“A roundhouse.”
She remembered Young Smith beside her making the picture complete, a vague sense of uplift, security. “It’s strange,” she said, “remembering something I didn’t know I knew. It’s strange to see our past.”
He put his fingers on the circle, traced its arc. He looked at her, and she at him. “Maybe it’s not our past,” he said, and she thought that he might kiss her, that she would open her mouth to his.
She waited for his touch, wanted his touch—a kiss, a hand running the length of her spine, even an arm wrapping her waist—but it did not come.
Eventually his fingers fell from the gritstone, and he stood up. She regretted that she had not responded, had not said, “Our future, then?” as he had surely hoped she would.
On their return, she slowed as they reached the clearing, put her hand on his arm. “That picture,” she said, “I’d like to see it again.”
She left him without looking to see the expression on his face and continued into the clearing. Next time she would not be so closefisted. He had given her an amulet, called to her from his forge, asked her to accompany him to the old mine, and all but said their old etching foretold the family they would one day form. She had been as miserly as dirt.
* * *
—
She returned her attention to the field just as Arc’s mattock fell on another clod. “Should we go to Edge?” he said, his voice lukewarm, as though it were only a passing thought.
She wanted to climb Edge with Arc, to see what she could from that only place where she had ever glimpsed what lay beyond Black Lake, but her mother would be making cheese and she should help. There was wheat to be milled to flour and thatch to be cut for a weak spot in the roof. All this, and she needed to gather comfrey root so that it might be ground to a paste, and stirred into warmed beeswax to form an ointment useful in healing the lesions blistering on a dozen of the bog dweller children’s hands and mouths. The pain was mild, but she would not neglect her obligations as Black Lake’s apprentice healer.
She knew the bog dwellers’ ailments—Old Carpenter’s gums, Old Tanner’s bound bowels, Old Hunter’s strained heart, one hand’s menstrual cramps, another’s wakefulness at night. She cured and mended and sometimes wept when all she could offer was the comfort of sweet violet draft. For her generosity and skill in preparing Mother Earth’s magic, she was praised, sometimes rewarded. When she tended a Black Lake tradesman, she might be given a scrap of hide, a handful of oily wool. From the hands, she received only blessings, bowed heads, astonishment.
“I’ve got to dig up some comfrey,” she said to Arc, hoping he heard her sincere regret.
“A large, hairy leaf. A purple bloom.”
“Like a goblet,” she said, curious that he knew the flower. But then, why would he not with his habit of observing the world?
“I know a good spot,” he said.
As they made their way along the path that led to the bog, he stepped lightly. It pleased her, the way he hardly disturbed the woodland floor and touched the tall grasses edging the track, their furred tips skimming his palm, the calluses left behind by the mattock. She thought of his gentle hands sliding from her cheeks to her neck.
What would she answer if asked whether she preferred Young Smith over Arc, or Arc over Young Smith? It depended on the day, who was closest, which particular moment she had most recently rehashed in her mind. Arc, when she thought of the sweet violets or the thrill that rippled through her when she heard his bullfinch call. Young Smith, when she thought of the amulet or the pair of them kneeling in the old mine. Arc, when she thought of the golden curls on his belly. Young Smith, when she thought of his thick-lashed eyes. Oh, the hours she spent pondering.
She turned her mind to silently naming the flora rooted alongside the path. Her knowledge of the riches all around had blossomed three years ago, when she was just ten. She had slipped into an apprenticeship with the ancient bog dweller who birthed the babies and cured the warts at Black Lake, who knew that a menstruous woman should not take the honey from a hive. Their familiarity began with Crone standing firmly, blocking small Devout’s passage on the path between clearing and bog. “What do you seek, child?” Crone had said. Her voice was like stone sliding over stone. Her face was wizened, her eyes thinly lashed.
“Stinging nettle,” Devout said, stepping backward from so ancient a woman.
“Won’t be finding any so close to the path. Already been picked.”
Crone pinched a handful of yellow blooms from a slender stalk and tucked them into the sack looped over her shoulder. “Bloodroot,” she said and began clawing the ground with fingernails as thick and curled as talons. “Good for a nervous gut.”
She teased a thick root from the earth and snapped it in half. Red sap oozed from the flesh. “I’m making dye for Old Hunter’s firstborn girl,” Crone said. “That buck Tanner skinned, she’s got it in her mind she wants a red cape.”
Few at Black Lake dyed their wool, and none their skins. It added nothing to strength or warmth, and it meant collecting and preparing the dye and then extra wood gathered and water hauled so that a cauldron could be set to boil. Still, a red cape was the sort of indulgence Reddish liked, and Old Hunter was inclined to spoil his brood.
“The scraps from the hide will come to me as payment,” Crone said.
She raised a leg, stretched her ankle, rocking her foot from side to side as though showing off a foot wrapped in fine leather rather than an assortment of scraps. “I’ll lace red shoes around my feet.”
Crone would wear red shoes, and Reddish would cross her arms and huff. Devout dared not smile, though. The old woman was leaning close and saying, “Your name came to you because of your devotion to Mother Earth.”
Devout bobbed her chin, liking how even this old woman knew her piety.
“Mother Earth’s magic is a useful thing to know. The bog dwellers will need someone to prepare the magic when I’m gone.”
“You’re going somewhere?”
“Not just yet,” Crone said. “First you have much to learn.”
Devout liked the idea of being more than a hand who sowed and reaped and did not know a single thing more of the world. She liked the idea, too, of the bog dwellers one day calling her generous and wise. And would knowing Mother Earth’s magic not help her in some way? Might she at some point trade bloodroot dye for leather just like Crone? Devout dipped her chin, the tiniest bit.
“I’m old,” Crone said. “We’ll begin today.”
* * *
—
Devout and Arc continued through the woodland, the path beneath them well trodden by those heading to the causeway, the pool at its farthest reach. They went to scrub bodies or linens, or sometimes to find comfort in so hallowed a place. At the bog, the peat and rushes of their earthly lives touched the mist and mystery of the gods, the shadows and whispers of those already departed to Otherworld—that place without hunger and want, free of every kind of unease. The barren went to the bog, the anxious, the brokenhearted, the ill. Along with tears, they dropped offerings into Black Lake’s pool—pretty stones and pottery vessels, clay roughly shaped into the tiny newborn who had not come or the eye that saw no more than dusk.