He leaned in close. “You bring my sister a few tins of the moss, I will ink anything you like on that fine young body.”
I blushed and took him in. He was handsome in a brutish sort of way. Perhaps closer to thirty than twenty with corded muscles and a sensual expression. “Done,” I said and held out a hand to shake on it.
The tattooed man bent over my hand and kissed the back of it.
The next day, I brought him several tins of the moss. I watched him walk to another wagon and deliver them to the woman standing outside of it. I realized that they were likely kin. He returned and helped me up into his wagon.
It hurt terribly, but I gritted my teeth and took the pain. He gave me, over the next two days, the two things I had decided to put on my body, a story written into skin, words on a page, two things to remind myself who I was and what person had loved me the most. He put a gathering of blackberries and their spiked leaves on my left upper arm. On my right, in the same place, he put an artfully coiled god snake.
“Come back tomorrow,” he said, wiping blood from the tail of the snake.
I exhaled and blinked away the tears in my eyes. “I do not think I could withstand another day of inking. And there is nothing else I want.”
“Nothing else?” he asked and ran a fingertip over mycollarbone.
We were sitting facing each other on stools in his wagon, the tarp stretched above us blocking out the sun’s blistering heat. I did not get his meaning at first. His slow smile helped me understand.
I was only nineteen and in no way ready for the world. At the time, I found his response to be incredibly silver-tongued. I returned the next day and the next day after that. He did not press me for my maidenhead, and because of that, and because I was desperate to be rid of the thing I had wanted to give to Thane, I surrendered it gladly.
The tinkers had no shame regarding sex, and it astounded me continuously. I was amazed to learn that they tended towards taking lovers over marrying.
“What priest would marry any of us anyway?” said the tattooed man lying alongside me in his wagon, naked, tangled in linens. “If someone really wants to, they can buy a marriage in Eccleston from a magistrate.”
He was called Micah and did me the kind service of acting like my innocence and lack of experience were not as extreme as they were. I never developed anything but a fondness for him, my heart still belonging to my first love, my sister’s now husband. When Micah returned the following summer with a sheepish grin, introducing a girl closer in age to him as his woman, I greeted her cheerfully and informed her of the services I provided. There was no resentment between us.
After that, I spent the summers coupling with a very good-looking but flirtatious tinker named Yates, who, at night, put on knife-throwing displays—and during the day did the gods knew what. Micah may have gotten his women with a silver tongue. Yates got his with a precocious joke and a way of winking that said more than any dirty speech could.
“I’ve got an ache, madam,” he said in his first attempt at winning my favors. “I hear you are a medicine woman. I think you have the cure.” In response to my asking him what it was, he put his fingers to his mouth and, without a missed beat, said, “A midwife’skiss.”
He was so ridiculous, I could not help but laugh. I laughed little in those days. Bedding him was even less a loaning of my heart than Micah had been. We were purely companions enjoying each other’s bodies. When I learned that his flirtations were not exclusive to me, that he bedded any person of fair face, I laughed again and told him we were better off as friends.
Every woman in the tinker’s camp was generous and welcoming, eager to trade mother’s moss for their wares and to tell me their fondest memories of Magda. This did much to mend my heart, as in Sheridan I had to grieve in secret.
I would have been lonely if it were not for the tinkers. I spent the other three seasons content if alone with a house full of books, a farm lush with growth, a horse fit for a queen, a cranky cat, and my daily tasks of foraging, mother’s moss delivery, and the occasional act of care. I did not look at Thane even if we were in the same room. I remained submissive and polite with my father. I spoke only in passing to people, save my sister and mother.
I was happy to wait for summer for company.
In our twenty-first winter, Rowena gave birth to a girl. She and Thane named her Adelaide, which I found to be a rather prissy name.
“We’ll call her Addie,” my twin promised, but they never did. The rosy-cheeked, fat little thing that was now my niece charmed me despite what she meant. She was evidence that Thane and Rowena shared a bed, something I had known but put out of my mind.
That discomfort soon dissipated, for she looked and behaved so much like my sister, cooing and sweet natured, that I loved her desperately. I asked to hold her whenever I could and continued to look away when her father was near.
It was in these winters that Perpatane continued to encroach on Sheridan. Another unit of soldiers was sent from King Pollux to not only patrol the borders of Torm’s lands, but to be seen about the streets of town, eyeing the everyday actions of those that lived there. Because of this, more and more boxings took place. It came to be thatthere was not a tenth-day service without a boxing. The soldiers reported everything they saw to Starling. And they only seemed to report on women and children.
“That’s how they get to folk so easily,” I reasoned aloud to the trees in Nyossa, spade stabbed into the dirt, kneeling over patches of comfrey. “You see,” I said to no one in particular, “I am harvesting this root so as to aid a man at the keep with pain in his knees and fingers. But that same man will buy the tincture from my sister and look atmewith distaste. Because Perpatane has told him he is superior to me. You don’t see a man boxed. They need some of us to feel that this is the right way of things. And that group forces this way on the ones that would question it.”
The trees did not respond, nor did Zara when I repeated these things to her, but I felt the need to tell them my secrets, and I did. For so much of my life was kept secret. From praying to pagan gods to the service of mother’s moss, my actions were all unlawful. They had to be secret, or I would be in danger of Magda’s fate. My presence at the bedside of the woman who Magda had last helped was not forgotten. Torm Sheridan may have allowed for me to inherit her property, but Starling resented that. He had been twice robbed of punishing me, once with burning at the stake and once with taking the land left to me. He was eager to exact his own discipline.
He must have told his fellow countrymen—the garrison of Perpatanian men—I was to be watched, for they dogged me everywhere outside of my farm and Nyossa. They were at my heels with every visit to the sharecropper houses or to town, for I did help my sister with her midwife duties, happy to visit both expecting and new mothers in her stead.
The delivery of mother’s moss became difficult. I started to, despite stubbed toes and tripping over my own feet at times, complete my service on moonless nights. Once, I got lost between town and the sharecropper houses and found myself on the keep’s grounds. What brought me to my senses was the murmur of voicesand orange glow of torches from the gatehouse where several guards kept night watch.
I stood still, unsure of how to extricate myself from this new mess. I was even more terrified when I realized they were speaking of me.
“Who?”
“The woman with the big white Sibbereen,” the second man explained. “That’s the one the father hates so much.”
