skeins of yarn, and a bag of dried peas,” Morinen said with satisfaction.
“And the stockings that Fori gave me. Do you think that’s enough for my boots?”
“I think so. Let’s go over to Bitar’s now; he might give us some cash for this lot.”
Bitar’s small, cluttered hut was the village’s closest equivalent to a general store. He bartered for goods in the markets in Red Gate and Stone Top, then traded them to the villagers for a premium, and was rumored to have a box of gold beetles buried under his hearth. Mrs. Toristel said that she would never eat anything that came out of Bitar’s hut, but she sometimes went to him for small oddments like needles or string if she had no time to go to Red Gate on market day.
Bitar greeted them by complaining that they had ruined his business in dishes for the next six months. “No one wants to buy your bowls anyway, they’re much too expensive,” Morinen retorted. “But this is your lucky day, Bitar. Look at all the lovely things that Mistress Nora and I have to sell to you. Didn’t Porsn do a nice job of tanning these hides? We have some of Blue Dove’s blackberry wine, and this skillet, very clean, no rust on it anywhere, not like that iron pot you sold my ma last year.”
“She got a good price on that pot, I don’t know what you’re complaining about.” Bitar pointed out the dent in the skillet and the stain on one of the sheepskins. He and Morinen haggled for a few minutes until he finally agreed to pay them three silver beads for the lot, except for the sausages and the yarn. “I couldn’t give those away,” he said, scratching his chin. “Not this time of year, with everyone killing pigs. And I’ve got bags of yarn already. What would I be wanting more for, especially this coarse stuff?”
“You don’t know good wool when you see it,” Morinen grumbled, watching as Bitar fished a leather purse from somewhere in the region of his crotch and then slowly counted out three beads. They were black with tarnish. Morinen polished them on her apron until she was satisfied that they were real silver.
“He robbed us—we could have gotten twice that in Red Gate,” she said to Nora as they went outside. “’Course, it would have taken us all day to get there and back.”
“And it’s snowing now, too,” Nora said, turning her face away from the wind. “You did a fantastic job, Morinen, not just with Bitar but with all those people. Three silver beads is better than I expected. I couldn’t have done it alone—I wouldn’t have known what all those things were worth, let alone how to bargain for them.”
Morinen smiled, her eyes squeezed tight against the blowing snow. “I used to go to Red Gate with my pa to sell kids and lambs when I was little—now, that’s some hard bargaining. This was easy. And living in the village, you know who needs what and what they’ll give for it.”
“Well, here, you take the extra bead—you earned it. Take the sausages, too, and the yarn. No, I insist,” Nora said, as Morinen began to demur. “We have plenty of sausages, and if I take the wool back to the castle, Mrs. Toristel will just make me knit it into something.” Nora was thinking, too, that if she returned with sausages or yarn, Mrs. Toristel would want some explanation. Not that the day’s activities would remain secret for long—one of the villagers would be sure to spill the beans—but she wanted time to prepare her story.
On the way home, she stopped by the cobbler’s hut to order her new boots. He laughed when he saw her. “If I’d known you were so handy at fixing dishes,” he said, “I would have asked you to fix the bowl I threw at my wife the other night.”
“I’m done for the day,” Nora said.
Snow fell all night, a shadowy curtain blowing restlessly around the house, and continued into the next day. “Is it like this all winter?” Nora asked, staring out the window.
“This isn’t so bad,” Mrs. Toristel said, with a short, rueful laugh. “After the Null Days is the worst. We never had winters like this in Pelagnia, never, with the snow deep enough to bury a man. Although
The following day was clearer. Nora was trying to decide whether to chance walking to the cobbler’s in her old boots when Morinen’s brother Posin struggled up the hill with the new ones. Nora thanked him and brought him into the kitchen to warm up, where he filled Mrs. Toristel in on the latest news from the village.
The new boots fit perfectly—better, in fact, than any shoes that Nora had ever owned in her life. In her own world, she reflected, it would have taken a lot longer than a single day to earn enough money for a pair of custom-made shoes. After Posin’s departure, she hiked up her skirt to show them to Mrs. Toristel. The calfskin boots came up to her knee, high enough even for the snow that covered the ground now, and—pleasing her just as much—they had an interesting clunky, sexy look. She would have liked to wear them with tights and a miniskirt, although she did not mention this to the housekeeper.
“Cobbler does good work,” Mrs. Toristel allowed. “Mind, you polish them with tallow now, to keep the damp out.”
Nora went out late that afternoon to feed the animals, fearless of wet and cold. The leather boots gleamed in the lantern light; she enjoyed glimpsing her well-shod feet among the bustle of chickens demanding their dinner. At the kitchen door, she stopped and carefully wiped a crumb of dung off the top of her right boot.
“—two hours retrieving a fool who tried to make the pass at Witchneedle the night of the first storm.”
Aruendiel was back, still wearing his traveling cloak, a looming black pillar in the middle of the kitchen. His pale eyes flicked toward Nora and then back to Mrs. Toristel. “And then it was slow going to Red Gate,” he went on, “so I spent last night there.”
Mrs. Toristel reached for his cloak. “Any news from the inn, sir?”
“A lot of idiotic talk about the assizes. One of the drunkards presumed to tell me I should have hanged the lot. A shame that I cannot hang a man for stupidity.” Aruendiel glanced in Nora’s direction again, without acknowledging her. “Clousit from the village was there, too, with a most amusing story. I could hardly avoid it, since he shared it with the rest of the taproom. He said that he had encountered our own Mistress Nora in the village, casting spells to mend the peasants’ broken dishes.”
Mrs. Toristel, catching a sarcastic lilt in Aruendiel’s tone, folded the cloak over her arm and turned to look at Nora. “Yes, she mentioned that.”
“Did she mention that she went house to house, through the whole village, taking payment for repairing chamber pots and Gingornls’ cocks? She needed the money—so said Clousit—because his lordship refused to give her money for new boots. They had a good laugh over that at the Two Rams—at least, those who were too drunk to know I was in the room.”
Abruptly he turned to Nora. “Those are your famous new boots?”
“Yes,” she said, with a sinking feeling.
“You will take them off, and Mrs. Toristel will have them burned.”
“No!”
“Nora, is this all true?” Mrs. Toristel said, her thin face tightening.
After a moment, Nora nodded.
“Oh, dear, Nora.” Mrs. Toristel closed her eyes and looked faintly ill.
Nora tried to stay calm. “Yes, but I mended all kinds of dishes, not just chamber pots and whatsits. And yes, people paid me with cheeses and bacon and various things, and then I bartered them for cash, which I used to buy these boots. I’m sorry I let it slip that you wouldn’t pay for them—”
“I am not accustomed to hearing my financial matters being discussed in the public room of the Red Gate tavern.”
“I’m very sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything about that. But otherwise I don’t see what the problem is.”
“The problem?” Aruendiel smiled unpleasantly. “You have only made a public spectacle of yourself. You took the magic that I taught you and used it to cheat ignorant peasants.”
“I didn’t cheat them! I mended their pots, and they were happy to pay me. It was a fair trade.”
“Nevertheless, it was unseemly for you to charge them, and unseemly to put yourself on public display, to make yourself—and me—the object of village gossip.”
“As if you’re not already, come on,” Nora said, feeling the growing temblors of her own anger. “People in the village gossip about you, they gossip about me, they gossip about each other, they have nothing else to do.
