Painfully conscious of what he looked like, of the pollution that ran in his veins, he wanted to draw back, to stay in the shadows. But Mariat’s dazzling grace tugged at him and the curve of her cheek, the shape of her body, pulled him forward. Inwardly pleading for her tolerance, gambling on her kindness, he came out from the doorway. He could not lower his gaze as he knew he should. For one aching, heart-stopping moment, he looked full into her soft brown eyes.
# # #
Weariness dragged at Mariat’s body and soul. The trip home had been a long one, over cart-jolting roads—very like, she thought, her aunt’s slow journey through sickness and into death. She had accompanied her aunt every step of the way, ever since she’d gone to stay with her when she’d been eleven years old. So much of her time had been spent behind shuttered windows, in a small cottage that smelled, in spite of her best efforts, like urine and medicine. Now she was heart-worn and longed for air and sun.
Then Ane called Sheft forth, and he came out of the dimness of the barn like a tentative light. He wore a loose shirt with sleeves rolled up, and strands of his wheat-colored hair fell over his forehead. He was tall, sun-browned, male. Vivid memories sprang up from when she was a little girl, and they twined disconcertingly with how he looked now. She remembered his warm hand enclosing hers, the nearness of his cheek as he bent down to listen to her, the feel of his hard shoulders as she rode him piggy-back.
A shaft of acute emotion pierced her. Unexpected, intense, it ripped from her heart to her abdomen and down. She felt a blush creep up her face.
But then the sunlight reached his eyes. They gazed full at her. A chill swept through her, and she stiffened. She remembered them as a shining grey, not this startling, metallic silver.
He flinched and looked down.
She had hurt him. With a pang of compassion, she saw the sensitivity in his mouth, the vulnerability in his jaw and throat, and realized that deep inside, he was already wounded. But there was something more, the same trait her aunt had manifested during her final illness: endurance in the face of unrelenting pain. She was not prepared for her urge to heal it, not prepared for this bruised strength, not prepared for her longing that he take her into his arms.
With averted heads, barely touching, they embraced as Ane had requested.
# # #
Mumbling some excuse, Sheft escaped as soon as he could to the banks of the Meera. He shouldn’t have looked at her like that. He should have kept his eyes on the ground, where he wouldn’t have seen her revulsion. His spirikai twisted inside him, trying to make ice, but with an effort of will he stopped it. I’m not hurt, he told himself, not bleeding. He stood with his hands clenched, not seeing anything, until the threat of ice receded.
# # #
Early the next morning, the wheat harvest resumed. He could have avoided it, but to defy Gwin, he went. A bastion of hard stares followed him as he stationed himself in his row and set to work. He tried to ignore the hostility that hung over the field, tried to ignore how his skin prickled at the sight of sharp and swinging blades. How long, he wondered, before this re-doubled wariness would whittle him away?
After a while, the cutters rested, and the gatherers came into the field. One of them was Mariat.
He watched her, laughing and talking with the others as she made her way closer to his row, until she finally took a place at the end of it. She would be gathering the grain behind him. She had not glanced at him, probably didn’t even notice he was there, but she would be near him for much of the day.
It was, he now noticed, a beautiful late summer morning. The grain smelled like fresh baked bread, and the sun felt warm on his shoulders. Bits of straw and the shouts and calls of children floated in the air. Even Gwin’s little brother Oris seemed content to stay back by the wagons where he belonged. Surilla’s services were again being put to use, and Moro was grinning in anticipation of receiving an extra grain-share in payment.
The headman whistled and the cutters returned to their work. Sheft bent to his task, and Mariat’s presence at his back felt as tangible as a hand laid on him. When she left his row to help the other women tote baskets of food off the wagons, it was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud.
The noon bell rang, and along with the others, Sheft flung down his sickle, wiped his forehead, and got in line for his meal. It smelled delicious, and turned out to be sausage and yellow cheese, still warm and wrapped in dark bread. With Etane being occupied with a pert young lady from the village, Sheft found shade under a tree at the edge of the field while Gwin and his cronies settled nearby.
As he ate, he watched Mariat move among the workers with a cup and a jug. Amidst welcome-homes and glad-you-are-backs, she poured with slim-wristed charm and open warmth. Like everyone, she wore a belted tunic over trousers, but these did little to hide the curves beneath.
He couldn’t help looking at her. Apparently neither could several other young men sitting in the shade, especially Gwin, whose head turned to follow Mariat’s progress through the field. Time after time Sheft tore his gaze away from her, only to find himself staring again. She bent to pour a drink for someone in the next row, and a tendril of her hair came loose from however it was tied in back. It brushed against her cheek, which was as delicate as a flower petal. It would feel soft against the back of his fingers.
Mariat must have felt his gaze. She straightened and returned it, and the brown flash of her eyes made his breath come short, and the soft curves at the corners of her mouth melted his heart. As she looked at him, her smile faded away.
He ordered himself to look down, hide the alien silver, not make the same mistake twice. But her eyes held him, skewered him through and through, and he waited helplessly for that lift of the upper lip, the pinched nostrils, the look of repugnance that would rip him apart.
They never materialized.
Instead, her eyes softened and warmed for him in a way he could hardly believe. She simply looked at him and let him look at her. Her whole body said something he desperately needed to hear, and with a surge of desire he longed to answer.
But when she came to sit beside him, he couldn’t think of anything to say. He moved to make room for her in the shade, thinking himself a tongue-tied fool.
She handed him a brimming cup of tea. “We had this cooling in the Meera all morning. Good thing, now that it’s gotten so warm. It’s got honey in it too.”
A short blade of wheat had gotten caught in the strands of her shining brown hair and stuck straight up from behind her ear. Perhaps another man, here in his place, would reach out and remove it for her, but he could not. He took the cup, discovered he was thirsty, and drank it down. “Thank you.”
“My brother says you and he had some problems with wasps while I was gone.”
Sitting here with Mariat, he felt himself smiling at a memory from last summer. “We thought the smoke-pot we were using had done the job, but I guess it was too windy. All the wasps swarmed out and made a—well, a bee-line—right for us. We wound up rolling and yelling in the squash patch. Your mother had to use up a whole jar of bee-balm on us. We were lumpy-looking for days.” A glad thought, which to Sheft was strange and new, jumped suddenly into his mind. Mariat remembered something Etane had said about him. She had thought—at least once—about him.
Mariat searched his face. “Well, you don’t look lumpy now. As a matter of fact, you look”—she colored and glanced away—“fine.”
He swallowed. “So do you.” For a moment they sat in silence. “I hear from Etane,” he finally said, “that you took up bee-keeping when you were at your aunt’s.”
“I did. I brought some of her hives home with me and now we have our own honey.”
“Do you ever get stung?”
“Actually, no. Honeybees are quite gentle and won’t sting if you come among them quietly. I only have to make sure that my sleeves and pant legs are tied shut.” She grinned sheepishly. “I figured this out after a bee once got into my shirt and buzzed around in
there—”
He found himself imagining this must have been heaven for the bee, but resolutely put the thought aside as Mariat went on. “—smacking at my shirt like an idiot, but even then I wasn’t stung. Later on I learned how to think calm thoughts at them. You know what I mean, Sheft?”
He breathed in the way she said his name as if it were a fragile scent.
Perhaps she noticed, for her cheek turned even pinker. “You showed me how, remember, when we used to catch frogs by the river. Think reassuring thoughts, you said; move slowly, and foop! you’ve got one!” Smiling at the memory, Mariat settled back against the tree trunk, and they both looked out at the sunny field. Crickets trilled contentedly, and bees droned in the asters blooming nearby, but after a while he noticed that sadness had crept into her eyes.
“I’m sorry about your aunt,” he said.
Mariat glanced down at her hands in her lap. “She often told me she’d seen many summers and lived a full life. At the end, I could comfort her a little with those stories about Rulve your mother used to read to us. We prayed together. My aunt said she wanted to die in Rulve’s hands, and I think she did.”
To die in Rulve’s hands. A passing breeze rustled the leaves above his head, like a lingering caress. An ineffable feeling, part longing and part dread, washed through him. He blinked it away.
“…and all that time,” Mariat was saying, “I’d been caring for my aunt, and now I worry about my mother. Ane has some pretty bad days.”
“When she can’t get into the garden anymore, you know she must be hurting.” Sometimes, when he looked into Ane’s pain-creased face, he thought he could feel what she felt: a multi-pronged jab in his abdomen.
Mariat reached out to pick a deep blue aster and twirled the stem. “That’s a beautiful cane you carved for her.”
“Thank you.”
“I like the squash-leaves twining around it, and those little ladybugs hiding there.”
Sheft’s heart skipped a beat. To notice the two tiny insects she must have looked closely at what he had made. “I thought they’d be better than squash-beetles.” Of course they would; what an idiotic thing to say.
She laughed. “That’s true. The cane is so well done you must have carved other things too.”
“A few.” To put off going to bed, to avoid the nightmares as long as he could.
The tip of her long and lovely finger touched the aster’s yellow center. “Maybe one day, if you have time, you could bring Riah’s book of tales to read to my mother. She loves stories, and I think they would make her feel better.” A shadow passed over her face, as if she needed to hear stories too.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” he said, then inwardly winced for sounding so eager.
Mariat refilled his cup and shot a teasing glance at him. “Did you know my auntie saw you when you first came here?”
“You mean here, to At-Wysher?”
“Yes. My uncle was alive then, and both of them came out here to visit. Auntie saw your
family drive by in Tarn’s wagon. She told me it was full of those blue-flowering plants your father makes paper out of, and a foreign lady was holding a baby. That must’ve been you. Auntie said you were about eight months old, and still as bald as a peach.”
He leaned back and laughed out loud. Fleetingly, he wondered if he had ever done such a thing before. “You should talk. Until you were, let’s see, about five, your hair grew straight out all over your head. You looked like a little wild thistle.”
Making a face at him, Mariat stood. He realized that someone had been calling her.
It was Gwin, motioning her over to his group. “Mistress Mari,” he called, smiling. “We’re dying of thirst here.”
Mariat signaled she would be right there and then turned back to Sheft. She reached down to take something out of his hair. It was a wheat stalk.
“This was sticking straight up behind your ear, straw-head,” she said with a grin, and then ran off.
Chapter 6. The Green Cloak
During the month of Harvest, after chores were done, Sheft often strode through the sunny fields to Moro’s house, the red book of tales under his arm. Most of the time he was invited to stay for dinner, which Mariat prepared because Ane could do little now but rest in her chair by the hearth. These meals were merry events, and as they spent time together, it began to dawn on him that Mariat saw him very differently from the way he saw himself. She rescued him from roots and ice and gave him a vision of normalcy and acceptance. Even when he said little, he felt he was talking more than ever in his life.
Their family circle warmed him, and while talk wreathed around him he tried to describe to himself the color of Mariat’s eyes. They were the same complicated shade as a piece of polished oak, like the velvet brown in a sunflower’s center, like the soft burnt umber in the wings of a wren. Sometimes, gazing at them when she wasn’t looking, he decided there was no word for how beautiful they were.
After one of these meals, the five of them were still sitting around the table, their dinner long finished, when Mariat turned to him, her eyes bright with excitement.
Meera-brown, he decided, because of all the glints in them.
“Sheft, I’m going to sell my extra honey at the market-fair in Ferce. You should come there with Etane and me!”
He lowered his gaze, and a chunk of the happiness he had been feeling dropped away. His reception in At-Wysher was bad enough, but the residents of a strange town might react even worse. “I’ve got to help Tarn get the rest of the paper-mash pounded and dried,” he said. “Before the frost.”
They’d already gathered the last batch of the airy, blue-flowered plants from the south field, stripped away the leaves, and dumped the stems into a water-filled trough to soak. After the fibers from the stems rose to the top, Tarn had wrung them out until they were almost dry and carefully spread the mash over the fabric screens, making sure the pulp was even to the very edges. Now the pulp had to be pounded with special wooden mallets to break down the fibers and make them stick together.
“I guess I can help with the pounding,” Etane said with a grimace.
Sheft smiled to himself. At first, when they’d been boys, Etane had been eager to help with that, but soon discovered that pounding was a long and boring task that made his arms ache.
“Except,” Etane added with an obviously fake look of regret, “your father probably wouldn’t let me near his screens.”
Sheft’s smile faded away. He remembered the first time Tarn had peeled a dried sheet off a screen. It was beautiful, as soft and pliable as the finest leather, and so thin he could see the shadow of his father’s hand behind it. As an eight-year-old, he’d wanted very much to do this part, but he tore the sheet the first time he tried, and it had been two years before Tarn let him try again.
“Probably not,” agreed Sheft.
“Well, the weather’s still fairly warm,” Mariat said. “Maybe the sheets will dry early.”
“Maybe.”
Something must have occurred to her because her whole face lit up. “I’ve been thinking—”
“Uh-oh,” Etane interrupted. “It’s always bad when she thinks.”
Mariat smacked him on the leg with her spoon. “I’ve been thinking about your carvings, Sheft. Etane says you have a whole box of them in your barn, and if Mama’s cane is any indication, they’re beautiful. Let me and Etane take them to the fair. We’ll set them out next to my honey pots, and I bet they’d go for a good price.”
She was amazing, always bringing new brightness into his life. But something he made, that people would spend coppers on? “I don’t think they’d be good enough to sell.”
“Nonsense,” Ane said. “Let us women be the judges of that.”
“There’s not enough in the box to bother with.” Now it was his turn to get smacked by Mariat’s spoon—but he noticed the blow was a gentle tap compared to what Etane got.
“Then get busy, Sheft. The fair’s at the end of Acorn, and you o
nly have a few weeks.”
A cold thought—that the Rites would take place shortly after that—he pushed out of his mind.
“Now that’s settled,” Ane said, “I want you to see the beautiful cloak my sister left me. Show him, Mariat.”
Mariat took it from one of the pegs beside the door. The cloak was a truly sumptuous garment—long and hooded and made of thick, green wool.
“The Okrup villagers gave this to my sister,” Ane said, “in gratitude for all the medicines she made for them over the years.” She stroked the lining with hands that trembled almost imperceptibly. “After I no longer need it, daughter, it shall be yours.”
“Not for a long time yet,” Moro said, reaching for the last slice of bread.
Ane passed the cloak to Sheft for his inspection. The green wool felt soft in his hands, but as he held it, the room seemed to darken. As had happened in the wheat field, sounds around him drained away. A picture flashed into his mind: new grass blanketing a quiet grave. He was clutching the folds tight in his fist and eased his grip.
“As long as I’m up,” a voice said. “Anyone want more tea?”
From far away, he heard himself say, “No thank you.” He didn’t want to look at the cloak anymore and draped it over the back of his chair. What was wrong with him? It felt as if some other place and time had edged into the room.
Mariat’s hand touched his shoulder and her hair brushed against his cheek. She was bending close to him and her eyes were soft with concern. “Are you all right, Sheft?”
“Yes.” He put his hand over hers. “Yes, fine.”
Ane was trying to push herself up from the table, so Etane jumped to her side, helped her to her chair by the fire, and got her settled in.
“Sheft,” she said, “before you have to leave, read me the story about the creek.”
Pleased that she asked, but still feeling strangely distanced, he retrieved the red book of tales that he had placed on the mantle, and sat cross-legged on the carpet at her feet. He found the place and read.
Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One Page 5
