CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Business and Family

There was a covered cart outside the family hedge. After the first jolt of recognition, I realized it was different from the one Ma had at home, with its cunning wooden house perched on top of the wagon bed. This one had a frame covered by tanned leather and had bells bolted to the corners.

A muscular dun mare grazed in front of it, her forelegs hobbled to keep her from straying. Maro and Dan perched in a tree a few steps away, watching her with delight.

A horse?

I hadn’t seen a horse in months. I had assumed that these people did not have horses. Now I knew that everyone around us was simply too poor to have them.

“What is it like, Lizbet?” Dan asked. He was the shyer of the two boys, so his words spoke to a special determination.

“What?”

Maro pointed “How do we…”

I realized that if there were seldom any horses around, my brush with Sida would be one of their only sightings of such animals. And Sida was much smaller than this work animal.

The mare looked up at us, her ears twitching. She knew she could not run and was made nervous by her vulnerability.

I put out my hand, palm down so she could smell it. “Yimma naisik,” I murmured, using the same crooning tone Torun had used with Sida. I scratched her under the chin, stroked her cheek and her neck. She was so docile, so used to being touched.

“Come down from the tree quietly and slowly,” I told the boys.

They came and joined me in patting the horse. “If you look in the cart, there might be brushes for her.”

Dan went and came back with the stiff-toothed curry comb and the long-haired dandy brushes cradled in his arms. I showed them how to work the curry comb in circles over the horse’s body, how it shook off loose dirt and old skin. She was tall for them, so Dan climbed on Maro’s back to get at her shoulders.

“She should get brushed every day,” I told them.

“That’s what Pa said. He and Heino came back today, but Heino’s in the village, selling.”

“This is Pa’s horse?”

Dan nodded, but they were deep in their task.

I left them and pushed through the hedge.

Melina and Sarai were cooking a stew over an open fire—as the weather warmed, we had started cooking outside. Although we usually ate on chairs made of stumps, today they had laid out a blanket a few feet away, on top of which lay a spread of leaven bread, candied ginger and chestnuts and ripe peaches. Pa sat on the blanket as well, playing slap-jacks with Telka. His hands lay lightly over hers and every few seconds she’d try to slap down on them, breaking into giggles each time.

When they saw me come in, Melina and Sarai regarded me with uneasy respect, as if I were somehow different and formidable. Telka flung herself at my legs. I gave her a kiss on the top of her head before she ran back to Pa. Being away from her for snatches of time made me see more clearly how she was growing. The baby-roundness of her face was slowly fading into Melina’s delicately pointed chin. I felt a small twinge. For those who knew us well, she would not be my miniature as she grew, but Bettina’s.

“Lizbet,” my father said, his face split in a wide grin. “As promised, a share of the reward!” He sat Telka down on the blanket beside him and untied a small leather purse from his belt. He flung it to me and I caught it. It was heavy for its size. I teased open the drawstring and found the dull glint of gold and silver inside.

I couldn’t help letting out a little gasp and my heart went tight. It was more money than I had ever seen. At home we didn’t get so much for our medicine, and the money went into the coffer or was turned into meat and bread. With this much gold, a person could run away, set up a shop or a house or a herd. I took a few steps forward and held the purse out to Pa. Lording it over me, I thought. That would be just like him.

He shook his head.

“It’s yours,” Pa said. “I hope you don’t mind that I spent a few coins on the horse and cart.”

“No…no,” I switched to Gersan, “of course not.”

“They bought the horn and wanted more.” He stood up and came to me. We were talking business, and he wanted it to be conducted in private. We strolled over to the lambing pens on the other side of the oak tree. “I said my lass could call the unicorns to her.”

“They…they believed you?”

He put a hand to his chest and gave a neat bow. “I am known as an honest merchant of rare things.”

My heart gave another squeeze. Why not? said a small voice in my head. Picking up a horn here or there…we could make a fortune. But then I remembered Julian and his fine clothes, the arquebus he brought hunting, though it was made for the battlefield. If he had no respect for me, who shared his blood, hunters like him would have no respect for the animals they hunted or the people who sought to protect them.

“You cannot sell any more horns whole!”

He frowned. I was ruining his fun. “Don’t be absurd. They paid just to see the horn. Before I sold it, I made an obscene amount just letting people touch it! You should see their eyes light up, even as they part with their money.”

“Fair enough, Pa. But I’ve been in this business longer and I know it. Ma sold ointment made from the alicorn. We lived well and helped many folk.”

“I saw your face when you looked in that purse. You’ve never lived this well.”

“We never told the secret of the unicorns. Like this…You’ll attract the wrong kind of attention.” I had to translate the danger to the unicorns into terms he would understand. “It was our medicine that gave us a reputation and kept us safe.”

“Don’t be a little idiot, Lizbet. For ointment, you need jars, grease…it costs time and material to produce. The horn doesn’t need anything. I made twenty gold pieces for the whole thing and fifteen silver showing it off. A king’s ransom. No.”

“Hunters and kings won’t let someone as lowly as you get the glory.”

His body tensed up, his lower lip pushed out and his brow lowered. In Telka it would be laughable, but for a moment I was afraid he would hit me. Instead, he walked around in a circle, came back and gave the fencepost a great kick. The fence shuddered under my hands.

I stayed frozen where I was.

“You don’t scare me,” I said. Though I felt close to tears, I wasn’t going to cower. I narrowed my eyes and looked over, ready to stare him down.

“Find me another horn, Lizbet.” He was smiling again, careful and controlled.

I held out the purse to him again, though it was worth a future for a girl like me.

He shook his head. “Keep it. Think about it. Think about what you can get with money like that. It’s summer now, an easy season. But summer will come to an end and times will be hard. This family does not suffer shirkers. You will have to help us as we have helped you. And as soon as you spend a coin in that purse, one coin, mind you, understand that we have a deal.”

I felt a jag of fear in the bones of my arms, the muscles in my shoulders. At home, I had known what I had offered, but here, Pa was right. I didn’t give anything much to the family and yet they had fed me and clothed me.

The next day proceeded normally—that is, I pretended it was normal for me to stay inside on a sunny day to help my sisters with their work.

Pa played along. He saw the purse tied at my waist. He knew that I was tempted despite myself. He whistled as he went out to tend the vegetable patch with the boys.

I wished that Torun were there, that I had time before the sun went down to go to him and ask him what was happening. But at the heels of that wish, I remembered Bettina and her tear-stained face. I didn’t want to see him—how could I tell him about what I knew? Should I? Instead, I carded wool. I even worked a little on one of the small looms for making ribbons. I concentrated on making an even strip of red. Nothing fancy. I watched my sisters. They traded songs and rhymes, and my ribbon grew inch by inch.

“You’re not horrible,” Sarai told me. I almost blushed at the compliment, but she continued. “Still, you’d be better off in the forest getting more horns.”

“I can’t,” I said. “It will bring hunters and rich men.”

“I don’t care,” Sarai said. “That could be a good thing. I could sell my cloth to them.”

“But you don’t understand!”

“Don’t I?” Sarai snapped. “Tell me, then!”

“He’s offered me money if I can get more uksarv horns. But it feels wrong to sell my…my talent…when he’s so greedy.”

“What do you expect, Lizbet?” Sarai’s voice was harsh. “Pa is never going to let us have any sort of freedom unless he gets his cut of the money first. Bettina understood that…why can’t you?”

“Bettina gave us luck,” Telka said into the silence, as she worked on her small handloom. “That’s what Pa says. Sarai, if she didn’t go to the Alvina, you wouldn’t have gotten so good at weaving,” Telka added with desperate certainty.

“Right,” Sarai said, her voice torn between sarcasm and bitterness. She turned back to the loom and started weaving in a great clatter. In her anger, she counted her threads wrong, swore and started again.

Telka didn’t have the spirit to fight back. She ducked her head and started to work quietly.

Between the sounds of their weaving, I listened to the little house in the trees creak and shift with the wind. Bettina had gone to the Alvina. What did that mean? When I saw her, she had looked angry and almost…almost wild. So, where was she? Where had she gone? The forest? But I had been there and hadn’t seen a thing. I thought of the skull I had found years ago. Perhaps I wasn’t looking in the right places.

But the thud of hooves interrupted my thoughts. I wouldn’t have time to plan ahead.