Anyway, I had harbored hopes that Aron was sweet on me. I had certainly dropped enough hints. Every time he came into the shop, I imagined it was to see me. What was worse, so did Da, because he thought the sun shone out of my arse and that I was more beautiful than a thousand sorceresses.
“You’ll be giving me grandchildren before I thought, then,” he would say. “We’d better make extra space in the pigpen out back for them all to bunk down.”
“Da!” I’d say, and I’d swat his arm, but secretly be pleased.
It took me a shamefully long time to realize that not only did Aron not return my affections, but he also had noticed mine, and thought it was all simultaneously humiliating and hilarious.
I know it will sound ridiculous to you, but I did not think to be suspicious when Aron slipped a note under our door. I had lived my whole life with my Da, who loved me more than anyone, and despite the childhood taunts and the inauspicious circumstances of my birth, I didn’t know yet that I was worth less than shite to any other man.
In his note, Aron had said that I should come to his farm, to help make the wine. That’s what his family did, the Hodges: they made wine that they kept in big barrels in the pubs and sent it to the city as well. He told me a day and time. I told my Da, and he gave me his blessing. I wore my dress with the yellow sprigs of embroidered flowers and braided my hair into a crown. It was the best I had ever looked.
Aron was there to meet me, on the farm. He had a barrel of grapes, and he was cleaning his feet with rags and water, ready to trample the grapes. He smiled from one sticking-out ear to the other and asked me to take off my boots and do the same. Then he gave me his hand to help me step into the barrel of grapes after I had washed. I remember the green, sweet-sour smell they had, and how they felt bursting between my toes.
He walked me home afterward. I had hoped for a kiss, or at least the holding of a hand, but we merely walked side by side up to the butcher’s shop. My feet were still tingling from the grape-crushing, and I could still smell the fruit on me; it was a nice change from the stale butcher’s-shop smell of blood.
I have to credit him for the planning of it. It took a while for his scheme to come about, and I just thought he had gone off me when he did not call on me again.
I wet my pillow with tears every night, until the morning I walked out into the market and saw, beside the usual bottles of Hodges wine, one that was called “Toad Wine.” Just three bottles of it, with a crudely drawn toad in a butcher’s apron on the labels. There stood Aron and his friends, who had been waiting for me to trudge outside the shop, and they were laughing. I turned around and trudged back in.
Da went mad. I’d never seen him like that before. He practically overturned the stall before Aron’s father appeared to calm him down. Goodman Hodges had nothing to do with it, after all—only Aron and his friends.
Da smashed the bottles, and a green mush came out, and for a moment I believed the label and thought I had infected the wine with some terrible, ugly disease. Worse, that this green mulchwasme, somehow, my insides made visible. My wrongness, that had killed my mother and should have killed me too, but for some godsforsaken reason had not.
Of course, it was no such thing. Aron had tipped the grapes we’d squashed directly into the bottles and sealed them up without straining them or turning them into wine, for the sake of the prank.
Still, I kicked sand over all the mess that was left in the square that night, so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore.
I didn’t waste time on any boys after that. I had learned my lesson. Perhaps it was all part of the curse I imagined my mother’s death had placed on me, that I should be unlovable by anyone but Da. And Da’s shine and glow when he looked at me was now as much a mockery and a hurt as my own reflection in the glass.
3
I had never seen a male sorcerer—no one in the village had, as far as I knew. I hadn’t even known they existed. Afterward, folk sounded knowledgeable about it—oh yes, of course, some of the sorcerers were men—but I think it was a load of shite, and they hadn’t known either.
We had grown used to seeing the carriages come through once every couple months or so, but they had become more frequent of late, and the sorceresses were more high-cheekboned and lusciously curved than ever.
We’d had an unusually hard year—more sick livestock than usual and poorer crops—so people were looking for entertainment, and we didn’t mind the extra visits as much as you’d think. After all, the sorceresses brought our kingdom its prosperity, and surely seeing more of them meant things were looking up.
There was always a bit of a stir whenever one showed up, of course. It was bad manners to crowd around, or stare, but people would find themselves suddenly with urgent business that required them to stand in the middle of the square staring into space, pretending they were remembering their shopping list or some such.
On the day we saw our first male sorcerer, there were even more people milling about than usual, because each recent carriage had been more splendid than the last, and the panting lad who had come running into the square to tell people that a sorceress was coming had said that this carriage would be the most splendid of all.
He wasn’t wrong. The carriage was black, but shiny. Not shiny like paint, or like dark wood, but a hard-edged shiny, like stone—although, of course, it couldn’t have been stone, because not even the two hulking, great black horses pulling it could have dragged along a stone carriage, however much they showed off with their tossing manes and rolling eyes and the sharp clip of their feathered hooves on the cobbles.
There were black curtains at the windows as well, spangled and hung with beads, and black jewels clustered like frogspawn in the wheel arches and around the doors. Da watched me watch it, the way he did, with his mouth quirked to one side, and then lifted an eyebrow.
“You want to go out, Foss?”
“Nah.”
“’S a pretty one.”
“I can see it fine from in here.”
“Go on. I’ll watch the front. We won’t get anyone in while the madam’s here, anyway.”
And I wiped my hands on my apron and untied the cap from my hair, because yes, I did like to go out and look at the sorceresses when they came in, despite all my show of huffing and rolling my eyes.
I knew they took a bit more of us all away every time they left, but I liked to look at them all the same. People like to look at pretty things, me included. I got little enough of prettiness in the shop, and the gods knew I found none of it in the mirror.
