I didn’t understand it either. How could anybody lose a spade? I mean, the thing was big. It wasn’t like losing a button.
We searched for it.
“Think,” I told Nico. “What were you doing with it? And where?”
“Errrhh.” Nico looked dubious. “I was digging there, I think.” He pointed to a corner of the garden that had been partially dug. No spade in evidence. I lost patience.
“How on earth could you lose a spade?” I hissed at him. “That takes real talent, that does!”
Nico blinked and ran a filthy hand through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he said, contrite.
He really was sorry, anybody could see that. But sorry didn’t get us our spade back.
One couldn’t call Nico clumsy, not really. Slightly butterfingered, perhaps, with things he hadn’t done before, and there were quite a few of those. Castellans’ sons didn’t do much crafting and gardening, I supposed. But the worst of it was that he didn’t seem to have his wits about him when he was working. He didn’t take proper care of things. Left the saw in a half-sawn stump so that the blade warped. Put the hammer down on the ground and forgot where he had put it. Dropped a nail and failed to pick it up. Dropped a whole handful of spinach seeds in the yard, which made the birds happy but didn’t really please me much—we needed every crop we could get. And so on, and so forth. But the spade was a low point, even for him.
“We can’t afford a new one,” I told him through my teeth. “And if we don’t get those beans in, it’ll be a very hungry winter. Has the Young Lord understood that much?”
Nico bent his head like a whipped dog. “I’ll find it,” he said quietly.
A little later, Mama called us in for the midday meal.
“Where is Nico?”
“Looking for the spade.”
“Davin!”
I spooned some porridge into my bowl. It was so thin it looked more like gruel.
“We need that spade,” I said. “And it was Nico who lost it.”
“He’s trying.” Mama looked at me, and I looked at my porridge. “He just wants to help.”
“Yes,” I said. “But he’s not very good at it, is he?”
We didn’t find it until the next day, in a cluster of nettles where Nico had flung it instead of leaving it upright in the bean patch the way any normal person would have done.
And it was only the day after that that the rabbit thing happened.
I had left snares in suitable places—might as well take advantage of the fact that we were living in the woods. Every morning and every night I walked my round and checked all of them, and sometimes we’d been lucky. That day I had caught a rabbit, a small pale brown one. It leaped and fought and tried to get away when it heard me coming and didn’t seem to understand that it would do no good. I seized it by the neck and gave a quick twist. Meat for the pot tonight—and we didn’t get that often, these days. I was feeling quite pleased with my efforts, walking back to the cottage.
Nico was sitting in the grass outside the door playing with Melli. He held up a handful of twigs. “How many?”
“Four,” said Melli instantly.
Nico put that hand behind his back and held up the other. “And here?”
“Six.”
“Good. And how many altogether?”
Melli hesitated. “Nine?”
Nico let her see both hands at the same time. “Count them,” he said.
Melli’s lips were moving as she counted the twigs. “… eight, nine, ten,” she murmured. “There are ten!”
“Correct. That’s good, Melli.”
Melli caught sight of me. “Look,” she said, proudly holding up a contraption of strings and twigs. “This is an M. That’s the first letter in Melli!”
I could feel my temper rising. The beans weren’t in yet, the henhouse had no door, the horses still had to be tethered because we hadn’t had time to build a fence. We barely had a bench to sit on, or a table to eat at. And there he was, sitting on his backside fooling around with Melli. When there were a thousand useful things he could have done instead.
“Here,” I said, throwing him the rabbit. “Skin it and give it to Mama.” He could do that much, couldn’t he? I had even gutted it for him already.
He turned pale. Carefully, he lifted the rabbit off his lap and laid it on the grass. He held his hands stiffly away from his body, and I could see that there was a bit of rabbit’s blood on them. Was he afraid of getting it on his shirt?
“I can’t,” he said hoarsely and got to his feet. He went straight to the well and washed his hands meticulously till they were quite, quite clean. And then he left. Just walked off into the forest, without a word of explanation.
I simply didn’t get it. He had to have been hunting with his father hundreds of times. That was one thing castellans’ sons did do. Why was it then such a big deal for him if a bit of blood got on his hands? And you couldn’t get him to lift a sword to save his life, practically. If I hadn’t known that he had once killed a dragon, I would have thought that he was simply a coward.
It was nice of Nico to come with us, I suppose. It was just that I couldn’t quite see what earthly good he was.
“Three birds,” said Melli. “No, wait, four! Look, Davin. Four birds!”
“Yes, Melli. Come on, now.”
“Two slugs. Two slugs and four birds, that makes six altogether.”
I wish Nico hadn’t started on the numbers thing. Melli counted everything, now: gray stones and white stones, hazel bushes, horse poop, brambles, and footprints. All the way from the cottage to Clayton. Houses, fencing posts, chimneys. Bags of flour at the miller’s, horseshoes at the smithy. It was enough to drive a man crazy.
I had come to town to try and sell the black gelding. We couldn’t afford to keep four horses through the winter. Possibly not even three, but Falk and Silky would not be sold unless we were practically starving, and we could hardly ask Nico to sell his horse as long as we insisted on keeping our own two.
“A good little worker,” said the smith, picking up each of the black gelding’s hooves in turn. “Sound legs, too.”
“Does Master Smith know anyone who might buy such a horse?”
The smith let go of the last hoof and straightened his back.
“Hmmm. I might. Not impossible, no.”
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen. Thirteen nails!” said Melli.
“Melli, be quiet now.”
“Thirteen nails and three hammers and one horse, that makes… that makes… that makes seventeen in all.”
“That’s a bright little girl you’ve got,” said the smith. “Who taught her that?”
“The… errh, my cousin Nico.” We had decided that it would be best if we pretended Nico was part of the family, but I hadn’t quite got used to it yet.
“I can spell Melli, too,” said Melli proudly. “M-E-L-L-I. And smith starts with ssssss… an S.”
There was a grunt of laughter from the smith. “Whatever you say, missy.” Then he looked at me. “Tell me, this cousin of yours… do you reckon he could teach my Olrik his numbers? I’ve tried, but it doesn’t seem to take. And if he can’t do his sums and the like, he’ll get hung out to dry too often by people who can.”
“I can ask,” I said, somewhat dubiously. I didn’t know what Nico would say to being appointed tutor to the smith’s half-grown son. In Nico’s world, tutors were hired and fired as one needed them. One bought the best, of course, but they were not always granted the respect their skills merited.
“Tell you what, if Cousin Nico can teach my Olrik his sums, we have a couple of laying hens we can spare. And leave the horse here, I’ll see you get a decent price for it.”
“Done,” I said instantly and held out my hand. Eggs again! Nico had better hold up his end of this bargain, or I’d tell him what for.
The smith grasped my hand, and the deal was done.
“Five knives and a kettle,” said Melli. “But the kettle is broken, how do you count tha
t?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ll have to ask Nico.”
To my surprise, Nico brightened like a sunny afternoon when I told him about the bargain I had struck on his behalf.
“Of course I will!” he said.
And the very next day he went off to Clayton, whistling loudly like a man on his way to a tryst. I shook my head at him and began mending the henhouse.
A couple of days later, Agneta Bakers came to ask politely if Master Nico would agree to school her Cornelius as well? Master Nico. Well, that was one for the book. But Agneta saw to it that we had fresh bread twice a week, so it seemed Nico was good for something after all. For some reason, he appeared to like it, and soon the whole village was talking about Olrik Smithsson who could do sums like nobody’s business now, even though everyone knew he used to take two and two and make three.
By and by, Nico’s class grew until he taught nine of Clayton’s children two mornings a week. And Dina and Rose went with him, despite my protests.
“But we can’t do without both of them! There is so much to do here.”
“Rose needs to learn how to read and write,” said Mama firmly. “And Dina can help with the littler ones.” She looked at me pointedly. “A bit of book-learning would do you no harm, either, Davin.”
But there had to be limits. Me, sitting with the children listening solemnly while Nico taught us how to spell “I don’t want to get my hands dirty”? No way. Never. Over my dead body.
DAVIN
Strange Looks
It was a school morning. Nico and the girls had left shortly after dawn, so Mama and I had to do everything by ourselves: watering the horses, feeding the chickens, weeding the bean patch, collecting firewood, all the little chores that still had to be done while His Self-Importance was busy playing schoolmaster to the village children. It was later than usual by the time I was ready to see to my snares. In the third one, there was an incautious water rat, already dead. We weren’t that hungry, I thought, bending to loosen the snare. A yellow-green hissing head shot out at me, and I was so startled that I tripped over my heels and fell over backward into a prickly bramble hedge. Arrow-snake. Ill-tempered and lightning fast, but not venomous. Good thing it wasn’t a coppertail. But even though the arrow-snake’s fangs had no venom, they were still very sharp. And the snake apparently considered the dead rat to be its lawful prey. I had to cut the snare and let the reptile win the day.
The snare was ruined now. I was filthy and wet, and one hand sported a number of bramble scratches. And then it began to rain. Of course. It was that kind of a day.
Suddenly I saw Dina come walking through the rain. There was a really strange expression on her face, and she didn’t seem to be headed for home.
“Dina,” I called, “where are you going?”
She stopped, looking about her uncertainly.
“Is that you, Davin?”
“Yes,” I said. “Who else would it be?”
She didn’t answer, just stood there looking at me as if she still wasn’t sure I was me.
“Where are you going?” I repeated.
“Home.”
“Dina, home is that way.” I pointed.
“Yes,” she said, for all the world as if she hadn’t just been going in practically the opposite direction.
“Why are you home so early? Has the Oh-So-Learned Master Nico finished his teachings for the day?”
For a moment she looked almost her old self. “Why are you always so hard on Nico? You eat the bread he gets us!”
“Yes, and he eats the rabbits I snare. As long as he doesn’t have to get blood on his hands, that is.”
“What do rabbits have to do with it?”
“Nothing.” I brushed the rain off my eyelashes. “Is school over, then?”
She was back to looking stone-faced. “No,” she said and walked on.
“Dina, wait. Has something happened?”
“Happened? Why would anything have happened? I just don’t feel good, that’s all.”
Was she crying, or was it the rain?
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just have a stomachache.”
She moved on. At least she was walking in the general direction of the cottage now. And perhaps she really did have a stomachache. But I would talk to Rose about this later, I promised myself.
“I don’t know,” said Rose. “We were supposed to practice letters on the clay tablets Irena has made for us. Dina dropped one, and it broke. And then she just left.”
“But did anyone scold her? Nico or somebody?”
“No. Nico never scolds anybody. Well, hardly ever.”
“But doesn’t she like this school business?” She ought to, I thought. She was so good at reading and writing herself and, very much unlike me, she actually cared for that kind of thing.
“Well, yes—”
“But?” Because there was a “but” to it, I could tell from Rose’s tone of voice.
“The littlest ones—Katrin and Beth—they’re a little afraid of her. I think they can tell that she’s not so used to other children. And even though Dina hasn’t got Shamer’s eyes anymore, or at least not all the time, there is still something… something not ordinary about her.”
I sighed. Ordinary was probably not a word anyone would ever use about Dina. But couldn’t she at least try? Sometimes it annoyed me. Couldn’t she ever just be happy? Why did she always have to be so serious and hangdog, and… and weird, so that nobody wanted to talk to her or get to know her? That wasn’t how you made friends, I knew that much at least.
A couple of days later I had a fight with Rose that nearly blew the roof off. It all began with something Irena said when I came to return the dung fork we’d borrowed.
“Are you doing all right out there, Davin?” she said, giving me this strange look.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re fine.”
“And you have what you need? Food on the table, and everything else?”
“Yes. We have bread and eggs now.”
“Because if you’re really short, all you have to do is say so. All right? We’ll figure something out.”
Why was she looking at me so strangely? As if there was something she wasn’t saying outright.
“We manage just fine,” I said, slightly offended. Of course that wasn’t quite true, there were hundreds of things we needed, but nothing we couldn’t make, get, or earn. “We don’t need anybody’s charity.” I tried not to think about the ridiculously low rent she asked of us.
“Well, good,” said Irena. “And don’t be offended. I only meant to help. There are a lot of people in Clayton who would be sad if you had to leave.”
What kind of talk was this? And there was another one of those looks. Something was going on here, but I couldn’t tell what.
Irena walked me to the door. Across the square, Minna the Innkeeper was shaking out the tablecloths. When she caught sight of me, her face went all tight and twisted. I greeted her politely, but she didn’t answer. She just stood there glaring.
“What on earth did I do to her?” I asked Irena.
She hesitated. “Nothing,” she said. “She’s just in a bad mood because she lost a couple of chickens. The fox got them, I expect.”
Curiouser and curiouser. Why would Minna be mad at me because a fox had taken her chickens? I said good-bye to Irena and headed for home, somewhat confused.
I had reached the outskirts of the village when something hard hit me on the shoulder. I looked about, but couldn’t see anybody. Then another missile came flying, and as I ducked, I noticed the direction. Up there in Andreas Farmhand’s apple tree, two of the cobbler’s cheeky brats were sitting, pelting me with hard little green apples.
I grinned. Asking for trouble, were they? Well, I’d give them trouble aplenty. Quickly, I picked up one of the apples and got ready to give them a taste of their own medicine.
“Dirty thief, dirty thief,” yelled one of them.
I stiffe
ned. “I never stole anything!”
“What happened to the mince pie that went missing from our pantry?” shouted the brat, so loudly that all of Clayton must have heard.
“How would I know?” I yelled back, angry now. “Cheeky brat!”
I took aim and threw the apple, hard and straight as I could. There was an offended “ouch!” from up the tree. And I hope it hurt, I thought viciously. What a thing to say to decent people!
It wasn’t until I was halfway home that two and two started to make four. Irena’s strange looks and “if you’re really short, all you have to do is say so.” Missing chickens. Stolen pies. Somebody had begun to steal things around the village, and of course suspicion homed in on us. The new people. The strangers. Never mind that none of us had ever stolen anything in our lives!
I stopped abruptly. Because that might not be entirely true. Rose. Rose who came from Swill Town, where a lot of people had to steal to survive. Rose who could whistle a danger signal so that even a blackbird would think it was only another blackbird calling.
No, that’s too silly, I thought. Rose would never steal chickens. What would she do with them?
But Rose had a dog. What about Belle? Belle, who happily followed the girls to class on school days. And there wasn’t much meat to be had at home. What if Belle had taken Minna’s chickens? Or Rose had taken the pie for Belle? I got all dizzy with strange suspicions and no longer knew what to believe. Perhaps Rose didn’t know how important it was to behave decently to one’s neighbors. Especially when one was a stranger. I had to talk to her.
Slap! The sound echoed through the cottage, and it felt as if my head was about to come off. Belle leaped up and started barking like mad.
“How can you say such a thing!” There were furious tears on Rose’s cheeks, and her eyes were bright with anger and hurt.
“I only asked—”
“Whore’s brat from Swill Town, that’s what you were thinking. Dirty thieving vermin, the lot of them. Don’t you think I’ve heard that kind of thing before?”
The Serpent Gift Page 8
