58. Girl

After breakfast the next morning, as we met Cian by the stables, without his robes, dressed much like my husband but in browns, he showed the slightest irritation at seeing Alric but masked it before I think Alric noticed.

Alric spoke to a stable boy about Maggie as I greeted Cian good morning and said, “My husband worries about my spending my energy.

May he accompany us?”

Cian agreed, solicitously and then began to chat with my husband as we made our way down to the city, Cian on his usual white mount and Alric and I on Maggie.

Alric had again chosen to sit behind me on her and I let myself relax against him.

The two men spoke about some lord overtaxing his sharecroppers.

Alric, having heard the king’s chamber session’s outcome via Jeremanthy, agreed with Cian that while it was a local issue, it could lead to a countrywide trend and Hinnom had been right to intervene.

I thought that while Hinnom was most definitely insane, he had a certain talent for kingship.

They may be savages in many ways, but I was impressed by the way Tintar was ruled.

When we reached the farm in question, fields of melons, chard, cabbage and squash spread out before us behind wooden fences.

We dismounted, tied up the horses and met with a rather suspicious farmer and his adult son who led us to a field plowed but without a crop.

It was bordered by a small pear orchard that looked as if it fed their family and was not grown to sell.

We stood in the orchard.

I was close to Alric who, as he often did, had his hands on his hips, standing just behind me.

The smell of the orchard was heady, decadent.

The pears had mostly been picked and the white blossoms were decaying and floating down from the branches as they died.

For a moment, the knowledge of his closeness and the essence of the fruit and flowers in my nose aroused me.

I imagined laying down with him in the grass beneath our feet and letting him lazily fuck me, my hair loose and spread out beneath my head, pale petals dancing around our nakedness.

Would he say my name, the name only he called me? Edith.

I hated when men blamed women’s behavior on their courses, but I put a fisted hand to my mouth and bit down on the forefinger knuckle of my right hand, trying to shake off the ripe pinkness rising over my breasts and neck.

It must be my courses, my blood going hot knowing it would be bled soon.

I was going mad.

I needed to visit Gareth’s bath tonight and in privacy, pleasure myself and rid my body of this urge.

“Edie,”

Cian began, after speaking with the two farmers.

“Could you walk to the center and pray? Bleed, of course.”

I undid the leather covering of the axe’s pointed end to free it to swipe my palm on it.

I had sat it across the saddle in front of me as I did not want it to jab Alric in the leg.

It hung now, back along my right thigh.

Without looking at any of them, I stepped out from under one of the pear trees and chose one of the hollows of the plowed field in the center and walked farther and farther towards the middle.

I had worn my Tintarian black cotton dress.

I liked the celadon so much that I had asked Cian to tell me in advance of when we went to farms so I could wear the black dress which absorbed the work we did much better.

I sank onto my knees, resting my rear end on my heels.

I pricked my right palm on the sagaris, the pain now ritual for me, the cuts only delivering drops.

I pressed both palms into the dirt at my knees.

“Good day, goddess,”

I began.

“I have decided to continue to be truthful in my prayers to you.

I do like you, but I am frustrated.

I would like to know, if you don’t mind, today.

If I have no magic, I will serve you in scribing.

If I do, please, please tell me.

This one-sided game with you is tiring.”

Nothing happened.

I sighed and continued.

“Alright, here is my hope.

I am asking you for some kind of certainty.

My parents were never happy with me.

I married the first pretty boy to compliment me and he happened to be of noble blood.

Then I could not give him an heir and that made our life a misery.

I ran away.

Then I made a happy life for myself and that life, after ten winters, was taken from me by invading Tintarians and one of them is now my husband.

And as he was made to marry me, we are no love match.

But I, in my endless capacity for stupidity have now decided that I admire him, respect him, even like him and that I want him to swive me.

In that nearby pear orchard, in fact.

But he does not see me the same way.

Do you see what I mean when I say certainty? Please, goddess, give me something to hold onto.”

She remained intangible.

I reached up with my left hand to clasp at the chain and stone around my neck, keeping my right, bleeding hand on the ground.

I looked around.

What was this field? I could see no discernible previous use for it.

It seemed like fresh dirt, if a bit rocky, but I was still educating myself on cultivated lands and their regions, seasons and soils.

I placed my left hand on the ground again and said to Mother Earth, “I want to go home and bathe and pleasure myself.

I have been studying all the writing about you.

I have bled into you.

I have prayed.

I have tried.

I have cried.

Please show me what Cian says he can see in me.”

The sun was rising, beating down on the back of my neck.

There was no wind.

The day was still and sticky.

Birdsong and bees’ buzzing was all I could hear.

I leaned forward on my knees, growling with resentment and smacked my palms against the ground.

“Oh, come on, you bloody hag!”

From far off, I thought I heard a cackle in the distance and then right at the shell of my left ear, a crone’s croak said, so be it, girl.

And the earth beneath me shook.

It quaked and rippled, the piled dirt sitting atop the plowed rows tumbling from its arrangement.

The vibrations caused me to fall back on my heels, my fingers grasping into the dirt for purchase.

Stones shot out of the ground around me and throughout the field, my eyes only catching a glimpse of those farther away.

They were mostly pebble-sized but some were as big as chicken eggs, a few even as big as an apple.

They all hovered in the air for a breath, almost motionless, as if time stopped, and then they dropped back down on the surface of the field with a chorus of dull thuds.

And the earth stilled and I regained my balance.