5
It took hours, but I managed to make it far enough out of the village that night that I was unlikely to bump into any folk I knew on the road come the morning and have to try to explain what on earth I thought I was doing.
The very first cart I waved at stopped for me, and the driver even helped me up into the hay-stuffed back with his own hands. I spun him some story about an aunt with a sickness, how I had been sent by the family to care for her.
I don’t know if he believed me, but he pitied me enough to say he would carry me all the way to her fictional house in the city. I told him I didn’t know the exact address, that I had been told to ask about for it when I got there, and at that he did look at me a bit oddly.
I had forgotten how large a place a city must be, and how difficult it must be to find one person in the whole crowded mess of it, not like in our village where you just had to collar one old biddy to find out the affairs of the whole damn place.
He obviously decided not to ask anything further. I realized why when I saw his quick glance down toward my belly. He thought I was “in trouble,” in the way of village girls, and was leaving to spare my family shame. People didn’t usually travel unless, like him, they were delivering goods, or had some kind of dire need.
“I’m not going straight there,” he told me. “I have stops to make further out first—you caught me on my way out to the border villages. You might want to wait and find someone else.”
But I couldn’t wait. I had to be moving, to ease the roiling in my stomach and brain. “How much longer will it take?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A day at most.”
I had never been to the villages along the border. You heard strange things about them. From the stories, it was the outcasts and the oddities who moved there, close to the edges of the kingdom, people who had disgraced themselves irreversibly at home or who had other, private reasons for wanting to leave the comforts of the central villages for the straggling, struggling settlements on the edges.
I didn’t know quite why the kingdom’s borders attracted strays, and nor did anyone else seem to know, but all agreed that you didn’t go there except out of direst necessity—and, if you did, you took a stout stick with which to beat off any suspect characters.
Drivers like this one did a roaring trade ferrying goods out to them, though; for some reason, very little grew along the border. The soil was unforgiving, perhaps. The few people I had seen from those places had been small and weedy, too. Apparently, nothing thrived out there.
There were other stories, too, about something sinister that lurked around the kingdom’s edges, but I didn’t put much truck in that. My need to get to the sorcerer was such, however, that rather than take the risk of not finding someone else who seemed trustworthy enough to drive me to the city, I chose to take the roundabout route with this cart driver.
He was gruff, but well mannered, and I had no sense of danger from him. He would provide some protection. Not everyone I encountered on the road would be a safe bet, and I wasn’t desperate enough to take unnecessary risks. Not yet.
As we wound our circuitous and bumpy route to the border, the villages grew gradually dirtier and less prosperous. I looked with interest, having never seen any place but my own village before, and noticed the houses turning from brick-and-mortar to weathered boards, and the roads from cobble to pockmarked dirt.
Crops browned in the fields, and the cattle that grazed alongside the road looked thinner and larger of eye. The children grew skinnier too and chased our cart with their hands out, shouting for coin and candy, but I had none to give.
We passed through those villages without stopping, until we were right on the edge of the kingdom, a full ten hours’ ride from home, and the cart driver pulled up outside a rough-looking tavern.
This village had an odd feel about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It had a scruffy, scrounging air, true, like the rest of the border settlements, but the oddness was more in the angle and mien of the buildings. They seemed poised either to run or to snarl, like so many flea-bitten stray dogs that had been kicked one too many times.
The driver cleared his throat. He had said so little that this gave me a start.
“I’m not staying here tonight,” he told me. “We’ll set off after dinner. You can sleep on the cart.”
Sleeping in a pile of hay after sitting in a pile of hay all sodding day. Delightful. But it would save me some coin. I nodded. “Are we running behind, then?”
“No.” He rubbed his nose. “I don’t like to sleep here, is all. Always drive straight through.”
“Why don’t you like to stay here?” I asked, emboldened by what was our longest conversation since setting off.
“Just don’t,” he said. “No one does.”
He was clearly done with talk, and so I shut up as well. I did help him unload some of his crates of produce, though, as thanks for the lift, and he seemed pleasantly surprised at the strength of my arms.
I asked if I had time to stretch my legs, and he nodded, but told me to be back within the hour, as he planned to finish his transaction as quickly as possible.
I didn’t want to wander too far in this unnerving place, so I took a brief walk around the tavern, just enough to shake the cobwebs, and then I huffed out a great breath and sat myself down on a wooden crate.
I made sure I could see the cart driver from where I sat, in case I ran into any trouble. I don’t know what sort of trouble I imagined would find me, but the whole village had the stench of danger about it, no less worrisome because it was so undefined.
The light of the setting sun glanced off the windows of the buildings around me in odd, disjointed patterns, like a smile missing some of its teeth. There were few people about, and they walked with their heads down and their eyes determinedly on their shoes. Gave me the shivers, like I said.
Chastising myself for my childish fears, I forced myself to stand up and walk with as much confidence as I could muster. I needed to stretch my legs further before an uncomfortable night in the cramped cart, sandwiched between the hard boards and the itchy hay. And no matter how unsavory this village felt, I would be sorry later if I didn’t take the opportunity to work my muscles a bit.
I found myself whistling under my breath, more for the small measure of company the noise gave me than for any desire for a tune, and wound my way through the buildings, keeping to the main road and the lit path.
Abruptly, I reached the end of the village. Usually, buildings would trail away from a village center, getting smaller and farther apart, until they dissolved into farmland again.
This village, however, just ... ended. Even the road petered out, coming to a halt just beyond the shadow of the last house. Dandelions grew luxuriantly in the gaps between the last few cobblestones. There were no wheel marks or hoof prints in the mud beyond, still a little illuminated by the last gas lamp.
It occurred to me that this village had an extraordinary number of gas lamps for how poor and hardscrabble it seemed, and was better lit than the roads back home. Almost as if they were frightened of the dark.
I peered ahead into the gathering dark. I couldn’t see anything more frightening out there than fields and the shapes of cows, but a prickle at the nape of my neck told me to go no further. If I squinted, I could see what looked like a thick, swirling fog on the horizon, pale against the darkness. It was a desolate place, and the blessing of the sorceresses’ magic seemed scant out here.
I was not sorry to leave that town behind.
We stopped each night after that to rest the horse and ourselves. At night, I used the little coin I had to purchase a room in the least expensive inn I could find, usually dimly lit and evil-smelling, with portraits of the king in varying degrees of quality glaring down from the walls.
The cart driver stayed somewhere better, I am sure, but I never knew exactly where. He helped me down at the end of each day, brushed the hay off his hands and stomped off, leaving me to find my own way.
I woke every morning in a panic, washing up as quickly as I could and running out to the cart, fearful that he would have traveled on without me. But he never did. He was always there to help me back up, grumpy but polite. It could have been a lot worse.
On the evening of the fourth day, the driver called back to let me know we were nearly there. We had reached the very last village before the city. I found it hard to feel too much excitement, however, because waking up in a pile of hay is not an experience I’d wish upon anyone, and one that I’d had more than enough of by then.
My hair was a mad red tangle, and my skin was covered in red pinpricks from the thousands of little needles, as if I’d germinated another thousand freckles overnight.
Still, despite all that, I felt a tingle of what might have been anticipation. After all, it was the city! I’d never expected to see it in my lifetime. I twisted about and raised myself up as best I could to see over the driver’s head, but my first impression of the place was still framed by his ears and the wisps of hair either side of his bald pate, which detracted from the grandeur a little.
I saw yellow stone walls, with an expanse of tents and market stalls spread out before them. The walls were so high that if the city itself hadn’t been on a hill, I wouldn’t have seen a thing.
As it was, though, the whole thing rose up like the crown of a hat with a wide, flat brim, and I could see roofs and chimneys of all colors poking out all the way up to the castle perched on top, upright as a trussed pork chop. If you squinted, you could see the sun winking off the guardsmen’s spears.
As usual, the driver left me to my own devices once we had found a spot for the cart and he had unharnessed his horse. I was down to my last bit of coin, barely enough to pay for a room and board, so I thought the sorcerer had better either rip my heart out as soon as I got there to save me the trouble of sleeping and eating, or put me up for a couple of nights.
One good thing: the pain was much easier the closer I came to the city. It was like gradually getting over a bad head cold—I could think more clearly and breathe more easily. The tug at my gut, which sometimes felt a lot like desperately needing to go to the privy, had eased, but the anticipation of growing closer had set my belly to grumbling and growling as if it were waiting for a good beef dinner.
This last village was the most prosperous of any I’d seen, which made sense, since it was so close to the city. The people were friendly and open faced, and looked well fed. We found a pub. I bought a gray, greasy bowl of bone soup and a mug of warm ale. I sat apart from the driver, who wanted little to do with me when I wasn’t on his cart (not that I could blame him), and I listened.
One of the advantages of looking plain and nondescript is that it allows you a sort of invisibility sometimes, where a pretty woman would draw attention.
“Thin times,” one hairy-chinned fellow was saying. I looked down at my soup, which was little more than dirty water with a lick of oil on top; it seemed to add weight to his words. A lone cube of onion bobbed in the center.
“Getting worse,” said his friend, bald except for a few strands of hair slicked across his dome.
“It’s because they’re buying less, up there,” said the first one, jerking his head in the vague direction of the city. “I think,” and he leaned in close, but, in the way of drunkards everywhere, his whisper was louder than his speaking voice, “that They’ve come up with a way to make everything they need themselves, without coming outside the walls.”
The way he said “They,” you could hear the capital letter.
“The magic-workers?”
I stiffened and listened more intently. We called them by a different name, of course, but he had to be talking about the sorceresses. And my sorcerer.
“Who else?” said the bearded man.
“I don’t see how,” said the other, sucking at his remaining teeth. “Never heard anything about them making food and such. Just potions and hexes and murderous brews. Things for the nobles. They’ve been buying their foodstuffs from us for a hundred years or more.”
“Then how do you explain it? Three carts of my peaches, rotted, because I was told they didn’t need the usual order. Told by letter, no less. They didn’t even bother to say it to my face. Twelve years I’ve been supplying them!”
A man at a neighboring table with a shock of pale hair chimed in. “Parsnips! Turnips!”
For a moment I wondered if this was some strange way of swearing in this particular village, but then he went on, “Wurzels! Carrots! All useless. I held them back for the usual city order, and it never came. Now they’re tough as feet and smell as bad.”
Who would have thought that those hoity-toity sorceresses—and my sorcerer—would have had anything to do with something as everyday as fruits and vegetables? It was hard to imagine them sniffing at peaches like housewives and poking apples to see if they bruised. Why would such powerful beings need to concern themselves with foodstuffs? Surely they had other servants who could do the job just as well?
“I’m telling you,” said the first man. “They’re making it themselves. They’re cooking something up. Those ... women. ”
There was a collective moment of loathing and longing as everyone thought about those women. I took a slurp of my soup.
“Haven’t seen one of them for weeks either,” continued the bearded man.
“Because they don’t need us anymore.”
“They’ll always need us.” The bearded man lowered his voice. “ For hearts. ”
The room seemed to darken, shadows closing in from the corners, and the men scraped their chairs in close to the table and lowered their voices.
“They get those from the outer villages,” said the bald man. “They don’t trouble us.”
“They used not to,” said the blond man at the adjoining table. “Because we grew their food. But now,” he took a swig of ale, “they don’t need our crops any longer, apparently, or soon won’t.”
“They wouldn’t,” said the first man, sounding more sober. “We’ve had this arrangement for a century. Longer. My great-grandfather told me on his knee. They don’t take hearts from us because we grow their food, and they don’t take them from the city folk either.”
“And how long will that last, d’you think?” said Baldy. “All they need to do is sign another fancy bit of paper, and we’re done for.”
“Maybe they’ve found something else to use instead of hearts,” said the blond man, without much hope.
I felt a tug under my own heart, as if to remind me of my purpose. I got up and walked over to the men, ignoring their looks of embarrassment, their edgy glances at one another. Lucky for them, propositioning them was the furthest thing from my mind.
“I overheard you,” I said, “and I’m not from around here. You were talking about the magic-workers.”
“No, we weren’t,” said the bearded man automatically.
“Yes, you were,” I said. “You were saying they usually order their vegetables and such from you ...”
The bald man gave in to the inevitable, shrugging at the others as if to say, what does it matter?
“Usually,” he admitted.
The tension released. They relaxed their postures a little, moistened their mouths, ready to talk. “We grow the food,” said the bearded man who had first spoken. “The villages close by. They don’t make anything in the city but fine clothing and mischief.”
“Someone signed some bit of paper a hundred years ago or more,” said the bald man. “Said they wouldn’t take from us except in dire need, if we supplied the city.”
“And a good thing it was too,” said the bearded man.
“Did the ladies come themselves? To collect them?” I asked.
He snorted. “Of course not. They sent their servants.”
All the men looked at me as if I was a simpleton.
“Where are you from?” asked the bearded man.
I named my village.
“I had an aunt from out that way,” he said. “Things are different out there, farther from the center. You’re pretty close to the border.”
“Not that close,” I said, remembering the eerie border village I had visited just a few nights before. “And the sorceresses don’t buy from us. Nothing but herbs from the goodwife, that is. They just come to ...”
“ Harvest ,” said the bald man. All three exchanged glances.
“They go out to you for one thing and to us for another. They rarely ... take ... from here. That’s the bargain. They take from the border towns, mostly.”
Was that why it had felt so dangerous there? I had heard that living closer to the city was safer, and now I had an idea as to why.
“Shitting on their own doorstep, ’twould be,” said the man at the adjoining table.
“Josef! Not in front of the ...” the bearded man glanced at me doubtfully, “lady.”
“Something’s going on, that’s for certain,” said the bearded man, warming to his subject. The slowly descending level of his ale was probably helping with this, also. “There’s something they’re not telling us. We’ve been supplying them with food for as long as anyone can remember, and now they suddenly don’t need any? Something has changed.”
Something had changed. More sorceresses than ever before had come through our village in the past few months. And then, the most surprising change of all.
“Have you ever seen ...” I hesitated, “a male magic-worker?”
They all three raised their eyebrows and pursed their lips.
“No such thing,” said Josef, and the others nodded.
“Never been heard of,” said the bald man.
“Well,” said the bearded man, “if there were one, then that’s just one more of the strangenesses. Something’s up, no doubt.” He leaned back in his chair so that the wood creaked ominously.
“I’ve heard rumors,” I said. “But you said they’re canceling their orders. Does that mean they’ll be harvesting here too?”
There was a collective shiver.
“My granny said they don’t take the actual heart out of your chest,” said Josef. “It’s a mettyfor, like.”
We all stared at him.
“Mighty big word,” said the bald man.
“What’s that when it’s at home?” asked the bearded man.
“Like, something that means something else.” Josef looked embarrassed. “Like, they take part of you away, but we call it the heart because we don’t know what else to call it.”
“Get away with you,” the bald man said. “They rip the heart from your chest, all right? Blood and everything. My granny told me.”
“I heard that they don’t need to take you at all,” Josef said. “That they can just call you, like. They set eyes on you once, and you’ll come running.”
The oily soup churned in my belly. “And then what happens?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
“No one knows,” said Josef.
Wonderful. This close to the city and still no real answers as to what exactly had been done to me, or what would happen next.
“So,” asked Josef, and by now he was drunk enough to try winking even at me. “What brings you here?”
“Just passing through,” I said, and turned my back before he got any bright ideas.
A little of my gruel was left, but I couldn’t bring myself to stomach it after all that talk. Instead, I wandered outside to gulp a little of the manure-scented night air and settle myself a minute. I had to think about what I’d heard.
I had no idea that arrangements like those of the fruits and vegetables were in place, and now that I knew it, I felt rage bubbling up in my gut along with the soup.
So not everyone had to sacrifice their hearts to the sorceresses? Just my village, and others like it, while places like this grew their turnips and lived without that creeping dread, no less fearful because it was so unformed?
Another thought twisted my gut: we were the turnips, sitting out there on the borderlands, no more than vegetables to be harvested or discarded as the city folk saw fit.