Before I left the farmhouse, I had smiled and nodded at Jade sitting at the worktable drinking her bark tea. She had smiled and nodded back.
Fox had put her thin arms around my waist and squeezed.
My hand on her head, I said, “And what will you do today?”
I will set up the table with the mortar and pestle and tins for making the paste, she signed.Before that I will help Jade with the laundry.
“What a gift you are, child,” I said and kissed her forehead, but my eyes were on Jade. I mouthedthank you, but she waved her hand dismissively.
In the forest, I found a pretty pink-and-brown god snake, its little forked tongue flicking at nothing in particular, sunningitself on a root.
“Good morning,” I greeted her gently. I liked to think they were all girls. “Is there a blackberry bush nearby?”
There was. When I found it, I realized I had visited these trees just a few moons prior. And in my head, I heard Magda.
You’re not to visit the same trees twice in a row. Best to forget a tree once you’ve harvested from it. Let the forest tell you where to go.
And now Nyossa or Mother Earth or some other source had deemed these trees ready for gleaning. And I found myself lit within from wrath. I stomped a foot into the dirt.
The god snake slithered away with such speed she was but a blur.
There was a nearby clearing that I recognized. In some seasons, it was marsh-like, a shallow leaking in from one of the Nyossa creeks. It was likely why the god trees were here. Magda had said they liked water.
But now it was autumn. Now there was a chill in the night air and a dryness to the forest, the sounds of life more a scraping than a brush when trees were bent by the wind. Brittle grass crunching beneath my boots, I walked into the clearing and looked up at the sky.
“I would like to know,” I hollered, “what in the ever-lovingfuckit is you expect me to do now? I would really,reallylike to know. Could I be granted that? Is it so very much to ask?” My chest was heaving and my throat had already started to ache from the volume I emitted, but I was alive for the first time since I had seen my poor man’s drowned body. And though I was experiencing a grief like no other grief I had endured, I felt a certainty and a potency. I feltsafein my anger, my lifelong companion.
“I don’t know which one of you horse’s asses is listening to me, and I don’t care!” I declared and threw my arms above me, turning in a circle. “One of you bloody, suffering pricks should have the godsdamn decency to answer! One of you!” I was breathless now and had to pitch forward and put my hands on my knees. Had I the breath, I would have almost laughed.
I was amazed that I had yet to descend into weeping again.
When I collected myself, I straightened. And without yelling, but still calling out with a raised voice, I held my arms out again and said, “As far as I am concerned, you can all fuck right off! I don’t want a godsdamn thing to do with any of you! Worshipping you hasn’t done a thing for me, I can tell you that! In fact, you’ve made my life hell! And my family’s life hell, and my mentor’s life. You’ve made it allworse!”
A voice in my head reminded me that it was the tyranny of the church that had really done this, but I was drunk on my indignation. I felt far too good to stop.
“I’m done praying to you,” I continued. “I don’t even need you. I don’t even practice magic. I don’t bleed and pray. If I’ve magic in me, all it’s good for is mother’s moss. I’m not one of your Tintarians. I care nothing for your lawless, misunderstood,uselesswild magic. I’m a mad woman of the low country, and Ipisson your wild.”
I turned on my heel, returned to the god trees, and stepped inside one.
VII
DAUGHTER
77
NOW: RAIN
The closer the pilgrimage got to Skow, the more the entire caravan became restless. The cattle gave mournful lowing throughout the day, which we could hear at our place in the four hundreds’ rows of wagons. The horses, both for pilgrims and Perpatanians, were easily spooked and jerked at their harnesses more often. In the evenings, campgrounds were set up with less care, the sounds of clattering dishes and complaints going up around us as the sun set. In the mornings, when I woke for a second time, under the wagon, next to my family, the neighboring wagons were packed back up with a new frenzy, a nervousness that had not been there previously.
The infantry and cavalry responded in kind, cavalrymen riding by with more frequency, infantrymen stalking up and down the rows of penitent camps, a relentlessness in their observation. Several times, Gerard and Bertram made appearances riding near our wagon.
“Folk are antsy knowing that this journey has no return,” Tessa explained, her hands out to receive the tin cup of stew with foraged mushrooms and carrots flavored with scallions.
We had made camp and were having our last meal of the day amid a hubbub of anxious travelers around us.
“I keep hearing about that tower,” Jade said, ladling out Ilsit’s portion. “How it’s so big you can fit two whole wagons inside the doors.”
“That’s where they’ll have us stable the livestock,” Tessa added. “They’ve the capacity for stables on the first floor. I hear the first level of the tower is nearly the size of a small town. It’s a marvel of masonry, that thing. All smooth rock the first floor. And ancient as the world, they say.”
