Eileen Kernaghan by The Sarsen Witch (epub)

Author:The Sarsen Witch (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

16

Witch-Wife

It was too fine a day to bide indoors; the women of Ricca’s household had moved their looms, and spinning wheels into a quiet corner of the courtyard near the granaries, where they could enjoy the late spring sunshine. Their small daughters played and quarreled around their feet.

Naeri had set up her loom so that she could work in the shade, with her back against the granary wall. Having thus distanced herself from the other wives, she watched them covertly through the weighted warps.

Outside the walls she could hear the creaking and groaning of ox-drawn supply wagons, the drumming of hooves and clatter of two-wheeled horse-carts. From all over the Westland, the hosts were gathering.

All day the smoke of their cookfires had hung like autumn haze over the fields, and at night the sky was stained with crimson. As word spread, smiths, peddlers, minstrels—all the wayfaring folk of the chalk—streamed in from the hill-camps and villages. It was as though an enormous horsefair had sprung up, out of season, at Ricca’s gates.

Suais was absent this morning—sleeping late, said Barra, with a knowing smirk. What she knew, but did not say aloud, was that Suais had come in at dawn on dew-soaked feet.

Barra was the second of Ricca’s wives, a tall slender blond young woman with blue eyes and delicate rose-flushed skin. She might have been beautiful, were it not for a thin beak of a nose that gave her an oddly predatory look.

The other, Clia, was darker, plumper, softer—by far the sweeter-tempered of the two, but lacking Barra’s quick intelligence. When Suais was not there, Barra the Fair would queen it over the easy-going, empty-headed Clia, ordering her about and excluding her from the bower-gossip as though she were a servant. With Naeri’s arrival at the hearthside, there was a subtle shifting of power; now, more often than not, Barra and Clia were allies, united in their scorn of the shy, inept, incommunicative new wife.

This morning, Clia was distraught over the loss of her best gold brooch. She had been going on about it since daybreak, her voice as tirelessly repetitious as the flick-flick of her shuttle.

“I cannot think what I could have done with it,” she moaned for the twentieth time in an hour. “It was part of my bride-price, and I set it down on my chest only last night at bedtime.”

“You know very well what happened,” snapped Barra. “The clasp broke, and you dropped it somewhere.”

“No, no,” poor Clia protested. “Only last night I had it. I set it down on the top of my chest, as I told you.”

“Well then,” said Barra, in a voice clearly meant to end the discussion, “one of the bower-slaves has taken it; so you must tell Ricca, and he will discover the thief and punish her.”

At this suggestion Clia dropped her shuttle and burst into tears. Naeri decided that the matter had gone on well past the limits of endurance; and besides, she felt sorry for Clia, who was a warm-hearted girl at bottom, and could not help her silliness.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.