Chapter 36
Rosie is less than impressed at the weight of two – the lad’s slender but he’s tall and lightly muscled, like to fill out the same as his father and so heavier than he looks.
His arms are around my waist, loose, but he’s so close I can smell the blood and sweat of him.
It’s been a while since he stopped talking, since I stopped asking questions, picking at his story until I thought I’d got all I could out of him.
Beside us, Merry-girl lopes along, a little slowly, a little gingerly, but she keeps up.
How, after fleeing a fight with his father, Orin had found himself and Rowan somewhere new in the forest, Night’s Barrow, and lost, just as the sun dropped and huntsman and hounds poured out of the earth.
How he thought he was dead, but stood his ground, remembering his late gran’s tales that if you ran, you became prey.
How the huntsman looked at him a long time, sniffed at him as if his scent was familiar, like a horse with a foal, something it recognised.
How it had asked for his company, enquired after his dreams, took him hunting – exhilarating!
– and then began to ask for favours, small at first, then larger, harder to do, harder to stomach, but he didn’t want to let the huntsman down.
And I thought how I’d have done anything for the high sorceress, Almira, how the fear of losing her favour was as corrosive as acid.
I thought about what I did do for her and it’s very hard to hate this lad now.
A thought hits me. ‘You didn’t walk out here?’
‘He took Rowan.’
‘Blister?’
‘Only Da calls her that. The huntsman took her so I couldn’t leave…’
I grunt. The shadow half didn’t want him dead but also didn’t want Orin to be able to find help quickly. Does it plan to come back for him?
‘My mother hated you,’ he says, apropos of nothing. I’m not surprised to hear it. I knew it when she came and begged my help in getting pregnant, knew how she’d eaten her pride like a rotting apple, something that would be sure to leave its mark on her, its bitterness in her.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Surely you know.’
‘But I want to hear you tell it.’
‘What? Am I your storyteller now?’
‘Got anything better to do?’ he challenges. The little turd has a point.
‘Before your parents married, your father and I were friends.’ How prim I sound; how stupid I sound. Friends.
‘Lovers.’
‘Yes.’ I owe this boy no blushes.
‘Like you are again.’ His tone is tight as wire twisted around a bolt.
I think about that last time at the smithy, in Faolan’s bed, the haze of passion, thinking I’d seen a shadow pass the doorway, thinking myself mistaken.
Yet that shadow might have been roughly the height and slenderness of the lad.
Orin at the door, watching another woman in his mother’s bed, taking his father’s affection.
I know I’ve avoided the smithy and its master for a long time, but in the recent moments I’ve spent with him I’ve not seen Faolan interact with his son.
And it’s to my shame that I’ve never thought much of it.
Orin’s not my child, and I’m selfish after so long a separation.
Greedy for the man and his time and the illusion of being able to, perhaps, make up for what was lost. To devour whatever days or weeks or months or years we might have left with each other.
That was what I wanted for myself, something that for the first time in an age was neither affected nor influenced by consideration for the needs of others.
Perhaps if I’d known the lad his whole life – certainly if he’d been my own – then I’d have behaved differently.
But for that brief span, I just yearned for something that was mine alone.
‘My parents used to fight about you,’ he says, and I see I’m the wicked witch of the piece.
‘I have no doubt,’ I say levelly, ‘that your mother was unhappy about me. But to be fair, I knew your father long before she did, and he and I had finished our business before they married.’ I clear my throat. ‘Or close enough.’
‘She would scream at him. About you. That he carried you in his heart.’
‘Orin, it’s very hard for someone to be rational if they feel insufficiently loved.
If they don’t think they’re first in someone’s affections, and if they spend their time concentrating on who came before them.
Your father left me for Helvis – had I been her, that would have been a sufficient victory. ’
‘He thought about you, though, and she knew it.’
‘I didn’t see him for years, didn’t speak to him. Did my level best to not think of him.’ Made a legion of summer husbands to distract myself.
‘When she was sick, wasting away, I told her we should send for you,’ he blurts, and I don’t reply. ‘She refused. Forbade me or Da from doing it.’
‘It’s no comfort to hear someone would die rather than see me.’ But I can’t claim she’s the first.
‘Could you have saved her? If you’d come?’
‘If you’d called?’ I shake my head. ‘I don’t know, Orin. I’m not a god. I have some skills, I can heal breaks and tears, but tumours? Carcinomas? They’re beyond me. A wasting sickness would likely have defied me, but I could have made her passing gentler.’ No point in lying.
‘Mam said… that you’d made…’ He clears his throat.
‘What?’
‘Me.’
Oh. ‘She came to me because she was having trouble getting pregnant. I was able to help. You’re not the only child that’s come into the world because of my skills, so don’t feel special.’
‘I wish you hadn’t helped. I wish she hadn’t come to you. Then I wouldn’t be—’ The note in his voice is achingly sad.
‘Here? Orin, you were very much wanted – your father wanted you so much he left me, and your mother wanted you so much that she begged the woman she hated the most in the world for help.’ Awkwardly I pat one of his cold hands at my waist. ‘Your father loves you, he’s just very bad at showing it. That’s not your fault.’
‘It hurts, when he doesn’t see you. Stops paying attention,’ he mutters.
‘Yes, it does.’
‘It’s like you don’t exist anymore.’
‘I know.’ I’m aware that we’re almost at the penitents’ path trap; as if I didn’t have enough to contend with without giving life advice to a surly teen.
‘It’s like the sun going away, and your father’s affection is very much like the sun.
When it disappears behind a cloud you think you’ll never be warm again. ’
‘Doesn’t that anger you?’
‘Once. Not anymore.’ And it’s true. It was too long ago and I need my energy for other things. I’m too old for idiocies and what-ifs. ‘It hurt at the time but that was a long while ago. And getting mad about it just meant that I made worse mistakes.’ Summer husbands and stillborn babies.
‘Didn’t you want a child?’
Why am I answering these questions? ‘I wasn’t interested, and children aren’t toys, not to be got then put aside when you’re bored.
I’d have been a terrible parent and I never wanted to treat a child the way my mother treated me.
’ But I don’t tell him, just like I didn’t tell his father, that I couldn’t carry any child, couldn’t bear one alive, because that’s my pain to hold.
‘Then why does my father put me aside?’ He sounds so mournful and I remind myself that he is, when all’s said and done, a lonely boy who’s almost lost his dog, who’s crying for his father and grieving his mother, who’s become aware of the terrible weight of all the things he’s done in hope of love.
‘Because men are heedless idiots. All you can do is be a better man than your father, if you have children. Even if you don’t, you’ve a lot to make up to the children you’ve harmed – those who survive, anyway.
I know you protected them, once.’ I think about how much little boys adore their mothers until they’re taught not to, until they’re taught that softness equals weakness, when that softness is all they ever yearn for.
How boys grow into fathers who think they must tell their sons that softness is weakness, even though they miss it like a limb.
Instead of saying ‘I’ll not do what was done to me, I did not like it’ they repeat and repeat and repeat that awful cutting of heart from soul on their own sons.
I clear my throat. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m sorry Faolan is distant.
I thought he’d be better, and you deserve better. ’
I angle Rosie carefully past the penitents’ path – the trail of dead foliage leading from it looking even blacker, even more dead – and direct Orin’s attention to the series of brown concentric circles. ‘Did you help with that?’
I feel him shake his head against my shoulder. ‘That was him, he made it.’
‘But the hare – the hare was possessed, yes? And you’d followed me that morning.’ I’m just guessing but he doesn’t contradict me. ‘And you loosed it near me, and I was caught up in the chase.’ My turn to shake my head, but a reluctant laugh pushes its way out. ‘You little turd.’
We continue in silence for a while as the air between us settles, and the mood finds its own level that’s not quite so heavy, as if something’s been lightened.
* * *
There’s still some daylight left, but the sky is darkening, heavy with oncoming snow this last day of autumn.
We’ve dismounted and are standing in the shadows roughly in the same place I left Rosie last time, and where Rowan and Faolan’s great black stallion have wandered, abandoned.
Orin’s checked them over, tied their reins to branches, pronounced them hale and hearty with some relief.
I think about the red hide I saw across the clearing that last time – realise it was Rowan then too, that it was Orin come to the barrow to fulfil some obligation or other.
The boy’s examining his torso, the raised pink scars where only a few hours ago he was bleeding.
I feel sick to my stomach. I would like nothing so much as to run and hide in a hole in the earth – not the one in front of us, obviously.
Instead, I tether Rosie to a tree and Merry-girl with her despite the reproachful look she gives.
With an apology, I wrap my scarf around her snout as a muzzle because I can’t risk her barking.
I hand Orin the spare iron knife from my satchel, then adjust the quiver and bow slung on my back, and am searching for inspiring words when he blurts out:
‘What if it’s already killed my da?’ The lad’s face, stripped of all boldness, all swagger, looks achingly young. A little boy deprived of both parents, confused and doing terrible things to wring a little warmth from his life.
‘It hasn’t,’ I say and I’m mostly sure I’m right.
I wish I could tell him his father will be safe, that it will turn out all right in the end.
What I don’t tell him because it will offer no comfort is that I’m fairly sure the shadow half needs Faolan so it won’t do anything to him, or at least not without an audience.
That the death of the blacksmith needs to be a performance.
A ritual. Must be witnessed – because such a death unseen won’t have quite the same effect without testimony, without shock.
Of course, I’m not sure of anything right now, can’t think of anything except the sight of Faolan’s scars across shoulder and chest, stomach and hips.
I do the only thing I can and wrap my arms around Orin and hold him tightly until he stops shaking, then say, ‘You know what to do. I’m counting on you.’
‘Yes, Mistress Mehrab.’ His voice is stronger than it has been.
‘Remember: Be better. Do better. And if you betray me, I’ll get you, I swear.’ I grit my teeth. ‘You’ll wish it had killed you.’
‘I won’t let you down.’
‘If you do, I’ll turn you into a frog.’