Once they began their long, their endless, trail leading away from the little cottage and the garden where her mother had been killed, she had come to appreciate her skin, for even in the deepest heat of the summer’s sun, she never burned or blistered. At first she thought it was Da’s magic that spared her, for he burned and he blistered. Then, when she understood that Da had no real magic, no sorcery beyond tricks and homely remedies, beyond his encyclopedic knowledge, she thought it might be her own magic that protected her, waiting, quiescent, to be born when she grew old enough. Strong enough.
But Da told her over and over that she must never hope to have the gift. What little frail sorceries he conjured had not the slightest effect on her. If he called fire, it did not burn her hands. If he spelled a door shut, she could open it as if the spell had not worked at all, and then Hanna would come by and wonder how their door had gotten stuck.
She was dumb to it, Da said, like a mute who cannot speak. Like a deaf man who can see others speaking but not hear them. Once Da had caught her reading aloud a fire spell out of the book. Nothing had happened, but he had been so mad at her that he had made her sleep in the pig shed for the night, to teach her a lesson. But she had never minded the pigs.
“Liath.”
She jerked awake, rose, and found her way by touch to the window. But there was no one outside. Wind whispered in the trees. Nothing else stirred. She shivered, rubbing her hands along her arms. She was not cold, really; she was scared.
However much they had roamed, however much they had lived from one day to the next, picking up and moving at the strangest signs, to the tune of mysterious portents that only Da recognized, she had always had Da. Whatever else he might be or failed to be, he had always taken care of her. Loved her. She wiped a tear from her cheek, and another.
“I love you, Da,” she whispered to the cool night air, but there was no answer.
In the morning Marshal Liudolf escorted her to the common. The entire village had turned out, and quite a few farmers from farther out had heard the news that an auction was to be held and had come in for the occasion. The inn had set up tables out front. Liath could not bring herself to blame Mistress Birta and Master Hansal for taking advantage of this windfall to increase their custom. She refused the marshal’s offer of a seat. Frater Hugh stood to one side, silent, while the marshal sold off each item from the list. However eccentric Da had been, he had been a man willing to help any woman or man who came to his door and no doubt Liath was the poorer now for Da having spent much of his substance trying to help others for no return. But even with the bidding running high, for Da had been well-liked, when all his worldly goods were sold, the debt was not yet covered.
Liudolf nodded and sighed his great, gusting sigh, and looked at her. The crowd looked at her. By the inn door, Hanna stared, her face caught between anger and grief. But not crying, not Hanna. A sudden commotion stirred at the far edge of the common, and a horseman appeared.
Hugh flung up his head, starting ’round, his fine profile set off by his angry expression.
“Ivar!” cried Hanna. She ran to hold the horse’s reins while Ivar dismounted.
They were too far away for Liath to be able to hear what they said, but Hanna spoke quickly, gesticulating wildly. Ivar shook his head. Hanna said something more, impassioned, but Ivar simply shook his head again. He led the horse across the common, Hanna walking and still talking beside him, and halted before the marshal.
Liudolf raised his eyebrows. “My lord Ivar,” he said politely. “Have you come at your father’s bidding?”
Ivar glanced once, swiftly, toward Liath, then away. Where she and Hanna, at sixteen, looked more like women now than the girls they had been two years ago when the three of them had formed their bond of friendship, Ivar still carried much of the coltish boy in his limbs and in the awkward grace that he would soon grow out of.
“No,” he said in so low a voice she barely heard it. Hugh smiled contentedly.
“I just heard of Master Bernard’s death,” Ivar went on. He turned to face Hugh. “I came to see that… that Liath is treated well.” He said it sturdily, but as a threat or promise, thrown up against Hugh’s overweening confidence, it had little impact. Hugh had at least eight years on Ivar and the kind of natural grace that comes from a tyrant’s soul melded with a handsome man’s conceit. And though Hugh’s father might be baseborn—or so at least Birta gossiped—his mother was a margrave, by several degrees Count Harl’s superior. Bastard or not, Hugh was destined for greater things, starting with the vast church holdings endowed by his mother and mother’s mother. While it was rare for a man to act as an administrator of church property—as the Lord tends the wandering sheep so the Lady tends to the hearth—it was not unknown, especially where monasteries controlled vast estates. Or so Mistress Birta had said when Frater Hugh came as wandering priest to Heart’s Rest last year to minister to the folk hereabouts. Mistress Birta was the most reliable source of news, gossip, and lore in all of Heart’s Rest.