Agna soothed her daughter, but she was pushing the child away at the same time. “Best you go back to your chores before you make your father angry. Go on. Run!”
The child ran off, hiccupping. Agna caught Einin’s gaze on her and smiled. “You’ll have your own wee ones soon, you’ll see. A strong husband to guide you, a man for you to serve, in the natural order. My Wilm will make a good husband, he will. You just accept him and see.”
Einin looked at the woman’s blue wrists where her sleeves rode up again.
Agna covered them up with a shrug. “I deserved it, I did. Too slow with milking the cow, and late with dinner. I’m lucky to have a husband to give me God’s correction. You will soon see how it is.”
Einin filled Agna’s buckets, then, with a quick farewell to the women, she hurried home. The bread dough had probably risen by now on the sideboard.
The scent of baking meat pies wafted from a nearby hut, the clanging of metal sounding from the smithy. A small flock of children chased after a honking goose that was trying to escape its fate as the main course at the cooper’s daughter’s wedding on the morn.
The crooked streets between the small village’s huts and cottages were busy, people going about their business, rushing their work. Spring had come, but darkness still fell early. Everyone was intent on the chores they needed to finish before nightfall, Einin as much as the others. She had already cleaned her hut, laid in wood for the fire, had laundered what few clothes she had, but she still had bread baking left.
She was halfway home, her shoulders straining under the weight of her two full wooden buckets, when the priest stepped into her path.
A raven high above called “Caw!” as if in warning, but too late.
“Beg yer pardon.” Einin ducked her head, dropping her gaze to the priest’s dusty brown habit rather than looking at the harsh planes of his face. She didn’t dare to meet his eyes that filled with disapproval every time he looked at Einin. And he looked a lot. Every time Einin turned around, she found his gaze on her.
He was bald and gap-toothed, with small, mean eyes. She tried to step around him, giving him a wide berth, sloshing some of the well water on her leg. She jumped a little. Ack, ’twas cold. Yet not half as cold as the priest’s tone.
“Einin.” The way he said her name cut like a whip.
She froze. Then, when he said no more and it became apparent that he was in no hurry, she set her heavy buckets by her feet. She was in for it now.
“I hear you chopped wood this morn.” Each word dripped with disapproval. “Wearing man’s clothes. Doing man’s work.”
The three women coming out of the cobbler’s cottage behind him stopped on the steps and ceased their chatter, probably as much out of respect for the priest as the better to hear.
Einin winced. Fool! She should have put on one of her mother’s old dresses to go to the well, even if they were all too loose on her. She’d adjusted them time and time again and never got them right. She was no good with the needle. Her youngest brother’s clothes fit her well and were more comfortable for work. The temptation to slip into them had been too great.
The priest’s eyes flashed with judgment. “Did I see you the day before last, on the roof, repairing the thatching?”
“No man left in the family, Father.” That last word tasted bitter on Einin’s tongue. She had loved her own father and grieved him still, could never understand why she must call the traveling priest by the same title.
“A woman doing man’s work is against God and the laws of nature,” he pronounced, the words cold and sharp like icicles.
She did not dare argue, not with the priest. She feared him more than she feared the dragon. If the dragon chose to harm her, one snap of his powerful maw and she would feel no more. The priest, on the other hand…
One of her earliest memories was of this same traveling priest’s first visit to her village and the women he’d accused of being witches. He’d burned three grandmothers who’d never been anything but kind to Einin, one the very midwife who’d birthed her, another known for her knowledge of herbs, and the third with nothing to call her to the attention of the priest but a mole on her cheek.
The old women had taken a long time to die. To this day, Einin’s stomach heaved at the smell of burned meat. Not that she had much meat in her pot this past year, not since the war had taken the last of her brothers.
“You have not confessed your sins,” the priest said, and if winter suddenly blew back into Downwood, the village square could not have turned colder.
Einin shivered as she bit the inside of her cheek. Who had time to sin? She worked every minute of every day to survive. Although, life was slowly getting better in Downwood.
Somewhere nearby, a babe cried, but not the keening sound of hunger they’d all grown weary of. They had enough milk in the village again.
Four days prior, six stray cows turned up in a clearing just past the edge of the woods. An odd piece of luck as the nearest village—the village of Upwood—was on the other side of the hill, part of the rocky path far too steep for the animals to have walked. The cows were wild-eyed and scared to death, but calmed soon enough once they were tied up in various barns.
They were a boon on top of all the other changes that had happened in the past fortnight.
From the moment the blacksmith’s eldest lad had tied the talon to a twenty-foot pole in the middle of the village, things had begun to turn around. Every time someone began losing heart, he looked up at the top of that pole and thought, If someone from this very village could take on a dragon, nothing is impossible.
People expected a turn of luck, and so it happened. With the backbone of fear broken, they were nicer to each other, more helpful. Tasks were done more easily; more was accomplished before each nightfall. Improvement was visible in every corner of the village of Downwood.
“You have returned from the dragon,” the priest said, arriving at the root of his true dislike for her at last. He tapped the side of his hawkish nose with his forefinger. “God has sharpened my senses so I might root out evil. I sense something unnatural about you, girl.”
