an extra mouth to feed, I can do with any help I am offered. Besides,” she laughed, “Fearn can always refuse. He is not daft”.
That didn’t help explain Aunt Grizzel’s sudden sense of friendship — even duty — to Artin, when only a few days earlier she had seemed to be suggesting that he might have had something to do with the deaths of both of Niav’s parents, not to mention that of his own poor wife, Orchil.
Kyle and Estra had to be endured, but Fearn seemed a tolerant child, if self-contained. However, spending more time with her younger cousin Canya was a real joy. Canya was pretty and clever and kind, and her voice was clear as a blackbird and smack on the note and you could suddenly find yourself singing in harmony with her without having planned it at all.
But cousin Estra was a problem. She could be so obsessive about things. All the river-mouth children liked to go beachcombing together in search of bits of jet, and the tiny snake stones that were small enough to turn into saleable jewellery, but Estra was always contriving ways of isolating Niav from the rest of the group because she wanted to be “special friends” with her. Niav found this most annoying, but frantic complaints to Aunty Grizzel fell on deaf ears.
“Nothing very special about poor Estra,” was all she would say.
This seemed a bit harsh on Estra, who was the best of the three girls when it came to learning things from the two aunties. Helygen was not only a superb herbalist, she was incredibly house-proud and a consumate cook. Niav found she had a lot of catching up to do to be level with her cousins. Her aunt was also very conscientious, strict about care and safety with her herbs and potions with five children around, and a very good teacher too; extremely patient — not as erratic as Aunty Grizzel.
Uncle Lurgan would be out with the boys and the great dog, caring for the flocks, but was also responsible for their instruction in the skills of hunting and tracking. Niav and Canya would have loved to do this too, until Fearn told them how Lurgan managed to surround even that with endless ritual.
With Aunty Grizzel all three girls now learned the skills of spinning and weaving. Lurgan would probably have disapproved had he known that Grizzel also tried to hand on everything that she had learned from Niav’s parents, even letting them take a try at scrying in the smooth stone water-bowl that was kept in pride of place on the dresser beside her little drum and the ritual rattle.
But Estra continued to be a real trial for Niav. She was convinced that there must be some sinister magical connection in the way that both their mothers, Seyth and Befind, had died in the clutches of the river and so, equally, this should make an important bond between the two of them. Niav found all this very upsetting. She wondered if her own nagging worries about her parents’ deaths would seem equally crazy if she were to talk about it in public. She certainly didn’t feel ready to haul everything out in the open for a loud-mouthed idiot like Estra to pull to bits and put together again, almost certainly all wrong.
In the end she decided to try to see if anyone besides Estra felt poor Seyth’s death was anything other than a dreadful accident. It was the least she could do before dismissing Estra as annoyingly cracked in the skull. Since Estra, whether she liked it or not, was her cousin, she thought it only fair to ask people on both sides of the river what they thought.
She spoke to women rather than men because she didn’t think it was the sort of thing men would feel they should be concerned about. Everyone seemed sincerely touched that young Niav was taking such a charming concern in her cousin Estra’s tragic past. Niav felt almost ashamed.
The house-proud ladies on the eastern bank saw Estra’s mother, the Lady Seyth, as an amazingly beautiful wise-woman, and they had almost woven her tragic ending into a romantic legend. As they saw it, Master Lurgan, the son of their wise-woman (Niav’s grandmother) had gone off into the West on an “axe-quest” — something that devout young men did not do enough these days. He had returned to his mother’s deathbed to bring a polished axe of superb quality, to everyone’s universal approval. To all of them, it made some recompense (with respect) for the distress that they had all felt when his sister, Mistress Befind (Niav’s poor mother), had chosen to disregard her birthright and throw in her lot with a weaver on the other side of the river.
Shortly after this — and even better — Lady Seyth, who had encountered Lurgan while on his questing, had fallen so deeply in love with him that she had deserted her own people and gone in search of him, bearing their new-born child. Such a beautiful thing — and they had all had every hope that she would be their new Lady.
This failed so completely to fit in with Niav’s vision of Uncle Lurgan that she could barely keep a straight face. Besides, what about poor Aunt Helygen — where did she fit in? But for the eastbankers, Helygen was not part of the story — everyone moved on to the terrible tragedy of the drowning. They were all sure that poor Lady Seyth, a stranger to their river, had simply misread the currents on a stormy day — and nothing more.
Attitudes on the west bank were very different. There, it seemed to be generally felt that her uncle, Lurgan — who, if she didn’t mind them saying so, was somewhat given to religious extremes — had taken it into his head to go off on the weirdly outdated custom of an “axe-quest”, leaving his intended bride, poor Aunt Helygen and his terminally ill mother to wait for his return.
He had no sooner arrived home, to bore them all to death with the stories of questing, than a most unattractive and self-opinionated young woman calling herself Lady Seyth had arrived, in one of those unwieldy dug-out canoes with a baby girl that she claimed to be Lurgan’s (though it looked nothing like him or any other members of his family). Lurgan had actually seemed on the verge of setting Helygen aside, when one torrential afternoon, the fool of a wise-woman refused to listen to everyone’s advice not to attempt a crossing, misjudged the river currents, and, very sadly, drowned.
Bemused, Niav finally sought Aunty Grizzel’s casting view on the matter; she was particularly condemnatory. “Dreadful woman! She would spout esoteric moonshine at you by the hour, but Lurgan was convinced she was a ‘great mind’. Your granny would have died laughing if she hadn’t already been dead. Poor Helygen, to be subjected to all that; she is such a brilliant herbalist and a really caring soul — not that I need to tell you.”
“But where was Estra? Why wasn’t she drowned too?”
“That is the appalling thing! That bitch, Seyth, had left Estra for Helygen to look after, as though she was her minion, while she swanned over here to get some unnecessary fiddle-faddle for her “work’. Poor young Estra, I am afraid, shows every sign of becoming another exhibitionist like her mother. Clear your mind of it. Nothing or nobody murdered Seyth — it was just an accident.”
Totally deflated, after all her busy questionings, Niav wondered if, equally, maybe, nobody had murdered her parents either.
But then how was it that Artin the Magician had re-emerged, and such a long time later, when you would think that a cripple like him should have been sucked into the stormy seas beside them? No wonder people wondered if he wasn’t some sort of godling. And why had Fearn’s mother died suddenly like that? And, particularly … why was it that Grizzel did not seem, any longer, concerned to know?
So, in spite of her own worried imaginings, Niav concentrated on trying not to lose her temper with Estra. She tried to feel sorry for her, because Aunty Grizzel clearly did, and Aunty Grizzel was not a one to suffer fools gladly. But she couldn’t come to terms with the way that Estra obsessed so about what she seemed to consider were their exclusive rights to magical power.
To Niav, if, as a result of her family background, she ended up more able to help other people stay lucky and well, that was a gift she was happy and honoured to share. But if it came to some inbred right to dominate people and the forces of nature, just because you could, that was where Niav, very firmly, drew her line in the sand.
But Estra’s next, worrying, foray into the worlds of imagination concerned the sacred “barra” or wand of power. Obviously every self-respecting wise woman would be expected to have one.
“We have to have barras!” Estra solemnly announced one afternoon as the three girls were busily engaged in collecting the latest harvest of wool that the sheep regularly rid themselves of in the thorny field hedges. “We have a great heritage, you and I, Niav, a mystic bond, I sense it! This river — it’s malevolent. It wants to steal our powers! We have to join forces to face the river out. I know we can do it!”
“I think you have to wait for your barra to find you,” countered Niav nervously, plucking out of the air a vague memory of something Aunt Grizzel had once mentioned. She had the greatest respect for the raging majesty of their river, but she doubted that it would waste its time on the rantings of two little girls.
Where on earth had this latest notion come from? Some puzzled questioning finally made Niav suspect that someone had mentioned to Estra that both her own mother, Seyth, and Niav’s mother, Befind, would have had their barra with them when they died.
Somehow Estra had turned this obvious fact into a cosmic conspiracy, and Niav noted to herself that their
