Page 4

Chapter Four

He didn’t know whether to rage or cry or run away and never show his face in the village again. He wanted to do all three—he kept flashing hot and cold all over, swinging from a high passionate anger to a crushing, cold humiliation. Who had Lyford betrayed him to? Who had listened to him complaining about Tam? Who else knew so much of Tam’s private life that they felt entitled to stick their noses in where they didn’t belong?

He let himself back into his tea shop and slammed the door closed after him.

Perhaps the whole village knew, he thought as he stomped up the stairs to his private rooms. Perhaps they had all been gossiping behind their hands about him, mocking him, laughing at him. How was Tam going to show his face in the village ever again? He couldn’t. He couldn’t. Not when he wouldn’t know who was scheming against him and talking about him and thinking he was a bloody little fool.

Before he knew what he was doing, he’d flung his clothes into a bag and gathered a few treasured possessions into a box. The rest could stay behind. He’d sell the tea shop, he’d go to a big city, maybe Brassing-on-Abona, and he’d start a new life, and—and he wouldn’t cry to be leaving it all behind, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t— and there would be someone else, eventually.

He couldn’t sleep. He barely tried. He paced, and he seethed, and he worked himself into a state—so much so that he could recognize that he was doing it to himself, that he was torturing himself over it. Was he being irrational? Was he overreacting? Oh, what did it matter!

He went out as soon as there was a touch of light in the eastern sky, the beginning of Mategat’s hours. By Angarat’s hours of full morning, he’d be gone. The holiday meant there weren’t any mail coaches he could ride to the next town, but he could walk as far as he could manage, and then the next day, he’d find a coach and go somewhere with enough people that nothing he did would matter, and that no one would notice who he spent time with or not, and that he could pray to whichever gods he felt like he wanted to follow without drawing any attention.

Except Angarat. Never Angarat.

Dawn was cool and quiet, all pink and silver and pale blue with the dew and traces of fog over the fields. The road out of town was pleasant, planted with trees and hedges on either side, which kept the sun off as it rose higher, burning the pinks away and transmuting the blues to rich shadows and bright sky and golden sun. Three hours of walking and he was deep in farmland. The fields were abundant with crops—at first, wheat and barley and rye, peas and carrots and turnips, and then further from the villages, sheep dotting the rolling green hills.

He had not thought to pack any food, of course. He’d been at the festival the last two days, and he’d had all his meals there, so everything in his kitchen was gone or stale. Just as the sun reached the most glorious glow of morning, before it got too warm—nine o’clock or so, the middle of Angarat’s hours—just as his stomach began panging him fiercely and his mouth became intolerably dry, he came upon a little brook with a stone footbridge over it... And beside them, a standing stone.

The brook fell from a small, waist-height cascade on one side, pooled in a little green glade that had grown around this wet, muddy spot, and then toppled down the rocks on the other side and rushed away down the hill in a series of more small, narrow cascades. As for the standing stone, Tam didn’t have to look to see which gods were carved on it. It would be Ystrac on one side—the god of the woods and the hunt, of wilderness and wildness, of green growth untamed by human hand—and on the other side Angarat Seed-caster, in her guise as goddess of farms and tilled fields and orchards. The road was a liminal space between their realms, and thus protection over travelers was shared between them.

Offerings had been laid at the bottom of the standing stone, but most of them had been picked over by squirrels and rabbits. There was, however, one small loaf of bread on a nice, clean, large leaf—Tam’s stomach panged again to look at it, but it was on Angarat’s side of the stone.

He gritted his teeth and stomped over to it.

“Hello,” he said to the carving of her on the stone. “We are in your hours of the day, and this road runs the border between your dominion and your brother Ystrac’s, and I am a traveler on that road. The two of you have a bargain to protect travelers. I’m very hungry. Your brother’s children have already eaten their fill of the offerings. I would really like that loaf of bread. I don’t expect you to do something so absurd as to appear and give me permission, so I’m just going to take it.”

“Go right ahead,” said a woman’s voice on the footbridge behind him.

Tam spun around so fast he dropped his bag.

He froze.

“Bitch,” he said before he could think better of it.

“I don’t deserve that,” Angarat said gently. “Maybe you’d like to rethink your habit of name-calling.”

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Giving you permission to eat, little fox,” she said with an openhanded gesture towards the loaf. “I don’t like it when people go hungry, and you are a traveler on the road. Go on. You might be in a better mood afterward.”

Tam glared at her for a moment, then bent to swipe the loaf off the ground, sat unceremoniously on a rock at the edge of the brook, wrestled his shoes off, and stuck his feet in the water.

She just sat there, humming to herself and plaiting some stalks of wheat. Tam shoved the bread in his mouth and kept glaring at her.

How had he known that it was her?

Her hair hung long and loose well past her hips. It was an impossible color that seemed to shift as the wind rustled the leaves overhead and moved the dapples of sunlight that fell on her: it was the golden of the rye-fields; it was as silver-white as heckled flax; it was the dark color of damp, newly-tilled soil; it was the rich, warm brown of shiny chestnuts; it was the colors of fruit heavy on the orchard branches—yellow-orange of apricots, dark red like plums. Her skin was the color of the pale flesh of an apple in one instant, and in the next it was the rich brown of the fleece of Matshire sheep, and either way, her lips were berry-stained. She was clothed in loose drapes of fabric in all the colors of flowers and spring leaves.

Her figure was the only thing that didn’t seem to shift strangely with the movement of the wind in the wheat. It was the figure of a mother who had borne several children—plump and rounded, with a generous lap for crawling onto like a toddler seeking a cuddle, and a bosom for weeping on like an infant, and soft arms for being cradled by.

And she was beautiful—ravishingly beautiful, as beautiful as the morning sun after a week of rain, as beautiful as one’s first lover, as beautiful as a feast table laden with food and surrounded by loved ones.

Tam finished his bread and drank from the brook.

“Are you still hungry?” Angarat said, looking over with a gentle smile from her perch.

“Yes,” said Tam, begrudging.

“What would you like best to eat?”

“Tarladown cheese, and a pork pie, and a raspberry tart. And elderflower cordial.”

“Say please, love,” she said, as chiding as his aunt had been when he was a child.

It annoyed him, but it had annoyed him back then too. “Please.”

She set down her wheat beside her and turned away, picking up a plate from her other side where he couldn’t see. It might have been there the entire time. It was laden with food—the pork pie was steaming, and the raspberry tart was crisp and shiny, and the Tarladown cheese was soft and white and probably ready to melt apart in the middle when cut in half. She’d given him a mound of fresh steamed snap peas too, though he hadn’t even asked for those. He had to get up and pad up the footbridge to take the plate from her, and then she turned aside again and produced an entire pitcher of pale golden cordial, the water and sugar syrup still swirling and shimmering through the middle as it mixed together.

“Thanks,” he said, taking it from her. He took it back to the brook, and sat on the ground again.

“You’re welcome,” she said simply. “Take your time. I’d like to talk when you’re finished, but you can think about whether you’d like that too. I’m not going to force you.”

Wildly uncomfortable proposition, but Tam wasn’t going to turn down a meal, even from the bitch who had consistently ruined his life. He ate—it was maybe too rich and heavy for so early in the morning, but they were his favorite foods, and he didn’t much care at this point if it made him queasy afterwards. It would just be one more way that Angarat had let him down.

The food was, of course, incredible. The pork pie was rich and deliciously seasoned and just perfectly juicy without dripping everywhere. The raspberry tart was sweet and bright and summery, and it paired beautifully with the soft, white Tarladown cheese that indeed melted, gorgeous and luscious, when he cut it in half with the knife Angarat immediately supplied for the purpose. The snap peas crunched, soft but crisp, buttery and salty and so healthsome that he could practically feel the sheer nourishment of it on his tongue. The elderflower cordial tasted like paradise, and quenched his thirst like nothing he had ever tasted before.

He finished the food, barely stopping himself from licking the plate, guzzled down the rest of the pitcher of elderflower cordial, smacked his lips in absolute contentment and satisfaction, and took a breath.

The air rushed into him—cool, damp air, heavy with the smell of the brook and the wet leaves and the cultivated fields around him, the green growing things, the faint whiff of sheep in the distance, the mud, the sweet tang of berries in the hedges, the suggestion of rain later in the afternoon...

He breathed, and it felt like it might have been the first real breath he’d taken in several years.

Tears stung in his eyes.

He looked up accusingly at Angarat. “What did you put in that?”

“Oh, Tam, you really are impossible!” she said, sounding faintly annoyed for the first time. “How often have I tried to give you something nice, just for the sake of kindness and love, and you’ve gotten so fussy about it and looked for the catch! Really, dearheart, it’s getting old.”

“Well, I don’t know—how many times have you tried that?”

“Several,” she said seriously. “One begins to lose count. Are you comfy down there by the brook, or would you like to come sit with me?” She patted her perch on the footbridge wall. “You can see the fields better from here.”

“I’m fine. My feet hurt.”

“By all means, soak your feet, then. Now. Did you decide whether you wanted to talk? Or, if you prefer, I’ll let you go on your way.”

“What is it that you think we need to talk about?” Tam asked warily.

“Well, first of all, I think it would probably do you good to tell me why you’ve been so angry at me.”

Tam scowled. “You didn’t curse Lyford’s dick with a flesh-eating disease.”

“Or spiders,” she said, nodding.

“What?”

“You asked for flesh-eating spiders, once.”

Tam considered this. “I would take flesh-eating spiders. Or leprosy.”

“I’m not going to curse poor Nicolau’s instrument of love with spiders, nor leprosy, nor gangrene, nor anything else,” she said regretfully. “I know this is a disappointment to you, but you must admit that it’s not fair to blame your lack of self-control on poor Nicolau’s body. He can’t help the fact that his genitals are bewitching to you. That’s your own problem.”

“It’s your problem,” Tam said, aghast. “He’s your favored one, you were the one who gave him that cock!”

“Did I give him that cock because he’s my favored one, or is he my favored one because he has that cock?” she said, setting her wheat down again so she could look philosophically off over the fields. “You know, I can’t remember which came first. I think it’s probably the latter—that, and he loves me, and throws himself so fervently into seeking my gifts and blessings. Such a sweet boy.”

“He’s awful.”

“Is he? Well, never mind that for the moment. What else are you angry with me for, besides the allegations of complicity in the state of sweet Nicolau’s anatomy?”

Tam couldn’t even name all the things, but— “He’s your favored one, even though he knocked over my table at the vegetable competition and smashed the marrow I grew for you all over the floor,” he choked out, tears stinging his eyes again. “And then I got scolded like it was my fault, and he got pampered and fussed over, and—and no one ever apologized to me or comforted me or sympathized with me, because it didn’t matter how hard I worked, no one ever noticed or—or appreciated it— ”

“Oh, Tam, sweetheart,” Angarat sighed, setting her plait down on her lap again and looking at him with—with the kind of brimming, heartfelt compassion he hadn’t gotten that day, or any day after. “Are you still hurting over that, after all this time?”

“It established a pattern, that’s all,” he said bitterly. “I work hard and no one notices, and then eventually it gets smashed on the floor anyway.”

“Will you come here a moment, dear?” She slid off the wall and extended her arms to him. “Come on,” she said when he hesitated. “One hug won’t kill you.”

He pulled his feet out of the brook and got up, surly and resentful, and padded over the dirt and once more up the small slope of the footbridge. Immediately, she slid her arms around him and hugged him.

It was without question the best hug he had ever gotten in his life, and it made his eyes burn with tears enough that the fields around them wobbled and blurred into smears of color. He clenched his eyes shut and let his face fall onto her soft shoulder, and her arms tightened around him, and her cheek came to rest against his head. “I’m sorry no one comforted you when you needed it,” she murmured. “It was a beautiful marrow. I was very touched that you worked so hard on it.”

Tam pulled away from the hug and wiped his eyes on the cuff of his sleeve. Angarat let him go, but her hands lingered on his arms and shoulders, and she squeezed a little as he got himself together. “Doesn’t matter now. Stupid thing to be upset over.”

“Not if you felt like it established a pattern,” she said softly. “You were such a gentle child—such a sweet boy, all the boys who come to me are such sweet, sweet boys—and because you were so sweet and soft, what happened hurt you deeply. But the result at the end doesn’t cancel out the work you did before that. I know you have a difficult time with that idea, but take it on faith for the moment. I saw the work you did, and the care and effort you put in to growing and nourishing something, and I—well, no, I can’t tell you that part just yet. I don’t think you would believe me. Suffice it to say that sometimes the bad things that happen eventually lead you to something good.”

Tam scoffed. “You and Lyford really are a pair. You both think I won’t believe you about something—”

“Because you are inflexible and obstinate and stuck in a rut of your own devising, dearheart,” she said, so gently that it didn’t even sound like a rebuke. “Now, are you enjoying the rut you’ve devised, or would you like to get out of it and see what you can see from a better vantage point?”

“I’ve already gotten myself out.” Tam gestured back the way he’d come. “I left. ”

“Yes, that could be one way out of the rut. Or it could be leading you deeper into it—you’re choosing to turn away from your problems instead of facing them and opening your heart to them and giving them the care and nourishment you gave that marrow.”

His heart ached, and he couldn’t make his voice louder than a whisper: “I don’t have it in me.”

“How so?”

“I’m so tired, ” he said, almost a sob, and pressed his cuffs to his eyes again. “I’m so tired, I can’t do it—and I can’t go back, they’re all conspiring—”

“They are not conspiring against you.”

“Mrs Hatter—”

“Mrs Hatter is a nosy old biddy who thinks she knows how to do my job. She thinks I need help to care for my favored one. If he is my cherished marrow that I have been nursing along so carefully for so many years, Mrs Hatter is the troublesome crow that keeps fucking pecking at it.” Tam spluttered with surprised laughter. Angarat gave him a warm and indulgent look. “Her meddling is getting in the way of the growth opportunities I have so carefully been setting in front of my favored one. It’s a very delicate balance of things, and you were quite right to tell her off last night—Idunet told me all about it , dear. I do hope you won’t have a tantrum that the gods are as gossipy as the humans, but you were in his henge, during his hours, engaging in an activity that falls within his domain.”

Tam laughed wetly and scrubbed his cuffs over his face. “I don’t want to be in my rut anymore.”

“Good start. What do you want?”

He sniffled. “I don’t know. I don’t know. ”

“You’ve spent a long time trying hard not to want anything,” she said softly. “Because you were afraid of those marrows being smashed on the floor. Yes?”

“Probably.” He swallowed the lump in his throat.

“What would be one nice thing that would heal just a little bit of all your hurting, love? You can think of it in dear Idunet’s ways if it helps you. It might be a little early for you to be able to reach mine.”

“What about Brassu’s?” He wiped his face again.

“Old stick-in-the-mud,” she murmured. “He’s down there in that rut with you. After all, someone has to rule the domain of slogging through the muck by sheer force of will even when there are easier ways. Come now, you were at Idunet’s henge last night, so you’re comfortable enough with him to borrow his methods—what would be the pleasurable thing? What would be the best, most lavishly indulgent, Tam-centered thing that could possibly happen?”

“Lyford would fucking apologize for the marrow incident,” Tam sniffled. “I know it’s stupid. You asked.”

“I did ask. Have you asked?”

“Eh?”

“Have you asked him to apologize? Have you told him you wanted him to?”

Tam was silent. He looked down at his bare feet on the cool stones of the footbridge. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“Because it would feel less real? It would feel like he didn’t think of it himself?”

“Essentially.”

“What if he’ll never think of it himself? What if his memory of that incident is so wildly different from yours that he doesn’t know that there was anything to apologize for? What if he has no idea that you’re still carrying that broken marrow around with you?” Tam couldn’t reply to that. After a moment, Angarat pulled away and hopped back onto the wall of the footbridge, patting the spot next to her, which he took, clambering up so his feet were dangling on the opposite side, over the brook. “If you wanted an apology, you’d have to go back home to get it,” she said mildly. “Because you didn’t tell anyone where you were going, and you left at dawn. So even if he wanted to run after you—which he would—he wouldn’t know where you’d vanished to.” She paused. “It’s going to hurt him very deeply when he finds out you’ve gone.”

“How can I go back when everyone was interfering? ”

“Well, let’s ask ourselves why they were interfering. Easy answer, no? Because you and Nicolau have been waving around banners proclaiming that there is something unresolved between the two of you, and people—especially Anghenge sorts of people, unfortunately—can’t stand to see something unresolved. They want to plant seeds and nurture them and care for them actively . It’s very difficult to stop fussing over something long enough to stand back and give it a chance to grow.” She picked up her plait of wheat—it never seemed to get any longer, and she didn’t seem to need to replace stalks with new ones as she came to any ends. After a moment, she gave Tam a secret, sidelong smile. “Would you like to know how to thwart their meddling?”

He nodded silently, watching the brook between his feet.

She leaned in close to whisper conspiratorially, “You resolve things before anyone else has a chance to start biting their fingernails over it.” He stirred, scowled, and she clucked her tongue at him. “ Resolved doesn’t mean that you have to go hurl yourself into Nicolau’s arms and declare that you’re going to be married and have five babies—”

“ How .”

“Fuck’s sake, Tam, work with me. Kittens and puppies and lambs and calves can be babies, if you can’t figure out how to source a human one or don’t want to. Plants can be babies. It was figurative.” He grumbled and muttered to himself, and she snorted. “Resolved just means sitting down with Nicolau and having a discussion about what you both want so that he doesn’t have to keep guessing and fretting and chasing you so hard—”

“He doesn’t chase me. He flirts with me. He asks me absurd questions like do I want to go dancing. He makes salacious suggestions . ”

“Yes, you’ve taught him very well that that’s the only thing you’ll reliably respond to, and everything else gets thrown back in his face. As I was saying—talking to Nicolau so that he doesn’t have to chase you, and so you don’t have to keep throwing yourself out the nearest window every time he blinks in your direction. Wouldn’t it be lovely? I expect you’d be much less tired if you weren’t diving out of windows all the time. You could just tell him what you want from him—or what you don’t—and then you’d probably get it.”

“What would it matter? He wouldn’t care. ”

“First of all, I think you haven’t gotten sufficient crop rotation in your perspective of him, and it’s stunting your ability to see him clearly for who he is now, rather than who he was when you were both teenagers. Secondly, his caring or not is his business, not yours. If he doesn’t care, then you can shrug and go traipsing off wherever you want, and leave him to his feelings. Here, I’ll even make you a wager—if Nicolau doesn’t care at all about what you want from him, then I will gift you a horse fit for a king for you to ride away in style, and I will gift you a bag of gold to buy a new tea shop or land or a house or whatever you like, and Idunet and I will put our heads together to find you a ravishingly handsome man who will fuck you until your eyes cross. That is my promise to you.”

Tam squinted at her. “What do I get if I lose this wager?”

“Then you get the knowledge that there is a person who cares very much about what you want. And that’s worth rather more than a fine horse and a bag of gold and a handsome stranger, hm?” He sat in silence for a long time, and finally she nudged him, bumping their shoulders together. “Or perhaps you’d like it better if I framed it as a quest?”

“What kind of quest?”

“How would you feel if I charged you to apologize to Nicolau for yanking him around by his feelings all these years and jumping out of windows rather than making his life easy by providing him clear and consistent information about what’s going on in your stubborn little head?”

“ Apologize? To him ?”

“Just a thought. You needn’t take it if it’s not an appealing quest—but you’ve been so long with Brassu that I thought something that challenged your willpower and strength of character might be more, hm, accessible to you at the moment than one that challenged your caring and vulnerability and capacity for compassion.”

“I can be compassionate,” Tam muttered.

Angarat laughed—it was like flowers blooming and lambs gamboling across a field and children playing in the sunshine. “Such a stubborn thing! So intractable! It’s astonishing that you didn’t end up with Ystrac, dearheart, considering how much you hate the idea of being tamed.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Think about the things you want. Go home. Tell people what those things are. Flourish and prosper.”

In the space of a blink, she vanished as if she’d never been there, and the sun seemed duller and more ordinary, and the glade seemed a more mundane shade of green, and the sound of the brook was the same as any other brook, not ringing with life as it played through the rocks.

But there was another raspberry tart on the wall beside Tam, and the pitcher of elderflower cordial had been refilled.