CHAPTER SEVEN #2
Anya admitted to herself, but not to him, the coach was far more comfortable than the back of a lumber wagon.
They had it all to themselves, so she was free to gape out the window.
Several wagons passed them along the way, loaded to the brim with sundered pines.
The blossoming industry had not yet breached the Lichtenwald, favoring the less rugged, and less magical, woods to the north.
The Lichtenwald also served as a sufficient border with Preule, helping keep the two nations in relative peace.
But she wondered how much longer it would. At this rate, it would soon be the only place left to harvest.
They spent the ride through the farmlands in silence. Anya preferred it after the bustle of the city. Not a true silence: the braying of cows, the crush of wheels against chipped stone, the buzz of bumblebees. The brush of the wind against the trees, against her neck through the open windows.
But as the afternoon passed, the farmlands and copses of birch and oak gave way to rocky hills and towering fir and pine, the sound of songbirds replaced by the sharp cries and knocks of woodpeckers.
Then, as the sunlight was shrouded by clouds and the temperature dropped, it all gave way to the stony silence of an impending rain shower.
It was early evening by the time they arrived. There was no road leading to Anya’s cottage; only a narrow dirt lane. As Anya disembarked, Sylas left the driver with a generous tip. She rolled her eyes. He had taken every opportunity that day, to the last, to flaunt his wealth.
She led Sylas up the grassy hill, past the flowering rowan trees flanking the wobbly gate, to the clearing where Johanna had long ago built her home.
What had always seemed a refuge to Anya now seemed pitiful.
A simple wooden cottage with a useless door and a crumbling roof, a sagging well and a processing shed that smelled faintly of blood no matter how you scoured it, a barren yard of shabby grass and chicken shit.
She hadn’t really noticed she’d neglected her garden this year, but now realized it grew more scrub than anything edible.
The sky was sodden. As they reached the door, fat globs of rain started to fall.
A kerosene lamp hung by the door, and she lit it, illuminating the stark space.
It was larger than Sylas’s apartment, though not by much, and all her furniture, which had been old as long as she could remember it – except for her bed, which Johanna had built her brand new twenty years ago – now seemed decrepit.
Her walls, always bare, now seemed skeletal.
“I must apologize,” she said tightly as he set his things on the dusty floor. She removed her weapons and set them with a thump on the table. “I know this is nothing to the fine manors and hotels of the city.”
“A jar of wildflowers would do wonders,” he said, unphased. He considered her small kitchen. “Some curtains. A painting or two.”
Her eyes swiveled, acerbically, to the metal pot collecting rainwater from the hole over her stove. “Yes, well, not all of us have coin to spend on pretty nonsense.”
“I’d rather spend my coin on nothing else.”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” she muttered.
“Yes,” he replied, not with the carefully managed detachment she’d noted before, but with a simple, raw vehemence. “Money should be spent on beautiful things, and beautiful things alone. Necessities should cost nothing at all but the labor it takes to make them or grow them.”
“Or hunt them.” She went to the trunk at the foot of her bed, pushing a pile of unsold rabbit skins onto the floor. At the sight, he pursed his lips.
Testily, she plunged her hands into the trunk. “Why shouldn’t everything be free, then? Beautiful things most of all?”
“Because beauty, more than anything else in this world, is hoarded like a dragon’s gold.”
She scoffed, pushing aside her spare sleeping shirt. “Gold is hoarded like gold.”
“Because it is the price of beauty. Of softness, pleasure. Delight. Knowledge.”
Her back to him, Anya paused her digging, listening. She had the impression he was voicing something he’d never been able, or allowed, to voice. That he voiced it now because her opinion of it couldn’t matter.
He went on. “The stingiest miser might spare a penny for a beggar on high holidays, or in fear for his own soul. Even the cruelest despot will open a workhouse and feed him watery soup for his labor. But no one would dare say the beggar deserved a soft bed, deserved a nightly feast fit for a king, not for his labor or for his past suffering, but simply because he was born. And the man who believes that is called a fool at best, a danger at worst. Beauty has the steepest price of all.”
She resumed sifting, keeping her eyes in the trunk. “That was a rousing speech. Do you and your friends give such overtures over champagne at the club?”
He folded his arms over his chest. “Not exactly.”
“You’re right. Beauty does have a steep price.” She lifted a mink skull from the trunk. She brandished it at him, clacking its sharp teeth. “This chap was beautiful, once.”
“Charming.” He looked as if he had been insulted. She supposed he had.
Her throat was tight as she turned back to her trunk.
“The pelt I skinned from this beast, and a dozen like it, fetched me enough money for a new rooster after ours was torn to shreds by dogs, and made a charming coat for some charming woman who pays her servants late and a pittance at that, with beatings and insults to make up the difference. That’s what softness – what beauty – is worth. ”
Heart thrumming, she put the skull back into the trunk and continued digging.
Her fingers drifted over a pile of lilac cloth.
A silk dress. The last remnant of her past life; a traveling dress, impractical and ridiculously expensive.
The one she’d been wearing on her last ride into the countryside.
It was odd; she felt no relation to it any longer. A stranger’s dress. A doll’s dress.
The wizard’s voice broke through her reverie. “That isn’t what I meant.”
“What do you care if I know what you meant?” she snapped.
For several long moments, the only sounds were of the rain pounding on the roof, the clang of drops into the metal pot she’d set under the poorly patched hole. The gentle shifting of the contents of the trunk. She thought the matter settled, and fine that it was.
But then he said, in a softer voice, “There’s more to life than base survival. There must be. I must believe it.”
His profile was to her, his attention fixed on the kitchen window, on the raindrops against the glass.
The fine instrument of his expression was out of tune.
She felt he had forgotten she was there; felt she was intruding on something private.
He was revealing a hidden facet of himself. She did not want to see.
“Maybe for a certain set,” she said coolly.
As he faced her, the strings strummed back into perfect tune. “I’m not sure I catch your meaning.”
“I know I appear a simple country rustic to you, but despite what you may think, I’m not a complete idiot. I know it takes an absurd amount of money for an education like yours. I saw your friends.”
And back out again. “I do not think – honestly.” He threw his hands in the air. “Tell me then, how did a cultured young woman such as yourself come to acquire such a charming abode?”
“Parents were killed on the road.” She found what she was looking for and slammed the trunk shut. “I was eight. Ran into the forest. A woman found me, a hunter. Took me in as her own. Johanna. She died, too. Three years ago.”
She stood and faced him. For a moment, a silent moment, they only stared at each other. Heart thrumming harder than ever, she worried she may have revealed something herself, something she hadn’t meant to, though she couldn’t say what.
He broke the silence. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“Well.” She brushed a hair behind her ear. “Others have been through worse.” She carried her treasure to the table: Johanna’s handmade map of the Lichtenwald, crafted on thin calfskin and drawn in blackberry ink.
She folded the map open. It felt strangely tacky to her fingertips; she used her sleeve to brush it free of dust, but didn’t see any. As she spread it on the table, she wondered if she had sap on her hands from the lumber wagon. She rubbed her fingers together.
“Stunning.” She looked up; the wizard’s owl eyes had spotted Goose. He admired the bird’s emerald neck and ruby breast. “Such rich jewel tones. Did you kill it yourself?”
Hot embarrassment colored her cheeks. He mocked her.
Pheasant was not a difficult sport; not even the ones in Augur Meadow, where she’d killed Goose.
Not even for an eleven-year-old girl who’d just learned how to handle a shotgun without dislocating her shoulder.
His wealthy friends bagged them by the dozen on their estates every spring; he may have too for all she knew, though he didn’t seem the type.
But his owl’s eyes, trained on her, were full of genuine interest.
She considered the stuffed bird with new eyes. Regal, slim. Jewel toned. Goose was quite beautiful.
“My first kill,” she provided warily. “Johanna taught me everything she knew, then sent me off on my own. She wasn’t one for vanity, but she had him stuffed for me.
” Remembering her first hunt, alone, in the depths of the Lichtenwald, her pulse quickened.
She could feel the sun’s radiant heat; smell the sun-drying grasses.
“Five pounds, he was. Big, even for a cock. They’re not hard to shoot if you’ve the eye for it, but they’re fast and they remember.
If you miss, they’ll take off and aren’t like to come back to the same spot in a hurry.
They fly, but they can run fast, too. Swim, dive.
I’ve even seen one slip into a rabbit’s burrow. ”
Goose had slipped her net and made for the stream nearby. He was a clever bird. Not clever enough.