“What was that?” I asked.
“Crystals. Sulfur crystals. I had Torm’s father send away to the mines of Eccleston. His fields had become acidic, like a poisonous hand choking any growth. And simply adding sulfur crystals to thetopsoil reduced that poison. Magic likely saved this place from famine.”
“She spoke to you?” I asked.
Magda shook her head. “She gave me a vision in my mind. And I had studied soils, so I knew. It was half magic, half knowledge.”
“Is that how you met your husband?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yes. But he wasn’t a sharecropper. This was his little farm. He was a bachelor and established and much sought after in those days. Every widow was after him, every girl with a pretty face. They did not care for his loving the Tintarian pagan woman who was nearing her thirtieth winter and rather homely.”
“And you stayed, and he married you?”
“Yes. And this place needed a midwife badly. I felt compelled to be here. And I had the advantage of his land being next to the sanctuary of my goddess.”
39
THEN: FORAGER
Magda gave us hard labor for the first seven days. We weeded her gardens. We climbed up the trees of her orchard and snipped off dead branches. We watered and fed the animals, swept her floors, and cooked her meals. The first time one of us snagged the hem of a dress in these tasks, she gave us old tunics and boys’ breeches to wear every day.
“These make your backside look even bigger,” commented my twin, but not unkindly. “It truly grows every day.”
I snorted with ready laughter, for even though I was tired from my labor, Magda’s house was a happy one compared to our own.
Sometimes she left us to attend a birthing or visit one of Lord Sheridan’s sharecropper families to check on a newly delivered babe. She never asked us to go with her.
“When is she going to teach us anything?” I had complained at the end of the first week, calling to my sister while we were in the orchard. I was straddling aVshape in a pear tree, using shears to clip off twigs that looked dead. I was anxious to learn, and though I enjoyed the liberation from our father’s house, I wondered when my education would begin.
Something shaped like a nut—but sticky and wet—hit me in the arm. I peered through the branches to see my grinning twin sliding down from her perch in a peach tree with juice on her face.
There were times during the early days with Magda when I saw that Rowena forgot to be careful, to be a good daughter of Rodwin, and simply let herself be a smiling girl, dappled in sunlight, throwing peach pits at her sister.
At night we spent hours packing jars with dried herbs and topping them with oil from sunflowers. Magda explained the herbs would infuse the oil and could be used for things like joint pain, a chill in the chest, and phlegm in the throat. But she did not bother to tell us what each herb was.
We would then go to bed in her bedroom, a tidier room with more stacks of books along the wall and a bedside table with candles on it. Under beautifully rendered quilts with what seemed to be pagan patterns on them, we would discuss what we had done that day and guessed at why.
The second week, she gave us more than labor. We finally got a lesson.
She gave us each a spade and a basket and told us to follow her into Nyossa. Her cat, an aggressive, attention-seeking thing named Dewdrop, followed us down one of the skinny footpaths that only allowed for the span of one person to walk on them at a time. Then she saw a fleeting body of something in the bushes, a coney or a fox or a badger, and ran squalling back to the farm.
“Fool of a thing,” Magda muttered, pulling a branch out of her face.
Nyossa’s terrain was varied. There were whole portions of it where the trees were so tight, a person could not see beyond them. There were parts where the river was fast and thick and bisected the land. There were tributaries and creeks that were slovenly, forking off from the river to create pools and inlets where whole worlds seemed to live underwater.
And every so often, there was a break in the trees where a spot ofland, free from monstrous tree roots, was able to flourish, playing host to countless flowers, mushrooms, wild ferns, and herbaceous plants.
“We’re collecting indigo today for the roots,” Magda said when she introduced us to one of these openings.
“I think we used to play in this,” Rowena said, looking around.
“You did,” Magda commented, ignoring the surprise on our faces.
“How much did she see?” I whispered to my twin.
The midwife carried on speaking, squatting over a cluster of plants. “We’re here for its roots, but it’s best to use all of a plant if you are going to cut its life short, so the flowers and seed pods we’ll set aside for making dyes.”
Magda rolled up her sleeves as she spoke. She waved the tips of her fingers at me, indicating I was to give her my spade. With deftness, she plunged it into the ground and began to lever it back and forth. As she dug, she taught. “This is indigo. See it is shaped like a spike, and the flowers shoot out from the main stem part. They look like clover leaves, but they are either violet or blue. You’ll see yellow or white indigo now and then, but not often hereabouts. You’ll want to be careful with the roots when you dig. You should not sever it, so plant your spades carefully. You’ll find yourself digging around one indigo spike and see that you’ve severed the roots of another. Patience is the best approach here.”
