I think of her returning home from that call, her head hanging low, and explaining to my father that there was nothing to be done for an improperly formed spine. Had my father’s heart fluttered, a flicker of lightness, as he digested her words? Had he counted his good fortune that I had been replaced as the most imperfect at Black Lake?
Feeble did not take his first steps until he was four, but he was not like the usual toddlers—teetering two steps one day and six the next. He never progressed much beyond a dozen, before he collapsed to the ground. Nowadays he spends most of his time cradled on his father’s back, or slouched against a wall, moaning and holding the aching head that no amount of willow tea can soothe.
Why has the druid come? The eldest of the Carpenters—that Black Lake clan respected for their sturdy wheels—had recently taken his last breath, collapsing even before he loosened the harness he used to haul logs. But we knew how to proceed without a druid’s guiding hand, and days had passed since we took the body to Bone Meadow—that place where flesh decays, where maggots and carrion pick bones clean. Could the druid only mean to lay offered loaves in the fields once they are fully planted? But then why the rush when only half the fields are sowed? And why ride by day?
My mother positions herself between me and the druid very nearly upon us, but I peek around her thin frame, straining to see any evidence of eight mounted Roman warriors in quick pursuit.
His horse still at a gallop, the druid skirts the field where we stand. As he passes, I take in his ridged brow and deeply grooved cheeks—a face made lean by unrelenting effort, I think; by accomplishment.
“He isn’t old,” says Sliver, my steadfast friend, born when the moon shone a thin slice in the sky. “Druids are supposed to be old.”
“Usually, my sweet. Hush.” Sliver’s mother touches her lips, the earth.
“His beard is short,” says Sliver’s younger sister Pocks, whose skin is pitted around her mouth.
“It isn’t white,” adds Mole, his eyes beadier than usual as he squints to see.
The color has not yet drained from the druid’s hair or beard. Both are trimmed and still reddish brown. He rides erect on his horse, rather than with a humped back. The whispered consensus among the hands is that this particular druid has never before come to Black Lake, that his face promises severity, and that his youth suggests recklessness, impatience.
“Don’t like the looks of him,” Old Man says.
Sliver tugs her mother’s arm in the direction of the clearing. “Let’s go. Let’s see what he wants.”
The hand children begin to plead.
“The horse. I want to see the horse.”
“He might bless us.”
“He might leave.”
“It isn’t fair, missing out.”
The hand mothers shush their children, pull them close; and for a moment, I breathe in the comfort of shared fear.
“Why has he come?” Sliver asks.
“He’s come to lay the loaves,” her mother says, her weak smile as unconvincing as an early thaw. “That’s all.”
“Your Romans,” my mother murmurs just loud enough for me to hear and lifts her fingers to her lips.
The druid’s horse halts a step shy of my father and those bog dwellers gathered in the clearing. As the druid dismounts, all of us—in the fields and the clearing—touch our lips, then the earth. We remain crouched on one knee. Eventually Hunter, who is First Man at Black Lake, rises to address the druid. As our settlement’s leader, he has no choice. My father briefly held that role, before the distinction passed from the Smith clan to the Hunter clan. Though that loss pains him as keenly as an open wound, today I do not feel a scrap of remorse.
Hunter and the druid speak—Hunter, with his head bowed. I try but can hear nothing other than the shrill cries of a caged partridge fretting outside the Hunters’ roundhouse door.
The druid beckons those of us kneeling in the fields, his arm cutting through the air, a gesture he must repeat a second time when, for a moment, our knees remain rooted to furrowed earth.
Old Man steps first toward the clearing, then Sliver and Pocks. Sliver teeters on the edge of skipping farther ahead, then glances over her shoulder, seeking permission, but her mother clasps her daughter’s shoulder, tethering her to the group. My mother and I hesitate, putting off that moment when my lame leg will reveal me as a runt. I seek courage in the idea that the druid has already seen the misshapen boy bundled on Tanner’s back but find it in a nobler thought: Soon I will show the druid how I can run.
When my mother and I reach my father, we drop to our knees on either side of him. He rests a hand against my shoulder blade, wraps his free arm around my mother, who does not shy away but rather leans into the heft of him.
“I’m called Fox,” the druid says.
I try to keep the quickness of foxes from my mind, their known cunning. My eyes lift to his reddish-brown beard. It is bushy. Yes, like a fox’s tail.
He moves among us, his fingertips grazing our shoulders, the backs of our necks. He approaches the three of us. I hold my breath as he shifts to squatting, as he lifts my chin with two fingers so that we are face-to-face. “A runt,” he says.
My eyes flicker to Feeble, a lowly effort to redirect the druid’s attention to Black Lake’s true runt. But Fox’s two fingers press against the fleshy underside of my chin, and I cannot manage even to turn my head. Then my mother touches the druid’s sleeve, lifts her face. She is fine featured, lithe, pale, ethereal in her beauty. Just now, though, she looks as frail as a sigh. “A seer,” she says, timid as dew.
She bows her head again. The cords in her neck appear, withdraw, a slow laborious pulse.
Fox huffs. “And what is it the runt sees?”
“Romans,” my father says, his voice low yet laced with authority.
My parents gamble, then, to shift me from runt to seer, from unworthy to worthy in the druid’s mind.
Fox’s eyes light with interest, and he leans close enough that I feel the wet of his breath. “Romans?”
I blink, make a slow wisp of a nod.
The horse paws the earth, and Fox’s fingers drop from my chin. He pats the beast’s hindquarters, strokes the hollow running the length of its neck. He turns back to the gathered crowd. “Rise,” he commands.
I watch as bog dwellers straighten, brush the dust from their knees. My father hoists me to my feet. He holds me steady as Hunter steps forward and touches Fox’s sleeve. “Come,” Hunter says. “Come eat, rest with us.” As First Man he is obliged to provide the druid respite from a hard ride.
“You,” Fox says to Hunter. “See that the horse is watered and fed.”