9. Now List
NOW: LIST
Tessa agreed to visit the farmhouse the next day and help me explain what Perpatane would offer to Sheridan.
I myself did not know how to break it to Ilsit and Jade.
Jade had not left the forest or my farm except to visit the tinkers’ tents since she was eleven winters old, and she was nearing forty.
Ilsit had only just been declared dead by her husband, and being seen in town was inadvisable.
The four of us adults sat at my worktable while Fox collected the tin dishes from our lunch and piled them in a bucket for washing.
“They can’t make you sign the list,” Tessa was saying.
“I’m not signing any godsdamned list that Gerard is behind,” Ilsit declared, her voice going over Tessa’s.
I shushed Ilsit. “Let her finish! Go on, Tessa.”
Ilsit blew her pipe’s smoke in my face. A day or two after she had moved in, she had fished Magda’s old bone pipe out of a tin cup and started using it as her own.
“They wouldn’t let you or Jade sign it anyway,” sighed Tessa.
“Why in hell not?”
“Because we are listed among the dead,” Jade said.
Tessa nodded. “But you would have to come with us. You two can’t stay here alone.
And another thing to think on—and I hate to say it—but we’ve no man.
I would prefer if we had the protection of more than Thane.
We’ll barely see him along the journey. He’ll be busy.
It will be hard on the five of us, even if we pack and prepare well. ”
Ilsit stood from her chair. “You talk as if you plan to sign!”
“Sit down,” I ordered and snapped my fingers at her.
“Am I a hound?” Ilsit shot at me. To Tessa she said, “I cannot believe you even think of this. After what they’ve done to all of us.”
“Tintar will march again,” Tessa said. “We are on the Nyossa border. We would be crushed by them. In hours. And Robbie’s farm first.”
“They cannot march an army on those skinny paths!” Ilsit was triumphant in her rejoinder, jabbing her pipe at Tessa.
“And we’re a far cry from the main road up north that cuts through half of the forest. And still too far from the south road that cuts through the bottom of the forest before the marshlands. ”
“You are correct.” Tessa was patient, almost amused. “But we are still a town funded by the very country that has declared war on Tintar. I don’t know that we should chance it.”
“Perhaps,” Jade chimed in. “But also perhaps we let them leave, the priest, the lord and his guard. Our families.”
There was a brief pause during which we all looked away from each other as Jade stared into the fire. Kent, the magistrate, was her brother.
“And then we carry on without their . . . bothering us so much,” she finished. “I mean it is a dangerous plan, but maybe we could weather this war hidden on the farm?”
“That,” Ilsit said, pointing her smoking pipe at Jade. “I like that.”
Me too, signed Fox, setting the bucket down and joining us to sit at the table. I don’t want to leave.
Daisy leapt into her lap from the floor.
“You forget,” I said gently. “Sheridan won’t be abandoned. It will be a place for Perpatane to marshal their troops. They may even occupy the farm.”
Daisy burrowed into Fox’s lap, then let out a whimper muffled by her snout buried into the crook of Fox’s elbow.
“That’s a vote for staying,” Ilsit said, swinging her pipe at the fox.
Tessa shook her head. “I feel the same. I don’t want to go to Perpatane, but we could go to Eccleston. Thane says they have been given hefty sums of coin to rebuild. And not from Perpatane. From their own mining families.”
“That’s interesting,” I said.
“Yes. They say they are grateful for Perpatane’s protection, but there is a rumor going around that the Council of Ten—all members of which are still nowhere to be found, mind you—required for trade agreements to be broken because Perpatane paid them in gold to do so, so as to invite a war with Tintar.
And the mining families, which are all the wealthiest powers in Eccleston, really and truly, are mad their government messed with their affairs. ”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s a country run by citizens’ vote or by a king,” Ilsit proclaimed. “All leaders are corrupt.”
“And King Pollux wants the whole of this world,” Tessa tacked on.
“So they seek to return to their state of a citizen-run government, free of monarchal influence, by funding their own reconstruction,” I mused.
“Yes!” Tessa said. “Perpatane still tries to buy them, but they are still them. Eccleston’s gods are industry and science. That would be a good place to retreat to. Even though it has been sacked, they will rebuild. And I know people there. I could find us work and lodging.”
I frowned. I heard the wisdom in her words, but I needed the wilderness near me.
Descriptions of the size and grandness of that city-state had always impressed me—but to consider it as a place to live, to make a life?
I thought on every word I had ever heard about the dry, scrubby landscapes of the mining territories that surrounded the city.
That was not a wilderness to me but a wasteland, with treasures beneath the ground rather than above it.
Ilsit was shaking her head. “It’s a nice idea, Tessa, but it is a gamble.”
“As is staying here!” Tessa shot back, and they were off on another not-quite-fight where they smiled at each other before dismantling each other’s points.
Jade turned to me and asked for my thoughts, but I could not answer her. I was watching Fox shift Daisy’s now slumbering body to one side to hold her with one arm so she could lift the other and sign to me.
Either scares me.
“I know,” I said to her.