'Please, my lady...' I shouldn't have argued, Mistress would've scolded, but better to be scolded than hanged on the city's south wall. In the city, I learned that's where they execute those whose crimes are so rotten they'd have no hope of ascending into the Ancestors' Realm. The south wall. The wall farthest from the Sacred Mountain.
My lady offered me her hand. How perfect her hands are! I've never seen skin like hers, so soft, no rough spots on her fingertips, her palms like the underside of calf leather. She'll be made to touch nothing harder than water, so I swore by the eight Ancestors and the Eternal Blue Sky. And if what she commands leads my head into a neck rope, then so be my lady's will.
I spoke a prayer in my heart--
Pardon me, Nibus, god of order.
She sat on my mattress while I lodged the wooden spoon beneath the flap.
'I'm here,' I said. I could see his boot in the puddle of moonlight. It was brown leather, double stitched. It would take a mucker a week to make one of those boots.
'I didn't wake you?' he asked. 'Oh, no, I never sleep...' I was going to say that I never sleep until my lady does, but I stopped myself. 'You never sleep?'
'No, yes, I do, I just, I mean...' I don't know how to lie to gentry.
'That's a shame. I'll say some prayers for you to Goda, goddess of sleep.'
His voice went dry. I knew he was teasing me, so I said, 'And I'll pray for you to Carthen, goddess of strength.
Your ankles look too skinny to carry you.' They didn't, of course, but accusing one of having skinny ankles is a friendly insult among muckers, and it felt so natural to say.
I could hear the smile in his voice when he said, 'I'll wager it'd take three of your ankles to make one of mine.'
'Not a chance,' I said. 'I have sturdy ankles, strong as tree trunks.' 'Show me, then.'
So I did. I was wearing a pair of my lady's older slippers, the kind with the toe curled up prettily, so I was proud to let him see my foot when I lowered my right leg through the flap down to my knee. I could feel her khan press his own leg against mine, measuring our ankles together.
'Hmm,' he said, 'I hate to contradict, my lady, but I think my ankle puts yours to shame.'
'Not a chance. And it's not a fair comparison, as you're wearing boots.' I was giggling. I couldn't help it, it was so ridiculous, my leg down the dump hole to prove I had sturdy ankles, her khan measuring them, and my lady surely wondering if we're insane. And then when I tried to lift my leg back up, I got stuck, and I felt his hands unhook the tip of my slipper from a metal catch and help raise my leg. He was chuckling by now, too.
'Oh! I brought you a gift.'
He lifted something. He used both hands as one does to show deep respect. I thought how he must have had to kneel on the ground to do so. I thought how no one had ever offered me something with both hands before.
It was a pine bough. I reached down and took it. His hands were cold and rough, and I wished I'd had gloves to give him. I thought to hold his hand and sing the song for warmth, but that wouldn't do at all, a mucker holding gentry's hand, and him thinking me his betrothed lady. Not at all.
'You asked for a flower,' he said, 'but in autumn there's little to choose from. Besides, I think pine boughs smell better, don't you?'
I smelled it like I was starving and the odor alone would fill up my belly. My head got dizzy with memories of Mama and being cold and cozy.
'It smells like the winter nap,' I said, longing for some truth to tell. 'Midwinter every year, my mother would decorate our... our home with pine boughs, cracking the needles to get the richest smell, then we'd curl up in blankets and take our winter nap, five days of no food but milk, sleeping on and off all day and night, like the burrowing animals do.'
'That sounds strange and lovely and wearying, too. Is winter nap a common custom in Titor's Garden?'
'Common enough.' I didn't say that it's common for muckers. We do it as a prayer to Vera, goddess of food, to help us through another year, and we do it because at midwinter there's not much food for the having anyway. I don't suppose my lady needed a winter nap, with her honored father's cellars full of grain.
'In Song for Evela, our midwinter rite is just the opposite. All folk come together under my roof and eat and eat and eat. Enough cakes, apples, mutton, and raisin rice to last a year! Sometimes it feels good to feast until it hurts.'
'You feast with muckers, even?'
'What are muckers?'
'The folk that live on the grassy steppes in ghers--those are felt tents they make themselves.'
'Are they herding folk?'
'That's right. The steppes of Titor's Garden are too hard for farming, rocky and windy and rough. Muckers do work when work is sent out from the city folk, and the rest of the time they travel with the seasons, herding sheep, horses, reindeer, yaks.'
'May I say something? Will you be offended?'
'No...,' I said, though I was thinking, He knows I'm a mucker!
But then he said, 'Your hand, when you took my pine bough, I saw--your hand is beautiful.'
I tucked my hands under my arms and looked at my lady. She was staring at her own hands and frowning. All
