The villagers shook their heads. Gift was a brave woman, but there was such a thing as being too brave. Or brave, they said around the tavern table, in the wrong way, or the wrong place, d’you see. Nobody should ought to meddle with sorcery that ain’t born to it. Nor with sorcerers. You forget that. They seem the same as other folk. But they ain’t like other folk. Seems there’s no harm in a curer. Heal the foot rot, clear a caked udder. That’s all fine. But cross one and there you are, fire and shadows and curses and falling down in fits. Uncanny. Always was uncanny, that one. Where’d he come from, anyhow? Answer me that.
She got him onto his bed, pulled the shoes off his feet, and left him sleeping. Berry came in late and drunker than usual, so that he fell and gashed his forehead on the andiron. Bleeding and raging, he ordered Gift to kick the shorsher out the housh, right away, kick ‘im out. Then he vomited into the ashes and fell asleep on the hearth. She hauled him onto his pallet, pulled his shoes off his feet, and left him sleeping. She went to look at the other one. He looked feverish, and she put her hand on his forehead. He opened his eyes, looking straight into hers without expression. “Emer,” he said, and closed his eyes again.
She backed away from him, terrified.
In her bed, in the dark, she lay and thought: He knew the wizard who named me. Or I said my name. Maybe I said it out loud in my sleep. Or somebody told him. But nobody knows it. Nobody ever knew my name but the wizard, and my mother. And they’re dead, they’re dead… I said it in my sleep…
But she knew better.
She stood with the little oil lamp in her hand, and the light of it shone red between her fingers and golden on her face. He said her name. She gave him sleep.
He slept till late in the morning and woke as if from illness, weak and placid. She was unable to be afraid of him. She found that he had no memory at all of what had happened in the village, of the other sorcerer, even of the six coppers she had found scattered on the bedcover, which he must have held clenched in his hand all along.
“No doubt that’s what Alder gave you,” she said. “The flint!”
“I said I’d see to his beasts at… at the pasture between the rivers, was it?” he said, getting anxious, the hunted look coming back into him, and he got up from the settle.
“Sit down,” she said. He sat down, but he sat fretting.
“How can you cure when you’re sick?” she said.
“How else?” he said.
But he quieted down again presently, stroking the grey cat.
Her brother came in. “Come on out,” he said to her as soon as he saw the curer dozing on the settle. She stepped outside with him.
“Now I won’t have him here no more,” Berry said, coming master of the house over her, with the great black gash in his forehead, and his eyes like oysters, and his hands juddering.
“Where’ll you go?” she said.
“It’s him has to go.”
“It’s my house. Bren’s house. He stays. Go or stay, it’s up to you.”
“It’s up to me too if he stays or goes, and he goes. You haven’t got all the sayso. All the people say he ought to go. He’s not canny.”
“Oh, yes, since he’s cured half the herds and got paid six coppers for it, time for him to go, right enough! I’ll have him here as long as I choose, and that’s the end of it.”
“They won’t buy our milk and cheese,” Berry whined.
“Who says that?”
“Sans wife. All the women.”
“Then I’ll carry the cheeses to Oraby,” she said, “and sell em there. In the name of honor, brother, go wash out that cut, and change your shirt. You stink of the pothouse.” And she went back into the house. “Oh, dear,” she said, and burst into tears.