by Paula Guran
“The Wise Woman is dead, and of course this isn’t my home. I just do some work for her granddaughter who lives here now,” Ceren/Oaf said.
“So I was given to understand, but is her granddaughter not a . . . not of the trade?”
Ceren nearly smiled with her borrowed face in spite of herself. The stranger’s phrasing was almost tactful. Obviously he wanted something. But what? She finally noticed the stained bandage on the young man’s right forearm, mostly covered by the sleeve of his shirt. Obviously, he needed mending. That was something Ceren could do even without a borrowed skin.
“She is,” Ceren said. “If you’ll wait out here, I’ll go fetch her.”
By this point Ceren was used to her borrowed form, but she still almost banged her head on the cottage’s low door when she went inside. She made her way quickly to the storeroom and tapped the back of her neck three times with her left hand.
“Done with ye, off with ye!”
The skin split up the back again like the skin of a snake and sloughed off, leaving Ceren standing naked, dazed, and confused for several moments before she came fully to herself again. She quickly pulled her clothes back on and then took just as much time as she needed to arrange the Oaf back on his shelf and cover him with muslin until the next time he’d be needed.
When she emerged from the cottage, blinking in the sunlight, the young man, who had taken a seat on a stump, got to his feet. He had pulled the cloth from his head like a gentleman removing his cap in the presence of a lady. For a moment Ceren just stared at him, but she remembered her tongue soon enough.
“My hired man said I’m needed out here. I’m Ceren, Aydden Shinlock’s granddaughter. Who are you?”
“My name’s Kinan Baleson. My family is working a new holding just beyond the ridge there,” he said, pointing at the ridge where Ceren-oaf had stood just a short time before. “I need your help.”
“That’s as may be. What ails you?”
“It’s this . . . ” he said, pulling back the sleeve covering the bandage on his right forearm.
Just as Ceren had surmised, he’d injured himself while clearing land at the new croft, slipped and gouged his arm on the teeth of a bow saw. “My ma did what she knew to do, but she says it’s getting poisoned. She said to give you this . . . ” He held out a silver penny. “We don’t have a lot of money, but if this isn’t enough, we have eggs, and we’ll have some mutton come fall.”
“Unless the hurt is greater than I think, it’ll do.”
Ceren took the coin and then grasped his hand to hold the arm steady and immediately realized the young man was blushing and she almost did the same.
Why is he doing that? I’m no simpering village maid.
She concentrated on the arm to cover her own confusion and began to unwrap the bandage, but before she’d even begun she knew that Kinan’s mother had the right of it. The drainage from the wound was a sickly yellow, but to her relief it had not yet gone green. If that had happened, the choice would have been his arm or his life.
“Should have come to me sooner,” Ceren said, “with all proper respect to your mother.”
“She tried to make me come yesterday,” Kinan said gruffly, “but there’s so much to do—”
“Which would be managed better with two arms than one,” Ceren said, planting a single seed of fear the way her Gran had taught her. In this case Ceren could see the wisdom of it. Better a little fear in the present than a lifetime disadvantage. “Hold still now.”
Kinan did as he was told. Ceren finished unwrapping the bandage and pulled it away to get a good look at the wound. The gash was about two inches long, but narrow and surprisingly clean-edged, considering what had made it. The cut started a hand’s width past his wrist, almost neatly centered in the top of the forearm. A little deep but not a lot more than a scratch, relatively speaking. Yet the area around the cut had turned an angry shade of red, and yellowish pus continued to ooze from the wound.
“Sit down on that stump. I’ll be back in a moment.”
Ceren picked up her water bucket, went to the stream and pulled up a good measure of cold, clear water. Before she returned to Kinan, she went back into her cottage and brought out of her healer’s box, a simple pine chest where her Gran had kept her more precious herbs and tools. While most everything else in her life felt borrowed, Ceren considered that this box belonged to her. She had earned it. Both by assisting her Gran in her healer’s work for years and by being naturally good at that work. Ceren inherited the box, inherited in a way that didn’t seem to apply to the rest of the things around her.
Especially the skins.
Ceren carefully washed out the gash as Kinan gritted his teeth, which Ceren judged he did more from anticipation than actual added pain. A wound of this sort had its own level of pain which nothing Ceren had done—yet—was going to change. Once the wound was cleaned out, she leaned close and sniffed it.
“I can’t imagine it smells like posies,” Kinan said, forcing a smile.
“I’m more interested in what it smells like, not how pleasant it is.” Ceren wondered for a moment why she was bothering to explain, since her Gran had been very adamant on the subject of secrets: “Best that no one knows how we do what we do. Little seems marvelous, once you know the secret.” And it was important for reputation that all seem marvelous; Ceren saw the wisdom in that as well.
Even so, Ceren found it easy to talk to Kinan, she who barely had reason to speak three words in a fortnight. “My Gran taught me what scents to look for in a wound. A little like iron for blood, sickly-sweet for an inflamed cut like this one. Yet there’s something . . . ah. You said you cut yourself on a saw? Fine new saw or old, battered saw?”
He sighed. “Everything we have is old and battered, but serves well enough.”
“Yes, this saw has served you pretty well indeed. There’s something in there that smells more like iron than even blood does. Unless I miss my guess, your saw left a piece of itself behind and is poisoning the wound. That’s why your arm isn’t healing properly.”
He frowned. “You’re saying you can smell iron?”
“Of course. Can’t you?”
“Not at all. That’s amazing.”
Ceren almost blushed again. So much for Gran’s ideas about secrets, Ceren thought. Or at least that one.
Ceren reached into her box and pulled out a bronze razor, which she proceeded to polish on a leather strop. Kinan eyed the blade warily, and Ceren nodded. “Yes, this is going to hurt. Just so you know.”
Kinan flinched as Ceren gently opened the edges of the wound with her thumbs. More pus appeared and she rinsed that away as well. She judged the direction the sawblade had cut from and looked closer. A black speck was wedged deep into the wound’s upper end. Now that she had found the culprit, it only took a couple of cuts with the razor to free the piece of broken sawblade. Kinan grunted once but otherwise bore the pain well enough and kept still even when new blood started to flow. Ceren held the fragment up on the edge of her bloody razor for Kinan to see before flicking it away into the bushes. She then washed the wound one more time and bound it again with a fresh strip of linen.
“Considering what you’re likely to do with that arm, I really should stitch it,” she said. “And it’s going to bleed for a bit as things are. Let it, that’ll help wash out the poison. If you’ll be careful and wash the cut yourself at least once a day—clean, clear water, mind, not the muck from your stock pond—you should get to keep the arm.”
“We have our own well now,” Kinan said. “I’ll heed what you say. I’m in your debt.”
She shook her head. “You paid, so we’re square. But mind what I said about washing.”
Kinan thanked her again and left. Ceren watched him walk back down the path toward the road. After a moment she realized that she was, in fact, watching him long past the point where it was reasonable to do so. She sighed and then went to clean her razor in the cold stream.
That night Ceren drea
med that she walked hand in hand with Kinan through a golden field of barley, the grain ready to harvest. Yet no sooner had Kinan taken her in his arms than there stood his family: the brothers whom Ceren saw that day from the ridge, a mother and father with vague, misty faces.
“Stay away from that witch! She’s evil!” they all said, speaking with one voice.
“There’s nothing wrong with me!” Ceren said, but she didn’t believe it. She knew there was. Those in the dream knew it too. Kinan turned his back on her and walked away with his family as the barley turned to briars and stones around a deep, still pool of water.
“You can’t do it alone, you know. Your Gran knew. How do you think you got here?”
Ceren looked around, saw no one. “Where are you?”
“Look in the pond.”
Ceren looked into the water but saw only her own reflection. It took her several moments to realize that it was not her reflection at all. Her hair was long, curly, and black, not the pale straw color it should have been. Her eyes were large and dark, her rosy-red lips perfectly formed. Ceren looked into the face of the most beautiful girl she had ever seen, and the sight was almost too painful to bear. “That’s not me.”
“No, but it could be. If you want.”
When Ceren opened her eyes again, she had her own face once more, but the other girl’s reflection stood beside her on the bank of the pool, wearing golden hoops in her ears and dressed like a gypsy princess. Ceren couldn’t resist a sideways glance, but of course there was no one else there.
“Dreams lie,” Ceren said. “My Gran told me that.”
“This one is true enough and you know it. Even if Kinan was interested, what do you think his family would say if he came courting a witch?”
“He’s not going to court me. I’d toss him out on his ear if he did. What a notion.”
“Liar.”
Ceren’s hands balled into fists. “I just met him! He’s not even that handsome.”
The girl’s laugh was almost like music. “What’s that got to do with anything? He’s young, he’s strong, he has a touch of gentleness about him, despite his hard life. And he’s not a fool. Are you?”
“Be quiet!”
The strange girl’s reflection sighed, and ripples spread over the pond. “I never cared much for your Gran, but I will say this: she was always clear on what she wanted and never feared to go after it, too. So. She’s dead and now you’re the Mistress here. Tell me you don’t want him. Make me believe you, and I’ll go away.”
“How do you know me? Who are you?”
“I’ve known you all your life, just as you know who I am.”
Ceren did know. Just as she knew how she felt about Kinan and how strongly she tried not to feel anything at all.
“The topmost shelf. That’s you.”
“No, there is no one there. What remains is little more than a memory, but it is a memory that can serve you in this, as the memory of the Oaf and the Soldier and the Tinker cannot. What remains is merely a tool. Your Gran understood that. Use me, as she did.”
“No!”
“Mark me—you will.” The ripples faded along with her voice and reflection, but just before she awoke, Ceren gazed into the pool once last time and saw nothing at all.
For the next few months Ceren kept herself too busy to think about either Kinan or what lay on the topmost shelf. It was easy enough. There was always something that needed doing around her croft and a fairly steady stream of villagers and farmers from the surrounding countryside.
After her grandmother was cold and buried, Ceren had worried about whether the people who had come to her Gran would come to her now, she being little more than a girl and not the Wise Woman of Endby, who always wore her Gran’s face so far as Ceren was concerned: ancient, bent, hook-nosed and glaring, while Ceren was none of those things except, now and then, glaring. But she needn’t have worried. A Wise Woman was always needed where more than a few folk gathered, and as long as there was someone to fill the role, there were always people willing to let her. Ceren knew she would grow into the part, in time. Besides, “Wise Woman” was them being polite; she knew what they called her behind her back. Such rubbish had never bothered her grandmother. Ceren couldn’t quite say the same.
One day it will seem perfectly natural, she thought, but the prospect didn’t exactly fill her with joy. Fear and secrecy were the witch’s stock in trade, just as her Gran had always said. She had no right to complain if other, less pleasant things came with them.
Ceren had just doled out the herb bundle that would rid a silly village girl of her “problem” when she heard an alarm bell clanging from the village itself. The girl mumbled her thanks and hurried away. Ceren looked south toward Endby but saw nothing out of the ordinary. When she looked back north it was a different story.
Smoke.
Not Kinan’s home, she realized with more relief than she cared to admit; this was further west. Still, too close, to all of them. Ceren didn’t hesitate. She didn’t think of all the other things so much smoke in the sky might mean. She knew what the smoke meant, just as her Gran would have known. She went to the storeroom and put on the Soldier, because it was the only thing she knew to do.
The face and form of the Soldier remembered, so Ceren did too. There was no time to worry about what she did not want to see; it was all there, just as she’d left it the last time she had worn his skin, but now there was too much else that needed remembering.
Too far from the Serpent Road for this to be the main body. Most likely foragers.
This was what the Soldier knew, and so Ceren knew it, too. After a moment’s reflection, the Soldier took one long knife from the cutlery rack and placed it in his belt. Ceren had expected him to take the felling axe, but now she understood why he didn’t—too long in the handle and heavy in the blade to swing accurately at anything other than a target that wasn’t moving. A short, balanced hatchet would have been better for their purpose, but there was none.
The Soldier trotted up the path toward the ridge, not hurrying, saving their strength. They passed the spring and scrambled up the ridge, and from that height the flames to the west were easy to see. Neither Ceren nor the Soldier knew which farm lay to the west, but they both knew there was one, or had been. The foragers would be spreading out from the Serpent Road; it was likely that they didn’t know the north road—little more than a cart path—or the village of Endby even existed, but it looked like one group was going to find it if they kept moving east.
How many?
That was a question that needed to be answered and quickly. From the ridge the Soldier simply noted that a group of farmers had arranged themselves at the western border of their field, armed with little more than pitchforks and clubs. Ceren noted that Kinan and his father and his two brothers were about to get themselves killed, and there was nothing she could do about it.
They mean to keep the raiders from burning the field! thought Ceren.
Foolish, thought the memory of the Soldier, they’d be better served to save what they could and make for the village. Ceren couldn’t disagree, since she knew the same could be said for herself. Yet here she was. She tried not to dwell on that or why her first instinct had been to don the Soldier. She thought instead of how hard the Balesons had worked to get their farm going. And how hard it would have been for them to let it all be destroyed.
The Soldier’s thoughts closed in after that, so Ceren didn’t understand at first why they turned left along the ridge rather than descending to stand with Kinan’s family, but she knew better than to interfere. He was in his element, just as she was not. The Soldier kept low and moved quickly, using the trees and bushes that grew thick on the ridge as cover. Soon they left the bramble hedge that marked the edge of the Baleson farm. About three bowshots from the boundary, the ridge curved away south. They peered out of the thicket at the bend. There was still no sign of the foragers.
“Maybe they’ve stopped.”
The So
ldier’s thought was immediate and emphatic. Not enough time. They’re not finished.
Ceren and the Soldier found a way to descend and, once they were on level ground again, slipped away quickly into the trees. Ceren realized that they were approaching the burning farmhouse by a circular route, keeping to the cover of the woods. They heard a woman scream—and then silence.
They found a vantage point and looked out in time to see a man tying the straps of his leather brigandine back into place. He was lightly armored otherwise, but well armed. A bow and quiver lay propped against a nearby railing. The body of a man and a child lay nearby. A woman lay on the ground at the raider’s feet, unmoving, her clothing in disarray and even at their distance they could see the blood. It took Ceren a moment to realize that the sword that she’d thought stuck into the ground was actually pinning the woman’s body to the earth. She felt her gorge rising, but the Soldier merely judged the distance and scanned the rest of the scene. The farmhouse was still burning well, though the flames were showing signs of having passed their peak. Another moment and the roof came crashing down in a shower of embers.
Unmounted auxillaries with one scout. We have a chance, thought the Soldier.
Kill him, she thought in her anger.
The Soldier remained cold as a winter stream. Not yet.
The memory contained in the Soldier forced her to look toward the east. She saw four more men armed and armored similarly to the one lagging behind, but only the straggler had a bow. For some reason this seemed to please the Soldier. The other four carried bundles over their shoulders, apparently the spoils of the farm.
“You said there was another farm this way,” shouted one of them. “We need to hit it and then return before nightfall if we’re to be ready to move at daybreak. We haven’t got time for your dallying.”
“I’m almost done,” said the first, “but this baggage has befouled my good blade. I’ll catch up when I’ve cleaned it.”
One of them swore, but they didn’t wait. The other four disappeared into the trees, heading toward Kinan’s farm. Ceren still felt sick but now there an even greater sense of urgency.
