“Why us?” I asked Magda, watching her watch the two of us.
She gave us both a slow, cryptic smile. “Maybe the forest picked you.”
I shivered, both at her suggestion that she had witnessed our summery adventures and her brazenness in suggesting that a forest could be a sentient thing that communed with people. It sounded like blasphemy, and I found it exhilarating.
She had to have seen us run wild in Nyossa.
“What did you see?” Rowena asked, the pitch of her question high and quavering.
I thought of her and Ilsit kissing on the riverbank. Then I thought of me and Thane and began to blush.
Magda remained smiling. Then she turned to my parents and said, “And think of this. With the occupation of an apprenticeship, your Roberta will have less free time on her hands, less chance of disobedience and less chance of being boxed. Maybe ever again.”
“Done,” my father pronounced, standing from his chair. “You can have them seven days a week until their majority. But they’ll return for the eighth, ninth, and tenth days, to assist their mother and attend church. They can use the old mare to travel to and from yours.”
Magda nodded.
“And,” he went on, “if they so much as bring home any of that spell craft of your pagan beliefs, I’ll change my mind so quickly, woman. And I’ll keep your gold. Do you hear me?”
“I’ll stick to sage and stitches,” the woman replied, her eyelids closing over her eyes rolling at him.
I was shocked at her again, impressed by her complete disregard for my father, an impressive man, a business owner, an elder of the church, and a friend to Lord Torm.
But he was busy pocketing the coin and telling our mother to handle the rest of it. He slipped out into the night through the front door before she answered him, before he even had his dinner.
“Well, my girl,” Magda said to our mother. “I have solved one problem for you but created another, I think.”
“That problem has always been, I’m afraid,” she answered the midwife, rueful and resigned.
I did not know what they meant, nor did I care. I was beside myself with excitement. I had never lived anywhere but the mill house and was so happy at the idea of escape, everything else seemed meaningless.
38
THEN: WITCH
Magda collected us after the next tenth-day service. We met her at the public hitching post, where we saw her lean her white-haired head against the cheek of a massive plow horse. The horse was the color of sand, with a white mane and tail and a pink nose, and was tied next to our old mare, Dusty. We each had a small satchel with an extra set of clothing and other things we would need for our first stretch of seven days.
I had wrappedThe Life of Unain my second shift and buried it at the bottom of my bag. Though it was a thinner volume, I felt its weight on my back like it was a collection of stones. The very idea of my parents finding it in our little bedroom made me break out in a cold sweat.
“This is Apple Dumpling,” Magda said, patting her big horse’s neck. Then, without further explanation, she mounted her ride and set off down the main dust road that led out of town on the Nyossa side.
I climbed up on Dusty and helped Rowena climb up behind me.
In my ear my twin whispered, as I clucked and urged our horse to follow Magda’s, “Do you think she is afraid to come into town?I mean I know Lord Torm and Father Starling have said she is exempt from church, but they say also that the priest would love to find her guilty of something. I heard our father tell Kent’s father that if Starling could, he would put her in the keep dungeons for life.”
“Then why give her the lenience of not having to attend services?”
“Because I think the priest knows she could easily spread discord.”
“Discord?”
“Amongst the women. You know our mother is very devout. She worships at the altar of Rodwin’s scriptures, but she is the first one to say that women should be allowed tonics and anything that eases a pregnancy and a delivery. She just doesn’t say it openly.”
“You’re saying there are other women like our mother, outwardly devout and inwardly... more open-minded?”
I felt Rowena nod behind me. “They just don’t show it. They can’t.”
We rode in silence for a while and then turned at a fork in the road. This stretch of it was untried, not as beaten down as the other dust roads. Rowena and I were only familiar with it as it was a path we had taken to find Nyossa. Soon, on the left side of the road, the Geist farm came into view. It was an adequately sized farmhouse with a small stables behind it. It had an orchard lining the side closest to town. I could make out pear and peach trees. On the other side of the house was a stretch of gardens that seemed to yield a myriad of root vegetables, tomatoes, beans, peas, and what looked like a small field of herbs. All of this was fenced in, from the road and also on the sides and back of the property. And on the other side of the gardens was the edge of Nyossa, a solid tree line of knotted trunks and dark-green foliage.
