53. Then Wedding
THEN: WEDDING
Idid as my father instructed and slipped into the dark, running down the streets until I reached the mill.
I took the horse, saddled it, and raced for the farm.
My body took over as my mind was gone. I was wooden, my guiding of the horse based on memory and familiarity without conscious decision.
All I could see were Magda’s eyes, the lower eyelids lifted in a squint, her piercing stare watching me struggle with the keep guards and then that dense wall of flame.
I barred the door of the farmhouse with one of her smaller worktables and tried to bandage my hand.
I sat all night in her rocking chair with my hunting knife in my lap.
I was certain the keep guard would come for me, but they never did.
Another day and night passed in which I did not eat or sleep.
I only rocked and wept, listening to a blustery wind bat against the house.
My sister, on another of my father’s horses, visited me on the second day to tell me that in the terror, the origin of the fire had been forgotten.
Starling was happily claiming it had been sent by the spirit of Rodwin to purify Sheridan from pagan filth.
She said Torm Sheridan had visited the mill and said he would keep the arrangement of a supplement to her wages to pay for my foraging services.
“He was trying to tell me a message without telling me. I think he does not mean to hunt you down,” she finished.
“I think people just remember the shock of that fire. No one seems to remember you at the edge of it. They pumped all the wells all night to douse it. It did not spread, but it did not die down until morning. Robbie, what happened?”
I numbly shook my head. I did not know, nor did I care. My Magda was gone. Perhaps the only person who loved me wholly and without condition.
“Don’t you grieve?” I asked my sister. “Where are your tears?”
She startled and then glared at me. “Of course I grieve.”
“You do not seem to be in deep mourning the way I am.”
Rowena cocked her head at me. “Not every soul shows sorrow.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” she shot back, mouth turned down, “I keep everything hidden inside me. Everything. Things you could never understand.”
I held up my hands. “But how can you not weep for the woman who cared for us, taught us, equipped us with more faith and guidance than our bloody church ever did—”
“It is always this with you,” Rowena cried, standing up from her seat at the worktable.
“It is always rebellion and never trying to think your way through a thing. You charge headlong into your rage, Robbie. It will get you killed too!” And it was saying this that caused her tears to finally spill forth.
My father visited the following day. He informed me that Magda had, winters prior, gone to the magistrate and put the farm in my name, to be given to me when I reached my majority.
“No one wants this property anyway,” he had said, looking around her little house and farm as if there were demons from Rodwin’s hell dancing everywhere.
“You’re the last woman to own property in Sheridan,” he went on.
“Father Starling was very much against the farm going to you, but Torm said this is land stained by Tintar, and I agree. Don’t push your luck, daughter. ”
Just a little meeker, I heard my mother’s voice.
I spent the remaining half a moon before my sister’s marriage weeping alone in Nyossa, foraging only what took little effort, berries and ferns.
I did not dig for roots. I did not climb trees for wild fruit.
I spent one sad day harvesting mother’s moss and grinding it into paste.
That night I walked through the town, both relieved and terrified to see the windflower wreaths, many of them fresh.
These women, who had stood by and watched Magda burn, expected me to wear that same mantle and deliver them a pagan magic.
“Very well,” I whispered into the dark, standing in the town square under a night sky with stars that seemed to hang so low.
I turned around and saw a handful of doors with windflowers.
I saw, looking down one street, a garland swaying on the night breeze, the round, waxy petal of an anemone falling from the string and spiraling to the street.
“I will let you condemn me, but I will—as she did—bring to you what you need.”
I wished I could have taken her bones to Nyossa. But my mother said the fire burned so hot, there was nothing but piles of ash after the flames had eaten everything.
“The wind blew it all away,” my mother explained. Did you have such strong winds the next day? Down by the farm?”
Brother Air, I thought and almost laughed to myself. Was I going mad? Perhaps I was. I found I did not care. I would do my duty as entrusted to me by Magda. I would become the steward of Sheridan’s women as she once had. My heart did not have to be in one piece for me to do that.
On the day of Thane and Rowena’s wedding, it was a tenth day.
Starling married them after his sermon in the church.
Had it been Bertram marrying my sister, the ceremony would have perhaps taken place inside the keep’s private chapel, but Thane was not Torm’s legitimate son.
Still, the day was celebrated with no expense spared, the wine and ale flowing in The Pale Horse from noon to midnight, Torm doting on his handsome younger son that had the town’s like and approval.
This legitimized Rowena’s status as the practicing midwife of Sheridan and provided a distraction from her having been trained by the heathen forest woman burned at the stake for her crimes.
I spent the day with a thick throat, pretending any tears that shone from my eyes were of happiness for a most beloved sister. At that time, I was without companions, feeling that I had lost my first love and my sister to each other.
My parents were overjoyed, my father bursting with pride at having a daughter married to a lord’s son.
The entire town gathered in and around The Pale Horse, spilling out into the town square. Father Starling was not pleased with the drinking and the subsequent fiddling and dancing that broke out, but he must have allowed for this indulgence as the groom was of noble blood.
I reluctantly danced with Wynne, who looked at me knowingly.
“I know it is a hard day for you,” he said without his regular sarcasm.
His sympathies took me aback. It was the first and last time I ever heard him speak with anything other than humor or derision.
I busied myself with helping Gertie and her husband behind the bar at one point, claiming with false cheer that I could not let the ale stop flowing on my twin’s wedding day.
Then I aided the keep staff who provided food for the merrymakers.
When the sun began to set, the revelry was still at a fever pitch, the town of Sheridan rarely seeing such abandon.
I felt it was then alright to make my excuses and leave.
I had endured enough.
“Daughter,” my father cried to me as I set out for the street that led to the mill. “Hold on, Roberta. I would speak with you.”
I halted and cringed, not turning around.
“Are you tired?” he asked, coming to stand next to me.
“Yes,” I replied, employing the demure manner I now used with everyone, my careful gratitude at not having been burned evident. “Did you have need of me? Should I return to help with the wedding?”
“No,” he answered, shaking his head, and there was an uncharacteristic softness in him. “No, I will walk you back to the mill. Your mother said you would not return to your little farm tonight. She made up a bed for you.”
I nodded, unsure of this version of my father that was much like how he had been with me as a little girl, before I got ungodly ideas in my head.
We walked back, him carrying on a commentary about the day, satisfaction in his speech, openly delighted with his daughter’s match.
Though he had put his god and his church before me so many times before, he was still my father, and I felt an uncertain contentedness in this easy exchange, something I so rarely had with him.
“Before you are to bed,” he said as we drew near our house, his hand on my elbow, “I would have you visit the stable with me.”
I was too tired to question this and went along with him.
A small stables was attached to our mill house, and it kept his two horses and extra stalls for his workers’ mounts. Standing, not in a stall but in the aisle, was a young, large, nearly all-white dam with richly made tack and a flat saddle on her.
“A wedding guest’s?” I asked, assuming he remembered our love of animals as little girls or some such thing. He was in a good mood today. Perhaps this was a paltry peace offering on his part, showing me this expensive creature.
“Yes,” he said, a small smile on his lips. “And no. But you are a wedding guest, so, yes.”
I could only stare.
“She is yours,” he went on, warming to the subject. “Bought her on auction in Carver last week from a filthy Tintarian. He just delivered her an hour ago. She is young. And she has a spiteful nature. She had to be broken in twice over. Hence, why I could afford her.”
“Is she—Is she Sibbereen?” I finally was able to speak.
My father huffed. “Only Tintar can buy stock from Sibbereen. They say Vyggia and Ruskar can too, I don’t know.
No, girl, she is half Sibbereen. That is why she is nice and big, why her coat has such sheen.
Don’t know what her dam was, but the sire was an island horse.
But hear me. She was affordable because of her mixed lineage.
And because she had to be so broken. She can be skittish and stubborn. You’ll have your work cut out.”
She was perhaps the most lovely animal I had ever seen.
Her coat was white but speckled closely with small brown spots.
At a distance her coat would have looked all one color, with a mane and tail the shade of bleached bones.
The white went all the way down to her hooves, none of her stockings a different color.
She had a gray nose and some gray around her eyes.
Her mane was so thick it grew from both sides of her neck.
She was perfect, save for a tuft of hair between her ears that grew straight up.
“Unfortunately, she was broken in Tintar,” my father was saying. “So she only responds to some Tintarian name. You cannot rename her something more appropriate.”
“What is it?” I asked, extending a hand to her nose.
“Zara,” he said as if it was a curse.
I was at a loss. We had not been together as parent and child for some time.
We had not spoken without distrust or dislike between us in winters.
And yet here—on my sister’s wedding day—was this luxurious present, and a useful one too.
I had hoped to save for an old horse no one wanted someday, as my father’s old mare was on her last legs, but this one was perhaps worth the entirety of Magda’s property.
“I cannot thank you enough,” I said past the lump in my throat.
“Well, it’s your dowry that paid for her,” he answered.
I turned to him.
“I don’t mean to be cruel,” he continued. “But I doubt any man is going to seek your hand, Roberta. Not with what you have chosen. You replaced the old hag. That is all a boy of Sheridan will see.”
When I searched his face, I saw that truly, he did not mean cruelty in this moment. He was likely right. Rowena had managed to escape the shadow cast by Magda. I now lived in it and shamelessly so.
“Maybe one day,” my father offered. “But it’ll be a widower who cannot be choosy, or a foreigner. Your reputation is too sullied. Again, I do not mean any unkindness.”
“I understand,” I assented. “I do.”
“Leave Dusty here. She can die in peace. And she is soon to it, believe me. I cannot have you traipsing to and from your little farm. It’s just too far to not cause me and your mother concern.”
I put my forehead to the horse’s cheek so as to disguise my emotion. His casual mention of concern for me was more affection than he had shown in winters. I was ashamed at how greedily I wanted to lap it up, like a starving man eating a meal.
“Be safe, girl. Go about your business looking over your shoulder. You’re a woman on your own, and that is a perilous thing to be.”
I made a hmm noise, my head still bent to the animal.
He went on to explain that her fine tack and the long flat saddle that could accommodate two riders, a Tintarian make, had been included in her price.
He further warned against her fiery nature, but I was barely listening.
I was overwhelmed both by her beauty and expense and by this sudden kindness from him.
It was the final time we spoke without any enmity before his death.