“He told the priest. Starling has always had it out for you, Robbie. And then add on your apprenticeship. Well—I’ve been much monitored. This is the first night I could get away really.” He frowned at me.
“In two winters?” I challenged.
Thane nodded. “I do not joke. I’ve proved obedient, and so now I’m not watched as much. Also, the times I did manage to ride here, your mentor scared me away.”
“She did?”
“Yes! And she’s terrifying.”
I laughed. “She is. What did she say to you?”
His face softened, and he stepped closer to me. “That it did not matter which twin I wanted to steal kisses from, I had better make myself scarce. And I said—” He stopped, hesitation on his face. Then he said, “I said I wanted to kiss the girl with the darker hair and wondered if she would pass that on to that girl. The old woman told me to go screw myself.”
I laughed, a catch in my throat as Thane brought his face closer to mine.
“Do you remember kissing me in Nyossa?”
I must have nodded.
“I swear to you, Robbie. I remember every single kiss.”
My jealous imaginings rose in my mind and I asked, “Have you kissed anyone since?”
Thane stilled and then said, “To me, I think your lips are the only lips that exist in the known world.”
“Are you a poet now?” I croaked. This boy would make me cry soon. I was hanging on by threads, my eyes falling closed when he took his hands in mine and brought them to his lips.
“Can I please kiss you again?” he asked.
Before his mouth met mine, he kissed away the tear that had slid from one of my eyes and halfway down my cheek.
Thane stole away every night he could and waited at the same part of the fence line that bordered where the sugar peas grew.
As long as we worked hard during the day, our evenings were our own. Magda did not care if we stayed up late talking or reading, or if we went into the woods to watch the fireflies and moths glow in the dark. Rowena was fortunately a heavy sleeper, and I would go for a walk along the property line hoping for a glimpse of Thane, his big black horse tied somewhere nearby. Some nights we missed each other. Some nights he could not get away. But other nights we spent together in their entirety, our exhaustion the following day not something we cared to think on.
46
THEN: FRUIT
Closer to our eighteenth day of birth, Magda took it upon herself to truly educate Rowena and I about the flesh between our legs and how it worked.
We were sitting at her kitchen table, peeling potatoes for her to make a hearty potato bread with a hard crust that she flavored with garlic and rosemary. She was going to take us to the tinker tents outside Carver the following day and use the loaves to trade for goods.
She set a plate of fruit in front of us. “That’s your luncheon.”
Rowena thanked her politely.
I mumbled my thanks and picked up a heavy piece of citrus fruit that I had never seen before. It was rounder than the lemons that grew on the little tree in the yard. It was heavier than the oranges I had seen traded at the tinkers’ markets. But it had the same dimpled, shiny rind. It was a pale pink color striated with bits of yellow. “What is this?”
“A lady fruit,” Magda replied, taking a seat near us and slicing a pear she had pulled from the plate. “I sometimes findthem in the forest, but they’re more prevalent on the Tintar side. It’s very sour but still pleasant.”
Then, before I could make a tear in the rind with my thumbnail to peel it, she dropped her pear and reached across the table to pluck it from my hand. “Actually, this is a good time to continue your education.” Magda grabbed a kitchen knife from the table and roughly sliced the fruit in half from the divot where the stem had once been so that it was split down the center of the rind and not from the side that would create pie shapes of the little segments. She held up one half. “It’s time I told you how a woman’s sex can give her pleasure as well as deliver a babe. I will tell you now.”
Rowena looked up from her careful slicing of her own pear. Her face was reddening. “You—You what?”
Magda smiled at her. “Perhaps you already know, Rowena.”
My twin’s blush spread to her neck and chest.
