Blood Ties Read online

  She would have left the carcass for the crows and the foxes, but she didn’t want the warlord’s men to find it, if they came looking for the hide later. Let him think that he had missed. She dragged it up the hill to a rock outcropping, and piled stones on it. At least it would make a meal for the ants and the worms.

  She washed the blood off both her and the hide, put her clothes back on, tied up the hide and hoisted it over her shoulder. It weighed her down heavily, but she could manage it easily enough. She set off home.

  The way was through the black elm and pine forest, and normally she would have lingered to admire the spring-green leaves that were beginning to bud, and listen to the white-backed woodpeckers frantically drilling for food after their long migration. She had been observing a red-breasted flycatcher pair build their nest, but today she passed it by without noticing, although she stopped to collect some wild thyme and sallet greens, and to empty one of her snares. She found a rabbit, thin after winter but good enough for a stew, and the pelt still winter-lush. Her hands did the work of resetting the snare but her mind was elsewhere.

  The forest was ostensibly the warlord’s domain, but was traditionally the hunting or grazing ground for a range of people, from foragers like Bramble to charcoal burners, coppicers, chair makers, withiers, pig farmers and woodcutters. It was a rare day that Bramble didn’t meet someone in the forest; depending on the season, sometimes she saw as many people there as in the village street. It was just her bad luck that today she had seen the warlord’s men.

  She came out of the forest near the crossroads just outside Wooding and realized that it hadn’t been just bad luck. There had been an execution today.

  Her village of Wooding saw a lot of executions, because it was on the direct road from Carlion to the warlord’s fort at Thornhill. For centuries the South Domain warlords had used the crossroads just outside Wooding as the site for their punishments. There was a scaffold set up for when the warlord felt merciful. And for when he wasn’t there was the rock press, a sturdy wooden box the size of a coffin, but deeper, where the condemned were piled with heavy stones until their bones broke and they suffocated, slowly.

  Today they had used the rock press. There was blood seeping out of the box at the corners. The condemned often bled from the nose and mouth in the final stages of pressing. Bramble slowed as she walked past the punishment site. Did she want to know who they had killed this time? What was the point?

  She went over to the box and looked in. No one she knew, thank the gods. Some stranger — the Domain was large, and criminals were brought to the warlord from miles away. Then she looked closer. A stranger, but just a boy. Fourteen, perhaps. A baby. Probably accused of something like “disrespect to the warlord.” Her heart burned again, as it had in the woods. Anger, indignation, pity. She would have to make sure she was nowhere near the village the next morning, when the warlord’s men rounded up the villagers to see the boy’s corpse removed from the box and placed in the gibbet. She doubted she could applaud and cheer for the warlord over this execution, as the villagers were expected to do.

  Some did so gladly. There were always a few who enjoyed a killing, like the crows that nested in the tree next to the scaffold and descended on the corpses with real enthusiasm. But the rest of the villagers had seen too many people die who looked just like them. Ordinary people. People who couldn’t pay their taxes, or hadn’t bowed low enough to the warlord. Or who had objected to their daughter being dragged away to the fort by the warlord’s men. It was important to attend the executions, and to cheer loudly. The warlord’s men were always watching. Bramble had cheered as loudly as anyone, in the past, and had been sick later, every time.

  So the warlord’s men would have done their job today and gone home as soon as the boy stopped breathing. The blond had probably taken the shortcut through the woods and had seen the wolf by accident. He couldn’t resist tracking it a little way. Couldn’t resist killing again.

  A hunter who didn’t care if the animal he shot suffered deserved nothing but contempt. He certainly didn’t deserve the hide of the animal he had abandoned to pain and slow death.

  But the sensible thing to do would be to take the skin to the warlord’s fort, say it had one of the warlord’s arrows in it when she found it, and let the blond claim it. Let him have his prize for killing.

  Bramble looked at the boy in the box, whose face was still contorted in pain. “Well, no one ever said I was sensible,” she said.

  She skirted the village and came to the back of her parents’ house, through the alders that fringed the stream. She dumped the wolf skin behind the privy, then went the whole way back so she would be seen to come home through the main street with nothing in her hands but rabbit and greens.

  Bramble passed the inn and ignored the stares of the old men who sat on the bench outside the door, tankards in hand, until one of them called out, “Got your nose stuck in the air, I see! Too high and mighty to tell us how that sister of yours is doing off in Carlion!”

  It was Swith, the leatherworker’s father, both hands cramped around his mug. He was a terrible gossip, but that wasn’t why he had called Bramble over. He wanted her to notice his hands. The arthritis that kept him sitting here in the mild sun had swelled his knuckles up like a goat’s full udder.

  “She’s well, she says,” Bramble replied. “They’re building a new house, on the lot next to his parents’.”

  “Ah, she’s done well for herself, that Maryrose!” cackled Swith’s crony, old Aden, the most lecherous man in the village in his day, and still not to be trusted within arm’s reach. “She wasn’t an eye-catcher like you, lass. But he got a good hot bed to go to, I’ll say that, her town clerk’s son!”

  The other men frowned. Maryrose had been liked by everyone in the village, and she was certainly no light-skirt.

  “That’s enough of that, Aden,” Swith said reprovingly. “Your mam and da will be missing her,” he said with a cunning sideways look. “She was their favorite, wasn’t she?”

  It was an old match of his, trying to get Bramble to give him back a short answer. It kept him amused, and it didn’t do her any harm. Everyone knew that Maryrose was the favorite.

  “They are missing her, of course, Swith,” Bramble said. Then, feeling she had given Aden and the others enough entertainment, she said, “I notice your hands are bothering you. Could I be helping? Give them a rub, maybe?”

  “If you want to help a man by rubbing something—”

  “Close that dirty mouth, Aden!” Swith bellowed then glanced a bit shamefacedly at Bramble. “Well, lass, now you mention it . . .”

  She smiled at him. “I’ll come by after supper.”

  It was a more or less regular thing she did, massaging goose grease and comfrey into the old people’s hands and feet. Not all of them, of course. Just the cross-grained ones who couldn’t find anyone else to help them. She was glad Aden didn’t have arthritis; she wasn’t about to get within groping distance of him.

  She hefted the rabbit and greens in one hand. “I have to get these to Mam.” None of them had mentioned the rabbit, though they had eyed it and no doubt would have liked to hear all the details on where she had trapped it and what kind of snare she had used, the kind of talk that kept them occupied for hours. To ask would have been against custom, since they all knew Swith had called her over to ask her a favor, which she was granting. If she wanted to tell them about her hunting, she would, in her own good time.

  If she hadn’t offered to help Swith, it would have been a different story, she thought with amusement as she walked up the street, exchanging greetings with Mill the charcoal burner, home at his grandparents’ until after the snowmelt and spring rains, and ignoring the tribe of dogs that swirled around her heels as they always did. But she had made the offer, so the old men couldn’t cross-question her without being unforgivably rude.

  “I have a doe ready to drop twins, Bramble,” called Sigi, the new young brewster who had doubled the inn
’s clientele after she had married its owner, Eril. Sigi’s three toddlers, who ran around her feet as she brought in her washing, were screaming with excitement about a maggot one of them had plucked from the rubbish pile. “If she doesn’t have enough milk for both, can I bring one to you?”

  “Of course, and welcome,” Bramble called back. “I’ve no orphans this season so far.”

  When Sigi had first met Bramble, she had reacted as many people did, with suspicion at Bramble’s dark hair and eyes. In this land of blonds and redheads, a dark-haired person was assumed to be a Traveler, a descendant of the original inhabitants of the Domains, who had been invaded and dispossessed a thousand years ago. Old history. But no one trusted Travelers. They were thieves, liars, perverts, bad luck bringers. Bramble had heard all the insults over the years, mostly (though not always) by people who didn’t know her, like ordinary travelers on the road through Wooding to Carlion.

  Sigi had finally overcome her suspicion, and Bramble was trying hard to forget the insult. It would be nice to have a friend in the village, now Maryrose was gone, and Sigi was the best candidate. The other girls had long ago shut her out after she had made it clear that she didn’t have any interest in the things that obsessed them, like boys and hair ribbons and sewing for their glory boxes. Not that boys weren’t a pleasure, now and then.

  Sigi’s oldest child grabbed the maggot and dropped it down her brother’s back and the resultant wailing distracted Sigi completely. Bramble laughed and went on to her own home, following Gred, the goose girl, as she shepherded her waddling, squabbling, hissing flock back to their night pasture outside the mill.

  Bramble’s family lived in an old cottage, a house really, bigger than it looked from the street, as it ran far back toward the stream. It was built of the local bluestone, all except for the chimney, which was rounded river stones in every shade of gray and brown and dark blue. It was thatched with the herringbone pattern you found on every roof around here, although in Carlion they thatched a fish-scale pattern, when they didn’t tile in slate. The front garden caught the morning light, so it was full of early herbs just pushing through the soil. The vine over one corner was still a bare skeleton, but the house had a cheerful, open look with its shutters wide and its door ajar.

  The door was ajar because her mother was in the road sweeping up the droppings the geese had left behind. The Widow Farli was doing the same thing outside her cottage a little farther down. Goose droppings were good fertilizer, and for someone like Widow Farli, who only kept a couple of scraggly hens, they were important. Bramble’s mother, Summer, kept pigs, as well as goats and hens, and really didn’t need them.

  “No use wasting them,” her mam said as Bramble came up. She swept the droppings onto an old piece of bag. “Here, go and give them to Widow Farli.” She held the bag out.

  Bramble took the droppings and handed the wild thyme and the sallet greens and the rabbit carcass to her mother.

  Farli had a face you could cut cheese with, and the tip of her nose was always white, as if with anger, but at what, Bramble had never figured out. She stared past Bramble and said snidely, “Nice of your mother to take the trouble. She’s not one to go off gallivanting and leave all her work to others.”

  “Just as well,” Bramble said, smiling sweetly, “or what would become of you?”

  Farli’s face flushed dark red. “Your tongue’ll get you into mischief one day, young lady, you mark my words! Mischief or worse!”

  She turned on her heel and flounced toward her back garden, keeping a tight hold of the bag of droppings.

  Bramble grinned and went home. She had a pelt to cure. She fetched it from behind the privy and went to the kitchen door to ask her mother for a loan of the good knife to scrape the skin down.

  “A wolf?” her mam said, that note in her voice that meant “what will the girl do next?” She had her frown on, too, the “what have I done to deserve this?” frown.

  Bramble had grown up knowing she’d never be the daughter her parents wanted — never be like her sister, Maryrose, who was a crafter born, responsible, hard-working, loving in the way they understood. Maryrose looked like her mother, tawny-haired and blue-eyed, clearly one of Acton’s people, while Bramble looked like her granda, who had started life a Traveler. He looked like the people who’d lived here before Acton’s people had come over the mountains. Along with her coloring — or perhaps due to the way people looked askance at her because of it — Bramble had inherited the Traveler restlessness, the hatred of being enclosed. Where Maryrose was positively happy to stay seated all day at the loom with her mother, or stand in the workshop shaping and smoothing a beech table with her father, Bramble yearned to be in the forest, for the green luxuriance of summer growth, the sharp tracery of bare branches in winter, the damp mold and mushroom smell of autumn.

  She had spent all her free time there as a child, and a lot of time when she should have been learning a trade. While she never did learn to weave or carpenter, by the time she was old enough to marry, a good proportion of the family food came to the table from her hands, and a few luxuries as well. Their flock of goats came from Bramble’s nursing of orphan kids or the runty twin of a dropping. If she raised a kid successfully, she got either half the meat if it was a billy, or the first kid if it was a nanny. She had a knack with sick animals, and sick people, too. In the forest, she set snares, gathered greens, fruits and nuts, herbs and bulbs. In early spring, the hard time, it was her sallets and snowberries that kept the family from the scurvy, her rabbit and squirrel that fed them when the bacon ran out and the cornmeal ran low. They could have bought extra supplies, of course, but the money they saved, then and all through the year, from Bramble’s gathering, made the difference between survival and prosperity, between living from day to day and having a nest egg behind them. And her furs brought in silver, too, although they weren’t the thick, expensive kind you got from the colder areas up north near Foreverfroze. And old Ceouf, the warlord, took a full half of what she made on them, for a “luxury” tax.

  There was always someone in the village ready to spy for the warlord. At Wooding’s yearly Tax Day in autumn, it was amazing how the warlord’s steward seemed to know everything that had been grown or raised or sold or bought in the last year. Bramble suspected Widow Farli of being an informer, but she couldn’t blame her. A woman alone needed some way of buying the warlord’s protection.

  Bramble had never brought home a wolf skin before, but her mam thought poorly of it for one of those “it isn’t respectable” reasons that she could never quite follow.

  “The gods alone know what’ll become of you, my girl,” Mam said. That wasn’t so bad; it was said with a kind of exasperated affection. But then she sighed and couldn’t resist adding, “If only you were more like your sister!”

  When Bramble was six, and seven, and eight, that sigh and that sentence had made her stomach clench with anguish and bewilderment. At nineteen, she just raised an eyebrow at her mother and smiled. It did no good to let it hurt; neither she nor her parents were going to change. Could change. And if there was still a cold stone, an empty hollow, under her ribs left over from when she was little, it was so familiar she didn’t even feel it anymore.

  “I’ll make you a gorgeous coat out of it, Mam,” she said, and winked. “Just think how impressed they’ll be at the Winterfest dance.”

  Her mother smiled reluctantly. “Oh, yes, of course you will. I can just see myself in a wolf-skin coat. A lovely sight I’d be. No, thank you.” She looked down at the rabbit and greens. “Well, these’ll make a good meal.”

  Bramble nodded at the implied thanks, took the good knife her mother held out and went down to the stream to scrape the hide down thoroughly.

  Every so often she couldn’t help looking up to where flocks of pigeons and rooks, coming home for summer, circled the sky. High above them in the uplands of the air, a blue heron glided, like the old song said, free from care. It came from beyond the Great Forest, from up n
ear Foreverfroze. She longed to see what it had seen. One day, but not yet, because the gods forbade it.

  “Time and past to milk the goats, Bramble!” her mother called from the back door.

  Bramble groaned and trudged off toward the goat shed. She lingered for a moment at the gate, watching the sky turn that pale, pale blue that wasn’t quite gray, as it did on these spring evenings, just before it darkened. She wondered, for the hundredth time, or maybe the thousandth, where the birds had been. She had wanted to take the Road all her life. When she was a child, listening to her grandfather’s Traveling stories, she had promised herself that one day she would. Just go. But as she grew older she watched the Travelers who came to Wooding and realized that they all had trades. Skills. Tinkering, music, singing, tumbling, mural and sign painting, horse breaking . . . Bramble had no skills worth anything to anyone else. She could hunt and forage, but on the Road, far from the forest, what good would that be to her?

  So she laid her plan: she would save her coppers and head north, to the Great Forest in the Last Domain, where the mink and the weasel and the fox furs were so thick that the city folk would pay good silver for them. She would not Travel, but travel, to where her skills were useful and could earn her bread. She would see the oldest forest in the world and learn its secrets and there, in its green darkness, she would be rid of this yearning.

  When she came back to the house with a pail of frothy milk, her mam had warmed water for her to wash in, and had laid out cheese and bread and some dried apple, “to keep the wolf from the door until the stew is ready.” Bramble smiled — it was her mother’s way of making a joke, and making amends for maybe speaking too sharply. She never said sorry, but the dried apple was running low this side of winter, and to bring some out just for a snack was the only apology Bramble needed.