“This is what you don’t know. Some of Torm’s closest men have cresset torches. That’s a torch with an iron basket where the flame is. It’s kindled by oiled rope or pitch. But it shutters. They can twist the base of the cresset, and the little panels will be closed. If they don’t want to be seen in the dark, they simply twist the cresset. Do you understand?”
We shook our heads, trying to see her in the dark.
“If they spot you and don’t want you to see them, they’ll simply dim their light. Then they can sneak up on you and catch you in a crime.”
Rowena shrugged. “I just thought they were expensive-looking torches.”
“They’re deadly things. Now. Put the tins on the windowsills of the windows closest to the anemones,” she whispered, trying to lower her voice. “Or on the ground up against the building. They know how to look for it. Just don’t make it easily spotted.”
We did this all night in the town, bent over, dodging patches of torchlight from places with folk still awake, such as the tavern and the small office of the keep guards from where they kept watch on the town. Then we hiked towards the keep and the sharecropping fields. Every single house had a windflower wreath or garland strung to the front of it.
I had a sudden memory of my mother tossing a newly woven wreath into the hearth, saying she didn’t like how it had turned out. She had likely thrown it away so as not to confuse Magda, having just received a tin.
“Next time, you won’t carry so much,” Magda wheezed as we returned to her farm, our limbs deadened by all the grinding and carrying we had done. “You can deliver it more frequently and in chunks, so it is not such a big batch every time. Most of the women put the anemone outside a week before they run out.”
“And when do they pay?” Rowena asked.
Magda stilled and turned to my sister. Her hood slid back to rest on her hunched shoulders. The slice of moon shone down on her withered face framed by her white head of hair shot through with gray. She regarded Rowena with an impassive face and then turned to me.
“Part of her wages are to be supplemented with a foraging stipend so as to pay you for what you gather. It will just have to cover the cost of the time spent harvesting and grinding and delivering.This is not something for which I collect coin. Or ever will. It is also another danger to charge for it. It’s one more thing to worry over as well as the tins’ distribution and collection. There is already cost attached to this.”
43
THEN: CARE
Magda taught us to be criminals with the mother’s moss. Rowena was scared by this, but reasonable enough to overlook her fear as she understood the distribution of such a thing saved lives and eased the strain on households whose income and supplies were already stretched thin. I saw it as a divine calling, a revolution in the name of women, and I was happy to be in our small army of three.
Magda overheard me say this and made atsknoise with her tongue. “Fanciful horseshit,” she said.
But our true ordainment as outlaws was when she taught us about acts of care. After a long day of pickling beets, boiling and cutting them, jarring them and then pouring over them brine made of vinegar, cider, and herbs, our hands stained a lurid reddish violet, we sat at her worktable in front of bowls of water, vigorously scrubbing our hands with a soap made from an astringent tree sap, lye, and animal fat.
We were hissing from the sting of the lye but laughing over the vibrant suds we were making when Magda set a roll of leather down on the worktable with a tremendous thump. The leather rolled outand was revealed to hold two long tools made of what seemed like iron and silver held in by strips of leather looped through the roll.
“It’s time to learn a thing,” she said.
Inwardly, I sighed. I was exhausted. I had carried buckets of water all day, hunched over to cut the vegetables and to strain the brine into the jars. As eager a student as I was, I had nothing left in me.
As if she read my mind, Rowena said, “But we are so tired, madam.”
“Yes, and less likely to put up a fight or be offended by this lesson.”
“Be offended?”
“I am about to make you outlaws in two ways,” said Magda. “Once with mother’s moss and again with the act of care.”
“The act of care?”
“The act of care,” the midwife repeated. She pulled a rag from her apron and tossed it to Rowena, nodding her head as if to say that my sister should dry her hands off.
Our fingers and palms were still a violent pink, but we wiped them clean from the juice, soap, and water. When we were through, Magda continued.
“This work will fall under Rowena’s domain as midwife, but it’s best for you both to know a thing, of course. I have said that mother’s moss can help a woman if she is early on with child and doesn’t want to be. If it’s only a moon or so, you can mix nearly a tin’s worth of it, better with tansy, and it will clear out a womb. But what is to be done if the woman is further along?”
Neither of us had an answer.
“I will now teach you a thing that will likely have you imprisoned. This is your last warning. If you want to walk away from this, you must say so now. Your apprenticeship can end here without your father having to return his gold. Which, I suspect he no longer has anyway.”
We looked at each other. We were both content in our roles. Rowena enjoyed birthing and babies. I enjoyed foraging. And weboth were decent enough at the practice of herbalism, of taking the things I foraged and distilling them to useful states.
