“Today is my fortieth birthday,” I cried out, flinching when I heard the resounding rustling of creatures hiding themselves from me. I loved the gods of Tintar, but I felt like yelling today. I had yelled at them before without reaping a punishment.
“Today, I turn forty. And today, my most prized possession hasbeen taken from me. Taken from me and destroyed by the hands of men.” I paused and let a tear run down my cheek. “They tookThe Life of Una! They took Una from me. My favorite book of all. She is gone!” I paused again, overcome with a sob, a strangled gurgle of a thing. I went on, saying, “So, I would ask you, gods and goddesses. I would ask you the same thing I shouted to you but five winters past. What am I to do now? Why is this fight even worth fighting, and why am I the one forever on a battlefield? Whyme?”
I shook my head and paced a little along the edge of the clearing, watching a turtle slip into a ditch while three nearby butterflies shot up into the air above him, frightened by his escape. I knew I was disturbing the forest. I knew I was treading with clumsiness, but I was at the end of a rope.
I went on. “The thing of it is, I have a god-shaped hollow in me. My church cut that part of my heart out when I was still a little girl, and I have to fill it with something. I think I have spent my life filling it. I thought you were worthy of that spot.Godsdamn it!”
A flock of birds at the other side of the clearing collectively launched themselves into the sky at my last curse.
“I did not lose hope, you know!” I said, spinning from one direction to the other, finger raised to the sky. “I did not lose hope when they took my mentor from me. I did not lose hope when my lover married my sister. I did not lose hope when my husband died. Nor when my beloved twin did. And even a few seasons past, when my willful, spoiled niece left us to marry the enemy? I did not give up hope. I kept pressing on, gathering the moss and delivering it in the dead of night. I went back to delivering babes when my sister could not, though I was never a talented midwife, though I even dislike that they call me ‘midwife’ now. I never gave up. I never lost hope!”
Needing to breathe, I halted my steps and my words. Then I said, “They have taken the thing that told me I was not mad, that I was a good-hearted girl despite what my priest told me, the book that told me I was not destined to be a demon’s thrall in the afterlife. Thewhole reason I ever had a mind open enough to learn from Magda, to want to care for other women, to be your outlaw? They took it!”
I put my hands over my heart and tried to regulate my breathing. “I will still work and work on behalf of those other than myself. But you should know, I am utterly, entirely without hope. I labor for nothing that is myself. I work for others only. I—” I cut myself off, truly sobbing again, unable to quit. “I work for my girl and my friends and the memory of my sister and my man. But I have nothing left in me. There is no well from which to draw water. I have lostallhope. I merely tire on for the sake of duty.”
When I was done weeping at the edge of the marsh, I returned to the house and held a teary-eyed Fox and offered her my condolences. She had never spoken during the entirety of her life, and though we had designed a system of hand signals that grew more and more complex over time, books had been another way for her to communicate.
Her soundless weeping helped to lessen my own and, over her head, I offered an equally grieving Jade a weak smile.
The five of us spent that day continuing to clean the house, feeding the animals, quietly discussing what we should do next—what would be a hiding place for the medicinals when we returned them from the forest—and burning various candles of Tessa’s at open windows in the farmhouse to get the smell of burning parchment and leather out of our noses.
We were subdued but we were together and, for the moment, safe. No one mentioned that it was my day of birth, and I was grateful for it.
After a dinner of fried potato served with nearly overripe peaches from the orchard, everyone squeezed into their beds, Tessa taking Fox’s bed this time as I asked the girl to join me in mine. She and Daisy the fox crawled in next to me, and we slept more soundly than I would have thought we could.
In the morning, I woke first and gingerly stepped outside to the sit on the front step. I could smell the fresh air of a night turning intoa day, the dew on the grass and in my gardens making everything sparkle faintly as the sun began to rise. A barn owl’s flat, eerie face peeked out at me from the tree line of the forest. It was as if he was saying, “It is my bedtime now. The day is yours.”
He was right. It was time to start another day, no matter how much I may not have wanted that. I put my hands down to push myself up. When I did, my right hand skidded a little, and I looked down to see I was not touching the wood of the front step but a small, hard thing covered in old leather.
I blinked. It was a book. Transfixed, I picked it up. I did not recognize it, but many books were without an embossing to mark what they were. When I opened it, I saw scrawl over the book’s name on the title page. In what seemed to be a crude ink made of something natural, like berries, in a slanted hand, there were three words.
Don’t lose hope.
It was not a printing I recognized, perhaps a newer version than the one I had always owned, but I knew the title of that book like I knew my own name.The Life of Una.
5
NOW: WAR
We lay low. As was law, Fox and I attended the following tenth-day service. As Jade and Ilsit were listed among the dead, they did not, and they no longer showed their faces in town.
We sat in the back pews as we always did, heads slightly down. Tessa had a habit of standing in the back of the church so she could leave quickly. I spotted her out of the corner of my eye and nodded. She did not approach us, as we had discussed. The whole of Sheridan knew my farmhouse had been raided and that books had been burned. I felt the eyes of several congregants on me, knowing they likely wondered if there was a chance the books I had hidden for them survived. I forced myself to look back and grimace, as if to say, “No, and I am sorry.”
But I saw no accusations in these women’s gazes—for it was all women. They knew if my home had not been raided, it would have been their own homes. I wanted to shout at them that we had saved the moss, that the medicinal paste they relied on—to clean a man’s seed from their womb, to keep their courses regular and to keep someof the pain of them at bay—was still safe. There had been so little time, and we had chosen the moss.
After church, avoiding having to speak with anyone, Fox and I made our way to my sister’s house, where she had once run an apothecary out of the front, where she had raised a daughter both with Thane, her husband, and then with Tessa, whom she had called her “true wife.” Only Tessa lived there now, with an occasional visit from Thane when he was home from travel. But he mostly had returned to living at the castle keep.
“Thane is here,” she whispered as she opened her door, her broad presence filling the doorway, russet hair riotous and braid haphazard, dark eyes looking past us to the street outside. Then she took a moment to point at Fox and then hold that hand in a loose cup-like pose. This was what we did to say to Fox,How are you?
Fox patted her chest and smiled, saying,I am well.
I noticed that the straw hat Tessa often wore, which I sometimes borrowed for foraging, was askew and her hands were filthy.
“Come from the garden before church?” I joked, trying to catch her gaze. My manner was still subdued, and there was still a tension in the air. We had only just been raided by the lord, the priest, and their men. We had both withstood loss, exile, and the general wear of life, that stream of time that softens the stone’s edge. Had we been younger, perhaps we would have both still been flustered. At this age, we considered ourselves and the outcome before panicking any further.
She gave me a doleful stare and removed her hat, then waved it next to her sweaty face and commented that she was always a little grubby—that Iknewthat. She indicated we should go inside, past the apothecary front room to the housing in the back.
I found myself nervous. I had rarely spoken to Thane over the winters and only over things of importance or family. We had avoided each other for so long. We were both now past forty, and this was nonsensical to think about. Fox had always enjoyed Tessa’s house and proceeded to the living quarters ahead of me, holding up herhand in a little wave to where Thane sat at Tessa’s table. He waved back.
