‘When she was sick, wasting away, I told her we should send for you,’ he blurts, and I don’t reply. ‘She refused. Forbade me or Da from doing it.’
‘It’s no comfort to hear someone would die rather than see me.’ But I can’t claim she’s the first.
‘Could you have saved her? If you’d come?’
‘If you’d called?’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t know, Orin. I’m not a god. I have some skills, I can heal breaks and tears, but tumours? Carcinomas? They’re beyond me. A wasting sickness would likely have defied me, but I could have made her passing gentler.’ No point in lying.
‘Mam said… that you’d made…’ He clears his throat.
‘What?’
‘Me.’
Oh. ‘She came to me because she was having trouble getting pregnant. I was able to help. You’re not the only child that’s come into the world because of my skills, so don’t feel special.’
‘I wish you hadn’t helped. I wish she hadn’t come to you. Then I wouldn’t be—’ The note in his voice is achingly sad.
‘Here? Orin, you were very much wanted – your father wanted you so much he left me, and your mother wanted youso much that she begged the woman she hated the most in the world for help.’ Awkwardly I pat one of his cold hands at my waist. ‘Your father loves you, he’s just very bad at showing it. That’s not your fault.’
‘It hurts, when he doesn’t see you. Stops paying attention,’ he mutters.
‘Yes, it does.’
‘It’s like you don’t exist anymore.’
‘I know.’ I’m aware that we’re almost at the penitents’ path trap; as if I didn’t have enough to contend with without giving life advice to a surly teen. ‘It’s like the sun going away, and your father’s affection is very much like the sun. When it disappears behind a cloud you think you’ll never be warm again.’
‘Doesn’t that anger you?’
‘Once. Not anymore.’ And it’s true. It was too long ago and I need my energy for other things. I’m too old for idiocies and what-ifs. ‘It hurt at the time but that was a long while ago. And getting mad about it just meant that I made worse mistakes.’Summer husbands and stillborn babies.
‘Didn’t you want a child?’
Why am I answering these questions?‘I wasn’t interested, and children aren’t toys, not to be got then put aside when you’re bored. I’d have been a terrible parent and I never wanted to treat a child the way my mother treated me.’ But I don’t tell him, just like I didn’t tell his father, that I couldn’t carry any child, couldn’t bear one alive, because that’s my pain to hold.
‘Then why does my father put me aside?’ He sounds so mournful and I remind myself that he is, when all’s said and done, a lonely boy who’s almost lost his dog, who’s crying forhis father and grieving his mother, who’s become aware of the terrible weight of all the things he’s done in hope of love.
‘Because men are heedless idiots. All you can do is be a better man than your father, if you have children. Even if you don’t, you’ve a lot to make up to the children you’ve harmed – those who survive, anyway. I know you protected them, once.’ I think about how much little boys adore their mothers until they’re taught not to, until they’re taught that softness equals weakness, when that softness is all they ever yearn for. How boys grow into fathers who think they must tell their sons that softness is weakness, even though they miss it like a limb. Instead of saying ‘I’ll not do what was done to me, I did not like it’ they repeat and repeat and repeat that awful cutting of heart from soul on their own sons. I clear my throat. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry Faolan is distant. I thought he’d be better, and you deserve better.’
I angle Rosie carefully past the penitents’ path – the trail of dead foliage leading from it looking even blacker, even more dead – and direct Orin’s attention to the series of brown concentric circles. ‘Did you help with that?’
I feel him shake his head against my shoulder. ‘That was him, he made it.’
‘But the hare – the hare was possessed, yes? And you’d followed me that morning.’ I’m just guessing but he doesn’t contradict me. ‘And you loosed it near me, and I was caught up in the chase.’ My turn to shake my head, but a reluctant laugh pushes its way out. ‘You little turd.’
We continue in silence for a while as the air between us settles, and the mood finds its own level that’s not quite so heavy, as if something’s been lightened.
***
There’s still some daylight left, but the sky is darkening, heavy with oncoming snow this last day of autumn. We’ve dismounted and are standing in the shadows roughly in the same place I left Rosie last time, and where Rowan and Faolan’s great black stallion have wandered, abandoned. Orin’s checked them over, tied their reins to branches, pronounced them hale and hearty with some relief. I think about the red hide I saw across the clearing that last time – realise it was Rowan then too, that it was Orin come to the barrow to fulfil some obligation or other. The boy’s examining his torso, the raised pink scars where only a few hours ago he was bleeding. I feel sick to my stomach. I would like nothing so much as to run and hide in a hole in the earth – not the one in front of us, obviously. Instead, I tether Rosie to a tree and Merry-girl with her despite the reproachful look she gives. With an apology, I wrap my scarf around her snout as a muzzle because I can’t risk her barking. I hand Orin the spare iron knife from my satchel, then adjust the quiver and bow slung on my back, and am searching for inspiring words when he blurts out:
‘What if it’s already killed my da?’ The lad’s face, stripped of all boldness, all swagger, looks achingly young. A little boy deprived of both parents, confused and doing terrible things to wring a little warmth from his life.
‘It hasn’t,’ I say and I’m mostly sure I’m right. I wish I could tell him his father will be safe, that it will turn out all right in the end. What I don’t tell him because it will offer no comfort is that I’m fairly sure the shadow half needs Faolan so it won’t do anything to him, or at least not without an audience.That the death of the blacksmith needs to be aperformance. A ritual. Must be witnessed – because such a death unseen won’t have quite the same effect without testimony, without shock. Of course, I’m not sure of anything right now, can’t think of anything except the sight of Faolan’s scars across shoulder and chest, stomach and hips.
I do the only thing I can and wrap my arms around Orin and hold him tightly until he stops shaking, then say, ‘You know what to do. I’m counting on you.’
‘Yes, Mistress Mehrab.’ His voice is stronger than it has been.
