The next morning, after finishing her chores as quickly as she could, Nora went back to the village, a little reluctantly. She was feeling a kind of stage fright—terror that she would forget how to do the spell. But that wouldn’t really matter, she reasoned, because Morinen was probably wrong and no one would be interested in having her mend their broken dishes.
“People always want to see magic!” scoffed some brash interior carny that, until then, Nora had not known she carried with her. Strangely enough, it sounded a bit like Aruendiel.
When she entered Morinen’s hut, pushing aside the sheepskin that hung inside the door, she saw that Morinen was not there. But Morinen’s mother and two of her brothers—one sharpening a scythe, the other fitting a new wooden handle to a mallet—looked up as though they had been expecting her.
“Mori said for you to meet her at Caddo’s,” said Resk, the one with the mallet.
“All right,” Nora said, trying to remember which house was Caddo’s. “That’s on the other side of the village, right? Next to the river?”
“I’ll take you,” the other brother, Posin, said. “Mori said I wouldn’t want to miss this.”
When they reached Caddo’s hut, Morinen was waiting inside with Caddo—Big Faris’s wife, Nora remembered now, who kept bees—and almost a dozen other women. There was a large basket of broken crockery by Morinen’s feet.
“Morinen, did you tell everyone in the village about this?” Nora asked in an undertone.
“Oh, yes,” Morinen said. “It’s not as though you could keep it secret, anyhow. Here’s Caddo’s pots—we dug them out of her rubbish heap this morning. I reckon there must be five years’ worth of broken dishes here.”
“You’re not kidding,” Nora said, nudging the basket with her toe. She felt the leather of her boot pulling away from the sole, and the sensation steeled her resolve. She knelt beside the basket and rummaged through the contents, looking for pieces that might have come from the same dish. Caddo came forward to help her. By the end of ten minutes, they had what appeared to be the pieces of four separate dishes and a pile of unidentified shards.
With her hands on the broken pottery, Nora began to feel more confident. She picked up two curved fragments from the largest pile, both with the same reddish-brown glaze, and touched them together experimentally. The shards grated roughly against each other. Wait, she corrected herself, reaching into the pile again,
It turned out to be a pitcher with an old man’s face molded into its round belly. “Here you go,” Nora said, handing it to Caddo, who looked both gratified and suspicious. She turned the pitcher over and over, looking for flaws. “Go ahead, fill it with water if you want,” Nora urged. She turned her attention to the other piles of broken crockery. A bowl. Another bowl. A platter, painted with an intricate design of radishes and carrots. She was conscious, as she fit the fragments together, that the finished dishes were being passed around the room with whispers.
Then the pile of miscellaneous fragments. It was much harder to reconstitute an entire pot from a single shard. You had to summon the missing pieces from wherever they were, if they were even still in existence, or re-create them if they were not. You really needed the clay’s cooperation here, and some fragments were more apathetic than others. If it had been a very long time since the original pot was broken, the piece might have almost forgotten that it was once part of a shaped and greater whole. Aruendiel could reliably bring back an old pot from a fragment as small as a fingernail, but Nora’s success rate was perhaps one in three.
So this was good practice. By the time she had gone through the entire pile, she estimated that she had raised her rate to almost one in two, and Caddo was back in possession of another bowl, some roughly formed mugs, and a chamber pot with a sententious motto painted around the rim. (“Foul are my contents but sweeter than filth from the mouth.”)
“All right,” Nora said finally. “I think I’ve done all that I can do.” She stood up and looked questioningly at Morinen: What now?
Morinen had evidently prepped Caddo, who glanced shrewdly one more time at the newly mended dishes and then produced a small flagon of honey wine and three beeswax candles. After a second’s hesitation, she also handed Nora one of the reconstituted pitchers. “I thank you, most excellent lady, for this favor you have shown me,” Caddo said, with a curtsy, “and I beg you to accept an unworthy gift in return.”
“Your gifts far outshine my humble offering, Faris’s most excellent wife, and I thank you for your generosity,” Nora said, returning the curtsy. She was fairly sure that she had gotten the formula right—she had heard Mrs. Toristel go through the same ritual exchange when bartering with one of the villagers. Even so, the others in the room, even the little boys who had crowded in, seemed to be amused.
She got the same reaction—someone even tittered—at the next hut, when Morinen’s aunt Narl gave her a skein of crimson yarn for mending a couple of plates and an oil lamp. “Did I say something wrong?” she murmered to Morinen as they left.
“No, no, what do you mean? You’re doing fine,” Morinen said. “Aunt Narl was a little cheap, though. She could have done better than that yarn.”
“I don’t mind giving your family a discount.”
“Not so loud—the whole village is family. Now, Pelinen’s next. She’ll probably have some cheese for you. We should start doing a little trading, or you’ll never be able to carry all this stuff.”
“Trading?” Nora asked. “What should I—”
“Leave it to me.”
Pelinen was a square-faced widow of forty who owned the village’s two best dairy cows. After Nora mended a cracked pickle crock, a chamber pot, and—a new challenge—a small square of looking glass, Morinen drew Pelinen into a muttered side consultation. Nora could not hear the details of the discussion, but she got the sense that both parties were volleying back and forth with practiced ease. A few minutes later she and Morinen left without the beeswax candles and yarn, but with half a wheel of cheese that they had to trundle between the two of them, since even Morinen was not strong enough to carry it by herself.
At the tanner’s, the cheese and the honey wine and a half-dozen mended dishes turned into two goatskins. At Trouteye’s, the rubbish heap had been excavated down to bare earth in Nora’s honor; she spent more than an hour mending pots for him and his wife and left with a side of bacon. Lus had only a few items to be repaired, but he took the bacon in exchange for a cask of ale. At their next stop, as Nora mended dishes, the ale and one of the goatskins became a woolen blanket; at the hut belonging to Morinen’s cousin Porlus, the other goatskin became an iron skillet.
There was an unusual amount of joviality accompanying each of these transactions, it seemed to Nora. Sometimes people would glance at her worn boots and laugh. It took her a while to realize, from snippets of overheard conversations, that they were not laughing at her, but Aruendiel. Morinen had evidently told all—how Aruendiel had refused to buy new boots for her and how the cobbler was charging her at least double the usual price.
Further, Nora gleaned, one of the accused on trial before his lordship in Stone Top at this moment was a boy of nineteen from the village, known as Ferret—Morinen’s second cousin. Ferret was probably destined for the gallows anyway, everyone said, but most believed him innocent of the crime that he was accused of, beating and robbing an elderly peasant of his horse. The judges were likely to sentence him to hang.
“So everyone’s helping me because they’re angry at Aruendiel?” Nora asked Morinen, as they went from one hut to another.
“No, I wouldn’t say angry, not at all.” Morinen glanced around with a trace of uneasiness. “They just think it’s funny, you having to buy your own boots. And they do like having their dishes fixed.”
By this time, the light was fading. Nora had mended at least three dozen dishes and cooking vessels, two mirrors, four glass bottles, and two small clay figures of a rabbit-headed gnome with an oversized phallus. (“That’s Gingornl,” Morinen said matter-of-factly. “He brings children. Folks keep him in the bed with them, so he’s always getting broken.”) Nora was not tired at all—the opposite, in fact—but she was beginning to think that her brain would explode into tiny shards from working an unceasing succession of three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles.
“So what have we collected?” Nora asked Morinen.
“A skillet, three sheepskins, a goatskin, a kerchief, a flask of blackberry cordial, a dozen sausages, three
