Behind him, he heard the woman say, ‘That man I passed just now was spattered in mud. Did he bring news?’
‘Yes,’ Coyle answered. ‘The girl has acquired a companion, a husband by the sound of things. She was a pretty thing — it’s no surprise that a man might still want her. He’ll regret his choice of woman, though, once they’re found.’
Their voices became lower and impossible to overhear. The messenger rose and hurried down to the stables.
2
Strangers on the Road
My name is Silvermay. On the day my life changed forever, I’d been Ossin Hawker’s daughter for sixteen summers and one less winter. Haywode, my home for all of those years, lies in the southern valleys of Athlane, two days’ journey westward from the capital, Vonne. Father has been to Vonne. He says more people live crammed into its streets than he could count. Such a place was hard for me to imagine. Haywode boasts no more than three hundred, and that’s only if you count all the farmers who come into town on market days.
The busy road between Vonne and the rich farmland all the way to the sea runs well to the south of Haywode, but there are other towns on the Great River besides the capital and travellers heading westward to the coast from these often pass through our village. The inn does a fine trade feeding them, and some even stay for the night.
So it wasn’t unusual to see strangers on the road. Most barely earned a glance. I had never quite lost my interest in travellers, though. For me, the sight of them whispered tantalising questions. Were these people any different from me? What made them travel so far from their homes? What was the rest of the world like; the world that they knew and I did not?
‘Your mother is waiting for these eggs,’ said Hespa when I stopped near the inn to watch the figures approach. One led a weary horse, which the other rode. Though their heads were covered, I had already guessed the rider was a woman for she was mounted to one side and not astride the horse’s back as a man would sit.
‘Birdie can wait another minute. I want to ask where they come from.’
‘No, you don’t, Silvermay Hawker. You want to see the man’s face,’ Hespa teased me.
It was true, and a year ago I might have blushed at being caught out so blatantly, but we’d played this game so many times now that I didn’t feel the slightest embarrassment. Haywode had hardly any young men, and even fewer were the least bit handsome, so who could blame us if travellers had become our special treat.
The robed figures trudged nearer. Hespa fidgeted with the basket of eggs until they were within shouting distance, then turned away from the road altogether. ‘I’ll bet he’s old enough to be your grandfather, anyway,’ she said.
What should have been said in fun came out harshly and instantly I knew why.
‘Oh, Hespa, I’m so sorry,’ I said, touching her arm.
What a fool I was. Little over a month ago, we had watched like this as a much larger party trotted regally through Haywode. They turned up their noses at the sight of our inn and would have passed straight through if one of them hadn’t seen Hespa. He broke away from his companions and urged his horse back to where the two of us had started to walk away.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, staring down at my friend and ignoring me entirely. ‘Where do you live?’
Such a thing had never happened in our games before. Stifling giggles, we pointed to the house where Hespa’s mother was pegging out a hide to dry in the sun. It wasn’t her mother the man wanted to see. Once Hespa’s father had been summoned from the fields, the stranger told his story.
‘My wife died last year and I’m eager to marry again,’ he announced. ‘Your girl is the prettiest I’ve seen since I was a lad. Here are six gold coins.’ He laid them out beside one another on the table before Hespa’s astonished father. ‘They are yours if you’ll let me marry her today. I’ll call back this way in a week and take her home with me.’
Hespa’s father had picked up the six coins and handed them back to the stranger, who rode off to join his friends and never returned.
‘Like he was buying a prize pig,’ said Hespa indignantly as she described the scene to me later. But two things had upset her even more. The first was what her father said afterwards when he was drinking with his friends at the inn: ‘Six gold coins wasn’t enough. A dozen and he could have had her.’ Yet even worse than that, the man himself had been round as a ball and not a day under fifty years old!
I should have gone with Hespa to deliver the eggs, but instead I came up with a solution to make her stay there with me. ‘Pull your shawl over your head,’ I told her, demonstrating with my own. ‘To keep our faces hidden.’
Hespa thought for a moment, then put down the basket of eggs, and with the shawl in place, turned to face the travellers. She didn’t notice that I had made a poor job with my own disguise. But I had no reason to hide. My father wouldn’t sell me for a dozen gold coins, nor a hundred, even if my face was worth it. It was no match for Hespa’s, that was true, although I was hardly a crone. In fact, I was rather proud of the way my long brown hair turned to shimmering bronze in the sunlight, giving a boy’s eye something to remember. And I did have my admirers.
At the spring festival I’d danced with a boy named Obie, and afterwards let him kiss me. Not that anyone saw us. Even for girls old enough to marry, a kiss brought frowns to the hard faces of the elders and a complaint the next day to embarrassed parents. That was why I’d led Obie down among the willows that lined our stream. The thrill of something forbidden was what I wanted. The kiss itself was clumsy and disappointing. Although I still sometimes returned Obie’s longing glances, it was to remember that delicious thrill rather than the kiss. He certainly didn’t figure in my daydreams, and perhaps that was why I lingered by the road, with a reluctant Hespa at my side.
But the travellers were better shrouded than we were, inside cloaks topped by roomy hoods. Only the pinpoint gleam reflecting from the man’s eyes told us there was a head inside at all. A hint of colour escaped from beneath the woman’s drab brown cloak where her dress hung loose. Even then, the lively blue was dimmed by dust. A thick layer of dust, too. They had travelled a long way already. It was late in the day and I expected them to turn off the road into the inn, but, as they drew level with Hespa and me, I could tell that the hidden face of the man saw only the road out of town.
Then, without so much as a moan, the woman slumped forward and began to slip from the horse. With the man faced so doggedly ahead, it was left to Hespa and me to catch her. And it was just as well that there were two of us because the woman was hiding a baby inside the dusty robe. Desperately we each grabbed what we could: Hespa, the stricken woman, and I, the child. So tiny it was, too, no more than a few days old. The helpless little thing stared up at me with such a serious look on its chubby face.
‘I’ve got you,’ I said. ‘You’re safe with me.’
The man turned and immediately rushed to the woman’s aid. ‘Nerigold,’ he gasped.
‘I’m all right,’ she managed to respond but her voice was weak. She did her best to stand up, although, even with her companion to lift her, she was unsteady on her feet.
‘You should take her to the inn,’ said Hespa.
The man looked along the road where they’d been heading.
‘She can’t go any further, not until she’s had a rest,’ I told him, a little more firmly than I had a right to.
‘Yes, of course. I’ve asked too much of her and this is the result,’ he said in a voice that proved Hespa wrong about one thing. He wasn’t an old grandad. ‘Will you help us?’ he asked.
I was intrigued to see the face that went with that lively voice, and wouldn’t have said no if he’d asked me to carry the woman on my back and the horse as well.
‘What’s the baby’s name?’ I asked. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl.
‘Name?’ he repeated, as though this was a question he couldn’t possibly have expected. ‘Oh, he doesn’t have one yet. His mother
has been too ill to name him.’ After a heavy pause, he said, ‘I am Piet,’ as though I deserved to hear one name for my trouble.
I had no time to tell him mine or Hespa’s because the woman called, ‘Where’s my baby? Is he hurt?’
‘No, he’s here and looking sleepy,’ I assured her.
She didn’t wait for me to deliver the tiny bundle into her arms but came on unsteady legs to take him from me. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.
I had to admire the dogged spirit that had searched for the child when she barely had enough strength to stand. The hood had fallen back from her face and I saw with a start that she could only be a year or two older than me. Our eyes met as she thanked me and I glimpsed a flickering warmth in the midst of weariness and pain. If she had been born in Haywode, we surely would have been friends, just as Hespa and I were.
‘Go and tell Mrs Nettlefield to get some soup ready,’ I told Hespa, who hurried away importantly.
‘Take your time,’ I told the young mother. Nerigold, her husband had called her. ‘Would you like me to carry the baby? I’m used to it. My sisters have got three between them.’
‘Oh, er … that’s kind of you, but no,’ she said politely. ‘Tamlyn will help me.’
Tamlyn! The young man had told me his name was Piet.
He knew he’d been caught out and kept his face turned away a little too deliberately. When I followed behind them on the way to the inn and saw him whisper into the girl’s ear, I could guess what he was saying.
At the inn, water and a bowl of broth appeared in the hands of Mrs Nettlefield, who was all courtesy and care; unlike her husband, who watched with folded arms from the doorway of the ale room. Our innkeeper sometimes asked to see a traveller’s coins before he’d bring out a thing.
I watched Nerigold sip from the bowl without surrendering her baby. When the heat of the broth had spread through her body she sat straighter on the bench. Hespa and I had already helped her shed the heavy cloak and exchanged glances over our first clear view of the blue dress beneath. We never saw such fine cloth here in Haywode.
The man kept his cloak in place and the hood as well, even though we’d been indoors for some minutes now. No wonder Mr Nettlefield was eyeing him suspiciously, but I doubted he wanted to see that face as much as I did.
‘Won’t you share this soup with me, Piet?’ said Nerigold, holding the bowl out towards him.
Piet! Perhaps the innkeeper was right to be suspicious.
The hooded face turned towards me, worried I would give him away, no doubt. It crossed my mind to do just that. He’d lied to me, after all. But at that moment my mother burst in, carrying the embroidered sack that every villager in Haywode knew so well.
‘A boy came to fetch me. Someone collapsed on the road,’ she said, going quickly to the only face in the room she didn’t know and opening the sack.
My mother had been born with a name like everyone else, I suppose, but in this village she was known as Birdie. Some thought it was because her husband was Ossin the Hawker, who was quite famous throughout the district for the hunting birds he trained. In fact, the name was both an insult and a compliment. Even the best bird handler failed with some creatures, and no man would ever tame my mother.
None of us spoke while Birdie ministered to Nerigold. She pressed the back of her hand to the woman’s forehead, held her wrist to count the heartbeats, and frowned at the pallor of her skin. Nerigold endured these intrusions and even seemed to relax after Birdie had spooned a potion into her mouth.
‘May I hold the baby?’ my mother asked.
To my surprise, Nerigold gave him up without hesitating.
‘He’s as healthy as any baby I’ve seen,’ Birdie announced after a quick examination. ‘But this young woman is in no state to go anywhere for a week at least. Was it a difficult birth?’
Nerigold looked down at her hands, leaving her companion to answer.
‘If not for the midwife, she would have died,’ he said.
‘That doesn’t surprise me,’ said Birdie. ‘What does surprise me is that you’ve put her on a horse so soon afterwards.’
Tamlyn — I couldn’t think of him as anything else now — didn’t argue. Nor did he give a reason.
‘Could we stay here until Nerigold is stronger?’ he asked Mr Nettlefield, who hadn’t stirred from the doorway. ‘I have no coins but I’m willing to work at whatever you need done.’
‘Can you fix a leaking roof?’ asked the innkeeper’s wife.
‘So not a drop will ever get through again, ma’am.’
‘Then that’s payment enough,’ said Mrs Nettlefield.
The matter seemed settled until her husband spoke up. ‘I have a question before you can sleep under my roof,’ he said, bringing a tense silence. He let that silence linger menacingly until every ear strained for his words. ‘Are you two properly wed?’
It was an easy question to answer, an easy way to claim a bed for the night, for as many nights as Nerigold needed. Even if they lied, how would any of us know? But they hesitated, both of them, and after that not even a paper signed by King Chatiny himself would have convinced Mr Nettlefield.
‘I thought as much,’ he growled triumphantly. ‘Young man, I’m an elder of this village and I have standards to uphold as an example to the rest. If you two have a child together and no marriage, then you’re not welcome here. Put this woman back on your horse and beg for charity in some other village.’
‘But she can barely hold herself up,’ I protested. ‘Nerigold will die if we throw them out like this.’
‘My guess is they’ve already been cast out by their own, and so it should be, too.’
Mr Nettlefield would have said more if a voice hadn’t cut him off the way an axe works on a chicken.
‘That’s enough from you, Darry Nettlefield,’ snapped my mother. ‘You’re a pompous toad and all of Haywode is tired of your croaking. I don’t know how your wife puts up with you, honestly I don’t,’ and with this she turned a sympathetic glance towards Mrs Nettlefield. ‘Your mean spirit would see this little one in my arms die for lack of his mother’s milk,’ my mother went on, holding up the baby until Mr Nettlefield turned his eyes away in shame. ‘Elder or not, you don’t decide for Haywode.’
But the innkeeper wasn’t beaten yet. ‘I might not decide for the whole village, but I can certainly decide in my own house,’ he seethed. ‘Get out, all of you.’
Birdie was expecting this because she turned immediately to me. ‘Take this one,’ she said, settling the nameless baby into my arms. ‘I’ll bring the mother.’
‘I don’t know where you think you’re taking them. I’ll have every house in the village against you by nightfall,’ said Mr Nettlefield.
‘Not my own,’ she answered breezily.
I was proud to hear it. My father wasn’t afraid of the elders any more than my mother. Besides, like the rest of us, he was a little afraid of Birdie.
With the mysterious Tamlyn supporting her on one side and my mother on the other, Nerigold made the slow journey to our house on the edge of the village. I followed with the baby, and Hespa led the horse, which was all the young couple seemed to have in the world.
My eyes stared at the three figures ahead, though, to be honest, they lingered on one more than the other two. Even that bulky cloak couldn’t hide the man’s broad shoulders and the way he carried himself.
My daydreams might have become more extravagant if we hadn’t reached our door soon after. Once inside, Nerigold held out her arms for her baby again; and there, under the sanctuary of my parents’ roof, Tamlyn finally threw back the hood.
It was just as well that I had surrendered the baby. Just as well that I wasn’t carrying anything precious or fragile at all, for I would have dropped it onto the stone floor. Did I give myself away with a gasp?
His hair hung past his ears in a swaying curtain. Darker than mine, almost black, it shone even in the dull interior of our house. His jaw drew a strong line beneath un
blemished cheeks. He wore no beard. Like Nerigold, he was only a year or two older than me. And his eyes! They were the blue of a summer sky, shining out from beneath the brooding overhang of his brow.
I tore my gaze away long enough to see Hespa’s face, which could have been a mirror for the way I felt. This was the most handsome man either of us had ever seen. And at the very moment such an exquisite surprise washed over us both, he turned and looked straight at me.
3
Smiler
On that first night, my mother made a bed of straw for Tamlyn and Nerigold, who fell immediately into the sleep of utter exhaustion. At midnight and again in the hour before dawn, the little one woke up the whole house demanding to be fed. My sisters’ babies never made that much noise!
The next day, two of the elders appeared at our door; not mean-eyed Darry Nettlefield from the inn but a pair my parents respected more. Their complaint was the same, though. ‘The young couple are not married,’ they said solemnly.
I’d seen my mother argue with the elders for a week over the silliest of things. I think she enjoyed it. This time, she simply sighed and made a face.
‘Mother and child must stay here with me. I’ll ask the Grentrees to take in the young man.’
The elders exchanged a glance and nodded, relieved to dodge one of Birdie’s tirades.
Nerigold was moved to my bed, where she swallowed more of the potions Birdie kept in her bag and slept as much as she could.
‘She needs rest more than anything,’ my mother whispered as we stared down at the peaceful figure. ‘The baby will rob her of that if he spends the whole day beside her. Here, take him into the open air until he needs to be fed,’ and she dumped him into my arms.
Silvermay Page 2
