3
I had never seen a male sorcerer—no one in the village had, as far as I knew. I hadn’t even known they existed. Afterward, folk sounded knowledgeable about it—oh yes, of course, some of the sorcerers were men—but I think it was a load of shite, and they hadn’t known either.
We had grown used to seeing the carriages come through once every couple months or so, but they had become more frequent of late, and the sorceresses were more high-cheekboned and lusciously curved than ever.
We’d had an unusually hard year—more sick livestock than usual and poorer crops—so people were looking for entertainment, and we didn’t mind the extra visits as much as you’d think. After all, the sorceresses brought our kingdom its prosperity, and surely seeing more of them meant things were looking up.
There was always a bit of a stir whenever one showed up, of course. It was bad manners to crowd around, or stare, but people would find themselves suddenly with urgent business that required them to stand in the middle of the square staring into space, pretending they were remembering their shopping list or some such.
On the day we saw our first male sorcerer, there were even more people milling about than usual, because each recent carriage had been more splendid than the last, and the panting lad who had come running into the square to tell people that a sorceress was coming had said that this carriage would be the most splendid of all.
He wasn’t wrong. The carriage was black, but shiny. Not shiny like paint, or like dark wood, but a hard-edged shiny, like stone—although, of course, it couldn’t have been stone, because not even the two hulking, great black horses pulling it could have dragged along a stone carriage, however much they showed off with their tossing manes and rolling eyes and the sharp clip of their feathered hooves on the cobbles.
There were black curtains at the windows as well, spangled and hung with beads, and black jewels clustered like frogspawn in the wheel arches and around the doors. Da watched me watch it, the way he did, with his mouth quirked to one side, and then lifted an eyebrow.
“You want to go out, Foss?”
“Nah.”
“’S a pretty one.”
“I can see it fine from in here.”
“Go on. I’ll watch the front. We won’t get anyone in while the madam’s here, anyway.”
And I wiped my hands on my apron and untied the cap from my hair, because yes, I did like to go out and look at the sorceresses when they came in, despite all my show of huffing and rolling my eyes.
I knew they took a bit more of us all away every time they left, but I liked to look at them all the same. People like to look at pretty things, me included. I got little enough of prettiness in the shop, and the gods knew I found none of it in the mirror.
I trudged out to stand among those gathering and watched the big coach pull up, with much puffing and stamping of feet from the horses. They didn’t need coachmen, the sorceresses, but controlled the beasts from inside the carriage somehow. You never saw them with anyone else, not even a servant or a footman. They came alone.
The only person not in the square that day was Goodwife Tilly, the herbalist. She always got the worst end of it because she had to be in the shop ready to take the sorceresses’ orders, such as they were. A snippet of this, a cutting of that. Things they probably didn’t need—excuses for their visits, as we all pretended that they were in our village on innocent business.
Even the herb harvest had been sparse lately, and Tilly was glad of the more frequent visits to bolster her meager profits. And the sorceresses paid well.
As I said, almost everyone but Tilly was in the square, pretending not to look, but really agog and about to burst with curiosity, waiting to see that first fall of hair and that first finely turned ankle.
We saw a fall of hair, all right, but shorter than usual, and curlier, without that heavy swing. The foot that popped out was booted—a long, black leather boot with a shine on it like the wet on a dog’s nose—and it went all the way up the calf to a muscled thigh that certainly didn’t belong to a lady.
No one made a sound, but somehow, we felt a murmur and a muttering pass through the crowd anyway, as it sunk in that the sorceress wasn’t an ess at all, but an er .
When he shook back his black hair, we saw that he was a squarer, harder version of the ladies—the same face, just pushed out in some places and sucked in, in others, but with those same fine-bladed cheeks and the same odd, light-filled eyes that they all had.
He didn’t look around at us and smile, as the ladies did, but stepped those shining boots down into the dust and shite of the square, and made a beeline for Tilly’s shop without speaking a word.
We hovered, the whole countrified swarm of us, fascinated and astonished at once, until he emerged with his brown paper sack of herbs and, again, without a word or a glance, walked back to the carriage.
The horses had been shaking their heads and scratching at the ground like a pair of scrounging chickens while he’d been away, but as soon as his foot hit the ladder again, they quietened right down, necks all arched and proud, standing to attention.
The sorcerer threw his packet onto the seat and then turned round, just once, to cast his chill gray blue gaze over the lot of us, one sweep of it, making everyone shuffle their feet and look elsewhere.
And then he looked at me.
I felt that no one ever had looked at me, not properly. I imagined it was because they could see the whole story of my life stretched out in front of me, like a cart track full of holes, just as I saw it. No marriage, no sprouts. No chance of a sweetheart pressing me against a wall and rucking up my skirts.
It would be easier were I well past the marrying age and an old woman; being young, though, and at the time when the lads should be coming round with flowers and shite, that was different.
But the sorcerer looked at me. Really looked, so that there needed to be a new word for looking that didn’t just mean eyes pointed in a direction.
I could say that it seemed like no one else existed in that moment bar me and him, and I could say that sounds faded, and I felt his stare like something real and sharp going right through me. These things would all be true, but not in the way you hear lovers say them.
The best I can compare it to is when I got a great thorn through my foot, one of the devil thorns that grow by the well, and it poked right through between two of the bones and popped out the other side with its white head all pink with my blood. There was a beat, before the pain, when it felt hot and sharp and almost good, tunneling its way through all that mess of flesh—that’s what the sorcerer’s look felt like on me, all over, head to toe and right into the dark places, giving them a tug and a twinge.
I saw his face properly, then—a great beak of a nose, mouth curled up at the corners, two black wings of eyebrows and those gray blue eyes beneath, and those swathes of curled hair needing to be pushed back to reveal the sharp bones of his jaw and his long throat, white and smooth, like the throats of the hares Da caught in the woods and sliced open.
When he turned back into the carriage, I felt like someone was yanking out my innards, as if my monthly blood had come. I tried to keep my balance, but I fell, plop , down on my bottom, in a puddle, my skirts spreading out around me like a great ugly lily pad, and I the frog croaking in the center.
“You all right, Foss?”
Hands lifted me up, dusted me off, but there was no saving the dress. I muttered things and shook people off and made my way back inside.
“What the bollocks happened to you?” asked Da.
“I fell.”
“Well, you need to get yourself cleaned up.”
The only reason Da didn’t get an earful for stating the obvious was that I was still reeling from the sorcerer’s Look.
“You hit your head?” said Da. I must have looked mazed.
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe I’d better go lie down for a spell.”
He huffed and blew through his mustache, but there was nothing to say except, “Fine.”
As I dragged myself up the stairs, I heard him call after me. “A sorcerer, eh? Who would have known?”