Forest Mage (34 page)

“What happened?” I asked as I put Amzil’s cup into her hands.

“Rig had an accident. A heavy stone fell off a wagon and crushed his foot. He couldn’t work anymore. So even though his time wasn’t up, they let him stay at home here with us all day. I was glad to have him here at first. I thought he could help me a bit, could mind the children while I tried to make things better for us. But he didn’t know how to do anything around a house and his foot wouldn’t heal. It only got more painful, and he had a fever that came and went. The pain made him mean, and not just with me.” She glanced at her elder daughter and old anger flashed in her eyes. She shook her head. “I didn’t know what to do for him. And he hated me by then anyway.” Her eyes went past me to the fire and all feeling emptied out of them.

“Two days before he died, the guards said it was time to move camp. The prisoners who had worked off their time and their families could stay here and build a new life, they said. A lot of them decided to move on with the work crew anyway. But those who stayed got a shovel, an ax, a saw, and six bags of different kinds of seed. And they gave us what they said was two months of flour, oil, and oats. But it didn’t last our family more than twenty days.” She shook her head again.

“I did my best. I dug holes and planted those seeds. But maybe it was the wrong time or maybe the seed was bad or maybe I did something wrong. Not many plants came up, and a lot of the ones that grew got eaten by rabbits or just died off. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to grow vegetables. Before too long, people just started to leave. Nothing here to hold them, I guess. Some of them lasted the first winter. Others didn’t, and we buried them. When spring came, pretty much everyone who could got up and left, heading back west, trying to get back to a place where they knew how to live. Some of us couldn’t go. Kara might be able to walk a full day, but Sem and Dia are too small to walk that far, and I couldn’t carry them both. I knew that if I started walking, at least one of them would die on the way. But maybe that would have been better than staying here. Here we are, winter’s closing in again, and we have even less this time than we had last year.”

A long silence fell and then she said, “I fear we’re going to die here. And my biggest dread is that I’ll die before my children do. And there will be no one left to protect them from whatever comes next.”

I had never heard such black despair. Worse was to see in the children’s eyes that they fully understood what their mother said. My heart spoke. “I’ll stay a day or two, if you want. I can at least help you make this place tight for the winter.”

She looked at me flatly and then asked with acid sweetness, “And what will you want from me in exchange?” Her eyes traveled over me disdainfully. I knew what she thought I would ask of her, and that it disgusted her. I also read in her eyes that if that were what I demanded, she’d give it to me, for the sake of her children. She made me feel like a monster.

I spoke slowly. “I’d like to sleep in here, near the fire instead of out in the shed. And I’d like a day or two of rest and grazing for my horse, and some time out of the saddle. That’s all.”

“Is it?” She was skeptical. Her mouth pinched again, bringing out the cat in her again. “If that’s all, I’ll say yes to that, then.”

“That’s all,” I said quietly, and she nodded sharply to the deal we had struck.

She and her children slept in the only bed, across the room from the fire. She put herself between me and her children, and her pistol between her and me. I slept on the floor by the fire.

The next day, I built a wood crib for the firewood, so I could stack it so it would stay dry. It was crudely built from salvaged wood and nails, but it worked. I put a roof over it to keep the snow off the firewood. Amzil and Kara stacked the wood between the supports as I showed them while the other children played nearby. I found good thick logs and cut them into stout chunks. “These will burn a long time, once you’ve got a bed of coals going,” I told her. “Save them for the worst nights, when the snow is deep and the cold hard. Until then, use up the small stuff, and whatever else you can forage for yourself.”

“I’ve had one winter here. I think I know how to manage,” Amzil said stiffly.

“Probably better than I do,” I conceded grumpily. I’d worked all morning. My shirt was stuck to me with sweat despite a chill wind blowing off the rain-soaked hills. Hunger gnawed at my guts. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I rolled my shoulders and stretched. I leaned the ax up against my chopping block.

“Where are you going?” Amzil demanded suspiciously.

“Hunting,” I decided abruptly.

“With what?” she asked. “For what?”

“With a sling, for whatever I can get,” I replied. “Rabbits, birds, small game.”

She shook her head and folded her lips, obviously thinking I was wasting time when I could be cutting more wood. But the morning’s work had already convinced me that I’d need a more substantial meal than watery soup. I’d begun thinking of food, against my will, and had suddenly become aware of the birds calling to one another.

“Can you do that?” she asked me suddenly. “Kill birds with a sling?”

“We’ll see,” I said. “I used to be able to.”

I was fatter than I’d been as a boy, and out of my territory. Dawn and dusk were the best times to hunt, and this was neither. I tried the woods first, where tree trunks that spoiled my swing and tiny branches that deflected my missiles frustrated me. From there, I moved to the logged-off hillside behind the town, and there I did better, braining a rabbit that foolishly stood up on its hind legs to see what I was.

It wasn’t much of a hunter’s bag, but Amzil seemed delighted with it. She and the children gathered round me as I gutted and skinned it and cut it up for the pot. While she took it inside to start it cooking, I scraped the skin and stretched it as tightly as I could before tacking it, skin side up, on a board to dry. “You’ll need to keep this out of the weather,” I told her. “Once it’s dried, it will be hard and stiff. You’ll have to work it, rolling it slowly until it softens up again. But it will give you a rabbitskin with the fur on. Four or five of these sewn together would make a blanket for the little one.”

I’d kept back the sinew from the rabbit’s hind legs. I showed it to her. “This makes the best snares. There was a lot of rabbit sign out there. If you set two or three snares each evening, you’d have a fair chance of having some meat in your diet on a regular basis.”

She shook her head. “They’re too smart. I’ve seen rabbits out there, at dawn and in the evening. But I’ve never been able to catch one, and the traps I’ve made don’t hold them.”

“What kind of traps?”

“I dug holes for them to fall into. I caught a couple of babies like that in the spring. But the others soon learned to go around them.”

My amused smile offended her. I quickly wiped it from my face.
She knows nothing of rabbits, or of hunting
, I thought to myself. Her skills from her life in the city were useless here. That wasn’t her fault, and I shouldn’t look down on her for trying. At the same time, I could not help feeling a bit superior. “We’ll make the snare lines very fine, so they’re almost invisible. And I’ll show you how
to know where the rabbit will lift its head as it comes down the trail and out of the brush. That’s the best place to hang a snare, to make sure you get a quick, clean kill.”

“The young ones I caught were alive. I wanted to try to cage them and breed them, like people do pigeons and doves in the city. But…” She glanced at the children. “Sometimes meat today is more important than saving for a tomorrow.”

I found myself nodding. She was right. With the right kind of trap, live rabbits would provide her with a ready source of meat. “I might be able to come up with a pit trap that would work, then,” I offered.

“We’ll set some of both,” she decided firmly.

I was feeling rather satisfied with myself as I followed her and the children into the little house. The rabbit was simmering with onion and potato in a pot near the edge of the fire. The aroma of the cooking meat assaulted my senses. I almost lost myself in it. Then I saw my panniers open on the floor. All my possessions were stacked around them. I could not keep the chill from my voice as I asked her, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

She met my gaze, and her cheeks went a bit pink. But she did not look guilty. Instead, her chin came up. “Yes. Your washing and mending. That seemed a fair trade to me for the work you’ve done with the wood and the hunting. And when I found you had salt in there, I took some for cooking the meat. As you were going to be eating it alongside us, I thought nothing of it. Do you find fault with it?”

I didn’t like it. Everything I had in the world was in those panniers, including my journal and what money I had. A sneaking part of me resolved that at my earliest opportunity, I’d make certain it was still there. She was meeting my eyes in a very direct way. I took a breath. She’d meant well and she was honest about it. Traveling can make a person suspicious. “It took me aback, yes.”

“It was something I was
willing
to do for you.” From the emphasis she put on the words, she made it clear that there were other things she’d be unwilling to do for me. “My mother was a good seamstress and she taught me well. She sewed for some of the best families in Old Thares. She knew how to make clothing fit a…
portly man. And I learned it at her knee. I can make your garments more comfortable on you. So you can chop wood without straining the seams.”

Why was it so hard to say, “Thank you. I’d welcome that”? I suppose it was because I wished she could see me as something other than a fat stranger who wanted to lie with her. I had to admit that in many ways, it was a fair appraisal of me. It wasn’t that I was infatuated with her or wished her to like me. She was pretty enough, in a weary way, and she was a woman, and the first woman other than my sister I’d spent any appreciable time with in weeks. That was all, I told myself. It was simple proximity and honest lust. A man didn’t have to be ashamed of that, as long as he didn’t force himself on a woman. It was just the way a man was made.

That evening was both more comfortable and less easy. The food was more substantial, and once again we had tea to finish with, even if there was no sugar. But she had told me her story the night before, and I had no wish to tell her mine, so talk was scarce. Firelight was the only light in the room. We sought our beds early. I lay on the floor, rolled in my blanket. I tried not to think of her, soft and warm and only a few steps away. For all my harsh training to be a soldier, I thought to myself, this family lived in harder circumstances than anything I’d ever experienced. There were no evening pastimes for the children, no storybooks or music, no toys save what they had invented for themselves. Amzil had little education; I doubted she could read. Whatever culture she had absorbed growing up in the grand city of Old Thares would be denied to her children, growing up in poverty in this wilderness. It was grim to speculate on their future, not just during the harshness of the coming winter but for all the years after that.

I closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shut down my thoughts. She’d as much as admitted that she’d whored for passing travelers last winter to get food for herself and the children. With such an example before them, what would Kara and little Dia expect of life? What sort of a man would Sem grow to be, watching his mother sell herself to support him? It was tawdry and disgusting. Yet when she looked at her children, her gaze was familiar, for it was the same way my mother had always looked at us. In the last year, I’d had
my eyes opened to my mother’s place in our world, and had come to realize that in many ways she had sacrificed her own interests to ours. The seeds of thought that Epiny had sown in my mind were growing in uncomfortable ways. My mother had always been my mother and my father’s wife. I don’t think I’d ever stopped to wonder who else she might have wanted to be, outside of those roles. Now I’d glimpsed, several times, how she had had to bow her head to my father’s decisions for her children, and witnessed more clearly how she had battled him for a say in our lives. She’d never expected to be a nobleman’s wife; she’d been married off to the soldier son of a good family, with no higher expectation than that he would advance in his career as an officer. When she’d left her father’s house, she would have believed that eventually, when my father retired from the military, she would return to Old Thares, to live at the Burvelle mansion there, to visit her childhood friends, to go to the theater and enjoy the cultural and social events of her home city. Instead, my father’s elevated status had meant that she lived far from the capital city and that her social friendships were limited to women similarly uplifted. She had traveled to visit her family in the city perhaps once every five years, and only after we children had become mostly self-sufficient. Until then, she had not left us for a single day. Was that what it meant to be a mother?

I shifted uncomfortably on the packed earth floor. The cold from it seeped up through my blankets and made me ache. I tried to fall asleep, but my eyes kept opening, to stare around the dismal little room. I didn’t want to think about my mother and how life had trapped her in a similar way to how life had trapped Amzil. That led to wondering how deep of a trap I had fallen into myself. Here I lay, the son of a nobleman, a soldier son destined to be an officer, and I’d begged shelter and food from an ignorant seamstress, the widow of a thief. And I’d been grateful for what I’d received.

Clove had had a couple of days’ rest and some grazing. The days were getting cold and the nights even colder. It was stupid to linger here. The sooner I reached my journey’s end at Gettys, the sooner I would know what awaited me there. There was a danger to waiting too long. If the commander there didn’t accept me for
enlistment, I’d probably have to winter there, and then ride out in spring to try my luck at other citadels and forts. There was no guarantee that any regiment would have me. My thoughts spiraled into darker speculation. If no regiment would have me, what then? What if I had to face being a soldier son who could not be a soldier, a noble’s son who had been disowned? A brother who had not kept his word to send for his sister? A fat man who begged shelter and food of strangers? A man who looked at a woman with interest, only to have her turn away in disgust?