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Authors: Cynthia Voigt

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“All right then,” he asked, finally, “what would you do?”

She knew before she spoke it how her answer would anger him. “I'd take the boat to shore.”

“So. There are no bears, no wolves.”

“That I didn't say. Do you want to hear what I'd do, or do you want to go along in your own unknowing way?”

“I always go my own way,” he announced. “But I'll hear yours,” he said, for all the world as if he were the Steward listening to a man plea for lower taxes.

“I would tie up for the night,” she told him. “There will be a tree or a low branch at the shore. I'd tie up there, to await daylight—you can use the rope you loosed, when you were stealing the boat.”

“I have told you what I am not.”

He spoke too well for a robber, she thought, or a common servant. He was, at a guess, a city man, one of the Lords' household servants. She couldn't think why he would flee from the ease of such a life, but she assured him, “It's only the boat I want.” She would let him go on his way southward and herself return the boat to its owner. She was shivering over her entire body, with cold. Tied up to the bank, she would at least have protection from the wind. “I'll row,” she said.

“Thank you, no. I'm fine with it.”

He wasn't fine. The little boat twisted and rocked with his clumsy rowing. “The work would warm me,” she said.

Without a word he moved himself onto the board that made a seat at the stern of the boat. Shivering, keeping low so as not to upset the balance, Birle settled herself onto the rowing seat, facing him. The oars waited for her hands. She brought the bow around, and pulled strongly for shore. These fishing boats were built to ride high and light on quiet waters, so it would have been foolishness to try to take it back upriver, against the waves and current. She made straight for the low bank. Close enough, she could see a young, straight tree they might safely tie up to.

Up near the bank, the wind spent itself among the trees, and the heat of her body made the wetness of her clothes at least not cold. She left the oars and leaned out from the bow to loop the rope around the tree and then, quickly, before he might get up to mischief, turned back.

He sat watching her, silent.

She settled down into the bow. This was a double safety. He couldn't untie the boat without waking her, and should he decide to attack she could be out of the boat and in the shelter of the forest before he might do her harm. Bears were there, and wolves, that was true, but not many in this well-hunted forest. On the other side of the river, where no men had settled, such dangers were more common. Birle shivered again, along the whole length of her body.

“You might lend me your cloak,” she asked. He lay on his back along the seat at the stern, with his pack to make a pillow under his head.

“And why might I do that?”

“Aye, my clothes are wet, and cold.”

“Since that results from jumping into the river of your own free choice, it makes no persuasion,” he told her.

“Aye,” she pointed out, “I was chasing after a thief.”

He didn't answer. Birle fumed: When light came she would be able to identify this boat, which belonged to one of the village fishermen, or might even be one of the Inn's boats. She tried to think of what to say to this runaway, to show her scorn of him, but no words came to her. Besides, she could hear in his silence that he had fallen asleep. It was easy for him to go to sleep, she thought, wrapped as he was in a dry, warm cloak.

Chapter 2

B
IRLE DIDN'T KNOW HOW HE
could sleep. The boat was barely wide enough for two abreast on the rowing seat at its center, so he must have been uncomfortably cramped on the stern seat. Waves moved under the boat, rocking it like a cradle, and maybe that lulled him. She was not lulled.

Stars shone overhead. Looked at from where she sat unsleeping, the sky seemed walled in by forest. It looked as if there was a river of sky matching the water river below. The white stars floated on that sky river. Birle leaned back into the bow of the boat and rested her head on an outstretched arm. She closed her eyes.

What had she been thinking of, to follow him? He slept, the wind blew, the river slapped against its bank—she could be out of the boat and gone before he could stop her. If she kept to the riverbank she could make her way back to the Inn, even in the dark. She had no concern for what her family would say, but she did wonder—briefly—about Muir. Muir might make this night's work an excuse to turn his back to her.

If she followed the river, she couldn't get lost. She could be back at the Inn by first light. She could be back building up the fires, drawing buckets of water from the well, and only her own fatigue to say she had ever been away.

But when she recalled the morning chores, Birle had no desire to return. Let someone else do them, for once, and scold her later. Aye, and they did that anyway. Her brothers and Da, and Nan especially, drove her through the days, scolding. Why should she want to hurry back to that?

Besides, if she left now, the boat would be lost. The boat, and the oars built through the sides of it, and the net that might lie folded under the seat the runaway slept on, and maybe also the owner's short-handled fishing spear, with its five sharp prongs— If she gave up now, a man's livelihood would be lost.

Birle had nothing to fear. She knew the forest, even if she couldn't know just where she was presently, and she knew the river. She could run and she could swim. The man was no danger to her. She had her knife, safe at her boot, and she had as well two brothers, so she knew how, and where, to hurt a man so that he would be able to think of nothing but his own pain. Besides, living at the Inn as she had, seeing all manner of people, she knew how to judge a man. The blood that signaled her warning—at the way eyes watched, or the way a voice spoke, or the words a voice chose—had not given her any alarm.

Not just men, women too. There were some women who, when they had risen from the table, Nan counted the metal spoons; or women who, when they departed in the morning, you had to study them carefully to see that they hadn't overnight become round under their cloaks, grown fat with the Inn's bedclothes. Some men, and some women too, her father would not allow to sleep within the barred Inn doors. Man or woman, Birle trusted her blood to warn her. This man, her blood said, was no danger. She had no reason to fear him. Thus, she should not allow him to make off with this boat.

She might have been in the wrong to be outside in the night, or, rather, they might say she was wrong to go outside alone; but she was right to stay with the boat. In the morning she would deal with this runaway.

Birle doubted the man knew what his destination might be. Little as she knew of the lands to the south, she knew more than most people because of the caravans that traveled into the Kingdom, for the spring and fall fairs, bringing word of the world beyond the Kingdom. She knew from those merchants and entertainers that a few days' journey downstream, the river emptied into the sea—and the sea, they said, stretched out empty farther than any boat had ever traveled. Even before the sea, there was a port. Its size was no larger than three villages put together, they said, but in danger it exceeded its size. No Lord claimed rule over the port. No law governed it. This was a place of thieves, cutpurses, murderers; it was the home to pirates, and to soldiers who had deserted their officers or had been sent away, too wild even for soldiery. No merchant traveled alone near the port. No entertainer entered it willingly. Near the port, night and the forest were safer than day and the river. Birle told herself to remember to warn this runaway that he should go wide around the port, unless he wanted to find himself run away from servitude into slavery.

Thinking that, she slipped into sleep.

SHE OPENED HER EYES TO
darkness. Was it moments or hours she'd slept? Overhead, the river of night was crowded with stars.

No man had mapped the sky, although some few had mapped the land. Birle had seen these maps, from her grandparents' cupboard. It was safe to think of them, although not to put those thoughts into words. Some things were never to be spoken of.

Maybe the Lords had maps of the sky, she thought. She might ask this runaway servant that, before she sent him on his way. She had no idea where his way would lead him, except south. To hear the merchants talk, and the tales of the entertainers, the lands to the south were more strange than people of the Kingdom could imagine. Such tales were quickly cut off, because the people of the Inn and of the village were frightened by strangeness. Just as they feared the night, Birle thought. Birle had been taught that fear, and believed it, when she was a child. But now—

Sometimes, on a winter morning, when she opened the kitchen door to go out and draw water, the stars hung so close outside the door that she thought she would be able to step out among them, and she felt her blood racing at the possibility. What was known, and safe, seemed then to her like a cell in one of the Lords' dungeons. All the fear she lived among seemed then like a yoke across her shoulders, a heavy burden that kept her from moving swiftly, freely. Aye, men carried fears like great stones strapped on their backs, she thought. Why else had Da and Nan protested so when she said yes to Muir?

Birle shifted against the boat-ribs behind her, to find more comfort. Whatever others might say, she had nothing to fear from the night. People just felt safe with known things, things fixed and regular as the sun's passage across the sky. Night too had its one light, the moon; but the moon didn't move in the sun's orderly pattern. The moon even changed its shape, growing and shrinking—sickle to circle to sickle, to darkness. Darkness, Birle thought, looking up through dark air to the tiny lights of the stars, needed no map, because men avoided darkness. The work of darkness differed from the work of day. People slept away the dark, the long nights of winter, the short nights of summer. She wished she could sleep this night away, she thought, her eyelids closing down heavily.

WHEN SHE AWOKE AGAIN AND
raised her head from her chest, Birle's neck was painfully stiff. Opening her eyes, she wondered if the sun had set forever, yesterevening, and would never rise again. Still, the stars shone white in a black sky. Birle pulled herself up to sit straight against the bow. She gathered her cloak around her. It was as if the sun and the moon had been blown out, like candles, but by what giant's breath? Granda had asked her once, “There might be people living up there, in the stars, think you?”

Granda had a way of saying and doing odd things, so Birle wasn't surprised at the question. “Aye, no,” she promised him. “The stars are only lights in the sky. A man can't live in a light, any more than in a candle.” They had gone outside into the cold, to bring in wood for the fire. Three winters ago that had been, Birle calculated. A fall baby, Birle was then in her eleventh winter. Granda was an old man standing beside her, his breath floating white in the air before him, watching the moon sail among the stars.

“Aye, and you're probably right, although I like to think it,” he had answered, his voice as warm as summer. He had still been strong enough, that winter, to go out with her to fetch wood from the pile he built up in summer and fall. He had still been alive. “Although,” his voice went on as he piled logs into her arms, “when I saw your mother, with her hair like starlight netted, I sometimes wondered.”

It was that same night that they had told her about the treasure.

Sitting on the warm hearthstone, the door bolted fast against the night and the little high windows shuttered safe, Birle had looked up to where her grandparents sat at the table, both of their faces turned to her. “What treasure?” she had asked. “The Inn doesn't have any treasure. I never heard about any treasure.”

“The secret held safest is the one no one even thinks to wonder of,” Gran said.

“Where is it? What is it? Did you bring it with you when you left the Inn?”

BOOK: Tale of Birle
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