“I know it to be true. Both goddesses. Particularly Sister Sea. These rivers and pools have kept me fed for winters. Sometimes I would wake with mushrooms shooting up all around me, when I know I did not lie down in mushrooms the night before.”
I stared at her, sympathy filling me for this poor woman,abandoned and left to die, braving a wilderness such as Nyossa all while a child.
“You are a miracle,” I said. “That is—That sounds like something fromThe Life of Una.”
“Oh I have always wanted to read that,” she exclaimed. “I learned to read enough as a child, and so sometimes the tinkers have books to trade. Hold on!” She retreated into the shed, leaving me holding the mussel, which was rather slimy and likely had been retrieved from the river that very day.
I had a thought that I may have found her familiar not just from her resemblance to her brother but from her having been so friendly with the tinkers. I must have seen her face across a bonfire at the tinker’s campgrounds. All this time, she had been so close to me.
Jade returned with a thin volume of poetry she offered with one hand, pulling the mussel from my grasp with the other. “Avery says you have lots of books. I would love to borrow one of yours if you want to borrow this one.”
“Madam,” I began stiffly, suddenly overcome with too much feeling in me. I was enchanted by her easy offer of goodwill, but I also wanted more answers. “You still have yet to explain your relationship to my husband.”
Confused, as if she had already explained enough, she repeated much of what Avery had said, that the butcher, having an inkling that she was the declared-dead child of the Aldreds’, would not sell to her. And as the tinkers did not come by as often as they used to, she needed a more regular place to trade for things she needed. Avery had seen her at the butcher’s. He had stepped in and said he would buy the fish from her. Then he had turned around and sold it to the butcher, who, knowing fish was a delicacy for most, told them both to leave but gave my husband the coin.
“As long as he doesn’t have to deal with me, he will buy from Avery,” Jade finished. “And it’s been such a help, I tell you. I need so many things.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me who you were?”
She sighed. “I begged him not to. I heard about the midwife, about her burning. I have always worried that if they took a mind to it, they might burn me too if I was discovered. So I have sneaked as much as I could.” She paused and then said, “I think part of her knew. She used to call out and ask if someone was there when she foraged. I think she sensed me watching her. Sometimes she would leave food or blankets. This dress was once hers.” She ran a hand over the neckline of the old thing.
Magda had been sturdier built and more stooped than Jade, which explained why the dress pulled at the woman’s shoulders but billowed around what was clearly a thinner frame.
The mention of my mentor made my heart go completely soft. “That’s why she always told me to leave some for others, if I was harvesting pig-belly mushrooms or something edible like that.”
“Magda never had proof, but part of her understood,” Jade explained.
“So, you—” I cut myself off, overcome with shame at my behavior. I turned and saw Avery peering at us, clearly trying to see how our conversation was going. I cleared my throat. “So you are not carrying on a kind of dalliance with my husband?”
She shook her head.
A pitiful part of me pushed me onward. “You swear it? On the goddesses of Tintar, Mother, and Sister. Do you swear it?”
Jade looked frazzled and then started to speak, her first words rushing over my last. “I would much rather be your friend than your imagined rival. Avery does nothing but say ‘my wife this’ and ‘my wife that.’ I have wanted to meet you for—” She stopped to collect herself. “I have wanted to meet you since the first boxing of yours that I could remember. I watched you walk right up to the box, and your head was held so proudly. You were not scared of them. I could not believe someone so small was so brave. You even held your arms out for the guards to better lift you.”
I eyed her, my rage having ebbed but my pride still sore. I was mortified at my behavior, and I replied with that soreness. “I don’t loan outThe Life of Una,” I said tersely. “You’ll have to come and read it in my house. But you can borrow anything else. Well, not Magda’s journals. But I have other books.”
Her intake of breath was so full of wonder, it was as if I had offered her a whole gold mine. “Would it upset you if I started to cry?”
I shrugged. “I did. I suppose you are allowed a turn.”
“Can I please come back?” Avery called down the path. “I am terrified of what is happening. Robbie, have you come to your senses yet?”
I turned to Jade. “I want him to stew in it for a bit longer. Do you mind? We’ll let him worry he is in trouble still. I’ll just stand here and talk to you. You can tell me about which tinkers you know.”
With a grin, she asked, “Do you know Yates?”
73
THEN: FRIEND
It could be said that we improved Jade’s life, but the truth of it was that she improved ours. Avery was my only friend before Jade. I loved my sister endlessly, but there were secrets separating us. Our easy bond from childhood had thinned after her marriage, though we remained devoted to each other. She never admitted to Ilsit being her lover, and I had never admitted to Thane being mine. And Thane had been my friend, but that had all been undone. I realized I had expected much of Avery, to be both my partner and my friend, and he had shouldered that responsibility well.
I felt that Jade’s friendship to both of us made us better partners to each other. He had someone to try out his humor on and someone else who did not believe in Rodwin, one other soul to whom he did not have to speak with caution. And I had my first female friend.
I like to think we made up for these gifts with what we gave her. Her feet were roughly the size of mine, and I gave her a pair of my boots. I took two dresses, two shifts, and a set of stays from my trunk and gave them to her along with hair pins, a comb that was better than the one she had, and an apron made of thin, tanned leather withlarge pockets that Magda had worn. I could not bring myself to wear it after she died and had hung it on a hook in the front room and forgotten about it. Avery made Jade a nail file to better keep her fingernails, which she had bitten down to the quick. And he gave her a set of knives of several sizes, from small enough to pry open her mussels to large enough to gut a fat fish.
They were trinkets compared to the joy she brought with her into our house along with nearly daily fish and the occasional bucket of mussels.
