by Sharon Lee
The world did not forgive foolish, headstrong girls who failed to consider what was owed to their families. Her father had been quite clear on this point, and he had related to her in excruciating detail his long and laborious search for someone—anyone—who would be willing to take "damaged goods."
She had ought, her father had said, rejoice in her good fortune. And while she had never, really, rejoiced in Sir Jennet's suit, she had felt it was—
No. Her mind had accepted the problem as defined and the solution as provided, but she had felt nothing.
Now—now her entire spirit rebelled, and the thought of marrying Sir Jennet, leaving her family and her country, depending upon the kindness of strangers in what every knowledgeable resource assured her was an inhospitable and difficult land . . .
"I cannot," Becca whispered, and the new leaves above her rustled in the breeze, seeming to repeat her words.
Surely, she thought wildly, if I speak to Mother, she will speak to Father, and the wedding may be canceled before it is too late! Surely—
But she knew better. The banns had been read; the date of the ceremony had been published. The whole village knew. Indeed, the world knew! Could she sink further? Could she jilt the man? Would Father cast her out?
And would that, she wondered, be worse?
Becca shivered, suddenly aware that the breeze had come up, and that her arm was aching. She should, she thought, go inside, where it was warm; before the damaged arm grew chilled and stiffened.
But it was some few minutes before she was able to take her own advice, rise, and walk, slowly, up the garden to the house.
Chapter Three
Mist still curtained the treetops when Becca opened the gate and stepped into Sonet's garden.
Properly, of course, she should have gone to the front door like a civilized woman, and announced herself to whichever of "Gran's" foundlings opened to her. But the doorkeeper would only have sent her 'round back to the garden, anyway, Becca thought, pushing the gate silently shut behind her. It had been a year since Sonet had left the employ of the Earl of Barimuir, and Becca had visited her many times, though she had been inside the cottage precisely once.
Unlike the garden, which was laid out in neat squares intersected by scrupulously raked paths, and the shed, where every tool hung in its place, the house was a mad jumble, every surface occupied by something—sewing in progress, ledger books, candles, trays, cats. Becca must have looked her astonishment, for her teacher had laughed and waved a big hand 'round at the general confusion.
"We've got too many busy people under-roof, that's the truth! And most of 'em subscribe to the belief that it's no use putting something away when they're only going to want it again in a year or two."
Well. Becca stood with her hands folded under her cloak, listening to the soft, usual morning sounds of a spring garden—insect hum close at hand, and the stroke of the importunate breeze against new leaf and stem. High up the trees, a velyre sang a piercing couplet; further off, a raven shouted rude counterpoint. Somewhat nearer to hand, she heard another sort of song, half-mumbled and breathy.
Smiling, Becca moved in the direction of that soft undersinging, holding her cloak close and treading lightly on the raked path. The path intersected another; Becca bore right, the song becoming more distinct, but by no means loud, born on the back of the teasing breeze.
Sonet was surely very near, Becca thought, but where—
There.
Seated on a rock beneath a bitirrn tree was a large lump of a woman, wrapped in a cloak the color of garden shadows. The hood was thrown back, revealing hair the color of the retreating mist, twisted into a tight knot.
Becca stopped in the center of the path, unwilling to disturb the singer, or to put a period to the song. Officially, the Earl of Barimuir deplored and discouraged land-song, calling it backward superstition that had no place in an enlightened age.
Realistically, there was nothing he could do but pretend not to hear when the sowers sang the seeds into the ground in spring, and the reapers sang the harvest out in fall. Everyone did it—everyone who had a stake and a feel for growing things, that was. Land-song was wordless, often no more than a deep hum from the center of the chest, at once soothing and energizing. Very often, as Becca knew from experience, the singer was not himself aware of the song.
She took a deep breath, inhaling the heady green vapors of the garden, as the song-laden breeze capered around her, toying with Lucy's carefully done chignon, and tugging on the hem of her cloak.
She closed her eyes, letting the sensations of the garden fill her senses, while the song and the breeze danced—
And then the song was done.
The leaves sighed, and Becca did, in satisfaction, before opening her eyes and smiling at the green-shadowed figure perched on the dim rock.
"Well, look what the mist brought in!" Sonet called. She slid down the side of the rock, her cloak snagging on a low-slung bitirrn branch, spoiling her balance as her feet touched the ground.
"Storm and lightning!" she yelled, one hand flung out, feet slithering on the new grass. Becca leapt across the pathway and threw herself into Sonet's substantial chest, pinning her upright against the stone. The bitirrn branch, released from its tangle in the herb woman's cloak, whipped back.
"Ah!" cried Becca, hand going to her cheek.
"Spiteful stick!" Sonet snapped, and pushed herself upright, one arm around Becca's shoulder. "Well, it's nothing more than its nature, after all. We can't blame it for that." She took Becca's chin between thumb and forefinger and turned her face. "Let's see, then—tsk. We need to get some fremoni on that before the welt rises." She grinned, gap-toothed, and Becca couldn't help but smile back, despite the sting in her face. "Next time, let me fall, eh?"
"I don't think so," Becca said, following the old woman down the path toward the drying shed. "You could have struck your head on the rock, and that would have been serious."
"Serious for the rock, maybe," Sonet said, dryly, and pulled open the shed door, motioning Becca in before her.
Just over the threshold, Becca paused to twist the pin at her throat and shrug out of the cloak with a practiced motion. She caught it, one-handed, as it fell off her shoulders, and hung it on the hook before moving across the room to her usual place. By the time she was comfortably seated on the stool next to the worktable, Sonet had a pot in her hand and a look in her eye.
Sighing, Becca dutifully turned her cheek.
The salve went on cool, immediately leaching the fire from the sting.
"With luck, your lady mother will never know you had a mishap." The relief apparent in the herb woman's voice was comical, and Becca laughed.
"Or she would surely come down here with the largest carving knife in Cook's supply and gut you," she said.
"I don't put it past her, I don't, though she's a fair lady. More likely that she'd take down my poor bitirrn, which I'd rather she wouldn't, because it does have its uses, ill-natured and spiteful as it may otherwise be."
Bitirrn bark was a powerful painkiller, Becca knew, and a few drops of bitirrn berry cordial brought sleep to the most restless patient. Unfortunately, the trees were often sickly, even in the wild, so most herbalists used the less powerful, but hardier aleth to relieve pain, and poppy-laced wine to bring the fretful to slumber.
"Well then, I'll just have to say that I walked into a fence post," Becca said, "and spare both the herbalist and the plant."
"She's not likely to believe that," Sonet said, turning to put the pot away in its place. "Mint tea?"
"Please," said Becca, and smiled.
Sonet turned to the brazier and the flask bubbling there. She measured tea into the chipped teapot, poured boiling water from the flask and set it back on the brazier.
"Well, then, what brings you out in the misty morning time?"
Becca laughed. "You make it sound as if I'm here at cock crow! I assure you that the hour is quite respectable!"
"Well,
of course it is, which is why you've come with your sister, or your maid, or with his lordship's blessing?"
"Sonet, you know Caro doesn't walk out until the mist has dried and her skirts are not at risk—and that I have no maid! As for Father's blessing—he never comes down before midday, by which time I would surely find you awash in those in need of your skill and no time to spare for a novice's questions!" Becca tipped her head, studying the side of her friend's face as she poured tea into mismatched cups.
"If it will ease you," she said, more seriously. "Mother knows I've come."
Sonet's jaw relaxed, and she showed a full smile when she turned to give Becca her cup. "That's well, then," she said. "As long as someone knows you were walking out alone, and where you were bound for."
Becca bent her head over the cup, breathing in; the scent of mint so strong her eyes teared.
"Are there brigands in the neighborhood?" she asked lightly, knowing that theirs was the safest country in the Midlands.
"Not that I've heard," Sonet said, hitching herself onto her work stool. "The problem with brigands being that no one does hear until we hear, if you understand me. It's not like they'll send 'round their card and make themselves known to the neighborhood."
Becca did her best to look stern. "I can certainly understand their unwillingness to embrace civilized behavior, if all the world begins against them." She bent her head and breathed in more steam, feeling the mint clear her head and bring her senses to tingle.
"Well," Sonet said after a moment. "And what does bring you out at this highly civilized hour, with your mother's blessing on you?"
Becca looked up. "It occurred to me last evening that I will be needing to transport my garden to—north. And that I need to know which of my plants require extra protection across the winter, and which might not grow at all." She paused. Sonet said nothing.
"Also, I wondered if you would know who the herbalist for the Corlands might be, so I might write and—" She stopped, silenced by the expression on Sonet's face.
"Is there no herbalist at the Corlands?" she asked slowly.
"No," Sonet replied, equally slow. "She was . . . cast out . . . some twenty years ago by the lord of the place."
Becca sat up. "But—why?"
"Well, now. He believed that the way to make room for the modern way of doing things was to cast aside all of the old ways."
"But—healing . . ." Becca began. Sonet shook her head.
"For all he was a landowner, he mistrusted the land and the gifts of the land. He believed that healing should be done by devices created by man, to serve man." Sonet cast her a sharp look. "You know yourself that this is not an unpopular belief."
Becca shivered and her withered arm ached, as if in remembered agony. Indeed she knew for her very self. When she had been freshly . . . damaged. The Earl, her father, unable to accept that she could not be repaired, had carried her to the metropolis, there to place her into the hands of one Sir Farraday, who had strapped her to a table, wrapped her ruined arm in wire, and subjected her to course after course of "electric therapy."
She had screamed and wept, begging him to stop, but he would not. He had been sincerely moved by her distress, and it was with tears in his eyes that he urged her to courage, swearing that the electrically induced spasms were, indeed, strengthening the atrophied muscles; that when the therapy was done, she would stand up whole and beautiful.
He had lied.
She had arisen from the therapy ill and raving, her arm burned and useless; utterly unresponsive. Sir Farraday had wept, and begged her pardon, promising to contact her when he had discovered the error in his calculations, so that she might return to him, and be healed.
Vastly disappointed, and placing the blame for the cure's failure squarely upon her, Father had taken her back home and left her to Mother, and to Sonet.
It had been Sonet who had devised the painful exercises that, bit by bit, won her back some small amount of movement and dexterity. It had been Sonet who made sure that she did those exercises, pain notwithstanding, and who rejoiced with her over every inch of gain.
Here and now, sitting safe in Sonet's workplace, Becca sipped mint tea, and pushed the past out of her mind.
"Perhaps this lord should try one of those devices himself," she said, her voice tart despite the soothing effects of the tea.
"He did," Sonet said softly. "Eventually. When he was ill and dying. It might be that the devices gave him a few more minutes, or a few less. I could have done nothing better. Or worse." She looked down at her cup, raised it and sipped.
"Well," she said. "All that by way of saying there isn't an herbalist at Corlands, not that I know about. It could be that someone's moved into the village, now the old lord's been followed by his brother, who—" She bit off the end of her sentence and pressed her lips together.
Becca shook her head. "Whatever you have to say about Sir Jennet, it cannot possibly be any unkinder than Dickon's transports."
"We'll just leave it that the younger brother has his own faults, then," Sonet said. "As we all do." She drank off her tea and set the cup aside.
"There's some of your usual plants that won't survive the winters up north," she said, bringing the subject abruptly onto Becca's topic. "Fremoni won't. Feverease won't. Nor aleth."
Becca stared. "But—"
Sonet held up a hand.
"Trust the land," she said, more sternly than she was wont. "There are other plants, native to the cold, that will give you what's needful. You'll need to learn those—I have a book, somewhere . . ." She looked around absently, as if expecting to find the book floating in midair, or suspended from the drying rods that ran the length of the shed.
"Ah!" Sonet rose and crossed the room, casually reaching up to the shelf over the sorting table. She groped for a moment, then grinned. "There you are!" she grunted, as if to a playful child, and turned with a flat parcel in her hand.
"Feh! Quite a few seasons of dust on that! Good thing I had the sense to wrap it in oilskin before I set it away." She pulled a trimming blade from its place and cut the cord holding the packet together while Becca slid to her feet and crossed to stand beside her.
The book that emerged from its layers of protection was well-thumbed, its cover stained and edge-worn; a field herbalist's diary.
"Made that myself when I was no older than Harin," Sonet said, naming her current apprentice, a plump and quiet girl from up-country. "Though with more sense."
"Really?" Becca eyed her teacher fondly. "Now, I find Harin very sensible, indeed, which forces me to ask, Sonet—"
"Eh?" The herb woman gave her a mock glare. "Out with it, Miss!"
"I only wonder what happened," Becca concluded, making her eyes as round and as guileless as she might.
"There's proper respect for an elder in lore," Sonet observed, shaking her head. "Well, I will own it a relief to have a serious 'prentice with me now. Makes quite a change from the last—light-minded to a fault, that girl!"
"Tempery, too," Becca agreed placidly, "and of a nature to take risks."
"Nothing so bad with risk taking," Sonet murmured, opening the cover to reveal a drawing of a leaf surrounded by dense notes. The paper was rough, the ink so vibrant a green that the letters seemed to leap from the page.
"My cold country book." The herb lady's voice was so soft it seemed she must be speaking to herself. She looked up and gave Becca a nod. "This'll be what you want."
"I—" Becca bit her lip. "Sonet?"
"Now what, Miss?"
"No—" She put her hand on the other's arm. "I just—the old Corlands lord. You were the herbalist he cast out off of his lands?"
"Younger and hotter of head," the other said mildly. "You knew I was from the north."
"I did," Becca said, "it—I just never realized . . ." She shook herself. "Well. When may I come by to copy out—"
"No sense in wasting your time copying!" Sonet interrupted. "I'm not going back to the Corlands—not at my age! You'
ll take this very book with you, and glad I'll be to know it's finally seeing some use."
"Take it? Sonet, I can't take—"
"You can and you will," Sonet interrupted, thrusting the item into Becca's hand. "It's your master gift."
Becca gaped. "I'm no master," she protested.
The old woman cocked an eyebrow and gave her a gap-toothed grin. "Well, then, Miss Beauvelley, I'm forced to ask—"
"Don't!" Becca laughed, and cradled the book against her breast, defeated. "Very well—and thank you, Sonet. For—For everything."
