Black Spring (6 page)

She could be cruel, but somehow it was never personal. She once sat on me to hold me down and broke my little finger by bending it back over my hand. I still remember the expression on her face as she did it: it was curious and intent, as if she simply wanted to see what would happen. Her dismay at the dramatic result was comical, as if my screams and the subsequent row — I didn’t tell my mother how it happened, although she had her suspicions — were the last thing she expected.

The following day Lina told me that I should break
her
little finger, to make up for what she had done. She looked at me with unusual seriousness and laid her hand down flat on the floor. “It’s easy — you just pull it back like this. I won’t stop you, I promise.” To her surprise, I recoiled at her offer, and she pressed me until both of us began to get angry. When she realized that I really wouldn’t do it, she looked hurt, but then she shrugged and laughed. “You are strange, Anna,” she said. “It’s only fair. But if you won’t, I can’t make you.”

I suppose it’s unsurprising that Lina’s childish notions of justice should be shaped by vendetta: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a finger for a finger. However, when she believed something was unfair, she could react in unexpected ways that had nothing to do with what she was taught. I remember vividly the day some of her friends, who were mostly children from land-owning families nearby, began to tease me. They said I was only a servant and should not be allowed to play with them, and they mocked my clothes and held their noses to demonstrate how I stank. I was a shy child, and wholly unable to defend myself against their abuse.

As I stood in tears, Lina bristled with fury. “That’s nice coming from you, Kinrek Tomas,” she said, pointing scornfully at my chief persecutor. “Last week we had to take you home because you wet your pants! And Maya, I’ve never seen Anna with snot all down her front, like when you sneezed that time. Anna’s cleaner than any of you. And she’s six times more fun.” (This last wasn’t strictly accurate.) “I won’t speak to any of you until you say you’re sorry. You’re all
pigs.
” Then she took my hand and marched me home, where we played the games I liked best all afternoon, even though I knew they bored her rigid.

That day Lina won my undying loyalty. I did get my apologies, and I was never teased by those children again, though it took some time for me to forgive our playmates. Once they apologized, Lina regarded the episode as finished, and she showed no resentment toward any of them. One of her virtues as a child — it changed later, although I never blamed her for that — was that she didn’t bear grudges and was mystified by those who did. It was another reason I excused her excesses. That was the least northern thing about her: in the North, hatreds are nurtured for generations of vendetta, as if they are precious family heirlooms.

We children treated Lina as if she were a perilous natural element, like the sea: we watched her with caution and fled when she turned nasty. When she was in her sunny moods, no one was more fun: she led us into mischief, even the boys, because she invented the best games and was the most daring of all of us. We all admired her fearlessness, but her generosities inspired our deeper loyalty. Once, when we were caught raiding a neighbor’s orchard for his plums, Lina stepped forward and took the blame for all of us, persuading the angry man to let the rest of us go. She was thrashed for her pains, but, as she said to us with studied carelessness later, he wouldn’t have dared to beat her nearly as hard as he would have beaten us, because she was the Lord Kadar’s daughter.

Even then she was imperious and stubborn. It was, I suppose, the other side to her courage. My mother did her best to blunt Lina’s edges and to instill in her some sense of womanly modesty, but this was undone by her father, who spoiled and indulged her and whom she adored with a passion made all the sharper by his frequent absences.

One day the Lord Kadar returned home from a long journey. As was our custom, we all gathered solemnly in the dining room to welcome him home. After he had distributed gifts, he took Lina on his knee and kissed her cheek. She flushed with pleasure and buried her face in his neck, and he put his arm about her and announced, as if he were talking about tomorrow’s breakfast, that we were going to move back north, to Elbasa. “As soon as the house is packed,” he said. “I want to be home for the summer.”

There was an immediate hubbub of astonishment. “But what about Lina?” asked my mother, her question cutting through the noise. It was typical of her that she thought of Lina first, although even then, young as I was, I knew that she was homesick for the North and for the family she had left behind when the master moved us south all those years before. “What will happen to Lina?”

The master looked my mother straight in the eye, but he hesitated before he answered her. “Lina too. The king has forgiven my family, and I think it’s time we went home. And we are of royal blood, after all. The Lore doesn’t apply to us.”

Lina looked up at him with a wicked laughter in her eyes. “I am a princess
and
a witch!” she said. “No one would
dare
to touch me!”

“Neither they would, my darling,” said her father, and kissed her brow. “And a beautiful princess at that!”

My mother pressed her lips together, for she disapproved of such petting, which only encouraged Lina’s excesses. She said nothing more: it wasn’t her place to have an opinion about the master’s decisions. The rest of the evening was a whirl of gossip in the kitchens as everyone talked about the news. My father, a taciturn man, went so far as to shrug. None of us in the least expected it, not even the master’s manservant, who was a little sulky at being taken by surprise: he felt it demeaned his status in the household. Later my mother was uncharacteristically impatient with me as she washed me and put me to bed, and I knew she was worried.

“Will they really try to kill Lina?” I asked, for like everyone else I had heard dark rumors of the savage ways of the North, although my mother never told those stories. I mostly picked them up from my southerner friends, when they wanted to tease me. And sometimes — always led by Lina — we had played hunt the witch, with Lina in the principal role. We dressed up as highland wizards, with sticks for our staffs, and dragged Lina from hiding, her hands tragically clasped, and we pretended to set her on fire while she cast her eyes to heaven and called down curses upon our heads. I have sometimes thought, although her father would never have countenanced such a vulgar occupation, that she should have stayed in the South and worked in the theaters of the city: she was a born actress.

My mother didn’t answer me for a time, as if she were turning over things in her head. Then she said, “The master is right. She won’t be killed, at least not by the common people, and maybe her royal blood will protect her from the wizards. I doubt she’ll have an easy time of it on the Plateau. Things are different there. But it is not for you or me, child, to question the will of the master.”

And that was that.

I
t was early spring, and the weather was still uncertain: everything that was to go north must be wrapped in sacking and oiled tarpaulins and packed on the drays in straw, and my mother, as chief housekeeper, had the responsibility of making sure that all the fine china and glassware didn’t arrive in Elbasa shivered to smithereens. I had to leave behind my best friend, Clar, the red-headed daughter of the dairyman (Lina never counted as a friend so much as a condition of nature, to be borne as best I could). Once I realized I would likely never see Clar again, the gloss fell off the excitement for me; I cried myself to sleep every night for a week, and we knotted bracelets of colored wool for each other and swore never to forget our friendship. Lina, on the other hand, was radiant with excitement. She told everybody who would listen that she was going to claim her birthright as a princess of the blood, even after we were all heartily sick of hearing about it, and was determined to help with the packing. Although she was continually told off for being underfoot, not even the most severe scolding could darken her disposition.

I don’t remember much of the journey, except that it was very slow and that it seemed to rain every day. I sat on the cart, numb with cold and misery, hating everything. Our arrival in Elbasa surprised me out of my glums, all the same: even though the master was to follow us later, the whole village turned out to welcome us back, crowding into the square in their best church clothes, which looked rude and strange to my southern eyes. In the North, a village without its lord is a village abandoned. No matter the scandal that attached to the master’s wedding and his dead wife and, even more, to his witch-eyed daughter, blood is blood, and in this country, blood is everything.

I met my grandparents and uncles and aunts for the first time, and my cousins gave me dark looks and stuck out their tongues behind the backs of the adults, which made me act likewise and earned me a cuff from my father. Perversely, this had the effect of cheering me up: it seemed children up north were not so different from children down south, for all their crude clothes and muddy boots. I kept a wary eye out for the upland wizards, of whom I had heard much, and was disappointed when I saw no one who looked in the least wizardly, but there was some entertainment to be had from watching Lina, who took my breath away with her audacity. She ignored the children and greeted the town dignitaries with the gravity of a highborn lady of the South. Such was her seriousness that nobody dared to smile: even at ten years old, Lina’s sense of entitlement was a kind of enchantment in itself, persuading others to see her as she saw herself. There was much jostling among the peasants, because everyone wanted to get a sight of the witchborn daughter of the master, and she knew it too, and played up to it.

After the necessary speeches, which seemed to my mind quite unnecessarily long, we went up to the Red House. I think I fell in love with it at once because, even though it was small, it reminded me of the home we had left behind. The master’s grandfather had built it to please his southern wife, a delicate lady from the city who, so the story runs, quickly withered in the harsh plains and was carried away by the consumption in only a few short years. He bought the estate in the South when she was in her illness and moved there hoping she would recover, but by then it was already too late. Some still whisper that it was back then that the rot set into the Kadar family. Black Country people do not trust southerners, begging your pardon; they consider them dishonest, weak, and immoral, since they do not live by the Lore.

My master’s father did much to rescue the family reputation, and lived an unexceptionable life. He married a hard northern woman who ruled the household with a hand of iron and had no truck with any southern fripperies. She moved the principal household to the manse, where Damek lives now, but she kept a canny eye on the accounts and, for all her disapproval of the South, didn’t sell the profitable southern estate.

So my family were to live in the Red House, caring for Lina, and here too was the master’s residence; the rest of the household was to move to the manse and run the estate from there. There was much coming and going between the two households in those days.

One difference from our southern home I noticed right away, and it brought home to me more than anything else that we were in a place of unknown perils: every threshold was crowned with iron, and above every window was a sprig of rowan. It was, my mother told me, to keep out evil spirits, and because of the way she said it, I felt a run of goose bumps trickle down my spine.

I didn’t have to wait long for my first sight of a wizard. The next morning there was a hammering on the front door, as if someone were beating it with a stick, which was in fact the case. I was in the kitchen with my mother and the cook, peeling turnips for luncheon, and I remember my mother started and dropped her knife. She must have known at once who it was, must in fact have been expecting it, and my father was out in the fields and the master not yet come. She stood up, gathering her skirts around her, and went to answer the door. She didn’t forbid me to follow, which I am certain she would have done if she had not been so distracted, and I was alive with curiosity, so I dogged her heels through the hallway and peeked out from behind her as she opened the door. I’m sure my eyes were as round as saucers.

Outside stood a tall man who looked at first just like an ordinary highland shepherd: he wore a thick jerkin of unwashed wool and leggings of leather, and his rifle was slung across his back. The only signs of his vocation were the stout blackthorn staff that he carried, and the starveling boy who stood silently beside him, so pale and thin I thought he must be ill, and, despite the cold weather, dressed in rags through which his skin showed white. I stared at the strange pair and clutched my mother’s hand, at which point she noticed I was there. She reached behind her to give me a slap, for my cheek.

“Greetings,” she said. “The Wizard Ezra, is it?”