Fool's Assassin - Страница 49

I think my father suspected how I spent my time. When my mother told him of my desire, he bought me not just the spinning top but a jumping jack, a little tumbler fastened to two sticks with a twist of string suspending him. Of an evening, when I would sit by the hearth and play with those simple toys, he would watch me from lowered eyes. I felt in his gaze the same hunger I felt when I watched the other children play.

I felt I stole from them when I spied on them. And they felt the same, for whenever they discovered me watching them, they would drive me away with their shouts and name-calling. Taffy was the only one who dared pelt me with pinecones and acorns, but the others shouted and cheered when he hit me. My silence and timidity made them bold in their attacks.

Such a mistake. Or not. When I could not join them, I followed, and played where they had played after they had left. There was a place by a creek where slender willows grew thick. In early spring they wove the little trees together, and by summer the trees had grown into a shady arch of leafy branches. It became their playhouse, where they brought bread and butter from the kitchen and ate it on plates of big leaves. Their cups were leaves, too, spindled to hold a bit of water from the stream. And Taffy was Lord Taffy there, and the girls were ladies with necklaces of golden dandelions and white daisies.

How I longed to join them at that game! I had thought that a lacy pink dress might win me admittance to their circle. It had not. So that day I followed them stealthily and I waited until they were called away to their chores before I ventured in. I sat on their mounded moss chairs. I fanned myself with a fan of fern fronds that Elm had made and left there. They had built a little bed of pine boughs in the corner, and on a warm and sunny day I lay down upon it. The sun beat down but the bent branches of the shelter let in only a dappling of it. I closed my eyes and watched the light on my eyelids and smelled the fragrance of the broken boughs and sweet smell of the earth itself. I must have dozed. When I opened my eyes, it was too late. All three of them stood in the entrance, looking down at me. I sat up slowly. Against the sunshine outside, they were silhouettes. I tried to find a smile and could not. I sat very still, looking up at them. Then, as if the sun had come out from behind clouds, I remembered this day. I had dreamed it, and all of the many paths that could diverge from it. I could not remember when I had dreamed it, and then it seemed that perhaps it was a dream I was going to have. Or a dream of … something. A dream of a crossroads, a place not of two roads intersecting but of thousands. I folded my legs under me and stood up slowly.

I could not see the children for the overlay of dreams and shadows around them. I tried to study the myriad paths. One, I felt, led to something I desperately wanted. But which one? What must I do to put my feet on that path? If I went along another path, I died. There, they mocked me. There, my mother came running when I screamed. And there …

I could not make it happen. I had to allow it. I had to let the path form around me from the words I tried to say and the taunts they flung at me. The moment came when I could have fled but I was both too afraid to move and aware that only this path led to where I longed to go. The girls held me, their fingers biting into my thin wrists until the flesh stood up in ridges that were red, and then white. They shook me, and my head snapped back and forth on my neck, so hard that I saw flashes of light behind my eyes. I tried to speak, and it came out as gobbling. They shrieked with laughter, and gobbled back at me. Tears sprang into my eyes.

“Do it again, Bee-ee. Make the turkey noise.” Taffy stood over me, so tall he had to crouch inside the bower. I looked up at him and shook my head.

Then Taffy slapped me. Hard. Once and it rocked my head one direction, and then again almost instantly, from the other side, and I knew this was how his mother slapped him sometimes, rocking his head back and forth so that his ears rang. When the blood flooded salt into my mouth, I knew it was done. I was on the path. And now it was time to twist free of them and run, run, run, because from that point there were so many paths that led to my lying on the earth, broken in ways that could never be mended. And so I snapped my wrists from their grips and pushed through the willow trunks and out through a gap none of them could negotiate. I fled, not toward the manor, but into the wild part of the woods. In a moment they were after me. They chased me, but a small person can run doubled over and use the trails made by rabbits and foxes. And when the trail led into a thick and prickly bramble, I went where they were far too large to follow me without tearing their clothes and skin.

In the middle of a briar patch, I found a hollow, a place where soft grass grew and the brambles shielded me all around. I hunkered down in it and froze there, shaking with fright and pain. I’d done it, but oh, the cost. I heard them shouting and beating the edges of the bramble with branches. As if I would be foolish enough to leave its shelter! They called me vile names but could not see me, nor tell for certain that I still hid there. I made no sound as I opened my mouth and tipped my face down to let the blood run out. Something in my mouth had torn, a piece that went from the underside of my tongue to the bottom of my mouth. It hurt. It bled a lot.

Later, when they were gone, and I tried to spit out the blood, it hurt even more. My tongue moved in my mouth now, flapping like a piece of leather on an old shoe. When the afternoon was ending and the shadows deepening, I crawled out of my briar bower. I went back to the manor by a long and winding way. I stopped at the creek and washed the blood from my mouth. When I went in to the evening meal, both my parents were horrified at the spreading blue bruises on my cheeks and my blackened left eye. My mother asked me how it had happened, but I only shook my head and did not even try to speak. I ate little. My free-flopping tongue got in the way. Twice I bit myself before I gave up and sat staring at the food I longed for. For the next five days, it was hard to eat, and my tongue felt like a strange object that flapped in my mouth.

And yet, and yet, it was the path I had chosen. And when the pain lessened, I was shocked at how freely I could move my tongue. Alone in my room, after my mother thought me asleep, I practiced my words aloud. The sounds that had eluded me before, the sudden starts and sharp endings of words, I now could make. I still did not converse, but now it was because I chose not to, not because I could not. To my mother, I began to speak more clearly, but only in a very soft voice. Why? Because I feared the change I had wrought in myself. Already my father looked at me differently since he had seen I could hold a pen. And dimly I knew that the girls had dared to attack me because I had worn the pink dress that declared a status higher than theirs, one they felt I did not deserve. If I began to speak, would all the servants retreat from me, kindly Cook Nutmeg and our grave steward? I feared that speech would only make me more of a pariah than I already was. I longed so for companionship of some kind. It was to be my downfall.

I should have learned my lesson from what had befallen me. I did not. I was lonely, and the lonely heart has hungers that can overpower both common sense and dignity. Summer advanced, my mouth healed, and I began again to spy on the other children. At first I kept my distance, but it was too frustrating to view them from afar where I could not hear what they said or see what they did. So I learned to go ahead of them and shinny up a tree to look down on their games. I thought myself very clever.

It had to end badly, and it did. That day is as vivid as a dream to me still. They had caught me watching them when I sneezed. For a time they had me treed, and I was fortunate that acorns and pinecones were the best ammunition that Taffy could find. At last I thought of climbing higher up the tree, out of his range. But a tree slender enough for a small child to shinny up is thin enough for three hearty children to shake. For a time I rode the whipping top, and then I fell, flung in a wide arc to land flat on my back. Airless and stunned, I lay helpless. They were silenced and awestruck as they crept up on me.

“Did we kill her?” Elm asked. I heard Lea suck in a terrified breath and then Taffy shouted boldly, “Let’s be sure of it, then!”

That brought me out of my daze. I staggered to my feet and ran. They stared after me, and I thought they would let me go. Then, with a roar from Taffy of “Get her!” they came after me, as eager as rabbit-hounds on a trail. My legs were short, my fall had dazed me, and they came close behind me, yammering and shrieking. I ran blindly, my head down, my hands clasped over it to shield myself from the rocks that Taffy scooped up and flung with ever-increasing accuracy. I did not plan to flee toward the lambing shelter. I ran silent as a hare, but when a large body suddenly stepped in front of me and snatched me up high, I shrieked as if I were being killed.

“Quiet, girl!” Lin the shepherd barked at me. As quickly as he’d picked me up, he dropped me, and his dog came up to block my pursuers as Lin turned on them. They had been close on my heels; if he had not been there, they would have caught me that day, and I still wonder if they would have left me alive.

Lin seized Taffy by the back of his collar and swung him up, one-handed, while delivering such a powerful smack to his bottom with his free hand that Taffy’s whole body arched to the blow. Lin dropped him and spun on the little girls. They had not been as close, and they nearly managed to get away, but Lin caught one by the pigtail and the other by the edge of her skirts. Both crumpled before his wrath, as he demanded of them, “What be you doing, chasing a tiny child, you great bullies? Shall I teach you what it is to have someone larger than you give you a thrashing?”