The Warded Man

And they shall flee terrified before him.

“Very good!” Mery congratulated with a smile. Arlen frowned.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked.

“Of course,” Mery said.

“Do you really believe that?” he asked. “Tender Harral always said the Deliverer was just a man. A great general, but a mortal man. Cob and Ragen say so, too.”

Mery’s eyes widened. “You’d best not let my father hear you say that,” she warned.

“Do you believe the corelings are our own fault?” Arlen asked. “That we deserve them?”

“Of course I believe,” she said. “It is the word of the Creator.”

“No,” Arlen said. “It’s a book. Books are written by men. If the Creator wanted to tell us something, why would he use a book, and not write on the sky with fire?”

“It’s hard sometimes to believe there’s a Creator up there, watching,” Mery said, looking up at the sky, “but how could it be otherwise? The world didn’t create itself. What power would wards hold, without a will behind creation?”

“And the Plague?” Arlen asked.

Mery shrugged. “The histories tell of terrible wars,” she said. “Maybe we did deserve it.”

“Deserve it?” Arlen demanded. “My mam did not deserve to die because of some stupid war fought centuries ago!”

“Your mother was taken?” Mery asked, touching his arm. “Arlen, I had no idea …”

Arlen yanked his arm away. “It makes no difference,” he said, storming toward the door. “I have wards to carve, though I hardly see the point, if we all deserve demons in our beds.”

CHAPTER 13

THERE MUST BE MORE

326 AR

LEESHA BENT IN THE GARDEN, selecting the day’s herbs. Some she pulled from the soil root and stalk. Others, she snapped off a few leaves, or used her thumbnail to pop a bud from its stem.

She was proud of the garden behind Bruna’s hut. The crone was too old for the work of maintaining the small plot, and Darsy had failed to make the hard dirt yield, but Leesha had the touch. Now many of the herbs that she and Bruna had once spent hours searching for in the wild grew just outside their door, safe within the wardposts.

“You’ve a sharp mind and a green thumb,” Bruna had said when the soil birthed its first sprouts. “You’ll be a better Gatherer than I before long.”

The pride those words gave Leesha was a new feeling. She might never match Bruna, but the old woman was not one for kind words or empty compliments. She saw something in Leesha that others hadn’t, and the girl did not want to disappoint.

Her basket filled, Leesha brushed off and rose to her feet, heading toward the hut—if it could even be called a hut anymore. Erny had refused to see his daughter live in squalor, sending carpenters and roofers to shore up the weak walls and replace the frayed thatch. Soon there was little left that was not new, and additions had more than doubled the structure’s size.

Bruna had grumbled about all the noise as the men worked, but her wheezing had eased now that the cold and wet were sealed outside. With Leesha caring for her, the old woman seemed to be getting stronger with the passing years, not weaker.

Leesha, too, was glad the work was completed. The men had begun looking at her differently, toward the end.

Time had given Leesha her mother’s lush figure. It was something she had always wanted, but it seemed less an advantage now. The men in town watched her hungrily, and the rumors of her dallying with Gared, though years gone, still sat in the back of many minds, making more than one man think she might be receptive to a lewd, whispered offer. Most of these were dissuaded with a frown, and a few with slaps. Evin had required a puff of pepper and stinkweed to remind him of his pregnant bride. A fistful of the blinding powder was now one of many things Leesha kept in the multitude of pockets in her apron and skirts.

Of course, even if she had been interested in any of the men in town, Gared made sure none could get close to her. Any man other than Erny caught talking to Leesha about more than Herb Gathering received a harsh reminder that in the burly woodcutter’s mind she was still promised. Even Child Jona broke out in a sweat whenever Leesha so much as greeted him.

Her apprenticeship would be over soon. Seven years and a day had seemed an eternity when Bruna had said it, but the years had flown, and the end was but days away. Already, Leesha went alone each day to call upon those in town who needed an Herb Gatherer’s service, asking Bruna’s advice only very rarely, when the need was dire. Bruna needed her rest.

“The duke judges an Herb Gatherer’s skill by whether more babies are delivered than people die each year,” Bruna had said that first day, “but focus on what’s in between, and a year from now the people of Cutter’s Hollow won’t know how they ever got along without you.” It had proven true enough. Bruna brought her everywhere from that moment on, ignoring the request of any for privacy. Her having cared for the unborn of most of the women in town, and brewed pomm tea for half the rest, had them soon paying Leesha every courtesy, and revealing all the failings of their bodies to her without a thought.

But for all that, she was still an outsider. The women talked as if she were invisible, blabbing every secret in the village as freely as if she were no more than a pillow in the night.

“And so you are,” Bruna said, when Leesha dared to complain. “It’s not for you to judge their lives, only their health. When you put on that pocketed apron, you swear to hold your peace no matter what you hear. An Herb Gatherer needs trust to do her work, and trust must be earned. No secret should ever pass your lips, unless keeping it prevents you healing another.”

So Leesha held her tongue, and the women had come to trust her. Once the women were hers, the men soon followed, often with their women prodding at their back. But the apron kept them away, all the same. Leesha knew what almost every man in the village looked like unclothed, but had never been intimate with one; and though the women might sing her praises and send her gifts, there was not a one she could tell her own secrets to.

Yet despite all, Leesha had been far happier in the last seven years than she had been in the thirteen before. Bruna’s world was much wider than the one she had been groomed for by her mother. There was grief, when she was forced to close someone’s eyes, but there was also the joy of pulling a child from its mother and sparking its first cries with a firm swat.

Soon, her apprenticeship would be over, and Bruna would retire for good. To hear her speak it, she would not live long after that. The thought terrified Leesha in more ways than one.

Bruna was her shield and her spear, her impenetrable ward against the town. What would she do without that ward? Leesha did not have it in her to dominate as Bruna had, barking orders and striking fools. And without Bruna, who would she have that spoke to her as a person and not an Herb Gatherer? Who would weather her tears and witness her doubt? For doubt was a breach of trust as well. People depended on confidence from their Herb Gatherer.

In her most private thoughts, there was even more. Cutter’s Hollow seemed small to her now. The doors unlocked by Bruna’s lessons were not easily closed—a constant reminder not of what she knew, but of how much she did not. Without Bruna, that journey would end.