The Truth-Teller's Tale (30 page)

The Truth-Teller gave a crack of laughter. She was still staring at me, and I could read neither compassion nor interest in her eyes. “No, this one was a girl from the moment she was born,” the old woman said flatly. “She was a girl inside the womb. She has never been anything else.”

My mother fell back with a little cry, her hands going to her cheeks. I saw my father move to stand behind her, as if to lend her support. “But she—but I
saw
him—she has been changed—”

The Truth-Teller closed her eyes again and leaned back against the chair. “Don't waste my time,” she said.

My mother babbled a few more incoherent protests, but the Truth-Teller did not look at any of us again. My father turned my mother toward the door and practically hauled her out the inn and down the street to our house. I followed behind them, saying nothing.

I was neither surprised nor unsurprised by the Truth-Teller's words. My life had been so strange up to this point that I would not have found it particularly unnerving to have had my mother's madness proved true. You understand, I had not been treated as a girl at any point in my life—I had not been dressed in frilly gowns or showered with gifts of lace and ribbon. And yet, I had not really been treated as a boy, either, expected to go fishing or frog-hunting with my neighbors. In fact, no one really knew what to make of me. My father tended to avoid me. He was a peddler of metal goods and so he traveled a great deal. When he returned, he was awkward around me, not sure what to say. The people of Thrush Hollow all knew I was a girl, but—since I dressed in such indeterminate clothes, and since my mother
spoke
of me as if I was a boy—sometimes they forgot. So one day I might be greeted as “lad” and another day as “missy,” and I found it just as easy to respond to either. I did not really think of myself as a boy or a girl. I considered myself just Kellen. Just me.

Just nobody.

But the Truth-Teller was convinced I was a girl. Had always been a girl. She had not said I always
would
be a girl, and I considered life uncertain enough to reserve as a possibility the idea that someday, even yet, I might assume a shape that better pleased my mother. But for now, one question had been resoundingly answered.

It did not make my life any easier.

 

 

That night, as the night before, as many nights in the past, my parents stayed up late, arguing. There was a more urgent quality to the quarrel this night than there usually was; the raised voices were louder, more accusatory. I snuck from my bedroom to crouch in the hallway, listening to them as they paced the parlor and shouted.

“I cannot
do
this any longer, Amelia,” my father said, his voice despairing. “I cannot live such a strange and sad life. It is killing me—it is killing all of us.”

“Maybe in Wodenderry—there are plenty of Truth-Tellers in the royal city. I will go there with Kellen, and I will ask every one of them—”

“Amelia, you have been told the truth already! Kellen is a girl! She was always a girl! Give up this madness and try to resume some normalcy in your life! When I think what we have put her through—our own daughter—and when I think there is no end to it, I swear to you, I cannot breathe. Make your peace with your destiny and take up the shape of your true life.”

“I can't,” my mother whispered. “I know I'm right.”

There was a long silence. I crept close enough to peek around the corner of the door. I saw my father standing with his head against the wall and his hands flat against the paneling. It looked as if he was holding up the walls of the house, but I knew it was really the other way around.

“Go to sleep,” he said finally. “I have to leave again in the morning. We'll talk about this more when I get back.”

“And that will be when?”

He shook his head, rubbing his forehead against the paneling. “I don't know. I'll send word.”

“I'm not crazy,” my mother said.

Still resting against the wall, he turned his head a little to look at her. “You're obsessed,” he said. “And you're ruining Kellen's life. And you're ruining your own. And you're ruining mine. Even if you're not crazy, what you're doing is.”

“I want Kellen to be what he is supposed to be.”

“She will be,” my father said. “Whatever that is.”

 

 

In the morning, he was gone, his cart and his metal goods with him. He usually traveled for seven or ten days at a time and returned exhausted but cheerful, coins jingling in his pocket. He often brought us treats from nearby towns, Tambleham or Merendon or wherever he had gone on his route this time. Once he went all the way to Wodenderry and brought me back a doll shaped like Queen Lirabel. I was always pleased to know he thought of me on the road, since he seemed to think of me so little when we were in the same house.

This time, when he left, he did not return.

Two weeks after his departure, my mother received a note that sent her crying bitterly to her room. It was not unprecedented for my mother to have an emotional breakdown, and I knew what to do. I fixed dinner for myself, finished up the chores, kept quiet, and allowed her to weep in silence. When I was sure she had sobbed herself to sleep, I crept into her room to wash her face and loosen her dress so that she could pass the night comfortably. It was summer, but the air was cool, so I shut the window and covered her with a sheet.

Then I picked up the note that she had flung to the floor and took it to the parlor to read it by candlelight. It was from my father.

 

For a moment, I wanted to cry, too, except that I knew it would do no good. Tears would not bring my father back, and tears would not change my mother. Tears would not turn me into someone she could love. I folded the note and went back into her room, carefully dropping the letter on the floor where she had left it. Then I tiptoed to my room, stretched out on my bed, and lay awake till morning.

Once my father left, there was more for me to do around the house, and I began to take on the chores a son might handle. By the time I was eleven, I was very strong. I could chop wood, haul water, handle awkward and heavy loads, and wring the neck of a chicken if my mother brought a live bird back from market. I also learned the tasks that women taught their daughters—how to cook, how to clean, how to sew. Truthfully, I thought all skills were equally important, and I wondered why they had been, at least among the children of Thrush Hollow, mostly assigned by gender.

I had also come to appreciate the privileges that fell more to boys than to girls, and to take advantage of them when I had the opportunity. For instance, a boy's pair of pants was much less restrictive than a girl's dress, so I continued to wear loose trousers and shirts most of the time. There was no part of town that was off-limits to boys, although girls were discouraged from entering the tavern alone or wandering down certain alleys where gaming was pursued. Boys were expected to earn coins running a variety of errands—fetching a package for the innkeeper, for instance, or holding the reins of a traveler's horse. Girls were never given such opportunities.

As money was scarce in our household, despite the envelopes that came erratically from my father, I was always happy to earn a few extra coppers. Usually I shared them with my mother and they went toward some desperately needed household purchase. Sometimes I kept them for myself and bought an item long coveted. Sweets, usually; toys, sometimes. Once I brought home a gift for my mother, a length of discounted lace from the dressmaker's shop. She cried so hard and thanked me so often that I decided never to make that particular mistake again. Thereafter, I spent all windfalls on myself.

The summer I was eleven, I caught the attention of the new teacher who'd arrived a few weeks early to get the schoolhouse in order. I had helped him carry his bags into the inn, because he was thin and stooped and looked to be asthmatic besides. Not only that, he had to be old enough to be my mother's father. But his round face was pleasant, and he did not look at all stupid.

“Now, what's your name, young fellow?” he asked after he had introduced himself as Ian Shelby and dropped two coins in my hand.

“Kellen Carmichael.”

“What grade will you be in this fall?” I looked at him blankly. He elaborated. “How far are you in your schooling?”

“I don't go to school,” I said, for I never had. And now, with my father gone, there was too much to do around the house. It had not seemed to occur to my mother that I might need a formal education, and it had never occurred to me, either.

Ian Shelby looked disapproving. “You have to go to school,” he said. “How else will you learn your letters? Your numbers? Your history?”

“I can read,” I assured him. My mother had taught me, right along with the sewing and the cooking. “And count. I don't care about history.”

“It's always a mistake not to care about history,” he said. “How old are you, young—” He hesitated for a moment. “Young woman?” he asked.

I was impressed by his perceptiveness, so I answered. “Eleven. Twelve at the end of summer.”

“Eleven-year-old girls should be in school,” he said firmly. “If you like, I'll talk to your parents and explain why an education is important.”

I laughed. “My mother won't care what you say.”

He pulled a pair of spectacles from his pocket and surveyed me with some seriousness. It made me fidgety; I could not tell what his inspection would yield him. “Your mother might be brought to care,” was all he said. “I will see you enrolled in school this fall, Kellen Carmichael. See if I don't.”

 

 

If I had known Ian Shelby better at that moment, I would have resigned myself instantly to the notion that, come autumn, I would be attending the Thrush Hollow Schoolhouse. His visit to my mother yielded predictable results, for she swore she could not spare her son for the five hours a day school was in session. I was lurking outside the parlor while this conversation took place, and I heard the gap in the conversation that followed while Ian Shelby assimilated this information. But the pause was brief; he smoothly plunged forward.

“What you need from your son today is nothing compared to what he will need from an education tomorrow,” the schoolteacher said. “Don't set yourself up as the reason your child might fail in the future.”

“He won't fail. He's a smart boy,” my mother said. “I need him.”

The discussion, which lasted another twenty minutes, ended on the same note. I was standing outside, looking casual and disinterested, when Ian Shelby finally left. He appraised me a moment, and then said, “I was right, wasn't I? You're her daughter, not her son?”

I nodded. “Told you she wouldn't care.”

“Oh, don't give up yet,” he said. “I haven't. It seems more imperative than ever that you be allowed formal schooling.”

I wasn't sure what “imperative” meant, though I came to think it meant inevitable. Ian Shelby talked to the town mayor, he talked to the parents of other children my age, and the result was that enough pressure was brought to bear on my mother that she had no choice but to allow me to attend school that fall.

You understand, I was not sure this was a victory.