“She took it,” he whispered, and put one finger of his other hand to his mouth in a hushing gesture. “I don’t know where she keeps it, but I know it is still alive somewhere, because I am. But not for long. Not for long.”
I twisted myself out of his grip. “But you’re here, Dav. You came home. You got away.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said, and shambled off with blank eyes, as if forgetting I was standing there. I wiped my hand on my dress, feeling my skin crawl where he had touched it.
I went home and collapsed into bed again, feeling as if I could sleep for a year. I fell into another crowded and claustrophobic dream, where everything was black, black, black, and tunneled my way through to morning. I saw Dav again through the window the next day, and he looked up at me when I called, but without recognition.
I went back to the shop, because we couldn’t afford for me to take any more time away. Those tangled-up and suffocating dreams still bothered me every night, however, and I still looked like someone had leeched all the color out of me.
Da was worried, and got all kinds of tisanes and herbs from Goodwife Tilly with which to dose me, but nothing helped. I don’t remember exactly what was in those dreams, if anything. There were no images, no stories. Just this feeling of being wrapped tight all around, like a baby in swaddling, and then feeling suffocated.
And I thought about the sorcerer all the time. I hated myself for it. I wasn’t even mooning, like the others, and talking about his hair and his eyes and the muscles of his legs. I thought of him with resentment, with anger that he had done this to me—and yet I thought of him.
I still felt that tugging and pulling, fainter now than it had been on the first day, and I imagined him sitting on a great black throne somewhere, hauling on a rope he had wrapped around my innards somehow and made invisible. A shining black rope, made out of the same rock-hard stuff as his carriage.
“You’re not thriving, Foss,” Da said, weeks after the visit. We hadn’t seen any more carriages since then, which was unusual for this year, when one had been showing up almost every week.
The excitement of the sorcerer’s visit had faded, and people were concerned again with the meager crops and the unusual sickening of livestock.
Big Cully had lost three newborn lambs, which was almost unheard-of, and the incident was much talked about in the pub of an evening. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the sorcerer, I would have been worrying about whether this had brought the circumstances of my birth to the forefront of their memories again, but right then, I didn’t care.
“I know,” I said.
“Still feeling poorly?”
“Yes.”
“Getting any worse?”
It was. I felt sick but also antsy, reckless, as if I might break into a lopsided run or start kicking at the hanging carcasses in the shop, anything to get that dark, frenetic energy out of my legs.
“I don’t know what else to try,” Da sighed.
“I’m not dying, Da,” I said, although, truthfully, I wasn’t quite sure. I didn’t know what dying felt like, but if it felt like you were going to fall over at any moment, and if it turned your insides to black custard, I might indeed have been dying.
The restlessness got worse as I thought about it. I felt like shite, but I could have run a thousand miles without stopping, it felt like. So long as it was inhisdirection.
I suppose it was inevitable. Perhaps this was how all the sorceresses and sorcerers got hold of folk now, infecting them and then buggering off and leaving them to follow like ducklings. They didn’t even have the decency to truss someone up and throw them in the carriage anymore, like they did with old Dav.
I had thought that exchanging the odd heart for prosperity and peace was a small price to pay, but it felt rather different when it was yourownheart.
I’d like to say I gave it a lot of thought, turned it about in my head, but I didn’t. I just reached a point where staying put became impossible in the same way that standing calmly in a fire becomes impossible, and I had to go.
As I was packing for my journey, I muttered and swore under my breath. The last thing I wanted to be doing was leaving Da in the lurch and going off to a city I’d never seen to look for someone I hated, someone who was gods-knew-where but was tugging on me nevertheless, like a farmer pulling his great heavy plough.
Well, he wouldn’t get what he had bargained for, that was some comfort. He had probably wanted to snare one of the pretty girls, one of the Hallies, but no—his gaze had settled on me, and here I was, readying myself to journey across the countryside to find him.Here I am, Your Lordship.
I imagined the look on his face when he saw what flavor of heart he’d harvested, and it gave me some kind of satisfaction.
I didn’t tell anyone I was going. It was embarrassing enough telling myself. I left a note for Da, on the counter, saying that I was headed to the city for a few days. I wanted to write more, but I didn’t know what to say, or how to explain it.
I left the note as it was, scrawled and inadequate, and hoped that I would fix myself up and be back before long. I opened Da’s door, just once, to peer in at the great lump of him in his bed and listen to his whistling breath.
He would do well enough by himself in the shop, for a little while. And if it turned out that having your heart hooked by a sorcerer was fatal, if I were ground down to little bits, or my soul was sucked empty like marrow from a bone, he would find some other girl in the village to do my job.
And perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. Without me to worry about, Da would have a chance at a new life—even marrying again, perhaps. He wasn’t too old to father a sprout again, either—one not cursed with the circumstance of my birth, not destined to live in his house forever as an old and increasingly crotchety spinster.
I tried not to think of how it would hurt him.
