35. Then Thane
THEN: THANE
Torm Sheridan had married a noblewoman from Perpatane.
It was an arranged marriage, and her people had sent her—a younger sibling in her family—to wed the far-off lord of a settlement in the low country that bordered Nyossa.
She must have been far down the line in her family with several daughters ahead of her.
For though he was a lord, it was not a position of much standing to a Perpatanian lady.
The Lady Sheridan was as icy as the cold western north from whence she came.
She had a son they named Bertram. She bemoaned only having a small retinue of servants from her home country.
Perhaps she should not have complained so much, for this drew her husband’s attention to one of those servants and he got a son on her several winters later.
The poor lady-in-waiting did not last much longer than the birth and named the boy Thane before her passing.
The name meant “king,” and it was a cruel name as he was a bastard and could not inherit any of his father’s holdings.
But Torm seemed to love both boys the same.
The Lady Sheridan, a good follower of Rodwin, made the gracious gesture of adopting the boy as her own, but that was her outward behavior. Behind closed doors she treated the boy as she had treated his mother, like a servant.
Thane was better looking and kinder than his brother. Because he would not be the next Sheridan lord, he was allowed a freer roam than Bertram. When he was thirteen, he encountered my sister and me playing at the edge of the Nyossa forest.
Our dresses were wet, sticking to us both from summer sweat and the river that flowed from Nyossa into our town.
We had ridden one of our father’s horses out of town, past Magda the midwife’s run-down little farmhouse, and tied the dam to a tree.
After picking our way past the dense twist of trees covered in vines, we had dipped in the river that glowed from the phosphorescent moss on the riverbed rocks.
“What do you do here?” came a boy’s voice.
We both whirled from where we stood next to the horse.
Thane sat on a black stallion that was worth three times the swaybacked mare we rode. He was tall for a boy our age, his face fine featured, eyes and hair dark, shoulders already broadening though the rest of him was lean.
“What do you do here?” I replied, willing away the red in my face. This boy had witnessed me boxed more than once in the last few winters. I was not ashamed, but I knew I was supposed to be, and I did not know how to explain that to either myself or anyone else.
The boy dismounted and walked towards us, the stallion’s reins in his hand. “My mother has complained I am underfoot. So I have left the castle for the day. I hope she has forgotten her frustrations when I return for dinner.”
It was this confession that made me relax my defenses. Everyone in town knew he was not really the Lady Sheridan’s son.
“Have you ever gone inside Nyossa?” Rowena asked, her manner more inviting than my own.
“No,” answered the boy, shaking his head and stepping even closer. His eyes flitted over both of us, and I found myself irked when he went from looking at me to Rowena.
We looked alike and yet were different. Her hair had been a brighter color as a babe and had deepened into a gold with a red hue as she grew.
Her eyes were larger and brighter, a doe brown.
She smiled easily and was considered the beauty of us two.
I had similar features, but my eyes were a muddy hazel color, not deep enough to be brown nor vibrant enough to be green.
My hair was a sort of chestnut color but was much less silken.
And at our age, my body was taking on more weight, thickening everywhere, especially my hips and rear.
“They say it is a heathen place,” Thane went on. “That it is where one of the pagan Tintarian goddesses lives. Is that so?” He now stood an arm’s length from us.
I found myself taken aback by his beauty. I had never wanted anything before aside from books, freedom, and solitude. But nearing thirteen, though I did not understand it, I wanted him. I wanted to touch that face.
I thought of Una’s journal, her passage about her husband’s kisses melting her like thin metal over fire. They had disliked their arranged marriage in the beginning, but still somehow they had fallen in love.
“No,” Rowena laughed. “It is not heathen! Mother Earth doesn’t reside here, silly. That is just what Tintarians teach their children.”
Whether it was her natural charm or his being a kindhearted boy, he was not upset by her teasing. “Ah,” he said, smiling. “It is safe then.”
It was my first experience with jealousy. I burned with it.
“It is and it is not,” I chimed in. “If you know nothing of the Farthest Four, you may not know how to show the proper respect. So you had best be careful.”
Thane’s head turned to me. “Maybe you had better show me? I have always wanted to see Nyossa. But I have been warned not to enter it.”
“We can show you,” my twin offered.
“We were just leaving,” I proclaimed.
“Meet me here tomorrow,” he replied. “Please?” he tacked on as if realizing he, though a bastard, sounded like a lord’s son—commanding, entitled.
Rowena promised we would.
After he mounted his horse and rode away, I turned to Rowena. “We cannot play with a lord’s son. We certainly cannot skinny-dip with him.”
She waved a hand at me. “Oh I think you would love to dip in the Nyossa rivers with him. You fancy him.”
I glared at her. “What does that mean?”
“I know you,” she said more seriously. “You like the look of him. You always have.”
“Always have?”
“He always casts such sad looks at you when you are boxed, and you refuse to look at him. You have always looked anywhere but at him in church.”
We stared at each other and then I said, “Go on.”
Rowena leaned into me. “He seems kind. I think you notice that, and I think you notice his face.”
I resented her easy understanding of me and replied, “And do you notice his face?”
“Not in the way you do.”
The next day, Thane returned with three companions astride three fine mounts, all finer than our old dam.
Two were boys, one a fair-haired boy of Thane’s age, also handsome, though he had a sardonic look about him.
He was introduced as Wynne, though we knew him as the son of the overseer, the man who managed the lord’s land and sharecroppers for him.
The other was a hefty boy with round features.
He told us his name was Kent, but we also already knew him, the magistrate’s boy.
The fourth addition was a girl named Ilsit, a winter or two older than the rest of us with a face that could have been pretty if she had not been so condescending.
Her forehead was a tad too large and her mouth too wide, but those things would not have been as noticeable had she not frowned down at us from her horse.
We had no real knowledge of her yet because her father was the keep’s steward and we had only spied her on tenth-day services. She lived with Thane in the keep.
“We all want to see the forest,” Thane said after introductions were made and all were dismounted.
“I’m not taking my dress off in front of them,” I muttered.
“Hush, Robbie,” my sister said, smiling up at Ilsit. Louder she announced, “The river runs not a quarter hour’s walk inside the trees!”
“I did not realize that mad old woman lived so close to the pagan land,” Ilsit said, dismounting and shaking out her well-made skirts.
“Do you mean Magda Geist?” I asked.
The girl scowled at me. “Yes, the old hag. Soon Sheridan will not need her crude services anymore. My father says Thane’s father has been sent word from the High Conclave.
Perpatane worries that we have no physician.
They are sending a Perpatanian man who trained at Eccleston.
He will be paid for by Perpatane. A gift to Sheridan. ”
I had a thought that Magda’s little farm would surely suffer with no coin coming in.
As she had likely saved my mother’s life delivering me and Rowena, a swell of vague loyalty rose in my breast. I said, “And yet she was likely at the bedside of all of our births. A shame she should be displaced by a godsdamn foreigner.”
Thane flinched, and I recalled his mother had died from giving birth to him.
I cursed inwardly. Already I was wrong-footed with the lord’s son. I noticed Wynne and Kent glance at me with admiration for my language.
“I see why they box you so often,” Ilsit commented, as if she was bored.
“My father says one of you miller girls is a model daughter,” said Wynne, eyes on me. “And the other is an errant spark from a smithy’s hammer, ready to singe whatever or wherever she falls.”
“You must come see the glowing moss,” Rowena said, ever the peacemaker. She reached for a surprised Ilsit’s hand, and the two of them led the rest of us into the trees.
After I had read The Life of Una front to back ten or more times, I had decided, in my heart, that I would rather spend an eternity serving demons than a lifetime worshipping Rodwin and admitting that I was a lesser being simply for having been born a girl.
I loved Nyossa. Deep down, I felt Mother Earth did reside there, and I said my prayers to her trees and her lizards and foxes.
I knelt at the berry bushes and kissed the petals of flowers and asked for her to bless me and give me something to live for other than marriage to a Sheridan boy.
For I did like the idea of romance, especially after reading of Una’s love of Teller, her Helmsman prince, but not with a man who thought it was his life’s mission to correct and condemn me.
As we entered the forest, I felt a vulnerability.
I had discovered Nyossa with my twin, who, while scared of how the Tintarian gods could influence us, did not see them as evil and was particularly fascinated by Una’s writings of Sister Sea.
When I had voiced my feelings of devotion to Mother Earth, she grew concerned for me but never cast any judgment.
I should not have worried. The magic and gleam of Nyossa enchanted Thane and his companions, even the churlish Ilsit.
The four of them marveled at the moss and the blue moths, lit with a similar sheen, that whipped past our ears.
The hiss of the lizards, the buzz of the bees, the sweet smell of the vines, and the intensely entangled trees with the thin paths between them, which were only traversable on foot, distracted them from any qualms or judgment.
When we reached the river, Wynne said, “Well, I was told you could swim in this. But at our age, we’re not supposed to be naked with girls.”
Rowena blushed, and Ilsit rolled her eyes.
“I am not afraid if you are not afraid,” I challenged the boy.
He and Kent looked at me again in admiration.
Thane, a look of concern on his face, said, “The boys can keep their breeks on and the girls their shifts. That seems alright.”
Kent agreed that was acceptable.
Wynne, his eyes on me still, said, “Thane, you are accursed by a need to be a gentleman. Perhaps we should let the girls have a say.”
For a moment, no one said anything.
Then I began to undo the laces of my dress. My fingers shook, and I could not understand what I did. I had the curvier figure of us three girls, the most to expose. Though I felt all five pairs of eyes on me, I went on.
“Turn around,” Thane burst out to the other boys and did so himself.
I leapt into the water, which was a cool relief from the day.
I opened my eyes as I sank to the bottom.
We were at a small tributary creek, which was deep in places but had a weaker flow.
The current was lazier and better to swim in.
I took in the world around me, the blue and green moss like an ornate rug of stars, without pattern, strewn over the dark brown rocks of the riverbed.
Fat pink, silver, and white fish zinged around me.
Small shelled things that looked like giant ants crawled on the rocks next to where I squatted, whilst I tried to stay under as long as I could.
An eel slid past me, like a strip of ribbon on a breeze.
I shot up to the surface when my lungs began to burn. When I opened my eyes, the rest of them had entered the water.
“Feels fantastic,” called Wynne, on his back, eyes cast up to the canopy of kissing leaves and birds above. “Do you ever see wildcats here?”
“No,” Rowena assured him. “No bears or wolves come this close to the border either. Nothing scarier than a fox.”
I had opened my mouth to say that yes, we had seen wildcats, when I realized that those slinky bodies, their coiled muscles propelling them up and down trees with ease, had never been noticed by her.
They were larger than wolves but silent and solitary predators, sleeping in branches with one eye open, looking for the unwitting deer, coney, and fox below.
We must not have interested them, for they never did anything but blink their golden-green eyes at us.
As I closed my mouth, I caught Thane’s eyes on me and realized he treaded water next to me. But he did not see me see him at first, for his eyes were on my closing mouth.
When our gazes met, we both looked away quickly.
Then he whispered, “So there are wildcats here?”
Being this close to him was pure elation and also agonizing. He was so painfully perfect, the river water beading on his face, his eyelashes darker and thicker and forming into points around his eyes. His thick, brown curls were stuck to his head in arcs and swirls.
“Don’t tell my sister,” I answered. “I thought she had seen them too.”
He nodded. “I won’t say a word.”
That night, as I lay in bed next to my sleeping twin, our bodies exhausted by swimming and talking and laughing for hours, our minds exhilarated with our newfound friends, as I parsed out what my heart was doing inside my chest, I concluded I must be in love.