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Huddled in her cloak against the damp and cold, Velda Davidz stared out across the black mud towards the distant graves of her husband and child.
The rain beat down without mercy, turning the yard into a morass of sucking mud and manure, the grey sky mocking all her past hopes. It was supposed to be Firstmonth—the tail end of winter, the new spring—but she had seen no sun since the week the snow fever had come to the farm. The bright sun had seemed unseasonable then, and now she could not help but see it as an omen of what was to come. By the fifth day, Emmett had begun to cough. By the seventh day, the sun had gone, and her nineteen-year-old husband lay on his deathbed.
Velda would have given almost anything to be lying out there beside them, together in the ground instead of remaining here alone, but the snow-fever took only those who had never suffered it during childhood. Velda had been about seven when she survived it. But her son had been only just over a year old, not old enough and not strong enough. Infants died easily of fevers, she had heard, but she had never dreamed that death could rob her of all so quickly. It had taken no more than a week to claim them both.
Velda could not tell whether her cheeks were wet with the rain or her own tears. It had been three months, and there were some days now when she did not cry. But those were worse in a way, for she would sit at the kitchen table, alone, and gaze out at the winter landscape for hours, not knowing what she was seeing, the silence in the house seeming to fill the whole world.
She hefted the pail and stepped out into the rain. The pigs began to grunt and squeal in anticipation when they heard her footsteps sloshing towards the pen. She managed a smile as they all jostled for the best place at the feeding trough. The big sow, which Velda suspected was pregnant, was able to keep her position of pride simply by interposing her great bulk between the younger pigs. Emmett’s prize sow, Velda thought, and turned away. It was so unfair! They had done so well for themselves, worked so hard...
The way back to her kitchen across the mud seemed to last an eternity. Her cloak was soaked through, and she left her boots outside to avoid bringing the mud onto the sturdy wooden floor. She looked around the kitchen, hugging herself to try and get warm. There was more than half of yesterday’s bread left; she had baked far too much. Of last year’s jam, one unopened jar remained.
I cannot stay here. The thought struck Velda like a lightning bolt, and her bare feet seemed to move with a will of their own towards her bedroom. She flung open the chest that contained her clothes. During wintertime, there was nothing to do but hold on, but as soon as the rain let up, the planting season would begin. The farm was barely workable with two pairs of hands; Emmett had hired lads from down in the town to help him with the harvest last summer. It was good land, but challenging with the mountain slopes and springtime flooding. The homestead nestled in between a long finger of rock called the Witches’ Horn, and the falling valleys that led down to the town of Lynborder. Fertile land, owned by the Sven Church, but barely cultivated because it was so high up and so remote. It had taken Velda three days just to get down to the monastery to fetch a monk for the last rites.
She still did not know exactly how she had made it down without giving up and lying on the freezing ground to die. They had had to wait at the monastery for nearly a week before making the ascent back up to the homestead, waiting for the snow to stop falling. By the time they had arrived to bury the bodies, the house had been cold as death...
Velda began to pack the chest. Clothes, shoes... She got up to fetch her books, which were on a shelf near the kitchen hearth. She stopped in her tracks.
What am I doing? She went back to the chest and pulled her shoes out, then sank down on the bed with them still in her hands. Where can I go? I have no family, no-one to run to. The closest she had to her own kin were the girls who had grown up with her at the monastery. Kilda, Liezl and even little Susie were all wives themselves now, with households of their own to manage. She could not impose on them. She had to depend on herself, and herself alone. That was a lesson she had learned when she was very young—it was one every orphaned child needed to learn.
She could not go back to the monks—as kind and generous as what they were, their charity was reserved for lost children, not grown women who were merely lost in soul. Velda rummaged through the chest until she found, at the very bottom, the box in which she kept her silver medallion. All orphans received one when they departed the monastery, a small thing of worth to help them should they fall upon hard times. She wondered whether it was worth more than the things her husband had left her: the pigs, his clothes and boots, the cradle and furniture. If someone else dared to start their own farm in this forsaken nest in the Svanlyn mountains, she could sell them everything...
Velda thought briefly of her husband’s family, but there was no recourse there. He had been orphaned young, shunted between indifferent relatives for most of his life, and finally left them forever to seek his fortune. She was too proud to throw herself upon the goodwill of distant relatives, and why should she have to? She had no money to speak of, but all of this... all of her life was worth something, if she could bring herself to sell it.
You must, she told herself sternly. You must bring yourself to say goodbye to it all. Leave Emmett and little Ric, and find some place where it hurts less. Unless you want to marry again, and try a second time...
“No,” she said aloud. She would not marry again. Not now, perhaps not ever. As a young bride, the world had seemed full of wondrous possibilities. She had been happy at the prospect of raising her own children a stone’s throw away from the place where she had grown up. But with Emmett gone, what was the point?
She wished, not for the first time, that she had some inkling where she had come from in the first place. Many of the fosterlings at the monastery were bastard-born, their mothers unmarried, their families too destitute to provide for them. People came from the mountain towns, from the farms in the valleys, to give up the children that they could not afford to have, delivering them into the arms of the monks of Svanfeld, who were sworn to succour those in need.
Velda’s story was different. No weeping mother had made a secret pilgrimage for her; no shamed father had quietly consulted the monks about her. Nineteen years ago, the faraway stronghold of Armour City had fallen to the sorcerer-king Arran Sylvaissen, and the Morgei living in Vailana had all fled, died, or been captured by slavers. One such band of slave-traders, seven months after the city’s fall, had tried to cross the mountains here in an effort to reach the port at Sulshome. They’d had two dozen Mage-Gifted captives in their caravan—and one who had no magic at all. That one had been the seven-month-old infant Velda.
During her childhood, Velda had talked with every monk who had been there that day, with every stout farmer who had helped ambush the slavers and even the wives who had watched from the hilltops. They all told thrilling stories of triumph: the townspeople had surprised the slavers as they were attempting to cross a narrow valley, and had wiped them out to the last man. The Mage-Gifted would-be slaves had turned around and made their way east to the Forest of the Morning, hoping to start their shattered lives anew amongst their own kind.
But none of them had known Velda’s identity, not even the woman who had served as her wet nurse. According to them, the baby girl had been acquired off a pair of unscrupulous traders—obviously not her parents—somewhere near Armour City, for the price of a handful of silver pawns. She had no name; the monks had given her the name Velda Quix, after a hermit-nun who had written extensive works on the will of the gods, and a last name belonging to one of the senior brothers at the monastery.
Velda did not regret being left to the care of the monks; she had never gone hungry, never wanted for clothes or shoes, and was much better educated than the average Sven woman. The monks wished all orphaned children to be able to make something of themselves. Most village girls gave up their schooling by the time they were eleven, and had barely learned to read and write. Velda had been made to rigorously attend lessons on literature, medicine, history, and everything else the monks deemed important, until the day she left to marry.
But her questions would never let her rest. For a time they had been stilled: when she met Emmett, when she chose to love him, when motherhood and farm-work filled up her days, and he was there for her to take refuge in every night. But now, the old restlessness returned to her heart with an even greater vengeance than before.
How much would she keep, of her old life here? Where would she go? Her birth family must have been from Vailana. The people of Svanfeld were a fair-skinned race, with straight or wavy hair that was typically some shade of wheat or flax. Velda had always looked exotic, unusual enough for people to stare. She was several shades darker than anyone else she had ever met, almost as brown as the chestnuts the pigs loved to snack on. Her curly hair alternated between dark brown and black depending on the light that shone upon it, and her nose had always invited commentary. A great beak of a thing, so many boys had been wont to tell her that she would be a beauty without it that she had acquired something of a reputation for punching boys in the face when she was fourteen or so.
For a moment Velda smiled, thinking of the little feral thing she had been, running wild in the forests and hills. But the wild girl had been tamed by love, only now the love was gone, and she was alone again, with no pack to run in the wilds with her.
The road to Armour City was dangerous, Velda knew. The city itself, perhaps even more so. But it was her best chance. It was a new beginning, in the place where her story had truly begun. Perhaps there were still answers, even after nineteen years, lying dormant somewhere. Where better than the place she had been born?
Outside, the rain had begun to ease. Velda wandered into the kitchen to peer out of the top half of the doorway. The kitchen faced north, and she watched a sliver of sunlight break free from the clouds that shadowed the Witches’ Horn. It would not warm the mountain, not yet, but spring was on its way.
