How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain With the Crooked One, page 6
“But you listened,” the Witch continued. “You watched from your window. You stopped at the side of the road to hear their songs.”
“Sometimes!”
“What did they sing?”
“What did they sing?”
“What. Did. They. Sing.”
With a rub of my face and a shrug, I rattled off a few of the old chants. “Shark in the Cellar. How the Fox Ate the Moon. Come and Cut the Cute Cat’s Head. The One-Eyed Witch Lives Where?” I gestured about extravagantly. “Here, apparently. Oh, and the companion song, about the Witch’s…” I stopped.
That gold eye glared.
“About the Witch’s Crooked Son.” My gorge rose too fast. That terrible song. In her last days of life, Mam had lain beside her open window whispering it, frail and sobbing, and I could do nothing to comfort her.
“Sing it.”
“I won’t!
“Sing it.”
“Never! How could you ask it of me? His own mother?”
The Witch grasped my chin in her hand. I had never felt fingers so strong and fell. I, who’d been wife to boorish Jadio. Cold as the claws of the White One, they were, who rides your neck until you run off a cliff to escape her.
“You are not your mother’s daughter. You are craven. You do not deserve him.”
“Listen, you!” I bellowed, knocking her hand aside. “Twenty years the tots of Leressa have been singing that song. Cutting his soul into snippets and wounding him with every unwitting word. How could you–the Queen of the Valwode–you who know better–let his name be wrecked like that? Gentry never tell, he said–not even their own mothers. Is this why? Who let his secret name out? Who gave it like a golden ball into the hands of heedless children, until years of low games so dirtied and dented it you can hardly see the glistening? Twenty years of mockery. It must have been like a knife in his back every time some kiddie jumped rope.”
The Witch’s white shoulders seemed almost as hunched as her son’s. She whispered, “In the early days I trusted Lorez too dearly. I underestimated his knowledge of the Gentry. Too well did he understand our ways. The night he betrayed us, he called Torvald and Lissa into our room. Witness the Witch’s imprisonment, he said. The ruins of your baby brother on the floor. Do you see what your father does for you?
“Perhaps they were repulsed at the sight. Perhaps they were delighted. The faces they showed their father were pitiless as his own. Then Torvald made up that rhyme to sing while Lissa danced around the baby’s body. He had been silent until then. Stunned. That was when he began to scream. How they made him dance, rhyming him back his own name.”
The night air was wet and cool, but my skin baked so with anger that it might have been high summer. Shrugging off my quilted coat, I rummaged in my pack for the length of gold-braided rope I’d planned to sell off in pieces for food if my quest failed, or hang myself with if Jadio’s soldiers captured me.
My hands shook. Nevertheless, I stood, turned my back on the Witch, and began to skip.
Swoop, slap, thud. Swoop, slap, thud. The old rhythms entered me. My breath came faster. My heart began to drum.
“Rickedy-din, the Wicked One
"Quick – let’s kill the Witch’s Son
"Roast his hump until it’s done
"How meet’s the meat of Ricadon!”
Tears slicked my face. My nose began to run. My throat tightened ‘til I could do no more than squeak. A few skips more and the rope tangled my legs. I stopped to extricate myself, puffing for breath.
It came to me then, doubled over, that I’d been a rhymer for nearly as long as I’d been a prisoner. True, my couplets had all been curses like the one Torvald and Lissa had laid upon the Witch’s Son. I’d never tried to compose a counter-curse to coax a shy thing from the Veil. Point was, rhymes meant something to the Gentry, where a song was life or death depending on which you followed through the bog. Rhymes could make a broken baby dance with pain, or a twisted mouth flash out with laughter in the dark. My golden rope glittered in the moonlight as I got my breath back. I began skipping again.
“Rickedy-din, the Kindly One
"How I love the Witch’s Son
"Woo him well until he’s won
"My vows I’ll make to Ricadon.”
The ruins of Lirhu vanished. The Witch with one eye vanished (but a second before she did, I saw her smile). So did the night, and the chill, and my weariness. I could not breathe. My innards turned to soup and streamed out of holes in the soles of my feet. Then the world steadied. My body unjellied. I stood in a sunlit cow pasture–near enough the sea to smell it, though I did not know in which direction it lay.
My cow Annat grazed not far from me, her brown-dappled hide agleam. My heart jumped for joy in my chest.
“Annat, my love! You’re looking fat and happy!”
In a distant corner of the pasture, my good red bull Manu trotted back and forth, a tiny white figure clinging to his corded neck and giggling.
Now, I knew time moved differently in the Veil, that Gentry children did not develop as mortals did, but oh! I feared for her! She was so small, both her worlds so unsafe. I thought of my fox twins, and others like them. The war was not over–not by many a long mile and a longer year. King, Archabbot, Prickster, peasant, Gentry warrior, mortal soldier: our battles would rage ever bloodier before we knew an end. Such a tangle. Such a terror. If only the children were let to reach a reasonable age, perhaps together they might build a more reasonable world. But they had to survive it first!
“Be careful!” I shouted, “Manu, not so fast!” and set off at a run. Not two steps I’d taken before someone had caught the back of my skirt. People were always stopping me this way. I should start wearing trousers.
“Peace, Milkmaid! She won’t fall. We’ve taken to calling her the White Raven. If we don’t tie a thread to her ankle and tether her to something solid–like Manu–she’ll fly right up into the air and only come down again when she’s hungry.”
My body strained forward, not quite caught up to my ears.
“But–she’s–just–“
“A child. Our child. Seven days old and stubborn as the sea.” He released my skirt abruptly. I splattered into the dirt as was my wont–charmingly, just shy of a cowpat. This was so reminiscent of the moment we’d first met, I laughed.
His long black eyes danced as he gazed down. His hair was wild as a thundercloud. Clad like a farmer but for the opal on his finger, the ivory at his throat, the green flame on his brow, he looked… healthy. His shoulders still hunched, his torso still torqued, but his brow was unfurrowed, free of pain. No farmer or fisherman, prince or soldier had ever been so fine and fey, so gladdening to my eyes. Wiping my face briefly with the hem of my skirt, I took my first true breath in what seemed like a lifetime.
“If our Raven can fly, Ricadon, she gets it from your side of the family. Me, I’m mortal to the bone–remember?”
“Not anymore, Gordie Oakhewn,” said my friend and lifted me from the ground.
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Copyright 2013 C.S.E. Cooney
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Giganotosaurus is published monthly by Late Cretaceous and edited by Ann Leckie.
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C.S.E. Cooney, How the Milkmaid Struck a Bargain With the Crooked One
