Songs of Love & Death (23 page)

Timbal put her eyes on her gooseberries and increased her pace to pass the threesome. She resisted the impulse to give a bit more swing to her hip as she passed Gretcha. She knew she had the muscle to send the housemaid flying. But then people would wonder why and the truth was too painful to admit. She hated Gretcha because the housemaid knew that Timbal had made a fool of herself over the minstrel. Hated her even more because Gretcha had warned her and she’d ignored the warning. The woman must think her an idiotic slut. Her cheeks burned as she hurried into the clamor and crowding of the kitchen. Everyone was rushing to put their chores to bed. As Timbal covered the basin of berries and disposed of the stems and rotten ones, she forced herself to consider the obvious. Gretcha had known of the journey. That meant that Azen must also have known. Yet he hadn’t admitted it last night, or even hinted at it. No. He’d simply taken advantage of her, knowing well that he’d soon be on his way and gone for months. Why would he be so heartless?

The reason for that dropped on her like a gush of cold water: If she turned up pregnant, no one would believe the minstrel had lain with her. He’d had her virginity; perhaps the novelty of that was all that had drawn him to her. As she tottered up the stairs to her room, a new fear battered her. He was gone, and if she found herself expecting a child, she couldn’t even plead with him to help her. “Sweet Eda, let that not be,” she prayed to the goddess. “I’d rather be dead than a mother with no husbandman!”

She spent another near-sleepless night. She berated herself for being a fool to have given in to him, and for being a bigger fool for longing to feel his touch again. She finally fell asleep clutching the dream that he swiftly returned to the keep with some reason for his cruelty. It did not help that she herself could imagine no explanation for how he had treated her.

Instead, she dreamed that she disgraced herself by running out to him as soon as he returned. In her dream, she was heavily pregnant, and he denied and mocked her, and Gretcha led all the servants in first laughing at her, and then driving her away from the keep for her terrible lies about the minstrel. In the dream, she had to flee barefoot, wearing only her servant clothes, and she wept because she had lost her blue boots, the last vestige of her father’s love for her.

She awoke late, her tears still wet on her cheeks. She had to rush to dress,
and when she hurried down the stairs, she heard Cook calling her name in frustration. She rushed into the kitchen, was scolded harshly for being late, and put to washing up all the dishes by herself.

That night, Lord Just seemed pensive and weary. Chrissock chanted long historical lays about ancient battles. They were boring and depressing. Lord Just drank too much and was carried off to his bed early. Everyone in the keep seemed out of sorts as they drifted away early from their master’s hall and off to their own rooms. Gretcha was wearing a new cap and apron, so perhaps she had been elevated to a lady’s maid. She stood gossiping with her cronies in the kitchen yard. As Timbal passed them, one whispered something to Gretcha, and then they all burst out laughing. She could not keep herself from glancing toward them, and found them flatly staring at her; she was the object of their mirth and they didn’t care if she knew it. She forced herself not to hurry, but knew all the same that she fled as she retreated up the stairs to her room.

There she let her foolish hopes shatter. He’d had all he wanted of her, and now Azen was gone. Was his mission truly to get Lady Lucent with child so that the baby could be passed off as Lord Just’s and the line would have an heir? It seemed wildly unlikely, and yet there were songs about such things happening. Both Lord Just and the minstrel had the same dark eyes and curly black hair, but that was true of three-fourths of Buck. And if Azen had been chosen as a stud, why send them off for the deed to be accomplished? Surely it would be more believable if the lady never left her home? But perhaps the process was too humiliating for Lord Just to tolerate under his roof. Or—and like a cold finger down her back, she recognized the truth—was it a woman’s decision, one that Lady Lucent had made out of her husband’s need for an heir and her need for a bed partner livelier than a crippled old man? But how could she hope to deceive her husband if he were unable to impregnate her? Unless he believed her already pregnant from some effort of his own?

Timbal felt suddenly shamed to be dwelling on the intimate affairs of the nobility. Did not the folk who had taken her in and given her work and a place to live deserve a bit of respect from her? She thought of Azen and resolved to harden her heart. Whatever had happened between her and the minstrel had been her doing as much as his. She’d gone with him, she hadn’t resisted him, and if he had no more interest in her than what he’d had, well, she had only herself to blame. Put it aside and go on with her life.

And so she did. For a week or so, Gretcha continued to laugh mockingly whenever she saw her, but Timbal ignored her, and hoped that her shame did not show. The keep was a quieter, drabber place without its mistress. The rains began and did not let up. The kitchen yard became a sodden mucky wreck, and
Timbal walked barefoot across it rather than ruin the leather of her blue boots. She did her work by day and went to bed at night. It was her life. It had not seemed intolerable before Azen had stepped into it, and logic told her that it was not intolerable now. She tried to remember how pleased she had been with it when her tasks were new, how happy she had been to settle in at Timberrock Keep. Now it seemed tedious and pointless. She would spend the rest of her life preparing food for other people. That was all. It was life, it was what one did. One worked, and ate, and slept. With time, she’d remember how to do that without it feeling like each breath did no more than carry her one step closer to death.

On her next day off, Timbal resisted the urge to visit the river beach and moon over what had befallen her there. Instead, under lowering clouds, she walked into the village and treated herself to a mug of cider at the tavern and listened to a white-haired old minstrel who specialized in silly drinking songs and humorous tales. She even managed to smile a time or two. At the end of his performance, he announced that he would soon move on to the next town, and asked if there were news he could share with friends and relatives there. Half a dozen people sent greetings to extended family, one man announced the birth of a son, and another issued a warning about an upriver bridge that he proclaimed was so dangerous that carts should avoid it. The minstrel nodded to each message, repeating it back word for word. It was a common way for messages to be sent, especially those intended for the public or for folk who could not read and write.

Next, with a salacious grin, he asked for rumors and gossip worthy of being spread. A minstrel, he told them, could make more from a rumor than most men could from a pot of gold. So he begged them for whatever they had heard, no matter how unfounded. Much of what was offered had to do with the best whores in town, men bragging of their endowments, a warning to “whoever” had stolen six sheep from a high pasture, and a great deal of bawdy innuendo. The minstrel took note of it all with great good cheer, repeating the missives back so dramatically that even Timbal laughed until her belly hurt. Then a field hand from Timberrock Keep, somewhat the worse for drink, stood up to announce that “soon enough there will be an heir at Timberrock Keep. And Lord Just will be just as delighted as if the babe were his!”

“Eda’s tits, Lowl, you loud-mouthed drunk!” someone else at the table rebuked him, and gave him a friendly punch in the arm that sent him sprawling to the floor.

Another man at the same table shouted out, “He’s drunk! Pay him no mind!”

Even the minstrel seemed to sense that the man had crossed a boundary, for
he parroted back, “The field hands from Timberrock Keep are loud-mouthed drunks. Pay them no mind,” and received a roar of approval for his amendment. But Timbal sat, suddenly silent, the grin faded from her face and the laughter dried up in her mouth. She put down her coppers for her cider and left, to walk back to the keep alone.

It was pouring rain when she left the tavern. Timbal had not even worn a cloak; there was nothing to do except get soaked by the chilling downpour. For the first half of her walk, she allowed herself to think about Azen as she had known him. She thought of the songs he’d sung, and how it had always seemed he was singing for her, even when his eyes sought out Lady Lucent’s. She thought of his softly curling black hair and how it had smelled when it had danced across her face as they made love. She let herself think of his lips, not just his kisses, but his kind words, and how gently he had held her and let her weep out her sorrow for her father. She had one night of him. Could she truly say she knew him, let alone loved him?

Love wasn’t based on knowing someone. Love, it seemed to her, simply was. It shamed her that he had treated her so badly and still she was mooning after him, recalling every whispered word and every touch. It was bad enough to be stupid once; did she have to recall her stupidity with such longing? For the first time, she let herself think the thought. Timbal wished she had the courage to kill herself. Wished she were dead and no longer feeling this pain for which she had no remedy. “But I don’t have the courage. El should kill me for a coward, for lacking the spine to do the job myself.”

She came to the footbridge she had crossed earlier that evening. The river was up. All the debris that had littered its banks all summer had been lifted and floated down to catch against the footbridge. The water pressed it against the bridge’s wooden supports, flowing through the debris and in several places across the top of the bridge. She hesitated, and set a foot out onto the wooden planks. They trembled with the push of the waters, but the bridge seemed sound enough. She glanced back toward the village to see if anyone was coming, wishing she could ask someone’s opinion on the safety. But the falling rain obscured her vision, and she doubted the others from the keep would start for home before nightfall. It would be fine, she decided.

In the pouring rain, she stooped down and pulled her boots off. Her bare feet would give her a better grip, and she had no desire for the water to pour inside her boots and ruin them. She clutched them to her chest and walked out onto the bridge. The wooden planks muttered and shuddered under her step. The water was cold as it rushed past her bare feet. Then suddenly it skipped up over the top of her foot, and on her next step, she found herself ankle deep.
The water tugged at her and with one hand she snatched her skirts up out of its reach. She glanced back, but she was already in the middle of the bridge. As well go on as back.

Timbal took two more steps before the world bucked and lurched. For a moment, nothing made any sense. Then she realized that she was clinging to the bridge railing with one hand while clutching her precious boots to her chest with the other. The bridge was still there, under her bare feet, but she had lost her grip on her skirts. They tugged at her wetly as the water that was now knee-deep rushed past her. Her mind made sense of the tangle of lumber that loomed over her, pressed hard against the footbridge. The cart bridge upstream had given way, just as the fellow in the tavern had predicted. It had washed downstream, slammed into this bridge, and now other debris and the press of the flood waters was threatening to rip her bridge free of its supports and send it hurtling downstream. With her on it.

Or most likely, not on it, she realized, as timbers groaned and the bridge gave a lurch under her. She could not separate the thundering of her heart from the vibration of the bridge, nor the ringing in her ears from the roar of the water. “I cannot be this afraid,” she told herself sternly. “Not if I want to live.” And in that instant, she realized that she very much did want to live, Azen or none. The realization that she had asked dark El for death and the god had abruptly granted it to her shook her to her core. “NO!” she shouted above the harsh roar of the furious water. “I don’t want to die! I won’t die here!”

She flung her precious boots as hard as she could. The pouring rain obscured her vision but she thought they landed on the bank. Then, with both hands free to grip the shuddering railing, she began to lurch and sidle across the bridge toward the shore. She was a body’s length from the jutting stone support for the bridge when the wooden part tore free. She knew three seconds of a wild ride on a lurching raft of wood before it became merely a jumble of timber. It parted beneath her and she fell through it, into water thickened with forest debris and the broken jumble of planks and timbers the river had made of two bridges. She caught wildly at chunks of wood that turned under her, dousing her yet again. Her skirts caught on a tumbling snag. The roots bore her under, then up, then under as she frantically tried to breathe, scream, and tear her skirts from her body. Before Timbal could get her skirts free, the snag suddenly discarded her as abruptly as it had snatched at her. A floating plank slapped her, then spun away before she could catch at it. Flotsam that was close enough to bruise her floated tauntingly out of reach when she tried to cling to it.

The choking clog of debris that had smashed the bridge slowly dispersed.
In the torrential downpour, she finally caught hold of a splintered section of bridge planks. When she tried to climb up on them, they shifted, dunking her again. She found a new grip and held on, her head barely above the water. Her existence narrowed to a single task. When there was air on her face, she took a breath. When there was not, she held it. When her chilled hands wearied, she clamped them more tightly, willing the pain to keep them awake enough to grip.

Darkness soon cloaked the river, but the rain and the push of the water did not ease. She shifted her grip, was dunked, nearly lost her plank, and then found a new hold with her elbow wedged between two of the boards. She had no breath to weep or cry for help. All she could do was cling and pray to Eda, mother Eda, that she would be carried to shore out of cruel El’s reach.