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Memories: Irich’s Moon

It was the day of the fall market, of Irich’s moon, and the great, dusty field that served as the meeting place for the tradesmen was full. Minalka was a brown collection of poor shacks rising from the mud plains like a copse of burnt trees, perched on the the only low hill for miles, and the market sprawled out from its base. Some farmers drove their stock for a day to reach it. Without their trade at the monthly fair, the only coin that would find its way into the country would come from the red carts of Nighlata traders off their red ships, and everyone knew they were only out to steal honest men’s brass.

The occasional lean ox lowed quietly to itself and shifted its hooves as its stomachs rumbled and churned. Mottled pigs scratched the dust, chased by dust-mottled children with sticks. An old woman with long white hair and the sandals of a stroller did fire tricks in a narrow passage between two stalls where the light was dim; her flames were small and a bruised purple color, and they moved as if they shared the old woman’s illness. Sometimes she would erupt into a hacking paroxysm, spitting up phlegm while her flames spun wildly, alighting in her hair or on a spectator’s shirt, and folk would shout and laugh as she held her knees, racked with coughing. Two pilgrims in deep green cloaks passed with measured, matched stride, and within their dark hoods Leaf could see faces lighter by a tanned hide than hers, the mark of the dead Chakron on their foreheads.

The squall of crows and turkeys, the grinding of dust underfoot, and the endless droning of the converse of farmers and pigmen and fowlers filled the air, each noise as empty as the last to Leaf’s ears, hollow words about crops and animals and weather and roads, all of it the same as every market day before and all that could come after.

She wandered from the roped-off area where her father argued with two men over the price of sows and her brothers and their friends poked the young boars with sticks. She could not be bothered with them and knew that she could easily lose herself. Though she was taller than the others, already she had learned to fold herself into nothingness.

As Leaf stepped over piles of manure and gopher holes, a hand fell on her shoulder, the fingers waxy and light. When she turned it was the flame juggler. Her eyes were wide and crooked, and her hair smelled of cardamom and garlic; a few drops of transparent purplish liquid dribbled from the corner of her cracked lips.

“Wild in the heart,” she wheezed at Leaf, showing a mouth scorched black and nearly toothless; the smell of sour meat gushed with her words. “More grass than girl, more wind than child. Listen, listen to the wind, for it shall speak.” And the woman pulled her down and pressed her lips to Leaf’s forehead, her scrawny arms fierce with desperation. Her kiss burned like sulfur.

Leaf ripped herself from the grip and ran into the crowds, hearing the convulsive sobs of the old woman following her until she reached the far side of the field and rolled under a cart. Leaf peered out from behind the wooden wheels but saw no sign of the crone. She rubbed the burning patch on her forehead fiercely with her dirty sleeve, but the sensation did not fade. It sank into her skin and set her face tingling.

Casting about, Leaf saw she was near the planking of the central platform, mounted upon a few of the only stones to be found for miles at the western edge of the fair, just below hill. Near the platform stood three pardians of Irich, looking somber and hurting the eyes with their bleached robes; in the haze, the lanterns hanging from their staves cast no light, but the air about them wavered with heat.

The baron had come, as usual upon Irich’s moon, to renew his vows of fidelity and protection with the townsfolk. On the platform, little higher than the dirt, sat a handful of men in fine but soiled clothing. All the men were fatter than her father, and leaner servants and masande milled among them, some with their shaven heads bare, others with coppery or silver caps tight to their skulls.

Having seen these same men—or those so close as to make no difference—every year, Leaf was surprised to see something new: the baron, for what reason she could not guess, had brought his lady with him. Leaf had never seen her like; she had heard her father and uncle say over their cups that she was a vain and foolish woman, but they thought so of most women. The lady sat at the back of the platform in a large wooden chair, wearing a burgundy dress with more frills and laces and undercoats than Leaf had ever imagined. Her hair was almost gold but mostly brown and done up in ringlets and curls that stayed atop her head, slick with grease and pinned by a comb of jade. Dark stains were spreading through her velvet outer dress even through all the layers of cloth; her smile was waxen and false, her face paled the color of cedar bark by some glistening paint, and she fanned herself constantly with a yellow Nighlata fan. A great necklace hung on her collarbone, made up of pearls and lapis.

When the lady reached for a wooden goblet perched on a stool next to her, Leaf saw a flashing at her wrist in the sunlight. She wore a bracelet of twisted silver and from it hung strange ornaments—baubles and charms, some of glass and some of amber. Leaf’s eyes were fixed upon it and she could not look away. It was an ugly, thick bracelet, a strangely indelicate cuff on so slender a wrist.

As Leaf watched, the lady drank deeply from the vessel, a tiny rivulet of pale pink dripping down and leaving a faint trail through the paint on her chin. Then she set the cup back on the stool, and as she did so, something dropped from her wrist, bounced on the planking, and rolled over the back of the platform. Leaf could see it land in a plump of dust on the ground.

Leaf peered around, and the droning and dusty heat pressed in on her, filling her senses until she thought she would faint. A whispering noise like the wind in grass was rising in her, and a boiling tension filled her limbs as though they might scrabble away of their own accord. No one seemed to notice the fallen bauble, and the lady herself was unaware, lost as she was in her own heat.

Leaf elbowed out from under the cart, then rose to a crouch barely higher than the ground. She glided among the people, jilting to avoid touching any, and slipped along the wooden planking, wishing so hard not to be noticed that it felt like the wish radiated from her like the heat. She reached the back corner and the great folk had taken no notice of her. She muttered an incoherent prayer to the tiny gray spiders that moved soundlessly in the straw of her bed at night, the words seeming to come from the air around her and the rushing in her head, and she inched around the back of the wooden stand. Without looking down, she dropped to her knees and reached to where she knew the bauble had dropped. Her fingers closed on it like a promise; it was cool and smooth, the roughness of her hands and the dust almost grinding against its slick surface. The broken link of fine chain dropped away from the tiny metal setting that had held it.

A far-away part of her mind told her to drop the thing again, to run, but Leaf knew it was not a true voice—it was alone, and it spoke in her own tones. The greater part of heart, detached from her fear, whispered to her to walk. She did so, slowly, her hand clenched around her prize so that her fingers ached. She felt feverish. Everything was pulsing with light, all reduced to impressions of movement, and her body was tensed for upraised voices and shouted discovery. They did not come.

She pressed her way past a pardian chanting Neshtophor’s blessing over a manged dog, its coat raw and its skin welted. A trenchman shuffled across her path, others clearing a space before his stench and his swinging spade. A clan of pasturefolk from the east shared out hunks of bread, and once she had them between herself and the scaffold, Leaf did run, the voices singing high within her and the setting of the bauble cutting into her palm.

Next Chapter: A Table Tale: The Bat and the Raven