Author: MadMaxAU
Company: Self

SKY EYES
By Laurel Winter

* * * *

THE FIRST TIME I MET SKY Eyes, I thought she was blind. Her eyes were clouded white-blue, with no black circles in the middle, no white back ground. I thought she was blind, and then she looked at me and saw that I was seven years old and my mother was sick with something that ate her until her arms were brown sticks and my father wouldn’t admit it and I wanted everything to be back the way it was, but knew—even then—that it could never be that way again. 

I don’t know how I knew this, but I did. 

She also saw that I had been sent to her against my will to bring back some healing potion to cure my mother or, more likely, some soothing potion to help her die. This latter she gave me, a slender, black vial, accepting the single coin from my small, brown hand, but the knowledge in her cloudy eyes held me. She saw that we were just come to the village and not likely to move on. And she saw deeper — the strange patterns of thought in my child mind, that I had taken care to hide even from my mother. 

“Oh, Jamillah, the person you could be,” she said, touching my chin with a cool finger. “Are you brave enough? Are you cold enough?” 

I ran then, without words, but she didn’t seem to mind. “You’ll come back,” she called. 

Never, I told myself, frightened in a way that made my very bones quiver beneath my flesh. How had she known my name? I wanted to dash the vial of soothing potion against a rock, for I could feel peaceful death within it. I would have smashed it, too, but for the fact that I could also feel painful death whenever I touched my mother. Old knowledge, for a child of seven, that caught in my throat. Sometimes I didn’t speak for days. 

I was the one who fed my mother the potion, a drop at a time. The neck of the vial was just large enough to admit my smallest finger, let it emerge, glistening. Her lips held what smile they could as I touched the finger to her tongue. Then her eyes would glaze slightly, as the pain left her. And a bit of her life went, too. 

The vial didn’t last as long as she did. I couldn’t bear to give more than a single drop, couldn’t bear the sleep that so mimicked death when I gave her two drops in quick succession. She lingered and I was sent back to Sky Eyes with the empty vial. This time we hadn’t even a coin. 

People talked when they saw me slowly walking up the street with the black vial in my hands. People always talk as if children cannot hear, or, if they do hear, cannot understand. Since I hadn’t spoken for weeks now, and no one believed I would again, they didn’t even bother to lower their voices. 

“That poor, strange child.” 

“What her parents are thinking, sending her to that witch.... “ 

“Ah, but she’s a girl, so she should be safe. I don’t allow my son to even speak to that woman.” 

“What will happen to the child when the mother dies?” 

By then my cold feet had taken me to the door of Sky Eyes’s hut. The black, empty vial gleamed in my hand. Before I could knock on the rough wood the door opened to me. “Come in,” she said. “No need to stand in the cold — or listen to poisonous gossip.” This last she said clearly, in a voice that carried to at least three of the gossipers. They walked swiftly away whispering to each other. 

She led me in to the flickering warmth, but my shivers did not decrease. Her eyes were clear, pale blue — winter sky blue — without the clouds that had drifted through them before. I moved my mouth to ask why, but the sounds had forgotten how to come out. No matter; she knew my question. 

She gave the merest shrug. “No one knows, least of all I. Some say my mother spent too much time looking at the sky when she was carrying me inside, looking at the sky and wishing to be somewhere other than where she was. And then I was born and she was.” She paused for a bare moment and continued matter-of-factly. “My mother died when I was born. At least you’ve had yours for seven years.” 

I stared at her. No matter how many people whispered about my mother’s impending death behind my back, to my face it was always, “...when your mother gets better.... “ Even my father, when he sent me for this soothing, killing potion, sent me with lies about medicine to make her strong, make her well. But I knew, and so did my mother, and so did Sky Eyes. I gravely held out the vial. 

“Poor child,” she said, taking it in a small, neat hand. “You couldn’t bear to end it quickly, could you?” 

Pain filled me. 

“The best thing is usually the hard thing,” she said. She went to a stained wooden table and anchored the vial in a lump of reddish clay. She stuck a small funnel into the slender black neck. “If it’s too easy — like telling a child her mother will live instead of admitting she’ll be dust before the month is out —” She poured a thin, gleaming stream into the mouth of the funnel, a mere thread of liquid. “If it’s too easy, it’s likely wrong.” 

She quit pouring almost as soon as she’d begun, when even an inexperienced child could tell the vial was nowhere near full. She took the funnel out and placed it in a basin of water. She rinsed her hands and dried them on her gray skirt. 

“Can you remember that?” she whispered, seating the stopper firmly before handing the vial back to me. “The best thing is usually the hard thing.” 

Traces of clay marked the black. I didn’t have to nod to show her I would always remember; she knew. She closed her eyes and was an ordinary woman, tired, but with traces of beauty that nothing could erase. “Go now,” she said. “Be quick or the cold will eat your feet.” 

She hadn’t mentioned payment, and I scurried for the door, half afraid she would demand a coin I didn’t have, but she was silent. As I left though, she whispered, just loud enough for me to hear, “Come back to me.” 

I didn’t linger on the way home, although the tiny vial felt heavy to me, as though it contained an entire world. 

My father let me into our room, which had one bed, continuously occupied by my mother. When he slept, which wasn’t often, he crept next to the wall and made himself as thin as possible. I slept next to the fire atop a folded blanket and beneath my mother’s cloak. The room smelled sick, stale, hopeless, but somehow the cloak had retained a warm, sheep smell. Aside from the clothes we wore, our few belongings were stacked near the wall, still packed in bundles. Something about that made me uneasy, but Father could not be bothered to think about them. We had been traveling toward Shaboor when Mother’s sickness had demanded we stop; he still maintained that we would be going on soon, soon, when she was a little stronger. He spent all his time with her, stroking her face with his fingers or laying cool cloths on her forehead — switching to hot when cool did no good. Nothing did any good. She just lay there dying. 

She was awake now, her lips drawn back in a grimace of pain, too weak even to weep. “You have the medicine, Jamillah?” Father asked. “She gave it to you?” 

I nodded. 

“Quickly, then. The waiting is so hard for her.” 

I went toward the bed, but I couldn’t force my feet to move quickly. The best thing is usually the hard thing. My father gave me a little shove. “She’s waiting.” 

I stood by the bed and looked for her smile, but it had been eaten away by the pain. The lines in her face belonged to a woman who had lived her whole life and was ready to die. The best thing...I lifted the vial and she moved her lips. I moved my own, trying to bring words out. Goodbye. I love you. Please tell me what to do. Neither of us could speak, though. I leaned over and kissed her wasted cheek. The hard thing...I removed the stopper and tilted the vial, watching the thick, shining potion trickle into her mouth. 

Father watched me from the middle of the room. He knew what I was doing, but he just stood and watched until it was too late and then he ran to the bed with a cry and snatched the vial. “What are you doing? You are giving her too much.” 

He slapped me, hard, which he had never done before. I buried myself in the wool of Mother’s cloak and let my tears lead me into sleep. 

SOMETIME in the night, while I slept, my mother died and my father left. I awoke to angry voices in the hall. “ — gone and she’s dead and that child without a tongue in her head. What are we supposed to do with her?” 

I didn’t want to open my eyes, but I couldn’t stop myself. My mother lay terribly still in the bed, with her hands arranged across her chest. The bundles were gone. All that was left was me and the cloak I slept under. And the black, empty vial on the night table. 

The fire was out; the air against my face cold. I wanted to silence my ears as well as my voice, but the argument in the hall continued to invade. 

“She could sweep up and scrub the pots perhaps.” 

“I will not have her here! Do you know what she did?” 

“She’s a mere child.” The fat man who did his wife’s bidding; he’d slipped me sweets before when she wasn’t looking. 

It was the wife, the innkeeper herself, who hissed now. “She killed her own mother.” 

Suddenly there was no warmth in the cloak, no warmth left in my body. I began to shiver violently. 

“Now, you can’t know that.” 

“When I was up to start the bread, I heard him crying, ‘what has she done, what has she done?’ and then this morning the woman is dead and the daughter left behind with the empty poison bottle. Maybe we could sell her to pay the bill for the burial and the room.” 

There was still no warmth in the world, but I stood and drew the cloak around me. It dragged on the rough floor. I walked past the bed that held my silent mother and went to the window. It opened easily, I knew, for we had frequently tried to air the room of the sick smell — never successfully —despite the winter. 

Our room was on the ground floor, looking into a narrow alley. I pulled myself up on the frame and swung my legs through. The cloak caught on a loose nail. When I pulled it free, a long curl of wool ripped off. Then I was gone, leaving my mother to the cold. I don’t know what the innkeepers said when they found I was gone, but I imagine they were relieved for different reasons: he that he wasn’t forced to deal with the idea of selling me, and she that she wasn’t forced to deal with me at all. 

I had never come out through the alley before. The backs of the buildings — unpainted, rough — were much different than the fronts. The wind whistled between them, diving through the gaps in my cloak. I didn’t want to come out just in front of the inn, where they might see me, so I ran along the alley until it spit me onto a street. Thin ice broke under my bare feet, cut my ankles. I was crying, but silently, tears freezing on my eyelashes and cheeks. 

By the time I’d stumbled around and found myself in familiar surroundings, my teeth were chattering so hard that I couldn’t have spoken had I been otherwise able to. By the time I reached Sky Eyes’s door, I could barely walk. I crept up the steps, and fell against the door. My feet were numb, and my fingers, and my heart. I couldn’t even knock, but lay there thinking that I should. The wind burrowed down the gaping neck of the cloak. Too cold. Too penetrating. 

The door opened and I sprawled into warmth. Sky Eyes lifted me. “I’m sorry that you had to do what you did,” she said, “but I’m not sorry you did it.” She carried me to the fire, shutting out the cold with a push of one bare foot. She wore only a loosely tied robe; her grip on me shifted it from one shoulder and I could see the swell of one breast and its brown nipple. Her eyes were golden and rose and violet, a sunset giving over to dusk. I was too deadened by cold to be embarrassed. 

“Who is it?” asked a young male voice. Over her shoulder, I saw one of the village boys, wrapped in a bedsheet. His shoulders were bare and sweaty and so was the rest of him, I knew, beneath the sheet. He glowered at me, impatient at the interruption. 

She set me down on the hearth stone. “Her name is Jamillah.” She was touching my feet now, although I could barely feel it. She frowned. “Her mother just died and her father has abandoned her. She’s going to live with me and be my student.” 

She pulled her gaping robe shut. “Put your clothes on,” she told him. “I’m done with bed for the time being.” 

“But —” he said, and then did as he was told. It made me angry in a way that I didn’t understand at all, that he would just stop in the middle of that curious dance adults did, with hardly an argument, merely because she said so. I think even then I realized how hard it would be to defy her myself. 

She ignored him then, although I watched him through my half-frozen lashes, as he awkwardly struggled into his pants, dropping the sheet in the process. I had seen glimpses of my father in the mornings or evenings, getting into and out of the bed he shared with my mother before she sickened, but never a well-muscled young man, still hard with passion. It made me uneasy, but still I looked. 

Sky Eyes took hot water from a kettle near the fire and mixed it with cold in a large, shallow bowl, then dripped something light green and fragrant into it. “Sit with your back to the wall here,” she told me. I ended up with my feet and hands in the bowl, knees bent up to my chest and the bowl directly before me. The scent of the water and the pain of returning sensation in my hands and feet made me feel as if I were floating through a burning sea. 

The boy came up behind Sky Eyes as she was dampening a cloth in the water. He ran his hands down her back. “Go,” she said. “I’ve no time for you now.” 

“But we haven’t finished —” 

She gave him one steady look of her sunset eyes, which were almost entirely gone to violet now. He left without another word. 

She sighed. “I do like to bed that boy,” she said, “when it’s convenient. Ah, well, he’ll be back.” 

My pain was not enough to conceal my embarrassment and surprise. She turned the steady gaze on me. “I am not used to having children about,” she said, “although the villagers would have that I am despoiling their male children. In my mind, there is nothing evil or dirty about sex, as long as all participants are willing and reasonably grown up. There is more harm done in half the marriage beds in this village than is imagined in mine. I will not pretend that I am a celibate priestess.” She bathed my face with the cloth. “So if a lusty young man knocks at the door, let him in.” Her mischievous grin faded into total seriousness. “If any of them — or any else — ever touch you against your will, you have my permission to kill them.” 

I burst into shaking tears at that statement, and Sky Eyes held me, oblivious to the water spilled on her robe. “You did what you had to—no, not what you had to; what you could. You did the hard thing, the best thing, and now her pain is over.” 

I cried harder, clinging to her with hands that burned with ice. I wanted to hear that it wasn’t my fault, that my mother hadn’t died at my hands. Sky Eyes drew back and held my shoulders. “You did it. Neither of us will pretend otherwise. If you do not accept that, I will bundle you up and carry you back to the innkeepers to be sold for debts. You choose.” 

My tears died within me, and the last of my childhood. I nodded. “I’m sorry it’s so,” she said, hugging me to her, “but with ability comes responsibility. I don’t know yet if your mother would have thanked you or not, and your father certainly did not, but I think that you will someday believe you did the best thing.” She wiped away my tears with the fragrant cloth, examined my hands and feet. “Well, you won’t be running away for a day or two. Let’s get you into my bed now — since I’m not using it at the moment.” She winked one gray-violet eye and carried me to a big bed. The four posts had lengths of black silk tied to them. She deftly unknotted them. 

I must have looked as curious as I felt. “Sometimes, if you wish it —or your partner does —” she began, placing the cloth in a covered basket. Her voice trailed off and a faint flush came to her cheeks. “Never mind for now.” 

Later that day, Sky Eyes pulled boxes of dusty bottles out of a small storage room. She hung mismatched cloth to disguise the tall shelves that covered three of the walls: yellow, with slender green lizards printed on it; solid purple; red and blue striped. Only one wall was left to show cool, gray stone with a wooden door in the center of it. 

She had no other bed, so she formed a pallet of blankets and pillows on the floor. “Here,” she said, carrying me in and setting me down. “Birdy has a nest now. And I have my bed back — just in case I should need it.” There were hooks on the back of the door that had held dried herbs; the air in the tiny room still smelled of them. On the highest hook she hung the cloak which was the only thing inherited from my mother. 

“I’ll be going out now,” she said, running one hand along the wool lining. “If any beautiful male creatures come by, tell them to wait a few minutes for me — or a number of years for yourself.” 

Then she was gone and I was alone. I had never had a room of my own before. 

She was gone for some hours, during which I drowsed in and out of dream and thought, not always sure which was which. The vial, held by my winter-kissed hands, approached my mother’s lips. I tried to stop, but the hands moved of their own will, tilting the vial, pouring — and then the face changed and it was Sky Eyes, her eyes as night black as the vial itself. “The best thing,” her voice a mere breath, “is the hard thing. Is it so hard to forgive yourself?” And then my hands were holding the vial to my own lips and I was drinking a deep, endless drop. And crying. 

I hadn’t heard her return, but my cries brought her in to me. “I don’t know what to do,” she said, taking me into her arms. Her breath held the scent of wine; her eyes were deep summer blue with clouds floating across them. “Comfort is not a coin I am often called to give.” She let me rest against her shoulder for a moment and then set me back in the pillows. “I can’t take your pain away and wouldn’t if I could. No comfort now, but someday you will be able to use it.” 

My sniffling subsided, not because of her less than tender words, but because I had worn out. Too much had happened in too little time. My eyes drifted shut. Sky Eyes touched my face. “I hate them,” she said, her voice hard and vicious. “I hate them all.” 

The next day she slathered my hands and feet with gel and wrapped them with strips of cloth, wound round and round. “You are too big to carry far,” she said, “but I don’t think you can — or should — walk yet. Stand up for a moment.” I did, biting my lip against the pain. She draped my mother’s cloak around me, fastening the throat clasp, and put on her own. Then she crouched down, facing away from me. “Climb onto my back.” 

It wasn’t easy, with my awkward, bundled limbs and two cloaks to deal with, but she finally staggered to a standing position. “It’s a good thing you’re only seven,” she said. “At twelve you may well have to carry me.” She had to let go of one of my legs to open the door, and I almost fell off. 

She started laughing. “This will give them something to gossip about.” She shut the door and grabbed me again, readjusting before she tottered off into the wind. 

When we reached the low stone building, she pushed the door open without knocking. I had had no idea of our destination, but this place, cold by design, revealed its nature by the bodies stretched or twisted or curled up on the narrow benches that hung in tiers from the walls. A death house. A place where the corpses of those unfortunate enough to die in winter were kept until the ground thawed. I wanted to run on my bandaged feet, but Sky Eyes carried me to the low bench where my mother lay. She let go. I tried to cling to her, but my bandaged hands gave out and I slipped to the floor beside my dead mother. 

A thin layer of frost covered her skin and clothes and hair, sealed her to the bench. “Look at her expression,” Sky Eyes said softly. 

I made myself look. Under the frost, her mouth was slack, her teeth barely showing. Not drawn into that grimace of pain. Her hands were still arranged across her chest; my father’s work, no doubt. He had comforted the dead and left me huddled on the floor. A sudden rage flared within me. He had known she was dying, had known that the pain easer was a life drainer, had known that I would end up killing her. He had known and let me do it and then blamed me for it. 

A rough howl escaped me. I ran my hands over my mother’s face, her hands, her frost-coated hair. Tears melted trails in her white frost shroud. “No,” I said, my voice thick and awkward. “I didn’t mean to.” 

“You did,” said Sky Eyes, looking at me through pink-tinted dusk. “You made a choice, a decision, and carried it out. You acted — though it was perhaps the hardest thing you will ever do in your life. Poor child, that you were called upon to do the hardest thing so young.” 

I hated her, for not letting me lie even to myself, or to the dead. At the same time, her words had a curiously lightening effect. How hard could life be, if I had already done the hardest thing? I had yet to learn that the many smaller hard things, common as dust, were more wearing than the one hardest. Fortunately, she didn’t tell me, but let me discover it myself, in the years to follow. 

“I’m sorry,” I said, laying my face on my mother’s cold cheek. This time Sky Eyes did not contradict me. 

WHEN I HAD cried myself out and we were both shivering violently, it was time to leave the death house. I had to crawl up on the edge of my mother’s bench to get on Sky Eyes’s back, so stiff and clumsy were we both. I found my gaze drawn to the other bodies: several old ones who had found this last winter of their lives too harsh; a young woman with her dead child clasped upon her chest, both pulled into death by the birth; a large bearded man with terribly whitened hands and an odd, peaceful expression. 

Sky Eyes nodded toward him. “They say that freezing to death makes one warm and sleepy, that there is no pain. I can feel that in him. Can you?” 

Even as she asked me, she was showing me how to do so. Almost against my will, my mind threaded itself into his death. Yes; it was a comfortable death, as was the death of the old woman on the bench beneath him. I jerked away from the wrenching denial of the young woman who held her child only after her life had bled out of her. Sky Eyes stopped. She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder at me. “Do you want to feel her death?” 

I held very still, afraid that the shivering within me would be interpreted as assent or denial. Would it be a terrible thing to know? Would I regret it? Yet I could not refuse. I nodded and let my mind touch the last minutes of my mother’s life. 

Release from pain. Regret that there would be no more minutes of life, but acceptance that it had to be that way to escape the consuming pain. Shock and sorrow at the knowledge in my eyes. Then nothing. Life flowing from her in a thin stream, until there was no more left in her. 

I didn’t notice that Sky Eyes had even started walking until we were out of the death house and down the street. Tears froze on my cheeks. “You’d be better off not crying now,” she said. “Or your face will freeze and the frozen-hearted bitches of the village will be imagining that I am torturing you.” 

I stopped crying and let my head rest on her left shoulder. Perhaps it was torture, but it was the torture of sudden, rapid growth. I fell asleep and didn’t wake until she let me slide to the step outside her door. 

“You are heavy,” she said, opening the door with hands that shook. “Perhaps it is different when a woman has raised a baby from the first; the strength in her back and arms would grow along with the child. I must be an imbecile to begin this way.” 

Her words would have stung had she not, even as she was speaking, led me gently in and settled me on the hearth. She knelt beside me and stirred the embers with a stick which burst into flame. She built the fire up to a rage and leaned on one arm, looking at me with those summer blue eyes. “What a first lesson: how to speak with the dead. There’s no doubt; I’m an imbecile.” She affected the childish expression of one who had but a small portion of wit. 

My mouth twitched into a smile and she dropped the pretense. “Ah, you must have been starved for humor if my poor performance is enough for you. I suppose I will have to do, flaws and all. Shall we have soup for supper? Or breakfast, I guess it would be.” 

I had never had soup for breakfast before, but then I had never listened to the dead before breakfast either. Of the two, I preferred the soup. 

It was not the last time I ate soup for breakfast, not the last time I listened to the dead. Sky Eyes didn’t put her attention to knowing the proper foods to eat at the proper times. Or perhaps she did know and just refused to obey the rules that the rest of the women followed: gruel or night-soaked grain in the morning; a hearty midday meal of freshly baked bread, meat, whatever fruits or vegetables could be found; soup and leftover bread, maybe a sweet, in the evening. We were just as likely to start baking bread near sundown and eat it outdoors when the rest of the village was abed, butter dripping from our fingers as we pointed out stars to one another. Sometimes, stars in her eyes echoed those overhead. 

Most frequently, we had no formal meals, with each of us foraging through the supplies whenever hunger bit. I ate a ten-day’s worth of sweeting once, but Sky Eyes said nothing. She didn’t have to; my stomach spoke more firmly than any reprimand. More than that, though, there was an odd restraining factor to such freedom. The mere thought that I could eat anything I wanted whenever I wanted meant that in our pantry there was little of the luster that the forbidden holds. 

The luster glimmered on the knowledge she withheld for vague future times when I was “older.” That curse of children — to be forever too young for whatever is currently tempting. It did not occur to me that the opportunities she did give me — listening to the dead at seven; being told openly about sex as a fine, natural thing long before my woman hair began to grow; eating or sleeping as my body required it, not to the schedule of some adult — were far beyond the rights of the other village children. 

They despised me. 

Sky Eyes never suggested I go out to play with them, but neither did she discourage me the first time I thought to. It was spring of the first year with her, my hands and feet fully healed from the winter kiss. A group of children were floating chips of wood along the wagon tracks that had filled with water the night before, splashing barefoot in the mud. Their parents were so relieved to have them out of the house after a long winter underfoot that the washing up task ahead was being completely ignored. Even the cleanest were spattered and freckled with mud. I looked from the window to the table where Sky Eyes was sorting herbs. “Go if you wish,’ she said. There was more she wanted to say, but she only tightened her lips and let me discover some things for myself. 

The taste of mud. The feel of a bony foot on the back of my neck, pressing my face into a deep rut until I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. The deliberate release, after I had been choking for several seconds, that would not allow me to believe it had been any sort of accident. The sudden quietness of children who are no longer playing but have moved into the work of being cruel. 

For some, cruelty was no difficult task. The tall girl who tripped me as I went past her to see the boats and the boy with the scarred cheek whose foot held me down were the worst. I was more angry, though, at those who were clearly uneasy, the ones who formed the words and thoughts in their minds — we shouldn’t be; let her go; don’t — and yet said nothing. 

When I struggled up to my knees, sputtering and coughing, the front of my dress completely blackened, they were all standing around me in a ragged circle. 

“She’s a dummy,” said the tall girl. “She’s not even crying.” 

I touched my face. Amazingly, she was right. 

“She probably can’t,” said someone else. I didn’t see who. 

“I saw her crying.” This was a boy with black curls almost hiding his eyes. He spoke in a whisper. “I was looking out the window. She was riding on the witch’s back in the cold and crying.” 

“Really, Ketrin?” 

He nodded, his beautiful hair dipping down. 

“Witches don’t cry,” said someone behind me. “Maybe she’s not a witch.” 

“That’s stupid,” said another. “My father says there are no witches, just healers.” 

“She’s not crying now, is she?” asked the tall girl, ignoring the comment about healers. She stepped closer. “She’s a witch now. The innkeeper says she killed her mother. I heard her tell my mother.” 

They drew back a fraction, but apparently fear was not enough to overcome curiosity. Or cruelty. 

I didn’t move. This was not a time to be angry, not a time to leap up and claw at her with my muddy fingers. She was too big and the others were on her side — or at least not on mine. My whole body and mind were tense and alert. I made my face smooth and calm and just looked at her. 

She didn’t expect that. I sensed her confusion; a second later she stopped. “She’s not worth it. Little dumb witch brat. Let’s go slide on the hill.” She turned and ran off, making sure her first step sprayed dirty water on me. 

The others followed her. About half of them splashed me. Most of the rest avoided my eyes. Only Ketrin hesitated, giving me an apologetic smile before he left. 

I hated him most. 

I knelt in the mud for a long time, until the mud drying on my face made me feel as if my skin would crack and fall off if my expression changed. It wasn’t until a cart came sploshing toward me, the driver yelling obscenities, that I moved. 

Sky Eyes said nothing when I came in. She pulled the mud-caked dress off over my head and helped me into the big tub, already filled with gently steaming water. She dipped up handfuls of water and poured them over my face and hair. 

As the mud loosened, so did something within me, and I began to sob. Then her whispers were pouring over me as well, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Tears poured from her cloud gray eyes until her face was as wet as mine. Witches did cry — if that was what she was — just not in front of people like the tall girl and the boy with the scar. People like Ketrin. 

I never did go to the village school. Sky Eyes didn’t laugh at the school teacher when he came by to inform us that I should be educated. At the time, I was measuring out — to the drop — the various ingredients that made up a sleeping draught. The directions were written in Sky Eyes’s neat hand: one part this to three parts that, and so on. She had told me to read through the recipe, see that I had all of the components to hand, and make as much as possible, with the limiting factor being whatever there was the least of. I was nine. 

“Could any of your students do this?” Sky Eyes asked. 

“Certainly,” said the teacher, after a hesitation. He was a youngish man, very tall, who had lived in the village for only a few years. To my knowledge, he had never before been to our house, but I thought by the way Sky Eyes had greeted him, how she had held his hand for just a moment longer than necessary when he’d offered it, that he would be back. 

“Without supervision at each step?” Sky Eyes took a sip of tea and looked at the man over the rim of her cup. “And would you then drink the sleeping draught, keeping in mind that it contains bone leaf, which —in larger proportion — makes one sleep to the point of death?” 

I continued my task, measuring and mixing, but my hands were suddenly cold. Bone leaf. Sleep to the point of death. I knew how to make the potion in the black vial now, as well as administer it. 

The teacher gave her a rueful grin, as if to concede the point. “She does well at her reading and figuring,” he said, “but there are other things one learns at school —” 

Sky Eyes set her cup down and her eyes went stormy. “Things like which hurts most, the nose bleed after a slap or the soul ache after some vicious name-calling? Would you really have her learn that?” 

The teacher dropped his face into his hands. “No, no, you’re fight. I would try to protect her but it would not be enough. She would be hurt and I would be guilty.” He looked up at me. “You have a fine mind; I can see that. I would have liked having you in my school but chances are you would not have liked it. Is your potion done yet?” 

I had just begun funneling the liquid into a rack of clean, gray vials, with the rune for sleep scratched on the front of each one. I nodded, and he handed me a coin. “For when I have problems sleeping.” 

I stoppered a vial and gave it to him, pleased by this evidence of faith. 

He stood, and Sky Eyes did as well. “You must come back,” she said. “If you are having problems sleeping.” The look she gave him, her eyes half-lidded storms, accented her meaning. 

Even at age nine, I could sense his mixture of apprehension and desire. Desire won. He held out his hand again, although that was less common than doing so on greeting. Sky Eyes extended her own and their fingers met in something that was more than half caress. Yes, he would be here soon, making sounds that filtered through the stone walls of my room. 

THE SCHOOL MASTER did come by, always late at night, when he supposed I would not know. He didn’t know just how fine my mind was, that it could pick up his thoughts and emotions as well as precisely measure out the most complicated potion. I sometimes saw him on the street when I was out on errands for Sky Eyes; he spoke kindly to me. 

Sky Eyes was right, though. He couldn’t have protected me from the other children. They tormented me at every opportunity, flinging stones, animal droppings, names. My legs grew long and I discovered that this gave me a speed which few of them could match. For a while, the girl who had tripped me the first time could catch me, but it wasn’t long before she turned her attention from childhood cruelty to flirting with the older boys. 

Ketrin never became my defender, but he at least never participated in the viciousness. If he was alone when he saw me, he would greet me. I stopped hating him. Other than Sky Eyes and some of her men, he was the closest I had to a friend — I couldn’t afford to hate him. 

At nine, my fascination with sex was tinged with disgust. The disgust did not last. 

The fascination did. 

I kept the hinges on my bedroom door well-greased, and sometimes slipped out to look at Sky Eyes and whoever happened to be sharing her bed at the time. They were mostly — but not all — young. Occasionally, one of the older widowers or unmarried bachelors came to the door, ostensibly for some potion or other. 

She told me this after the widower who ran the mill had been by. I watched them from the space between the table and some crates. Through the slats in the crate, I could see them stroking each other and plunging and shuddering. “No,” she said, softly, with a catch in her voice. “Oh, no.” But it did not sound like a command to stop. His silver hair fell over her face like rain at dusk. He slid his hips from side to side, over her, slowly, slowly. Her fingers clutched the sheet and she arched her back, and then they were moving together, explosively. 

My own fingers moved between my legs. I didn’t know why it felt good, only that it did. Maybe I gasped. Maybe she had always known that I was watching and where I watched from. 

At any rate, after he had gone, with one lingering touch and an even longer kiss, she called me out from my hiding place. 

I was eleven. I had been there for four years, long enough to know that she would not hit me, no matter what I did. Still, my stomach quivered as I stood up. 

She wore the same silk robe as she had the day I came to her door half-frozen. “Are you satisfied?” she asked. “Did you see what you needed to see?” 

Whatever I had expected, it wasn’t this. Her cheeks flushed faintly. “It must seem strange to you, but it isn’t. You’ll discover it soon, whenever you are ready.” 

My hands came up to my chest and touched the tiny breasts there. It didn’t seem possible that I would ever have a woman’s figure, even though I already had the beginnings of a woman’s desire. One thing I did have to know, though. I made myself speak, my voice hoarse with disuse. “Touch yourself?” Heat rushed to my face. 

Sky Eyes laughed. “Oh yes. When there is no one in my bed — or there is, and he’s inept and clumsy. Not everyone you bed will know how to please you, so you’d better know how to please yourself. Here, I have a gift for you.” She darted back to her bed and took something out of a wooden chest. A long, curled feather, orange and yellow, streaked with blue. “The tailfeather of a shennikan,” she said, handing it to me. “I like to stroke myself with one, my arms and legs and breasts. And especially my throat.” 

My fingers curled around the slender shaft of the feather. I must have looked surprised, because she laughed again. “Of course I touch my sex parts — but that doesn’t mean I ignore the rest of my body. Or my mind. Sometimes I can bring myself pleasure just thinking of hot, young bodies and lengths of silk —” She turned bright pink. “I never imagined a conversation like this, though.” She swatted my behind. “Take your feather and your fantasies and go to bed now.” 

Another question, though. I hesitated. “Old ones?” 

“Ah, sometimes they’re the best. The young have the energy — but the old have knowledge. They know how to touch and move to please a woman. At least the ones I invite into my bed.” She looked at me seriously. “Be careful who you invite into yours, when you are ready to do so. Search them for sickness, in body or mind. And I will not take a man who has a wife.” 

She slapped her forehead. “What am I saying — telling one who hasn’t had her blood yet not to bed married men. You poor child, to have me for .... “Her voice trailed off, but we both knew her thought. For a mother. 

I had never called her mother, which wasn’t unusual, as I rarely spoke. More importantly, though, I had not allowed myself to think of her as a mother. I wasn’t sure she would welcome that. Now that I knew she would, I wasn’t sure that I could. It pleased me though, to have the option. 

“Thank you,” I whispered. 

“You’re welcome.” As I was closing my door, she said, “Just be discreet.” 

Was she giving me permission to watch? I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. There was too much going on in my head, not to mention my body. 

Men were not the only visitors, though. The same women that despised Sky Eyes, that gossiped about her and futilely forbade their sons to come near her, they came for abortifacients, joint easers, the silvery drink that brought one out of a dark mood, a dozen other things. 

A few came secretly for Seeings and Knowings, sneaking through the alleys and tapping the back door with shaking fingers. If we sensed the visit soon enough, one of us would race to the door and open it just as she raised her hand. Mean perhaps, but it enhanced belief. For some reason, those who sought Seeing or Knowing were always women. Did the men not know? Not believe? We talked about it whenever a woman left, the knowledge of the vision uneasy in her mind. Sky Eyes was of the opinion that men thought they knew and saw everything already. I thought perhaps they didn’t know we could do such things. 

Seeing and Knowing...the women didn’t really understand either. They came with simple, specific questions: Will I have a child? Yes or no. Once though, when the answer was yes, we both got the dreadful image of a daughter with brain enough to breathe and no more. That time, Sky Eyes shook her head sadly. “No child this time. I’m sorry. Let me give you a tincture to help you deal with this pain.” The brew also contained a ridding potion. There was no half-dead baby born to that young woman. 

When will my husband return from the high lakes? Never, alas. But we didn’t tell her that he had taken up with a mountain woman, that they laughed when they thought of her, waiting back in the foothills. Instead we let her keep the warmer image of his body floating in the clear, cold water of the lakes, fallen in returning to her. 

Seeing and Knowing. But not telling all. Perhaps it was good that the men did not come, and the women infrequently. Seeing and Knowing was not precise and simple and clearcut, as was the brewing of potions. 

We were kept busy gathering the ingredients in the fields and forests, along streambanks, past the tree line of the nearby mountains. Or trading for the more exotic substances that the traveling peddlers brought through. 

There was one, a small man with a head as bald as a stone and skin as black as shadows who always spent an extra day or two in the village, much of it in Sky Eyes’s bed, with scent sticks burning in a smoky circle. She smiled whenever she saw him leading his long-necked pack beast, its mane fluttering with bright ribbons. After he left, she always cried. 

His name was Ta, unusual in this area, and he spoke with a strange lilt to his voice, peppering his speech with words from another language. I couldn’t always figure out the meaning from context, but I didn’t care. He called me Jami-bird and measured himself against me, back to back, on every visit. At eleven, my head was already even with his, although he teased me that it was my hair that made me seem so tall. He was fascinating, and in my fantasies I most frequently imagined that Ta would be my first lover, small and dark, singing to me in his rich voice as he sang to Sky Eyes. 

Eventually he was my lover, but not my first. 

I WAS FIFTEEN, or nearly that anyway. Sky Eyes had gone climbing for bone leaf, which was found only above the tree line, in the shadows of boulders where pockets of soil had collected. It was used in many of our potions, from the sleeping potions and pain-killers to the abortifacients and life-drainers. Normally we went together, but my adolescence was testing us both, and she had stalked off at daylight with an extra collecting bag, enough food for two days, and a blanket. “Don’t expect me until tomorrow,” she’d snapped. 

I had stared at her sullenly, thinking fierce, uncaring thoughts, watching her struggle to open the door with too full hands. Not offering to help. 

She didn’t say it — I’ll give her that — but her mind did play with the thought: why did I take her in? Part of me wanted to fly back to that winter day and tug myself in the wrong direction, whisper words of discouragement, let the girl who would become me freeze in the snow. 

Maybe if I had been close with some of the others who were clumsily groping between being children and adults, adept at neither, I would have realized that such conflict was normal. Part of growing up. What had to happen on the way. 

But I did not, and neither did Sky Eyes, who had grown up without her own mother and was as isolated from the rest of the village as I was. I sat on the bench, smoldering with anger and resentment, a tall girl with slender limbs, ordinary brown eyes. 

When the knocker sounded, I almost didn’t answer. My mind was so busy turning over my misfortunes that I had no idea who had come. Probably another woman who needed soul or belly cramps eased. Or one of the village elders, aching for some joint salve. But I knew better than to let my tiff with Sky Eyes interfere with business, so I dragged myself to the door and arranged my face in a neutral expression — if not welcoming, then at least not actively hostile. 

It was one of the young men; I didn’t know his name. He drew back when he saw me, surprise almost palpable. And desire. For him, right then, no one existed other than Sky Eyes. 

“Is she here?” he asked. “I need a — a potion.” 

I just looked at him, his desire igniting the same within me. He was taller than I, but just by a little, with light hair and skin. The neck of a vial glinted between his fingers. I could almost feel his hand on my breast. I opened the door further and he came in, looking around for Sky Eyes, not seeing me. 

All I wanted to do was make him see me. Make him want me. I touched my hair, felt smooth silkiness rather than tangles. Yes, I had combed it this morning: deep brown, almost black, with more than a touch of wild curl. Would he see that hair while looking for Sky Eyes’s silvery gold? Would he want to stroke my brown skin? 

I closed the door behind him and he looked at me. “Where is she?” And then he looked again, seeing me, remembering things he had heard. “Ah, you’re the gift who doesn’t talk.” 

I wanted to talk. I opened my lips and took a breath, but no words would come out. 

“Is Sky Eyes here?” he asked again, watching for the reply this time. 

I reluctantly shook my head. 

“Oh,” he said. 

His disappointment cut through the stillness that inhabited my throat. “Wait,” I whispered. With a boldness that astounded me I reached out and took the vial from his hand. Plain clay brown, but the rune scratched on the front of it — the symbols for male and female intertwined — meant that it had once held aphrodisiac. 

I felt my cheeks heat up. The aphrodisiac was in the storeroom where I slept, behind the lizard-printed cloth. My hands grew sweaty and I almost dropped the vial. Could I do this? I gestured for him to follow me. 

In the small room, I could feel his breath on my shoulder as I lifted the cloth aside and reached for the bottle of aphrodisiac. I took off the stopper with a practiced curl of my little finger that allowed me to use both hands and not set the glass stopper down. 

Inside, I was shaking like pinch leaves in a breeze, but my hands were steady. Aphrodisiac was a thin, sweet potion, easy to pour. I filled the vial and handed it to him, uncorked. Then, while he was still watching me, I tilted my head back and poured some from the bottle into my mouth. 

His breath caught. He was seeing me, seeing the jumbled pillow bed on the floor, the open vial in his own hand. I set the bottle back on the shelf, replaced the stopper, let the cloth fall back into place. 

Desire burned in me, fanned into flame by the aphrodisiac. I wanted to touch him, touch myself, be touched. “Should I drink it?” he asked, his voice low. 

My eyes said yes. He heard. 

I felt light and heavy at the same time, unsure if I was about to fall down or float to the ceiling. I dropped to my knees on the bed, my skirt pooling around me. He followed. 

Sky Eyes had told me there might be pain the first time, and there was, but not much. The touching. His mouth on mine. The passion running inside me. 

When we were spent, he pulled his trousers on and covered me with a blanket the color of autumn leaves. “That was fine,” he said, his voice lingering on the last word. “I must be going now.” He shyly held the vial out for a refill on the aphrodisiac. I wrapped the blanket around myself and stood up, suddenly awkward with my bare shoulders and wild hair. Pouring was more difficult with my elbows clamped tight to my sides to hold the blanket in place, but I managed. “Well,” he said, “I must be going.” He handed me two coins, for the two fillings of the vial, and then he was gone. 

I danced around, tripped on the trailing edge of the blanket and fell on my jumbled bed. I laughed and cried and touched myself to see if I felt different. Yes, there was a difference. I wasn’t a girl anymore. 

It was late the next morning when Sky Eyes returned, pale bone leaf protruding from her collecting bags, grassy blanket slung over her shoulder, shoes scuffed and dusty. Her expression was wary when she entered, but it changed almost immediately. “Who was it?” she asked softly. 

I didn’t know his name, I realized, but she caught his image from my mind and nodded. “Rashi. A good lover. Not terribly imaginative, but .... “ 

I couldn’t look at her any more, embarrassed almost to tears by the thought that she knew what it was like to bed him, how he liked to run his fingers down a woman’s sides, letting the touch trail off at the hips. 

Her tight voice made me look up. “This is going to be more difficult than I ever imagined.” Her face was pale, with red spots on her cheeks. “I don’t think I can talk now.” She dropped the bags of bone leaf on the stone floor and walked to her bedroom, her back very straight. 

She was jealous, I realized with a shock that dried incipient tears. She couldn’t deal with a young woman who was actually going to act on the theories of sexuality she had spouted so glibly to a child. 

I picked up the discarded bone leaf and rinsed it in a bowl of clean water, being careful to handle it by the dry stems and not immerse my hands. It was more poisonous when swallowed, but it could cause a certain deadness in the fingers, and an air of confusion. Sky Eyes was jealous. The thought seemed ludicrous. I clipped the bone leaf to a drying string. 

My thighs felt sore from the previous morning’s activities, which gave me a rather perverse pleasure. I carefully lifted the bowl of tainted water and carried it to the back. We had a special place where we poured such things, on a deep bed of gravel which we covered with a board to keep birds and animals — including the human kind — from being affected, inadvertently or otherwise. Sometimes, children would sneak into the fenced yard and snatch pebbles, which they dared each other to suck on. The board deterred them little, but Sky Eyes insisted. 

I had just replaced the board when I heard the door open behind me. I looked and saw Sky Eyes holding a mug. “Thank you for hanging the bone leaf,” she said. “You should drink this now.” I took the mug and sniffed. 

“To ensure that you will not have a child.” 

The liquid was sweet, but with a metallic aftertaste. I shuddered and finished quickly. 

Sky Eyes picked the blossom from a bird flower. Yellow pollen clung to her fingers. We used the pollen in a grainy potion for head pain, the pinktipped petals in a mixture for burning that produced a calming aroma. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know I would feel this way —and I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. I’m not used to not knowing.” She gave a short, rueful laugh. “Maybe I could brew myself a potion. Or one for you, to turn you back into a child, and keep you one.” 

I tried to find a smile, failed. 

She looked at me again, her eyes tinted the yellow of sunrise turning to day. “No, you’re not a child and will never be again. So I will deal with you as a woman. If a man comes for me, he comes for me. Not you. If a man comes for you, I will not interfere. Understand?” 

I understood, and was sullen all over again. All the men and boys who came for Sky Eyes were not to be touched or teased or invited to my bed. Who would come for me, anyway? 

Ketrin. 

My almost friend. His body had lengthened and strengthened, but the black curls had not changed. And neither had the smiles he gave me: apologetic smiles that I rarely returned. I got the feeling that he still saw me as a skinny, mud-blackened seven-year-old who would not cry, no matter how much she wanted to. 

Two days after Sky Eyes returned, he came. 

I opened the door, as Sky Eyes was in back, checking the darkberry stems we had set out to sun dry. Ketrin stood there, his smile more tentative than usual. “Ah, hello,” he said, beginning to extend his hand, faltering, dropping it to his side. “I’ve come for a — potion.” His face reddened, and he let his hair fall, covering his eyes. “You might be too busy.” 

I truly didn’t know what I was going to do until one hand opened the door and the other gestured him in. What did he mean by a “potion.” Aphrodisiac? He didn’t have a vial with him, and he had never been one of Sky Eyes’s lovers. Had he talked to Rashi? Without intending to, I found in his mind that he had. Perhaps the boys and men were ignorant of Seeing and Knowing, but they knew — or soon would — that the mute girl who lived with Sky Eyes shared her fondness for sex. Rashi hadn’t known my name either. 

The air thickened around me. I wanted to die. I wanted to go back three days and shut the door in Rashi’s face — or, at the very least, choke on the aphrodisiac as I poured it into my mouth. I turned away from Ketrin, again unwilling to show him tears. 

“Jamillah?” He touched my shoulder. Lightly. Briefly. Not as a lover would. “Are you all right? Should I go now?” 

If I moved, I was afraid the tears would escape. At the back door, I sensed Sky Eyes, her arms full of darkberry stems. Her mind touched mine, took in the situation. She didn’t come in. 

“Jamillah? I didn’t really need a potion.” He didn’t want me to turn around any more than I wanted to. “I just wanted to talk to you. Perhaps we could go walking sometime.” 

Still I didn’t move. “Ah, then,” he said. “Goodbye.” 

He opened the door. Before he could go out, before he could close it, I said, “Yes.” 

He hesitated. “Tomorrow, then.” Since I wasn’t looking at him, I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded as if he were smiling. 

Sky Eyes came in the back after he closed the door. She dumped the stems on the table. A few wrinkled fruits fell off. “I was afraid your lover wouldn’t leave before I was as wrinkled as these.” 

“Not my lover,” I hissed. Anger dried any thought of tears. 

“He will be,” she said. She spread a cloth on one end of the table and picked up a single stem, tapping its base firmly on the table so the dried darkberries would fall on the cloth. She tossed the stalks aside; we used them to help start the fire. “He has beautiful hair.” 

My fingernails cut into my palms and she laughed. “I won’t touch your precious Ketrin, unless he touches me first.” 

Something froze within me. I wanted to scream that he would never touch her, but my mind showed otherwise. A Knowing. His arms around her. His black curls tangled with her pale hair. His face reflected in wintergray eyes. 

Her laughter died. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice soft as petals. 

The next morning I wove a green ribbon into my hair and tied a yellow scarf around my waist. I will not let you take him, my mind said to Sky Eyes, when Ketrin smiled to see me. She just glared at me and turned away, thinking as if I would. 

We went into the summer morning with a waterskin and a pouch of nuts and more dried diolla fruit than I should have taken B unlike darkberries, it was rare, hard to pick from steep mountain cuts, and it dried into practically nothing. Sky Eyes knew I had it, but she said nothing. 

It felt as if everyone watched us as we cut through the village, heading for the tallest hill this side of the mountains, almost a mountain in its own right. We hadn’t discussed where we were going, but it wasn’t hard to pick the destination out of Ketrin’s thoughts — a small cave with a curtain of vine over the mouth. He thought it was his alone, a secret place, but Sky Eyes and I had been up there many times. If we were going very high in the mountains gathering, we sometimes slept in the cave to get us just that much closer. Or, late on a return trip, laden with full collecting bags, we stayed if we were too tired to make the final descent to the village. 

Ketrin was having a hard time deciding what to say, and I certainly did not help him. The steepness of the slope was a good excuse, and we did little but cast shy glances at each other as we climbed. 

I don’t know what would have happened had we drunk from the waterskin on the steep part, but our hands were too busy grasping rocks and sturdy rooted grasses to help in the ascent. It wasn’t until we reached the cave and collapsed side by side that Ketrin unslung the waterskin from his back and took a long pull before passing it to me. 

The expression on his face might have warned me, but I was so thirsty that I could think of nothing but drinking, how good it tasted, how 

He reached for me as the first giddy waves of desire hit me. “Jamillah,” he said, as he laid me back into the cave, stroking my face, my throat, my breasts. My own hands were busy, running over his chest and down over his hips and the curve of his buttocks, pressing him against me. 

We didn’t even undress. I unlaced the front of his trousers with frantic fingers and he lifted my skirt. “You are so beautiful,” he murmured into my hair, his breath warm in the hollow beneath my ear. “So beautiful.” His hands lower now. I moved under him, and then we were moving together. 

It was better than the time with Rashi, for there was no pain, and I knew what to expect. Too, there was something about Ketrin that had captivated me for these eight years, ever since I had seen him in that ring of silent children. And he had never shared Sky Eyes’s bed. 

When we had satisfied ourselves, we lay together, my head on his chest, my face hidden in my own hair. The questions I read in his mind were echoed in my own: what had happened? I had put plain, fresh water in the skin and — and then I had gone to fix the ribbon in my hair. Sky Eyes must have poured out some of the water and replaced it with aphrodisiac. It didn’t take much, especially when attraction existed already. 

But he thought I had done it. “Sky Eyes,” I whispered. “Not me.” I tried to straighten my skirt, as it was bunched about my waist. It wasn’t a long skirt, anyway, but the shorter skirt to be worn with cloth or leather leggings, so useful when climbing or riding. Some women wore them always, but I had always enjoyed the feel of soft cloth swishing against my bare legs. 

Ketrin helped me straighten my skirt, and then rolled away from me to lace his trousers. We were both self-conscious and embarrassed by the sudden, wild passion we had exhibited. Not all of it could be explained by the aphrodisiac, diluted as it was. 

I sat up and pushed my hair back, carefully not looking at him. The discarded waterskin lay on the ground near me, by some quirk tossed aside in such a fashion that the mouth of it leaned up against a rock. Only a little had spilled. 

We had drink, if we were willing to drink it. 

Turning just a little, I saw Ketrin also looking at the hide container, also coming to the same conclusions. He blushed and dipped his head. “Sit closer,” he said, patting the ground next to him. I scooted over and leaned against him, feeling suddenly trembly. “I’m thirsty,” he said deliberately, reaching past me for the waterskin, his arm brushing my breast. “Are you?” 

After a hot, anxious second, I nodded. The grin he gave me was not apologetic this time. “Thank you, Sky Eyes,” he said, holding the bag out as if in salute. “We might as well drink it all this time.” 

I opened my mouth and he gave me a long drink, took one himself. Back and forth, until the bag was empty and we were reeling with passion. 

This time we took our clothes off, explored every inch of sensitive skin. There was no more embarrassment, no more hesitation, only my brown body against his pale one. 

After two more times when we seemed to be trying to get inside each other’s skin, we dressed. There was no more aphrodisiac, no more water. We fed each other the nuts and the tiny amber globes of dried diolla fruit. 

“We had better go,” Ketrin said, glancing at the sun through the sparse curtain of vine. I nodded and stood, running my hands over my hair. 

“It’s no use,” said Ketrin. “You are well and truly mussed. Wild. And lovely.” He kissed my forehead. “Come on then.” 

We were just as silent on the way down. 

I didn’t let Ketrin come in with me, just pushed him gently into the lengthening shadows. I was starving and my throat was very dry. I didn’t know whether to thank Sky Eyes or scream at her. 

In the end, I did neither. Sky Eyes was in her bed with someone; I wasn’t sure who. I filled a clean skin with water and took it to my room, with a whole roast bird that she had left for me by the trickling stream in the cold box. 

My fingers were greasy and my stomach full when I crept out later to wash and pee. Sky Eyes was in bed still, alone now, not asleep. 

“Goodnight,” she called softly. “I hope you enjoyed it.” 

As usual, I said nothing. 

IF ONLY I could say that Ketrin and I were as happy as we had been that afternoon. If only the image of the two of them entwined hadn’t burned in my head — it hadn’t happened, but it would, and that poisoned me. Even when we were together in my bed, I was angry. At Sky Eyes; at Ketrin; at myself, for somehow letting it happen. I didn’t tell him what was to happen, but every time he smiled at Sky Eyes, every time he spoke politely to her, I scowled. I stopped talking entirely, which made being with him more difficult. 

“Should we stay here today?” he asked me quietly, standing on the step. I shook my head. 

He sighed. Insects, stickery plants, rocky ground — all those deterrents to bedding outside flew through his mind. “All right then, let’s go.” 

The image again, the two of them together, flew through mine. Ketrin lying back on Sky Eyes’s sheet as she bent over him. No, I didn’t want to go out into the dust, either. I shook my head again. 

Ketrin stepped back. “You don’t want to stay; you don’t want to go. I think you don’t even want to be with me. Fine, then. You don’t have to.” 

He turned and left, taking the steps in one angry movement. I was alone. I was alone. I was alone. The image. Over and over. 

I couldn’t leave or he would think I was following him. I couldn’t go in to face Sky Eyes. I walked down the steps and around the house to the back, where I picked the heads from tall feather grass with vicious snaps of my fingers. 

Sky Eyes came out a few minutes later. “Ketrin wants to see you. I’ll send him out.” She looked at the ground, littered with the decapitated feather grass. “When he’s gone, sort through those and preserve the ripe ones. Why couldn’t you have waited a week? Over half of those are wasted now.” 

Ketrin wasn’t smiling when he came through the door. “I’m sorry,” he said, as soon as Sky Eyes left us alone. “I just don’t know what to do sometimes.” 

And you think I do? I wanted to say. You think I understand myself —let alone you ? I just want to love you and have you love me and be able to forget about this picture in my head. I want to be just an ordinary girl. But I had never spoken so fluently in my life, and I couldn’t start now. I bent down and picked up a few ripe heads, rusty gold, lighter hull tips waving in the breeze. 

“Say something,” he said. “I know you can.” 

Everything I had ever wanted to say gathered at the back of my throat, a choking ball of unspoken words. The feather grass heads were light in my hands, tickling my palms. I picked up another. Tears dripped, but my back was to Ketrin, so he didn’t see. 

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said. Sorrow, anger, frustration — his voice was tight with all of them. If you’d just talk to me beat in his mind. 

I sorted through the heads lying on the ground. To preserve them, one washed them thoroughly and packed them in clear, glass jars, then poured oil over them. After a year, they would be softened enough to eat, a delicacy. A pity I had broken them early — next year we would run short. 

The door closed behind Ketrin and he was gone. Sky Eyes left a few minutes later; I heard her go, received her brief message in my mind, Gathering. I’ll be back tomorrow. There was nothing we needed desperately, but I was too upset to be more than dully grateful that she was giving me the time and space to grieve. 

Ta came in the night, found me sitting by the fire with salt tracks dried on my face. “Not the tears of a child,” he said, his voice rich, the firelight glinting off his smooth, perfect head. “You have gone and grown up on Ta; haven’t you, Jami-bird.” He ran dark thumbs down my cheeks, brought his hands up to his mouth and tasted. “Not child tears at all.” He did it again, a slow, deliberate stroke, and his moistened thumbs loosened the tautness of dry tears. I turned my face until one thumb brushed my lips. We both shivered. 

“Ta can help,” he said. “My brown one. My Jami-bird.” He kissed my mouth and my chin and my cheeks and my eyes. After a time, I was kissing him back. He tasted of strange spices. 

“You are not so sad now,” he said, pulling away. “Ts will let you sleep.” 

“No.” I caught hold of one of the loops of ribbon that decorated his vest. My voice was hoarse. “Sing.” 

“Ta sings in only one place,” he said. 

I nodded, feeling shy. “Sing.” 

He looked at me for a long time, his eyelids hooding his eyes. “Come, then, little brown bird, my Jami-bird.” He led me to Sky Eyes’s bed, already humming under his breath, a deep droning that eased my hesitation about using her bed. 

“Lie down, Jami-bird, Wanissa shay.” He went back to his pack, took a handful of scent sticks from a hollow tube, and thrust the thick ends into the fire. Curls of scented smoke began to rise and drift. 

I was still standing by the bed. “Lie down, my slender one, my pretty one, my brown skin.” The words were a song to me. I let myself follow them as he placed the scent sticks in pitted lumps of clay that had been used for just this purpose. Windflower and siella and something that smelled of burning sandal oil, other scents too exotic for me to identify. His voice rose with the smoke, in words or in sounds that touched the ear without meaning. 

He knelt beside me on the bed. His hands were smaller than my own, and deft, but he did not hurry. He withdrew the laces of my dress, parted the bodice, touched my breasts as if they had never been touched. And they hadn’t — not the way he did it anyway. Rashi and Ketrin, my only other lovers, were boys. Ta was a man who knew women. Before he had removed my dress, his own vest and tunic and leggings, I was infused with pleasure. 

“You are a candy,” Ta sang, his mouth against my skin, his breath warming my woman hair. “You are sweetness. You are a fruit to be tasted.” 

It was a long time, hazy with scent and sensation, before he fitted his body to mine and brought us both to a gasping climax. He sang and whispered to me, and I found bits of song in my own throat, bits of song that twined with his as our limbs twined together. “My hungry one, my filled one, my Jamillah.” My part was pieces of a rising and falling tune that was utterly unlike my usual harsh or whispered words. 

This, more than the exquisite pleasure, filled me with happiness. “Ta,” I said, after we had finished, letting it be part of a song. “Ta.” 

“My Jami-bird has found her voice,” he said. He gleamed darkly beside me. “My Jami-bird sings.” 

Sky Eyes was a Seer, an herbalist, a wise woman, but no singer. I knew no songs except those trapped inside me, only beginning to be freed. Ta sang a lullaby for me, simple in tune and meaning, and I listened and listened and finally sang along, sobbing. “Mother rocks her baby soft, Mother rocks her baby slow, Mother rocks her baby warm, and baby falls asleep.” 

Somewhere in the center of the singing and crying, I fell asleep. 

When I awoke, in the earliest part of morning, Ta was watching me. “So,” he said, “my Jami-bird, my night singer, do you still have song in you?” 

At first, I thought he meant to share my bed again — or Sky Eyes’s bed rather — but he just wanted to hear me sing. I hummed shyly, hiding behind my hair, but the song was there; I could feel it. “Mother rocks her baby soft .... “My voice was slight and uncertain, but clear. 

Ta’s smile was very white in his dark face. “Jamillah, my sweetness, you have—” 

An image hit me and I crumpled and cried out. Ketrin and Sky Eyes. Ta’s arms around me. Their forms against the curtain of vines. “What has happened? Jamillah?” Sky Eyes looking at me through the window of the Seeing, her eyes Mack, a sliver moon slicing through the blackness. “Jamillah?” She had Seen me with Ta, and this was her answer. 

You can’t do this, I cried silently. 

You did, she replied from the cave, her mind voice angry and hurt. Why should I not? 
“Jamillah. Tell me what has happened.” 

The familiar muteness stilled me, but Ta would have none of it. “You can tell Ta, you can. Sing it to me, child. A bit at a time.” He held me and listened and stroked and coaxed. “I will not let you keep this silence. Tell me.” 

Somehow, I made the words come out, singing stubborn bits, stopping to catch my breath and weep. I told of Ketrin and killing my mother and Seeing and Knowing and loving Sky Eyes and hating her. Ta held me like a child, like a lover, like a friend. “You are all right, Jami-bird, all right. This is best, the telling. This is what you must do.” 

The best thing is usually the hard thing. Sky Eyes’s words from the cold, wretched time when I was seven. I wept harder, shaking myself to the bone, shaking Ta, shaking the image of the lovers from my head. 

When I was wept out, Ta rubbed my back, sat me up, made me drink some tea. The scent sticks had burnt down to the clay hours before; there was little residue of our sensuous night. Ta groaned and touched my face, which definitely held the residue of my weeping. “Here you are, sadder than when I came.” 

I laughed, dribbling tea on the sheets. “Not sadder.” 

“Perhaps not,” he said. He looked at me. “Jamillah, this Seeing and Knowing, can you use it at will? Or does it just come when it comes?” 

“Both,” I said. He nodded at me to explain, and, after a moment, halting over longer phrases, I did. “Sometimes, it comes. One can — try to call a certain image.” 

“One? Can you?” 

I nodded. 

“Do you want to stay here?” Ta asked, slowly and deliberately. “If you are happy — if you want to stay — I will say no more.” 

“Say it,” I whispered. 

“You could come with me,” he said. “As a peddler, I cannot stay long in one place, but if you were there, Seeing and Knowing, brewing potions —we could stay a hand of days. Maybe even two hands.” 

I was silent. Not because I could not talk, but because I did not know what to say. I was only fifteen — not old enough to make that decision. But then, what about the decision I’d had to make at seven? Things must be decided when they come up, not when one is ready to decide. Sky Eyes had she hesitated to take me? No. Had she regretted doing so? Perhaps lately, but on the whole I thought no. The things she taught me, the things she let me learn for myself, the midnight bread we ate under the stars. Could I leave her? Would I regret doing so? 

“Yes,” I said, not sure which question I was answering. Of course I would regret it, but girls left their mothers all the time, to marry or take up a trade. In a way, this would be both, for I could read Ta’s desire, mingled with his business proposal. My eyes filled with tears again, and Ta gathered me close again. I laughed through my sniffles —after being so careful not to show tears to Ketrin .... 

“You will miss her,” he said, “and she you. But you will come back. It doesn’t take Seeing and Knowing to know that.” 

Sky Eyes face appeared in my mind again, and she too was crying from her night black eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said, with my voice as well as my thoughts. 

So am I, she sobbed. So very sorry. 

Ta patted my back, unaware of the exchange. “You must not be sorry. You feel what you feel. You are who you are.” 

I was barely aware of him. “I will come back,” I whispered. “You know I will.” 

“Of course you will come back,” Ta said. 

Come back, she said. Oh, come back, my daughter. Her image wavered and disappeared, as if our common tears had washed it away. 

I didn’t take much in the way of glassware and tools; Ta could trade for such things. Several bunches of dried bone leaf, wrapped in paper. I could powder it myself when we reached Shaboor, the next stop. Small amounts of other plants that I would not be able to collect as we traveled — plants that were available in the spring, those that grew only in this area. The blankets from my bed. My few dresses and leggings. My shoes. My mother’s cloak, which hadn’t dragged on the floor for two years now. 

In the summer heat, I put it on and buried my face in the wool of the collar, savoring the warm smell. Sky Eyes had given me back my mother through the touch of her death. 

But she had given me so much more as well. I slung the cloak over my arm and took the shennikan feather from its place on the wall. Not that Ta would be unable to please me, but that I could still please myself. Thank you, Sky Eyes. I unhooked the yellow cloth, still bright, with the lizards scampering across it. This I would take as well, a piece of my home, a part of my life. I folded it neatly and placed it on top of the cloak in the smallest of Ta’s packs, the one he had cleared for my use by redistributing items in other packs. Before I strapped the top down, I stroked the fabric and sent a silent message. Thank you, Mother. 

“Ready?” Ta asked, from his place near the pack beast’s head. “Are you sure?” 

I nodded, secured the strap. This was a hard thing, but a good thing, perhaps the best thing. 

“Then we’re away,” he said. The rhythm of our steps as we set out brought a new song to the back of my throat. 

* * * *

By Laurel Winter 

Laurel Winter’s last story for us was “Fighting Gravity” back in September. She reports that much of her energy these days is going into her new passion, painting, and that she’s working on an sf novel for kids. This new fantasy tells the story of a quiet young girl’s coming of age and of a special woman known as...