“Well, never mind it. Ye’ve proved honest; ye may dress yerself and go. But not a word of what passed between us to Thorin, mind ye! Words between women need trouble no man’s ear, especially one as great as he.” Yet at this Rhea could not forbear a certain spasming sneer. Susan didn’t know if the old woman was aware of it or not. “Are we agreed?”
Anything, anything, just as long as I can be out of here and away.
“You declare me proved?”
“Aye, Susan, daughter of Patrick. So I do. But it’s not what I say that matters. Now… wait… somewhere here…”
She scrabbled along the mantel, pushing stubs of candles stuck on cracked saucers this way and that, lifting first a kerosene lantern and then a battery flashlight, looking fixedly for a moment at a drawing of a young boy and then putting it aside.
“Where… where… arrrrr… here!”
She snatched up a pad of paper with a sooty cover (citgo stamped on it in ancient gold letters) and a stub of pencil. She paged almost to the end of the pad before finding a blank sheet. On it she scrawled something, then tore the sheet off the spiral of wire at the top of the pad. She held the sheet out to Susan, who took it and looked at it. Scrawled there was a word she did not understand at first:
Below it was a symbol:
“What’s this?” she asked, tapping the little drawing. “Rhea, her mark. Known for six Baronies around, it is, and can’t be copied. Show that paper to yer aunt. Then to Thorin. If yer aunt wants to take it and show it to Thorin herself-I know her, y’see, and her bossy ways-tell her no, Rhea says no, she’s not to have the keeping of it.” “And if Thorin wants it?”
Rhea shrugged dismissively. “Let him keep it or bum it or wipe his bum with it, for all of me. It’s nothing to you, either, for you knew you were honest all along, so you did. True?”
Susan nodded. Once, walking home after a dance, she had let a boy slip his hand inside her shirt for a moment or two, but what of that? She was honest. And in more ways than this nasty creature meant.
“But don’t lose that paper. Unless you’d see me again, that is, and go through the same business a second time.”
Gods perish even the thought, Susan thought, and managed not to shudder. She put the paper in her pocket, where the drawstring bag had been.
“Now, come to the door, missy.” She looked as if she wanted to grasp Susan’s arm, then thought better of it. The two of them walked side by side to the door, not touching in such a careful way that it made them look awkward. Once there, Rhea did grip Susan’s arm. Then, with her other hand, she pointed to the bright silver disc hanging over the top of the Coos.
“The Kissing Moon,” Rhea said.” ’tis midsummer.”
“Yes.”
“Tell Thorin he’s not to have you in his bed-or in a haystack, or on the scullery floor, or anywhere else-until Demon Moon rises full in the sky.”
“Not until Reaping?” That was three months-a lifetime, it seemed to her. Susan tried not to show her delight at this reprieve. She’d thought Thorin would put an end to her virginity by moonrise the next night. She wasn’t blind to the way he looked at her.
Rhea, meanwhile, was looking at the moon, seeming to calculate. Her hand went to the long tail of Susan’s hair and stroked it. Susan bore this as well as she could, and just when she felt she could bear it no longer, Rhea dropped her hand back to her side and nodded. “Aye, not just Reaping, but true fin de ano-Fair-Night, tell him. Say that he may have you after the bonfire. You understand?”
“True fin de ano, yes.” She could barely contain her joy.
“When the fire in Green Heart bums low and the last of the red-handed men are ashes,” Rhea said. “Then and not until then. You must tell him so.”
“I will.”
The hand came out and began to stroke her hair again. Susan bore it.
After such good news, she thought, it would have been mean-spirited to do otherwise. “The time between now and Reaping you will use to meditate, and to gather your forces to produce the male child the Mayor wants… or mayhap just to ride along the Drop and gather the last flowers of your maidenhood. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” She dropped a curtsey. “Thankee-sai.”
Rhea waved this off as if it were a flattery. “Speak not of what passed between us, mind. “Tis no one’s affair but our own.”
“I won’t. And our business is done?”
“Well… mayhap there’s one more small thing…” Rhea smiled to show it was indeed small, then raised her left hand in front of Susan’s eyes with three fingers together and one apart. Glimmering in the fork between was a silver medallion, seemingly produced from nowhere. The girl’s eyes fastened on it at once. Until Rhea spoke a single guttural word, that was.
Then they closed.
5
Rhea looked at the girl who stood asleep on her stoop in the moonlight. As she replaced the medallion within her sleeve (her fingers were old and bunchy, but they moved dexterously enough when it was required, oh, aye), the businesslike expression fell from her face, and was replaced by a look of squint-eyed fury. Kick me into the fire, would you, you trull? Tattle to Thorin? But her threats and impudence weren’t the worst. The worst had been the expression of revulsion on her face when she had pulled back from Rhea’s touch.
Too good for Rhea, she was! And thought herself too good for Thorin as well, no doubt, she with sixteen years’ worth of fine blonde hair hanging down from her head, hair Thorin no doubt dreamed of plunging his hands into even as he plunged and reared and plowed down below.
She couldn’t hurt the girl, much as she wanted to and much as the girl deserved it; if nothing else, Thorin might take the glass ball away from her, and Rhea couldn’t bear that. Not yet, anyway. So she could not hurt the girl, but she could do something that would spoil his pleasure in her, at least for awhile.
Rhea leaned close to the girl, grasped the long braid which lay down her back, and began to slip it through her fist, enjoying its silky smoothness.
“Susan,” she whispered. “Do’ee hear me, Susan, daughter of Patrick?”
“Yes.” The eyes did not open.
“Then listen.” The light of the Kissing Moon fell on Rhea’s face and turned it into a silver skull. “Listen to me well, and remember. Remember in the deep cave where yer waking mind never goes.”
She pulled the braid through her hand again and again. Silky and?| smooth. Like the little bud between her legs.
“Remember,” the girl in the doorway said.
“Aye. There’s something ye’ll do after he takes yer virginity. Ye’ll do it right away, without even thinking about it. Now listen to me, Susan, daughter of Patrick, and hear me very well.”
Still stroking the girl’s hair, Rhea put her wrinkled lips to the smooth cup of Susan’s ear and whispered in the moonlight.
Chapter III
A MEETING ON THE ROAD
1
She had never in her life had such a strange night, and it was probably not surprising that she didn’t hear the rider approaching from behind until he was almost upon her.
The thing that troubled her most as she made her way back toward town was her new understanding of the compact she had made. It was good to have a reprieve-months yet before she would have to live up to her end of the bargain-but a reprieve didn’t change the basic fact: when the Demon Moon was full, she would lose her virginity to Mayor Thorin, a skinny, twitchy man with fluffy white hair rising like a cloud around the bald spot on top of his head. A man whose wife regarded him with a certain weary sadness that was painful to look at. Hart Thorin was a man who laughed uproariously when a company of players put on an entertainment involving head-knocking or pretend punching or rotten fruit-throwing, but who only looked puzzled at a story which was pathetic or tragical. A knuckle-cracker, a back-slapper, a dinner-table belcher, a man who had a way of looking anxiously toward his Chancellor at almost every other word, as if to make sure he hadn’t offended Rimer in some way.
Susan had observed all these things often; her father had for years been in charge of the Barony’s horse and had gone to Seafront often on business. Many times he had taken his much loved daughter with him. Oh, she had seen a lot of Hart Thorin over the years, and he had seen a lot of her, as well. Too much, mayhap! For what now seemed the most important fact about him was that he was almost fifty years older than the girl who would perhaps bear his son.
She had made the bargain lightly enough-
No, not lightly, that was being unfair to herself… but she had lost little sleep over it, that much was true. She had thought, after listening to all Aunt Cord’s arguments: Well, it’s little enough, really, to have the indenture off the lands; to finally own our little piece of the Drop in fact as well as in tradition… to actually have papers, one in our house and one in Rimer’s files, saying it’s ours. Aye, and to have horses again. Only three, ’tis true, but that’s three more than we have now. And against that? To lie with him a time or two, and to bear a child, which millions of women have done before me with no harm. ’tis not, after all, a mutant or a leper I’m being asked to partner with but just an old man with noisy knuckles. ’tis not forever, and, as Aunt Cord says, I may still marry, if time and ka decree; I should not be the first woman to come to her husband’s bed as a mother. And does it make me a whore to do such? The law says not, but never mind that; my heart’s law is what matters, and my heart says that if I may gain the land that was my da’s and three horses to run on it by being such, then it’s a whore I’ll be.
There was something else: Aunt Cord had capitalized-rather ruthlessly, Susan now saw-on a child’s innocence. It was the baby Aunt Cord had harped on, the cunning little baby she would have. Aunt Cord had known that Susan, the dolls of her childhood put aside not all that long ago, would love the idea of her own baby, a little living doll to dress and feed and sleep with in the heat of the afternoon.
What Cordelia had ignored (perhaps she’s too innocent even to have considered it, Susan thought, but didn’t quite believe) was what the hag-woman had made brutally clear to her this evening: Thorin wanted more than a child.
He wants tits and arse that don’t squish in his hands and a box that ’ll grip what he pushes.
