72. Then Jade #2
“This is hard to speak on,” she continued, clearing her throat.
“I’ve only told this story to the occasional tinker and then your husband.
I cannot really go into town without upsetting folks.
I don’t go into Carver much because it is too far, but I do make the journey to visit the tinkers when they set up outside Carver. I am not used to telling this story.”
“Well, I need to hear it,” I snapped. “That’s my man you’ve been entertaining these past moons.”
“Let me say it quickly then,” she replied, gulping.
Part of me felt a strong conviction that I was being needlessly cruel, pressing her to explain something deeply personal. But the rest of me was in charge. I had no self-containment and only knew a hot rage.
Jade seemed to withdraw into herself and then continued.
“I was born Kevin. I never felt like that was my name. Or that I was like my brothers. I, as children often do, stated this as fact. The priest was called in. I was chastened. This happened several times. I asked to be called a girl’s name.
I don’t know if you remember my boxing? I was about ten at the time. ”
I shook my head.
She smiled a little. “Likely because you were so often boxed yourself. Hard to keep track of others when you are the most famous culprit.” She spoke as if I was some kind of heroine in a book.
Jade went on, saying, “I guess then you remember the summer plague. I had it very badly. Starling told my parents he would take me to the lord’s keep and they agreed, not wanting it to spread to my brothers.
I cannot remember what was said. I was in the throes of a fever.
I remember him carrying me out of the house and putting me in a wagon.
I was taken to the keep. The Lord Sheridan and some of his men spoke over me.
I cannot remember that part either. And I fell asleep.
But I woke up not in the keep. I was in Nyossa. ”
I gaped at her. “He brought you out here to die?”
“That has always been my theory, yes.”
A sickening sensation roiled in my gut, a fury on behalf of the small child being left to the wilds of Nyossa—which, though a sacred and bountiful place, was full of predators.
“A wolf or bear could have eaten you. A wildcat would have been so fast you may not have wakened. Gods, I hate that man with a passion.” Any umbrage I had at present was put to the side.
“That is murder. You know that? You understand that? Even though you lived? They murdered you.”
“They knew they could never change me,” she responded. “So they got rid of me. If it weren’t for both goddesses of Tintar, I would be dead.”
The arithmetic of it shocked me. “You’ve been in the forest all this time? That has to be . . . fourteen? Fifteen winters?”
Jade Atwood’s brow creased. “I think? I cannot remember my true age. I think I was eleven when it all happened.”
“What do you mean the goddesses of Tintar?”
“Your husband says you practice. That you worship earth and fire?”
I bristled at the idea of them speaking about me, but I was cognizant enough to note her use of ‘your husband’ and not his name, like she was trying to show me she respected my being Avery’s wife. I dipped my chin curtly.
“Well, I did not come to them with any understanding. I never knew anything of Tintar’s religion until the tinkers explained it to me.
But I experienced it as a little girl. The first few days were a haze.
I was sick. But I found a river and had enough strength to wash myself, which I needed.
I fell asleep next to it and when I woke—Do you know what mussels are? ”
I shook my head.
“Hold on,” she said, a new energy to her, as if these mussels were exciting things. She returned with something I did recognize. It looked like one of the clams from Magda’s book of the ocean. She offered it to me and, dumbstruck, I took it.
“That is a clam,” I said.
“Close. It’s the freshwater kind. They cling to the riverbeds and the tree roots. Did you ever swim when you explored Nyossa with my brother?”
“That was nearly all we did back then. In summer, at least. I suppose I saw them but never understood them.”
“You can eat what’s inside. When I woke, there was a stack of them in my face. Like someone had piled them there. I don’t know how I knew to pry one open, but I did. I kept cutting my hands on them until I found a rock that worked better to wedge them open.”
“You think the gods of Tintar fed you with mussels?” There was no disbelief in my question. I felt my heart skip a beat at the idea of another sign, when I had seen so few, of their divinity—and not just another sign, but one seen by another.
“I know it to be true. Both goddesses. Particularly Sister Sea. These rivers and pools have kept me fed for winters. Sometimes I would wake with mushrooms shooting up all around me, when I know I did not lie down in mushrooms the night before.”
I stared at her, sympathy filling me for this poor woman, abandoned and left to die, braving a wilderness such as Nyossa all while a child.
“You are a miracle,” I said. “That is—That sounds like something from The Life of Una.”
“Oh I have always wanted to read that,” she exclaimed. “I learned to read enough as a child, and so sometimes the tinkers have books to trade. Hold on!” She retreated into the shed, leaving me holding the mussel, which was rather slimy and likely had been retrieved from the river that very day.
I had a thought that I may have found her familiar not just from her resemblance to her brother but from her having been so friendly with the tinkers. I must have seen her face across a bonfire at the tinker’s campgrounds. All this time, she had been so close to me.
Jade returned with a thin volume of poetry she offered with one hand, pulling the mussel from my grasp with the other. “Avery says you have lots of books. I would love to borrow one of yours if you want to borrow this one.”
“Madam,” I began stiffly, suddenly overcome with too much feeling in me. I was enchanted by her easy offer of goodwill, but I also wanted more answers. “You still have yet to explain your relationship to my husband.”
Confused, as if she had already explained enough, she repeated much of what Avery had said, that the butcher, having an inkling that she was the declared-dead child of the Aldreds’, would not sell to her.
And as the tinkers did not come by as often as they used to, she needed a more regular place to trade for things she needed.
Avery had seen her at the butcher’s. He had stepped in and said he would buy the fish from her.
Then he had turned around and sold it to the butcher, who, knowing fish was a delicacy for most, told them both to leave but gave my husband the coin.
“As long as he doesn’t have to deal with me, he will buy from Avery,” Jade finished. “And it’s been such a help, I tell you. I need so many things.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me who you were?”
She sighed. “I begged him not to. I heard about the midwife, about her burning. I have always worried that if they took a mind to it, they might burn me too if I was discovered. So I have sneaked as much as I could.” She paused and then said, “I think part of her knew. She used to call out and ask if someone was there when she foraged. I think she sensed me watching her. Sometimes she would leave food or blankets. This dress was once hers.” She ran a hand over the neckline of the old thing.
Magda had been sturdier built and more stooped than Jade, which explained why the dress pulled at the woman’s shoulders but billowed around what was clearly a thinner frame.
The mention of my mentor made my heart go completely soft. “That’s why she always told me to leave some for others, if I was harvesting pig-belly mushrooms or something edible like that.”
“Magda never had proof, but part of her understood,” Jade explained.
“So, you—” I cut myself off, overcome with shame at my behavior. I turned and saw Avery peering at us, clearly trying to see how our conversation was going. I cleared my throat. “So you are not carrying on a kind of dalliance with my husband?”
She shook her head.
A pitiful part of me pushed me onward. “You swear it? On the goddesses of Tintar, Mother, and Sister. Do you swear it?”
Jade looked frazzled and then started to speak, her first words rushing over my last. “I would much rather be your friend than your imagined rival. Avery does nothing but say ‘my wife this’ and ‘my wife that.’ I have wanted to meet you for—” She stopped to collect herself.
“I have wanted to meet you since the first boxing of yours that I could remember. I watched you walk right up to the box, and your head was held so proudly. You were not scared of them. I could not believe someone so small was so brave. You even held your arms out for the guards to better lift you.”
I eyed her, my rage having ebbed but my pride still sore.
I was mortified at my behavior, and I replied with that soreness.
“I don’t loan out The Life of Una,” I said tersely.
“You’ll have to come and read it in my house.
But you can borrow anything else. Well, not Magda’s journals. But I have other books.”
Her intake of breath was so full of wonder, it was as if I had offered her a whole gold mine. “Would it upset you if I started to cry?”
I shrugged. “I did. I suppose you are allowed a turn.”
“Can I please come back?” Avery called down the path. “I am terrified of what is happening. Robbie, have you come to your senses yet?”
I turned to Jade. “I want him to stew in it for a bit longer. Do you mind? We’ll let him worry he is in trouble still. I’ll just stand here and talk to you. You can tell me about which tinkers you know.”
With a grin, she asked, “Do you know Yates?”