Total pages in book: 204
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 193124 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 966(@200wpm)___ 772(@250wpm)___ 644(@300wpm)
His death is not far from him.
He does not know this, however. And this is not why he’s captured me in the darkness.
“The bairn is dying…” he says in his gravelly voice. “You must come to my newly born son. Now!”
Three
Wherein I Break the Law.
The farrier and his family of seven live behind his shop just off the market square, but he doesn’t dare bring me in the front. Though time is precious, and the stink of his fear is a roar in my nose, he scuttles me down an alleyway strewn with dirty hay and manure to the back side of his combination workshop and house. His cracked and black-stained hand trembles as he grips the iron ring of his stout door, and I glance over my shoulder to see if we’ve been followed.
No one. Nothing.
I can’t sense the stalking presence anymore, and I tell myself I was confused and it was just the farrier coming for me. The lie holds no logic as the danger was approaching from the rear, but sometimes I’ve got to construct a reality I can live with.
“This way,” he says.
As I step through, he shields the entrance into his home with his hulking body, but it’s not to protect me. I’m the last thing he wants in his house, and he’s making sure nobody sees me, even though no one watches back here—
The smell is terrible. Fresh blood, old sweat, horse hooves, and melted metal. The kitchen is a mess, with chicken bones sucked clean of meat and gristle scattered across a planked table and the remnants of stew molded into the bases of tin bowls. Bladders of drink are lined up, but going by the acidic whiff of him, I’m betting they’re full of mead, rather than milk or water for the children.
“He’s down here.”
The farrier’s boots thunder over the floorboards, his weight like that of the steeds he shoes, and he makes no apology for the state of his home. Then again, that’s women’s work to him.
As he rips back a tattered curtain, the first thing I see are the young ones. Four daughters are clustered together in ragged clothing, their pale faces dirty, their hair tangled and matted. All under five, born each year since the farrier took this wife. He killed his first one on the birthing bed, too, the fetus refusing to vacate the womb and souring inside of her.
There is also an older girl, one of teenage years, and I recall that she’s a niece he took in at some point for labor. She has a gaunt appearance, and she puts a thin arm around the children. She shows no interest in me, her fearful eyes only worrying about where the farrier is, and I don’t need to know how many beatings she’s had under this roof. It’s all in the way she hunches her shoulders and lowers her head.
I don’t look any of the children in the eye. I already cannot bear what I’m seeing and don’t want to know their futures.
I turn to the pallet in the corner. The young woman lying twisted as a rope on the bloody blankets is soaked with sweat and breathing in shallow pants. Her swollen lower body is fully exposed, her knees wide, the umbilical cord still tying her to the blue infant that lies waxen and motionless between her thighs.
The farrier speaks: “The laboring lasted most of the day and—”
I hold my hand up. “Silence.”
I want to slap him for forcing this breeding once again. I have memories of her before he claimed her as his birthing chattel, a girl of my own age, carefree and lovely, her dark hair streaming behind her as she danced with her sisters in the sunshine in the village square. Now she’s here dying like a plow horse used too hard. And he will go on and get another to raise these unwanted daughters of his, and more importantly give him the son he wants, because he has the money to do so.
And if that one dies, he’ll just return anew to the well of young girls.
Kneeling down at the pallet, I brace myself and look at the perfect little face of the infant. The eyes of the boy are open, and as I stare into them …
Nothing. No sensation, no images. I’m doing what others perform easily, meeting the pupils of someone else.
A familiar sorrow runs through me, filling my veins with a sour despair. I have to try to help the bairns, even if I hate the fathers—even if it means I am breaking the law and risk being flailed raw in the town square. When I was abandoned as an infant, a stranger cared enough to save my life. It’s my calling to do the same, the only legacy I have to live up to.