Owlsight

own emotions to notice. “Talk? Good gracious, Mum, what are they going to talk about? No one is going to think that you are bad parents, and if there had been a fight, you know that the neighbors would have overheard it! They didn’t, so obviously there wasn’t one.”

“You can’t be living alone!” Sidonie insisted. “There’s no one to protect you here.”

Keisha shook her head, and wished that she hadn’t. “I doubt that will ever be a problem. No one ever comes here that isn’t sick or hurt. No one would dare hurt me. The rest of the village would have his head on a plate. As for this cottage being on the edge of the village, well, that hardly qualifies as isolation! If I even whispered for help, the neighbors would hear me.”

“Maybe you don’t think that living out here alone is going to cause people to gossip,” Sidonie said darkly, “But - ”

“Mum, there’re no ‘buts’ about it,” Keisha interrupted, wanting to get the unpleasant scene over with. “Not when anyone in the village can come here at any time of day or night, knock on the door, walk straight in, and see that I’m quite alone. You forget what I am - people have every right to come here whenever they need help. I have less privacy here than I did at home! If I were carrying on an illicit love affair, moving here would be the worst thing I could do!”

“Keisha!” Sidonie cried, shocked.

“Well, it wouldr she insisted. “If I’m not here, it’s going to be noticed right away, and people are going to want to know where I am and look until they find me! There is no way that I could go off for a romp in the hay-fields, Mum; sure as I did, someone would get sick or hurt, and the whole secret would be all over the village. And I can’t have a young man here without someone eventually walking in on it! So there you are. Not only am I chaperoned, I have the entire village as my chaperone!” She shrugged. “Besides, as you well know, I haven’t any suitors. I doubt that there’s a boy in the entire village who thinks of me as a girl. I’m the Healer, and for them, I’m about as likely a source of romance as a tree stump.”

“Maybe, but you still aren’t old enough to be on your own like this,” Sidonie replied stubbornly.

“I’m old enough to be married, with a family, and you’ve said as much yourself,” Keisha countered, as her stomach soured and her neck muscles knotted. “So I’m old enough. I have all the proper domestic skills, and I can take care of myself quite neatly. Well, look around you. If you see anything amiss, I’d like to know.”

“But what are people going to say about us, about your father, about me?” Sidonie’s voice was no louder, but there was a definite edge to it. This, then, was probably the source of her anxiety. “They’re going to say that we drove you out, that we were such wretched parents that we fought, that - ”

Again, Keisha interrupted. “They’re going to say what they’ve been saying for the past week, that I am a very considerate daughter to see that not only were night calls disturbing you, but that I was afraid that some folk hesitated to call me out because they didn’t want to wake the rest of the household just to get me. I’ve made a point of telling everyone who noticed that I was actually living here that this was the reason why I moved. They’ll say that only someone who was raised right would be polite enough to want to save her parents from such disturbance, and at the same time make herself more available to the village than she was before.” She chuckled, shocking her mother out of incipient hysteria. “And if you don’t believe me, ask Mandy Lutter; she’s all but taken credit for the idea herself. She’s got half the village convinced that it was a chance remark from her that made me see it would be easier for people if I moved to the cottage.”

“Oh,” Sidonie said weakly, all of her arguments overcome.

Keisha’s own symptoms of stress began to ease, and she felt that she was winning the confrontation.

“Mother, love, I’m hardly living away from you when the house is all but next door,” she pointed out, a little more gently. “How big is the village, after all? If it will make you feel better, I’ll make sure and come home for dinner as often as I can. If you need me to help, you’ve only to ask, and you know that. If I really wanted to leave you all, I’d let Gil arrange for me to go to Healer’s Collegium. I’m here, aren’t I? And haven’t I said all along that I’m not going to the Collegium? I promise you, I haven’t changed my mind.”

She would have said more, pressing home the point, but just then two young men came in, supporting a third, whose arm bent at an entirely unnatural angle at the shoulder joint. Keisha dropped her mending and forgot everything she was about to say, forgot even her mother’s presence, until it was all over and the dislocated shoulder was back in place again. By then, of course, Sidonie was gone.

But she had simply slipped out, so Keisha had won; or at least, her mother had gone off to think about what she had said. Sidonie was perfectly capable of thinking clearly when her emotions didn’t get in the way.

So when she’s thinking dispassionately about what I told her, I will win. Keisha sighed, the last of her tension ebbing. It hadn’t been nearly as bad as she’d thought it would be.

A dislocated shoulder didn’t create nearly the mess of the average wound, and there was very little to clean up after the young man had gone. Keisha put the room to rights again, returned to her chair, and picked up her mending, but her mind was still on her mother.

It would probably be a good thing if I showed up at supper - or before,