Castings 01 - Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman

Author:Pamela Freeman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: FIC009020
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2010-04-14T17:06:06+00:00

Doronit’s Story

IT’S TRUE my parents were Travelers by blood, but they were as settled as can be by nature. I was an only child, raised outside a small town way down past Turvite toward the Wind Cities. My father was a cowman for the biggest local farmer; my mother acted as evening dairymaid so the farmer’s wife could get supper for her brood of children.

It was a happy childhood, I suppose, but a lonely one. None of the local children were allowed to play with me, the “Traveler brat.” They threw stones but I learned to dodge them. I wasn’t so skillful dodging the mud or the cow dung. If they’d come at me one by one I could have fought back, but they never did. I used to straggle home and just stand in the doorway until my mother saw me. She would get a look on her face. I thought, the first time it happened, that it was a look of exasperation with me, tempered with resignation at the work I made for her. I hung my head, but she chivvied me over to the fire and changed my clothes, speaking gently so I understood that it wasn’t my fault, and cheered up.

Later my parents bought their own cow, and a few goats, and I had the keeping of them. I hated it, but what was the alternative?

The spring I was sixteen, I was walking down the lane toward our cottage, bringing watercress and some young nasturtium leaves from the stream nearby for supper. I was brooding over my life, the way you do when you’re sixteen and think you’re unhappy, and I didn’t hear the horse come nosing up behind me until it was too late. I heard soft hoof noises on the gravel and then a snuffle and I turned, but the warlord’s man was off the horse already and had hold of me a moment later. I knew him by sight and by reputation — violent, crazed almost, but one of the warlord’s favorites. His name was Egbert, but they called him Fist. He was grinning at me.

What’s the point of describing it? There aren’t any words for the terror, the despair, the loneliness of it. He pushed me facedown into the spring mud until it was in my mouth and my nostrils, until I could hardly breathe, and took me from behind. Both passages. Grunting, “Traveler bitch, scum, whore, turd, filth . . .” And when he’d finished he got up, kicked me once in the ribs, got back on his horse, and rode off.

All I wanted to do was lie there and die. Then I started to vomit and I had to get up on my hands and knees to retch.

But you don’t die, that’s the worst of it: you have to stand up and stagger back home, walk in and see the look on your mother’s face. I’ll never forget her face that day. It was like the look she had given me each time I had come home covered in dung, but now I was old enough to read it.

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