She motioned to the table, and Kate sat, watching her as she busied herself at a cupboard by the front door. She brought over the chipped pitcher and Kate saw now it was full of water. Kate fidgeted at the table, wondering how Susan would know where to come. What if she walked the other way into the woods? What if, even now, she was circling, calling for them?
“Mistress Laysia?”
The woman looked up, the last of the smile still on her face. “Laysia,” she said. “Only. I’m no teacher.”
Kate thought that a strange thing to say for someone with so many books. But adults were often strange.
“I can’t stay here. Susan will be looking for us. I need to get back to the top of the hill.”
Laysia set a mug and a plate in front of her.
“Rest easy. I’ll know if someone comes up through the mist. The sound of it changes. If I hear that, we’ll go.”
“Hear it? But we’re so far!”
The sad smile replaced the easy one. “If the mist has come for you, its voice lingers. Perhaps your sister will hear it when she wakes.”
Kate said nothing. She was keenly aware of being behind, too slow to catch what others did. Maybe this was like that. She’d have to wait for Nell, now, to tell her what it all meant. She hated to, for two reasons — first, because Nell despised the job, and second, because she’d never let her forget it. Nell, even more than Susan, liked to remind Kate that she was younger and would never catch up. Every year older Kate got, Nell got, too — evidence, her mother had once confirmed, that the universe was not fair. She lived with it, but she didn’t like it. Thinking that way sent a pang of guilt through her, and she looked furtively at the door behind which Nell slept.
“She’ll be okay now, right?” she asked the woman.
Laysia nodded. She lifted the cloth off one of the covered dishes, sending a whiff of fresh bread into the air. Beside it she placed a plate of mild-smelling cheese.
“Soon she’ll be thanking you for bringing her.”
Kate doubted that.
“Is that what happened to you?” she asked, hoping to change the subject. “Someone pulled you away from it?”
The woman shook her head.
“Didn’t you have any family, to come for you?” Kate asked.
At this, Laysia winced, and Kate flushed. Nell had once complained that she asked stupid questions, and too many of them. Now she kicked herself inside, thinking this must have been the stupidest of all. But after a moment, Laysia said. “I had family. A brother. But he couldn’t come.”
Kate thought of Max. She couldn’t help herself.
“Why not?”
Laysia leaned back in her chair. “That’s a story. A long one.”
But Kate was familiar with stories, and she knew a statement like that was as much a beginning as Once upon a time.
She did not like to tell the child unhappy stories, but this was one who had climbed through the mist and seen her sister nearly taken. This was the child who had walked in dreams. Still, grief clung to the words and made it hard to begin. Laysia glanced at the worn books and wished one of them could speak for her. But the stories in them belonged to the ancients, and this one, this small private tale of anguish and loss, had no place there. What mattered one exile, one woman alone? The visions of the orchard had been gifts of the infinite mind, the pattern maker. Even if born in bitterness, they were grand enough to reach through time. She had only herself — a voice unused to speech, and words unpolished and workmanlike, too narrow to fit the tale. Yet she had been asked, and the small one waited in silence, in this place where silence had gathered too long. So she began.
It was my brother who saved me first,” the woman said, and Kate thought again of Max. “Like many others, I was unwanted, a girl child born unexpected, when only a boy would serve. They were farmers, my parents, and needed strong arms and a broad back, if they needed a second mouth to feed at all. Of course, I know this only from my brother, who told me later. I begged him so often for details of them, the memories almost seem my own, but they’re not.”
The woman laughed at herself. She had taken a seat at the table and was running her hands over a section where the good, dark, varnished wood had dulled. Kate wondered how many hours the woman had sat here, rubbing her fingers in that single spot.
“My brother was already half grown when I was born, and he was a great one for hearing things and spying them out. He heard my parents talk of putting me away. Do they still call it that, in the villages? I always thought it strange, as if a child is a thing to lock in a cupboard or set out in the woods with the trash.”
She looked up at Kate, who could only shrug, and quickly looked away again. “Maybe they have different words for it now. But at any rate, he heard, and heard, too, word of the hooded ones, though these were just market tales. He thought to find one or, failing that, to raise me on his own in the ruins. He might have done it, too, he was so stubborn.”
She laughed again, but a little dread crept into Kate, listening to the story. She had a feeling she knew what was coming. At home, she never liked stories like this, where the good people didn’t make it to the end. She didn’t even like to read about all
