Prologue
The Legend of the Spring
When the earth was newborn and the waters were being gathered together around the dry land, when no bird flew above or fish swam below, a fissure opened in the ground, and a spring emerged, heated by the fiery cauldrons beneath.
It bubbled there happily, effervescent and warm, and when the first wanderers arrived in that place, they drank its sweet waters and were refreshed. They planted a sacred yew seedling at its edge and called the place holy.
Now, once every generation, a bright ball of fire appeared in the sky, and shortly after, a disaster would follow—famine, pestilence or war. But though all the peoples around them fell, those who drank from the spring were spared. They venerated the spring, building it around with stone.
Over time, attitudes changed. Hearts grew proud, and the spring was abandoned. The stones sank back into the earth, and the yew’s roots thickened over the spring. The ball of fire would flash as it always had, though few noticed. Fewer still grasped its significance. Countless thousands were lost.
But a stream needs only one stone to change its course, just as a generation needs only one person to take notice of a warning, and avail herself of the remedy.
This is the story of one.
— 1 —
Everyone in the canvas-covered cart is asleep. Four other travelers nestle into the deep straw of the wagon bed—strangers, all of us, except for a father and his son of maybe nine or ten years. The old monk there’s a snorer, and it takes him the whole trip to get his bones comfortable. When I got into this cart, the only space had been next to the woman with the gray hair, the pink fleshy face, the gentle-eyed, reticent smile. She made as much room as she could, but someone’s knee or elbow is always in my side—
—like the proverbial thorn. That’s what Mam would have said.
“Tusmore village,” says the driver. “Everyone out who needs a piss.”
The monk needs help getting out, so I lend him a hand. From the gap in the cart cover, the white winter sun blinds me, and when my eyes adjust, it’s like I haven’t left Hartley Cross after all. They look the same, these villages, and each one makes me hurt for home.
I don’t dare leave my satchel in the cart for curious eyes or fingers. It wouldn’t be right to say that all of my worldly possessions are here in my stitched-up bag. Most things I had to leave behind. The blankets. The cooking kettle. Pounce barking me home, and Juniper winding around my ankles with that deep purr. The sheep, the trees, the forest trail.
Don’t forget the fort you built with Henry against that uprooted oak.
Don’t forget the scent of the fields in the rain.
Don’t forget the crack on the daub wall that looked like a fawn’s face.
Don’t.
Forget.
I reach into the satchel and run my fingers over each item until I feel the drawings I made of my parents. What’s left is barely discernible, the fine lines made with the brass stylus on fire-browned parchment, burned in a moment of anger.
Don’t forget Da’s face. And don’t forget Mam’s face. And don’t forget baby sis’s face.
Nor even your brother Henry’s.
I would have stuffed the entire house into the satchel if I could. But I only took what fit—Mam’s cloak and dark woad-blue gown, the small clay honey pot Henry gave me, my best willow charcoal twigs, rolled in a piece of linen, to draw with.
I hold the stone cross from Mason and sense his impact on it, his hands shaping and smoothing it. And don’t forget Mason’s hands.
I may have to surrender all these things when I get to the priory, but it’s a risk worth taking—they’re all I have left of everyone I love.
* * *
—
It was only yesterday, midmorning, when everything changed.
* * *
—
“Edie?” Henry’s voice was alarmed. He shook me. Shook and shook. “Edie, wake up!”
I stirred, shoved his hand off my shoulder and looked sideways at my big brother. Suddenly everything came rushing back like a tempest:
Da’s murder.
Mam’s death, birthing little baby sis.
Mason avoiding me, just like the rest of the villagers.
The fear of starvation.
The intensifying fights with Henry as we got more and more desperate.
Death and loss and fury and hunger.
“Get away from me,” I grunted, rolling back over.
“You weren’t waking up,” he said. “Are you all right?”
“No.”
Henry ignored me, grinning, almost dancing with excitement. I sat up slowly, suspicion gnawing at my belly.
“Edie, I know where you’re going to go!”
“Henry, we talked about this,” I reminded him. “You said we were leaving together. In the spring. You said that Lord Geoffrey would wait until then to evict us. Remember?”
“I know, but this is better. Brother Robert’s got a prioress friend up north, and she said she’d take you in. Lord Geoffrey agreed. It’s Saint Christopher’s Priory, in Thornchester. It’s all sorted. They normally only take noblewomen, but out of charity they’ll take you as a conversa!”
A priory?
The word felt like a fresh, icy slap to the side of my head. And a conversa—a lay sister, a servant? So instead of being a wooler’s daughter with at least some dignity, I’d be cleaning the latrines of prissy nuns? How was that better?
“What do you mean, it’s all sorted?” I pressed him. “Who put you in charge of me?”
Henry looked stunned. “Da did, Edie. When they murdered him.”
Of course it was Henry’s decision; I knew that. The moment Da died, Henry became head of house, but that didn’t really give him options. He still had to answer to Lord Geoffrey Caxton, the very man who killed our father. We were bound to Lord Geoffrey, and I was bound to Henry. But I didn’t want to accept it. Henry was only two years older than me—my brother, not my lord.
“But don’t you understand?” he coaxed. “It’s better than we could have hoped! You and I would have been lucky to find a house half this size to let, in some strange place, scraping by on someone else’s land—we could have been beggars!”
I tried to be calm, but I just couldn’t. “This is it, then, Henry? Sixteen years old, and the best thing I can hope for is to rot away in some convent? Where they send the old hags and toady girls? And I should be grateful? Go to hell!”