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“SHE’S A CHARACTER ISN’T she?” Emme Grinningtommy said as the Onnery departed, her son in tow and him as docile and eager to please as a little cade-lamb on a leather thong.
Tabeth snorted. “If by character you mean a foul-tempered sow, than I suppose yes.”
Emme cocked her head. “So you came, and with him.” There was a world of meaning in those few words. All the brief snatches of written communication had not prepared Tabeth for this meeting. She felt like she was fourteen again, thin as a summer reed and wild with spark and loneliness. Self-consciously, she touched one hand to her head, to the tightly braided and coiled whips of hair, fingertips brushing the silk ribbons.
“You should have kept a headscarf on,” Emme said. “Silly chit, you look wrung out and done in. Sit down, and I’ll make you some bread and tea. Leorn! Go get us eggs from missus Slate. Tell her I’ll be over later, y’hear.”
The boy nodded and ducked out of the shadowed house, the door slamming behind him. The bang reverberated through the little house, waking the small child on the cot. Its cries were thin and reedy, nasal little screams. Weak.
“Eh, tea will have to wait.” Emme loosened the ties at her neck to let her blouse fall open. “Pass her here, would you?” She took a seat on the single wooden rocking chair.
She didn’t want to pick up the child, but Tabeth was not about to start arguing with the Grinningtommy. For now, the atmosphere was charged, but underneath it lay the promise of calm. Tabeth leaned over the bed and hauled the little girl up. She looked to be older than Tabeth had first thought—legs and arms long and skinny. Tabeth was around enough women at the towerhouse to know babies and their looks. This one was too long-limbed, even though she was tiny. She passed the struggling, whimpering burden to its mother, and listened to the cries turned to contented sucks.
“She’s...” Tabeth sat down on the battered couch, its familiar fabric of blue and purple gonia flowers now covered with a woollen knit blanket in a zigzag of colours.
“Ill, Leorn would have told you that.” The rocking chair provided a rhythmic counterpoint. “There was an epidemic, year she was born.”
Tabeth glanced about the house. She hadn’t wanted to say anything when she’d come in, and the place had been empty but for the two children, and it hadn’t been something Emme had mentioned in her infrequent missives. That she would have remembered. Her unspoken question filled the room.
“Took her too, you see.” Emme looked down at the little head against her chest. “One came into life, and the other left it. An exchange.”
Tabeth nodded and bit her lip, her throat tight. She’d...not loved...Emme’s mother. That kind of connection was beyond her, but she’d trusted her, and she’d liked spending time with the older woman, winding her wools and being measured up for jerseys and bits that were never finished. She’d even taught Tabeth to knit—terribly and slowly—but she still remembered being inordinately proud of the scarf she’d made, ill-shaped and with a few unwanted holes speckled throughout, but still a scarf, and useful. She still had it, back in the towerhouse, ready for winter. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d brought you—both of you—some small things from Pelimburg.” Useless now. Thimbles and knitting needles and nilly-wool dyed the colour of browned sugar. Small, light things she’d been able to fit at the bottom of her pack.
“Ah, it’s kind of you. I supposed we did manage to drum a little sense of family into that head of yours. Between us and Inna.” She smiled. The child had fallen asleep. “I can’t move yet—”
“No. Stay.” Tired as she was, Tabeth could see Emme was even more so. She’d always been powerful, and she still was, with an aura of force and personality around her that drew everyone into her orbit, but the loss of her mother and the illness of little Prue had taken their toll. The lines by her eyes were deep, matching the ones that curved up from her mouth, and there were dark shadows under skin, pooling in her eye sockets. This wasn’t the Grinningtommy Tabeth remembered from seven years ago. She’d changed, as much as Tabeth had. “I’ll put the kettle on.”
She still remembered where everything was kept, and she busied herself with boiling water and cutting sour bread. She poured a little bowlful of oil for them to dip their bread, and cut tomatoes from the pantry, a little bowl of salt, pickled onions.
“So you found him, then?”
Tabeth still had her back to Emme, and she stayed like that, knife rasping through the hard crust on the bread. “I did,” she said after she’d arranged the food on a tray. She faced Emme, and took the food before her like a shield to set it down on the low table next to the rocking chair. “You might have told me.”
“Told you what?” Emme took the tea Tabeth poured her and nodded. “Sit, girl, before you fall down. Not that I don’t appreciate you waiting on me hand and foot like I’m some Lammer lady in her bedchamber, but if you collapse, I won’t be in a state to pick you up.”
Tabeth sat obediently down, and dipped her bread in the oil, crushed a tomato over it, and sprinkled a tiny bit of salt. It was good, like eating a feast after a lifetime of starving. Her stomach growled in appreciation. “Told me that the Onnery had a sparked son, old enough to do what I needed.”
Emme shook her head and popped the sleeping Prue free from her nipple. When she’d set the child back in bed and righted herself, she went, not back to her chair, but to Tabeth, and knelt in front of her.
It was such an odd thing to do that Tabeth started in discomfort. She’d never seen the Grinningtommy go on her knees before anyone. She was like a gum tree, unbowed and unbowing; no storm could fell her. Emme plucked the tea bowl from Tabeth’s hand and took Tabeth’s hands in her own, the warmth of her palms coursing through them both, connecting them. There was no answering meeting of spark, of course, the Grinningtommy’s power lay elsewhere, but there was memory, and wisdom, and kindness.
“I didn’t tell you, Tabeth, because the boy isn’t suitable.”
Tabeth pulled her hands free. “You mean you didn’t tell me because you’re dead set against this path.”
“I am not.” Emme sighed and stood. “Not any more. Things are changing, and changing fast. I think that perhaps the Casabi has set you on this path. But.” She shook her head.
“But what? What’s wrong with him? If it’s about how weak his spark is, I can deal with that. A bit of spark is better than none.” And even weak, it affected hers, the two magics crying out for each other, wanting to build something bigger between them, she was certain of it.
“There are secrets in the Onnery family that even I am not privy too,” Emme said. “And Shay and I have never seen eye to eye on matters. Least of all, on the subject of her son. That boy has been compromised.”
“And what’s that to mean?”
Emme sighed. “To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure. I could tell you I had suspicions, but they are awful ones, and Shay, for all her faults, is a good woman, and she loves her children dearly—”
Tabeth couldn’t help the snort of disbelief. She took another piece of bread, oil dripping from it golden and salt-sweet. “Sorry, if you say so, I’ll try believe it.”
“She does, though.” Emme smiled. “Unfortunately, she’s also the type that is never able to see when her children are growing their own ways, and she will do her best to bend them into the shapes she wants. But children aren’t fruit trees, as she’s learning.” The Grinningtommy began to clear away the remnants of the lunch. “You can use the back pump to get yourself water, clean up, and I’ll find some clothes that fit you.”
“You’re not going to stop me?”
Emme paused at the sink, and looked gravely back, a frown pinched tight between her eyebrows. “Stop you? No.” She shook her head slightly. “You’re not a fruit tree neither, my little rat.”
The endearment cracked open a door, a glimpse into memories. Tabeth shut it firmly, refusing to think of the little vicious creature she’d been when the deaths of her ma and da had brought her to MallenIve. “I’m doing the right thing.” The room was so quiet now Tabeth could hear the doves outside in the willow tree, the distant slap of feet and hooves on the dust road.
“Yes.” A dish clattered against the wood, and Emme returned it to its shelf, pattern out. “I think perhaps you are, though for all the wrong reasons.”
“What am I supposed to do then?”
“Carry on. It might be that I think I only know best because I have a million memories in my head. But memories can’t tell the future, can they?”
Tabeth shook her head.
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IT WAS ONLY LATER, when she was clean, dressed in light clothes that still smelled faintly of packing herbs and another person’s skin, that Tabeth felt ready to continue her conversation with the Grinningtommy. Prue had woken again, and Leorn, back with his eggs, had taken her to play outside in the shade of the willow tree. There was still no sign of the Onnery, not back yet, not with nor without young Door and Gil. Tabeth had helped Emme bring in the laundry off the line before a storm hit, and they were sitting at the kitchen table, folding the clothes neatly and putting them in piles.
“What am I to do about the dam—that bloody Onnery woman will make mincemeat of me if she has even the slightest inkling of what I plan to do with her precious little lambkin there. That’s if she doesn’t try kill me just for mere fact I managed to make it to adulthood.” Tabeth sniffed. “How come you never told her, anywise? I would have thought that it was your job. I was too old for killing, but you could have called for the Onnery to come scrape my head clean, leave me drooling like an imbecile.”
“Yes, I could have done that, couldn’t I? Or my mam could have. She was old, and her feet pained her a great deal so she couldn’t go far, but her mind was bright and sharp as an acacia thorn till the day she died. She could have done it. Makes you wonder, eh?” Emme winked as she neatly folded a little shirt—Leorn’s—sleeves meeting, collar straightened, and added it to the meagre pile belonging to the boy. “Perhaps we wanted you to grow. Perhaps we saw something in you.”
“Nilly-shit. Next you’ll say the Casabi told you to let me live on as I was.”
“Tabeth...” Emme cocked her head. There was a sound of clicking hooves and rattling wheels, drawing closer. “Perhaps the Casabi did.”
“You know I’ve no time for this mystical shite—it belongs in the past, along with the rest of what we used to be. Hobs need to change. It’s because of the Casabi we didn’t kill the bloody Lammers the moment their ships hit Lambs’ island.” Her head was pounding. Even though she was fed and cleaned, there was something about MallenIve that didn’t agree with her, a stickiness to the air that aggravated her spark. Even now, weak as it was, it itched and jittered. She had a headache starting.
“The river has her reasons, and you can’t pretend that you haven’t heard her voice. Not when you’re here now with young Ade Onnery in tow, and all your plans stitching together neat as a scarf.”
“Let’s hope it looks better than any scarf I ever made—what—what is it?” Even as she spoke, a spike of pain burst up from the base of her skull, made her teeth feel loose in her gums, her eyes water. It was like spark meeting spark, but ugly, turned inside out and rotten.
“Shay,” said Emme. “She’s only gone and bloody done something.”