Chapter 5 #6
Ceybold’s gaze only intensified at her refusal. She had the strangest notion that this stand-off between them was something more, a test of sorts as if he hoped to discover an important secret of hers.
He leaned forward, and she leaned away. “Kiss me,” he said, “and I will see to it Bron comes home for a visit in less than a month from now.”
His words were hardly audible above the chanting, but she heard every one of them with a sizzle of excitement.
The idea of seeing Bron again and so soon, set her heart racing.
Still, she didn’t trust Ceybold. “How can you—” she raked him with her most withering glare.
“Promise such a thing? You’re just the son of a yeoman in a Daesin village. ”
There was no mistaking the flash of anger in his eyes. His mild tone belied the emotion, but Disaris wasn’t fooled. “My father has connections,” he said. “Can your father say the same?”
She eyed him for several moments, ignoring the demands from the impatient crowd that she make up her mind one way or the other about kissing Ceybold.
She’d absolutely fight wolves blindfolded if it meant she got a chance to see Bron again.
She supposed she could suffer a quick peck from Ceybold.
There was still something that puzzled her though.
“Why do you want to kiss me? We don’t even like each other. ”
Sensing he was halfway to victory and her consent, his tight features relaxed.
The triumphant glint in his eyes was practically feral, and she wondered if maybe she’d made a mistake.
She took another step back. He caught her arm to hold her in place.
“Because,” he said, “this is a game I want to win.”
Every instinct inside Disaris warned he didn’t speak of the childish Honesty and Bravery.
She chose to ignore the warning. The chance to see Bron was too great a temptation to resist. “Fine,” she finally agreed.
“A kiss, but not a long one, and if you try to stick your tongue in my mouth, I’ll bit it off.
” The very idea of such a possibility made her want to gag.
She squawked a protest when he pulled her into his arms, his laughter mocking as his friends cheered him on. Disaris tried to free herself, only to surrender when Ceybold told her “This is part of it,” he said. “Fight me, and I walk. And Bron stays at Burnpool.”
His mockery vanished when she bared her teeth at him. “If you’re lying to me, I’ll cut you into pieces with my harvesting knife and feed them to Farmer jin Laren’s pigs.”
For the first time since she met him, a hint of admiration came over his features, and the tiny smile he bestowed on her was sincere. “I believe you, Disa.”
She stood rigid in his arms as he leaned down, his face filling her vision. Disaris closed her eyes and held her breath, dreading the kiss every other girl in the circle wanted to share with Ceybold.
“Don’t be wet,” she silently prayed. “Don’t be wet.”
It wasn’t wet. In fact, the kiss was surprisingly nice, considering its source.
She’d assumed the enmity between her and Ceybold would result in either a sloppy swipe of his mouth across hers or a violent smashing of lips.
It was neither. Ceybold carefully teased her lower lip with a series of soft pecks, then her upper lip as well.
Disaris quivered in his arms, caught between curiosity and revulsion, and ready to bolt the second he tried to deepen the kiss.
She squinched her eyes shut even harder and tried to picture the first moment she and Bron shared a real kiss and not just a clumsy clacking together of teeth.
His lips were shaped differently from Ceybold’s, felt different against her mouth, better in a way that Ceybold’s didn’t. Then, her blood had sung in her veins with the wonder of holding Bron in her arms. None of that happened as she stood in Ceybold’s arms and patiently endured his kiss.
Her eyes opened, and she freed herself from his arms with a slight shove. “That’s enough,” she said, tamping down the urge to wipe her mouth. She’d do so later, when there wasn’t a crowd gleefully watching her for a reaction.
Ceybold stared at her, his chest rising and falling with rapid breaths. “You liked it,” he said. “I know you did.”
She frowned, annoyed by his egotistical assumption. “I liked the memory it inspired.”
The gloating look emerging on his face slipped away, and his brow lowered.
She didn’t have to give details about what or who she referred to.
Ceybold was an ass; he wasn’t stupid. “You were thinking of him.” The snarl in his voice raised the hair on her nape.
“Bitch,” he said so softly only she heard the insult.
Disaris shrugged. “Call me what you want. My thoughts are my own. I held up my side of the bargain. Now you hold up yours.” She stepped away from him and gave Nazlin a quick hug. “I’m through playing,” she said. “I want to spend time with my parents and sister before the festival is over.”
She waved goodbye to the rest of the group in the circle, pretended a still seething Ceybold wasn’t glaring daggers at her, and rejoined her family in the square.
On her way to them, she scrubbed her lips on her shirt sleeve and nabbed a cup of small ale sweetened with honey from a vendor to quench her thirst and rinse away any taste of Ceybold.
One kiss from him was one too many for her.
The rest of the village girls were more than welcome to him.
Her mother’s eyebrows rose when Disaris joined her, Reylan, and Luda on a bench to watch a trio of acrobats perform on a temporary stage. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “You look like you’ve eaten an unripe plum.”
Disaris could only wish that were so. While she hadn’t liked being in Ceybold’s arms, she didn’t regret it, at least for now. If it meant Bron might come home for another brief visit, then she considered it a necessary trade well worth making.
There were moments over the next month when she regretted her bargain with Ceybold.
She was either the most admired girl in Panrin or the most hated.
Some gossiped about her within her hearing, spiteful comments regarding her appearance or dress and how could Ceybold want to kiss such a wild, average-looking girl when so many others were prettier and more elegant.
Others tried to pull her aside and beg for every detail about Ceybold’s kiss.
Was it soft? Hard? How did his lips taste?
Disaris hated that more than the insults. She didn’t want to revisit those moments. They weren’t horrible per se, they were simply not worth remembering. Even if they were, she had no intention of sharing her opinion about them just to titillate a flock of gossiping village magpies.
She counted the days toward Bron’s homecoming, leveling threatening glares on Ceybold every time their paths crossed. He only smirked at her, inciting her anger even more when he blew kisses at her and walked away.
“You better keep your promise, you bastard,” she’d mutter to herself. If Bron didn’t show up soon, Ceybold was dead.
Bron’s return often preoccupied her thoughts, even during the school hours when she should have been studying or paying attention to lessons instead of daydreaming.
The new schoolmaster had as little tolerance for any wool gathering as the previous master, but his reprimands went beyond disciplinary into cruelty.
Disaris sometimes returned home with red, throbbing ears from Master Morevan’s twisting fingers, or swollen knuckles from the strike of the slender cane he carried as he stalked the aisles between the desks.
She hadn’t liked the man from the start, when he’d stepped into the position made vacant by Master Feypas’s death.
Master Morevan was obvious in playing favorites, overzealous in his discipline, and petty in his criticisms. Disaris guessed his age at ten to twelve years older than her.
A young teacher and one with an unmistakable loathing for children.
He entered the school room each morning wearing a sneer that could curdle milk and thwapped his cane gently against his robes in unspoken warning.
The fourth and last time he tried to twist her ears, Disaris stood up, yanked the rod from his hand, and struck him hard across the shoulder and arm with it.
Jin Morevan crashed to one knee with a startled scream.
Several of the younger children fled the building while those who remained flattened themselves along the opposite wall, eyes wide as they watched Disa jin Gheza face off with the schoolmaster.
When jin Morevan tried to rise, she kicked one of the stools into his legs.
He fell on his backside, and this time wisely stayed there.
He stared up at Disaris, his expression changing from stunned disbelief to hatred. She pointed the cane at him. “Touch me again, and I’ll make you eat your own teeth.” She then broke the rod in half by stepping on it, threw the pieces at the schoolmaster, and stormed outside.
She didn’t give him a chance to tattle on her to her parents.
Both were home repairing a patch of the roof that had developed a leak.
Disaris confessed the entire incident to them in detail.
She didn’t trust jin Morevan to tell his side of the story with any semblance of truth.
At least she had the chance to tell her version of it first.
It was the scandal of Panrin, told and retold in sewing circles and taverns, embellished to the point that one recounting had Disaris attacking the schoolmaster with a sword and another in which he tried to beat her with a club he kept behind his desk.
Humiliated by the fact he’d been bested b a student, and a girl at that, jin Morevan refused to allow her back in his classroom, which was perfectly fine by her. Bron’s amman had already volunteered to help her with her studies.
“Mistress Hazarin is smarter and more learned than that vicious pip tarse anyway,” she declared to her parents. “And you can beat me black and blue or starve me to death if you want, Amman. Eitan. I’m still not apologizing to him.”
Gheza rolled her eyes. “No need to play the martyr, Disa.”
Reylan stared at his daughter as he chewed on the stem of his pipe. The three sat at the table in the kitchen. Luda had been sent to bed after supper. “Why didn’t you tell us about any of this before?”
She bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Eitan. I didn’t want to cause trouble.
I know it’s hard to lure a schoolmaster here.
They all want to teach in the bigger towns for better pay.
And I did misbehave sometimes. Daydreaming.
Not listening. I deserved a tongue-lashing, even a hand swat, but not the rest. He’s harsh with all of us like that, even the youngest students.
” Her lower lip quivered, and she swallowed hard in a bid not to cry. “Am I in trouble?”
Her parents exchanged a long, silent glance before Gheza motioned to her to stand. “We’ll see. Go to bed, and we’ll discuss it in the morning.”
Just before Disaris closed the door to the bedroom she shared with Luda, she overheard her mother ask her father what he thought. His answer was brief. “I’ll take care of it.”
Whatever “it” was, Reylan never mentioned it to Disaris.
She noted how in the days following their confrontation, the schoolmaster avoided her and especially her father any time he saw them on the streets of Panrin, sometimes darting into a shop or crossing the street so as not to pass them on the walkway.
Disaris was never invited back to the schoolroom, but the gossip among the villagers was that while jin Morevan still snapped at recalcitrant students and instituted punishments, he no longer touched any of them, and no longer carried one of those dreaded canes.
Even though Reyland and Gheza hadn’t forced her to return to the school or apologize to the schoolmaster, she didn’t escape punishment for her actions altogether.
Gheza thought Hazarin’s idea of volunteering Bron at the tannery was a wonderful idea and did the same with Disaris.
Reylan agreed, and the master tanner was delighted to have more free labor at his shop.
Disaris didn’t dare protest, feeling she’d been granted a reprieve of sorts. After her first day at the tannery, she considered begging her parents for a kiss of the strap instead.
It was hard, filthy work, fleshing hides and mopping up the mess around the fleshing beam.
By the time she walked home after a day’s work, she was covered in bloody smears of scraped flesh, and stank bad enough to kill a person at thirty paces just from the smell.
Like Bron before her, she happily submitted to scalding hot baths and soap harsh enough to peel the skin off one’s bones.
She was sure her hair, even tightly bound and covered by a cap, would never feel clean again.
At the end of her second to last day at the tannery, she trudged home, cold, smelly, and tempted to lay down in the road and take a nap.
She might have celebrated the end of her mandatory employment except that a full month had passed since the Festival of Spirius and Bron still hadn’t made an appearance in Panrin despite Ceybold’s smirking assurances that he would.
“So much for your empty promises, you lying sack of horse shit,” she declared to the wintry gray sky.
If she weren’t so tired, she’d march straight to Ceybold’s fancy house, knock on his fancy door, strike down the servants with her reek and drag their master outside where she’d beat him to a pulp with her lunch pail.
As it was, she’d have to settle for missing Bron and imagining how she might turn Ceybold into fish pie with the nearest kitchen knife.
As if her sinister thoughts had somehow conjured up her greatest desire, a voice called from a cluster of trees far off the worn path.
“My gods, I can smell you from three fields over! Have you been rolling in the tannery’s muck pit?”
Disaris peered into the trees’ shadows, hardly daring to believe what she just heard.
When Bron stepped out of concealment and onto the road, she couldn’t contain her excitement.
“Bron!” she shrieked, sprinting towards him.
She skidded to a stop when he held up both hands to ward her off, pale blue eyes wide with horror.
She broke into laughter and stuck her tongue out at him. “I’m not that bad, you delicate petal!”
He grinned before his expression turned solemn, and he sighed. “Besides beating up schoolmasters and kissing Ceybold of all people, what have you been doing since I last saw you, Disa?”
Missing you, she thought. Wishing you were here. You are, and the world is right once more.