Tim went half-days to the cottage of the Widow Smack, who kept school and was paid in food-usually vegetables, sometimes a bit of meat. Long ago, before the bloodsores had come on her and eaten off half her face (so the children whispered, although none had actually seen it), she had been a great lady in the barony estates far away (or so the children’s elders claimed, although none actually knew). Now she wore a veil and taught likely lads, and even a few lassies, how to read and practice the slightly questionable art known as mathmatica.
She was a fearsomely smart woman who took no guff, and most days she was tireless. Her pupils usually came to love her in spite of her veil, and the horrors they imagined might lie beneath it. But on occasion she would begin to tremble all over, and cry that her poor head was splitting, and that she must lie down. On these days she would send the children home, sometimes commanding them to tell their parents that she regretted nothing, least of all her beautiful prince.
Sai Smack had one of her fugues about a month after the dragon burned Big Ross to ashes, and when Tim came back to his cottage, which was called Goodview, he looked in the kitchen window and saw his mother crying with her head on the table.
He dropped the slate with his mathmatica problems on it (long division, which he had feared but turned out to be only backwards multiplication) and rushed to her side. She looked up at him and tried to smile. The contrast between her upturned lips and her streaming eyes made Tim feel like crying himself. It was the look of a woman at the end of her tether.
“What is it, Mama? What’s wrong?”
“Just thinking of your father. Sometimes I miss him so. Why are you home early?”
He began to tell her, but stopped when he saw the leather purse with the drawstring top. She had put one of her arms over it, as if to hide it from him, and when she saw him looking, she swept it off the table and into her lap.
Now Tim was far from a stupid boy, so he made tea before saying anything else. When she had drunk some-with sugar, which he insisted she take, although there was little enough left in the pot-and had calmed, he asked her what else was wrong.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why were you counting our money?”
“What little there is to count,” said she. “Covenant Man will be here once Reaptide’s gone-aye, while the embers of the bonfire are still hot, if I know his ways-and what then? He’ll want six silver knuckles this year, p’raps as many as eight, for taxes have gone up, so they do say, probably another of their stupid wars somewhere far from here, soldiers with their banners flying, aye, very fine.”
“How much do we have?”
“Four and a scrap of a fifth. We have no livestock to sell, nor a single round of ironwood since your father died. What shall we do?” She began to cry again. “What shall we do?”
Tim was as frightened as she was, but since there was no man to comfort her, he held his own tears back and put his arms around her and soothed her as best he could.
“If we had his ax and his coin, I’d sell them to Destry,” she said at last.
Tim was horrified even though the ax and lucky coin were gone, burned in the same fiery blast that had taken their cheerful, goodhearted owner. “You never would!”
“Aye. To keep his plot and his place, I would. Those were the things he truly cared about, and thee, and me. Could he speak he’d say ‘Do it, Nell, and welcome,’ for Destry has hard coin.” She sighed. “But then would come old Barony Covenant Man next year… and the year after that…” She put her hands over her face. “Oh, Tim, we shall be turned out on the land, and there’s not one thing I can think to change it. Can you?”
Tim would have given everything he owned (which was very little) to be able to give her an answer, but he could not. He could only ask how long it would be before the Covenant Man would appear in Tree on his tall black horse, sitting astride a saddle worth more than Big Ross had made in twenty-five years of risking his life on that narrow track known as the Ironwood Trail.
She held up four fingers. “This many weeks if the weather is fair.” She held up four more. “This many if it’s foul, and he’s held up in the farming villages of the Middles. Eight is the most we can hope for, I think. And then…”
“Something will happen before he comes,” Tim said. “Da’ always said that the forest gives to them that love it.”
“All I’ve ever seen it do is take,” said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head.
Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something happen to change it.
The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true.
That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summer’s beauty hard to look at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries. Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts and secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass.
The smell of the forest when the wind’s out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didn’t know if this was true or just chimneycorner blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she herself had (although often against her will).
She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da’, but now she found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a she-dragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She hoped the plated yellow-eyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode.
One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks’ work helping farmer Destry with the hay-cutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husband’s friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken.
A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why he’d come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable.
When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross she’d wed and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the aisle when the preacher was done. When Kells took it off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant nights.
Although the afternoon Kells came to her in the garden was hot, he was wearing a broadcloth jacket. From the pocket he took a loosely knotted length of silk rope, as she knew he would. A woman knows. Even if she’s long married, a woman knows, and Kells’s heart had never changed.