

I pushed away the thought that tried to creep to the forefront of my mind: that once she had seen that I could both provide and protect, she might look on me with a more favorable glance.

I looked at the cottages with an engineer’s eye, and shook my head. They were pathetic. Yet they could be made to serve, at least
for now. With timbers and logs from the nearby abandoned huts, I could shore them up to make them last the winter. Surely winter travelers on this road would welcome any sort of a shelter for the night. And the room I would build to connect them would be level and strong, the heart of a new structure that would eventually rise in place of the old. Sem was at my heels as I entered the second cottage. I was pleased to find it had a very functional-looking fireplace and chimney. Like Amzil’s home, the floor was of earth. A table with two broken legs leaned against a bed frame full of rotting straw and bugs. The table was beyond repair, but the bedframe was salvageable. I checked the inside walls of the cabin, testing the wood with my knife. Some rot, but not much. This structure was in much better condition than the first cottage, and I immediately decided I would begin my renovation here.

“Sem! Sem, where are you?” There was a frantic note to Amzil’s cry.

“He’s here with me! We’re coming!” I called back to her, and Sem piped up, “We’re coming!” in such an obvious imitation of me that I had to laugh. As we made our way through the weedy space between the huts, a very familiar smell suddenly rose to my nostrils. Looking down, I found that I was standing on the crushed remains of a small cabbage. I blinked, and recognized the top of a carrot, and there the rounded purple shoulders of a turnip pushing up from the weedy earth. We were standing in the remains of a badly choked vegetable garden. It looked as if the seeds had been randomly thrown on the soil and had sprouted haphazardly. I found another cabbage, not much bigger than my fist but sound. I gave it to Sem to carry, and pulled up both the turnip and the carrot. The carrot was a long, dark-orange root, gone woody in its second year of growth, and root maggots had left a trail on the turnip, but for all that, the good parts could be cut off and stewed down. I felt I had discovered treasure rather than some old and wormy vegetables.

I looked up from my knees to find an angry-looking Amzil bearing down on us. “What are you doing out here with my son?” she demanded.

“Seeing how sound this building is. Watch where you step! There’s a vegetable garden gone wild here.”

“You have no right…what?”

“We’re standing in a grown-over vegetable patch. I stepped on one cabbage before I realized it. But Sem has another, and I found a carrot and a turnip, too.”

Her eyes darted from her son holding the cabbage to me and back again. Conflicting emotions flashed across her face. “This is wonderful—but never again take my boy out of my sight without my permission.”

The vehemence in her voice shocked me, and I realized that however comfortable I had become here, she still regarded me as a stranger. And dangerous.

“Sem followed me,” I said quietly. I knew it was unreasonable to feel hurt or angry, yet in truth, I felt both.

“I’m…I’m sure he did. But I don’t like any of my children to wander out of my sight. There are many dangers here in the wild country.” It sounded like an excuse, not an apology.

“And you think I’m one of those dangers.” I spoke flatly.

“You might be,” she replied frankly.

“I’m not. Not to you or to your children. I thought I’d been helping you.”

“You have. You did.” She looked down at the small boy. He was frowning as he tried to follow our conversation, looking back and forth between us. “Sem, go home. There’s porridge on the table for you. Eat it up.”

The mention of food was enough to send the boy flying. He scampered off, still clutching the cabbage in his arms. When he was out of earshot, she looked back at me. Her expression was not unfriendly, but neither was it kindly. She spoke bluntly. “You have helped us. And in return, I’ve sewn your clothes for you, and allowed you to share our roof and fire, and whatever food we had. And I admit that it’s thanks to you that we’ve had more food in the last few weeks than we’ve had for some time. But—well, but I don’t wish to be in your debt. I don’t want you to start thinking that because you’ve done things for us, we owe you something. Well, I mean, I know that I do, but I won’t…that is—”