“I don’t know. They are not powerful penchants. I only have a soil affinity, and that is not proof of anything really?—”
“Yet I have never seen a door in a god tree. Please explain your fire.”
I gathered myself and then said, “If I let a drop of blood fall onto an already-lit flame, it blooms in heat and size. It will erupt, many times the size it was, and if I were cooking something, it would be crisp in the span of a few breaths.”
“They say that the most common magics of Tintar are sea and air,” said Jade, her eyes leaving mine to look at the tree line. “That is why they have such massive armies and thriving coastal dwellings. And fire is rarer, but not entirely uncommon. Least of all is earth. For every four or five air or sea Tintarians, there are maybe two fire Tintarians and only one soul blessed by earth.”
“Magda once told me it is because Mother Earth spreads herself as thin as she can,” I said. “She said that goddess is forever trying to reach not only her children, but the ones the fates made.”
“And you are blessed by two rarer magics.”
I looked back down at my dirty hands. “I will tell you more someday.”
“If you wish. But only if. I don’t need to know if you do not need me to know,” my new friend said and dipped her hand back in the sludge.
As I watched her cheerfully spread it, I thought of Brother Air’s words to the fate called Fear in Una’s book.
I have given them strength that is not a strength you know, of might, of power, as you call it. I have made them clever and fast, cunning and resourceful. These are immeasurable things, fate. You cannot break them. Not even you.
Some gods’ gifts were immeasurable things, I reasoned. Things like a friend reading your favorite book in your kitchen, that same friend knocking on your door with an apron full of wildflowers she had picked for you, drinking your tea, and working in your garden. Those were gifts of air as they were borne from the heart and the mind. As was the tightness at the back of one’s neck to sense danger. Perhaps the understanding of air magic was that it did not need to be understood to be received.
I gave them the best of me.
74
THEN: TESSA
Ihad taken on an apprentice, a girl of only ten, too young for the work but clearly miserable with her lot in life as the oldest of a brood of children with an exhausted mother and a father who ruled with his fists. But I had set a dislocated shoulder and put her other arm in a splint. When her mother, the wife of a sharecropper from Carver, brought her to me the second time, I paid for her to stay, as Magda had once paid for my sister and me. I did not even know her name when I took her in, as she did not speak. In the first weeks of her living with us, she had found an orphaned fox kit in the woods and informed us, via writing with a stick in dirt, that the fox was named Daisy and that she would like to go by Fox. I had declared that this was confusing and should be the other way around, but Avery had shushed me.
Though she was a hardworking little thing and often confused by Adelaide’s dudgeons and entitlement, she warmed easily to my niece. As opposite as they were, they found a friendship with each other. When the girls were old enough, my sister and I took them to the summer tinker camp.
Fox was desperate to go and had been asking me for the last fewwinters. I had a suspicion that her family, hailing from Carver, might visit the campgrounds, see her, and want to reclaim her. Her mother had never visited and, selfishly, I was grateful for it. I did not want to surrender the girl I called apprentice but now treated like a daughter. We never discussed her prior home or her parents. I had once offered to visit them in Carver on her behalf, and she had violently shaken her head.
“It is your choice, of course,” I had said.
Rowena assured me that the likelihood of such a coincidence was slim. And so we put the girls on the backs of our horses and went.
The tinker wagons were arranged in a large circle as in winters past, half tents erected like lean-tos on the sides of many of them. Music from a fiddler could be heard. The odds-and-ends traders had their wares spread out on quilts and old rugs. A new cobbler wagon we did not recognize drew our attention and, both of us having growing girls, we visited that first. The tinker cobbler would make shoes custom, but he also had a selection of ready-made boots in common sizes and many secondhand children’s shoes. As we looked at shoes for the girls, I noticed his neighbor was not a tinker I knew.
Next to the cobbler’s tent was a smaller wagon with a lean-to tent on its side and stacks of crates that looked like candles resting in hay. A full-bodied woman, tall and thick in her chest, sat on a stool and chatted with a customer in her tent who was smelling each crate.
“I’m in need of candles,” I said to Rowena. “Let’s visit that tent next. I hate making them myself. I never got the knack of it.”
Maybe she’ll want mother’s moss in exchange, signed Fox.
“Such a good little businesswoman,” I said to her. “Pick out your new shoes. Make sure they’re a tad bigger than your feet. You grow like a weed.”
When Fox smiled up at me, I looked away, pretending not to be moved by her happiness at secondhand shoes.
“Are you in need of mother’s moss, madam?” I sang out to the chandler, stepping into her half tent with Fox on my heels. “We’ve plenty of tins.”
The candlemaker looked up from peering into one of her crates.
She was a handsome woman, big, near to imposing. Her russet hair was in a fat braid, and she wore a straw hat. She was clothed in an old tunic and breeches tucked into boots.
“You must be the midwives of Sheridan. I am called Tessa,” she said, her face breaking into a smile as she stood and reached out to shake my hand. This was a common greeting or sign of agreement amongst the tinkers, and I had always liked it. It suggested friendship and respect.
I shook her hand and sniffed the air. “I am Robbie and this is Fox. Have you been with the tinkers before? I do not recognize your face, but your candles smell familiar.”
