Sistersong

by Lucy Holland

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Historical Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology

Synopsis

In a magical ancient Britain, bards sing a story of treachery, love and death. This is that story. For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Lucy Holland's Sistersong retells the folk ballad ‘The Twa Sisters.'

'A beautiful reimagining of an old British folklore ballad, Sistersong weaves a captivating spell of myth and magic' – Jennifer Saint, author of Ariadne

King Cador’s children inherit a land abandoned by the Romans, torn by warring tribes. Riva can cure others, but can’t heal her own scars. Keyne battles to be seen as the king’s son, although born a daughter. And Sinne dreams of love, longing for adventure.

All three fear a life of confinement within the walls of the hold, their people’s last bastion of strength against the invading Saxons. However, change comes on the day ash falls from the sky – bringing Myrdhin, meddler and magician. The siblings discover the power that lies within them and the land. But fate also brings Tristan, a warrior whose secrets will tear them apart.

Riva, Keyne and Sinne become entangled in a web of treachery and heartbreak, and must fight to forge their own paths. It’s a story that will shape the destiny of Britain.

Sistersong is a powerfully moving story, perfect for readers who loved Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and Katherine Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale.

Release date: October 5, 2021

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 416

Sample

Imbolc—a festival celebrating the end of winter

I will tell you a story.

Seven years ago, when I was a child of ten, I became lost in the woods. My sisters and I had been travelling the road that skims the coast like a stone from Dintagel. I loved our summer home—a spume-silvered rock of houses and workshops, its docks piled high with amphorae. But there is a place, many leagues to the east, where the road slows, turning inland. It loses itself amongst the trees, straying into giant country. Branches interlace here; it is easy to slip away into the green space between a giant’s fingers. Easy for a careless child to disappear.

Looking back, I wonder whether it truly was carelessness. Perhaps it was her doing. Given everything which came after, that would make sense.

Between one scout’s holler and the next, I am lost, a prisoner of the wood. I feel no fear, more an irritation that I’ve let the trees trick me. I can hear my father, the king, calling me and the irreverent footfalls of men rending foliage.

I wander so long, it feels as though I’ve crossed some hidden boundary. I’ve left our world for theirs—the nameless land where goddesses sing to the stars, where lost spirits linger in the twilight. Dark quills scratch me; I am surrounded by yews, the terrible grave-trees which grow from death. I shiver, as irritation turns to fear. Deep voices seem to call my name, anthems to lost children. And now I am lost, hopelessly so.

The sky darkens and with the light goes hope. Hunger claws at my stomach; I am old enough to know I cannot survive long without food and water. Tears well. What if I die here and the yew grows stronger, roots curling through my bones?

Despair is a sharp scent and I suppose she smells it upon the air, for suddenly a woman stands before me. She is old, but not so old as Locinna, our nurse. Eyes peer beneath a heavy brow, blue, and piercing as a gull’s. She wears rags, tattered and rent, but after a blink, these become a cloak of moths, their wings a-flit in the evening. Another blink and it’s just an ordinary cloak, albeit a strange one made of patches and ribbons fluttering free.

She extends a hand and I realize I’ve collapsed to the leaf mulch, the seat of my skirt now damp through. My legs wobble as I stand. Her fingers are rough, calloused like a smith’s. I wonder what strange trade might have marked them.

“Are you a witch?” The dangerous question is out in the open before I can stop it.

She smiles. “Perhaps.” Looks me up and down. “Would you like me to be?”

“No.”

“And why not?”

“Because witches are to be feared.”

She pauses. “A good answer, if not entirely true.”

“I want to go home.”

The witch tilts her head, her gull’s eyes narrowing on my face as if it were a fine fat fish. “I wonder if you do.”

“Of course I do.” But I glimpse her meaning. I have never felt at ease in my home.

“You are wet through. Come and get warm.”

They are such inviting words. And I’m freezing, it’s true. But she’s a witch. “My father must be worried.”

She steps back and something jingles—her stick-wrists gleam with silver bracelets. My eyes widen; only Mother has silver like this. Where hers is solid and silent, however, the witch’s bracelets sing. I feel a desperate urge to touch them, to capture those chimes between my palms, as if I could draw the melody inside me.

She notices my gaze, smiles again. “Would you like one?”

Throat dry with want, I shake my head.

“Here.” She slides off a single band, passing it over gnarled brown knuckles. Before I know it, my fingers have closed about its shining curve.

“I can’t…”

“But you already have.”

My cheeks flush. Shaped like a horseshoe, the band is too big, hanging on my wrist like the crescent moon above us. But it shrinks to a perfect size even as I watch, and I catch my breath at the tingle of magic. When I look up, she’s half turned her back. “Wear it when you are ready to find me again.” And she is gone, returned to the forest that birthed her.

The forest I am no longer within, for I now stand upon a wide road, and voices—human voices—are shouting my name. One laughing, one crying, my sisters rush towards me.

I remember burying that silver bracelet, sweating and fearful. I hadn’t planned to hide it, but inside Dunbriga, our capital, I began to question my gift. It felt nothing like the spells spoken over hearth and home. Not even akin to Father’s ability to spark a flame or ask the skies for rain. It was otherworldly. It had come from the dangerous heart of the forest, warmed by a witch’s skin.

And yet for all that, the bracelet was mine now. My parents would surely take it away if they found it. So in the shadows cast by Dunbriga’s oldest yew, I gouged a hole in the raw earth and dropped the silver in, weeping to see my shining crescent amidst the dirt.

I’ve ventured into the forest many times since then and have never once glimpsed the witch. As the years pass and the magic fades, she seems more and more a figment of a fevered mind. “Just a fancy,” I tell the wheat doll taking shape between my hands. She is nearly finished—a shoulder shy of complete.

“Keyne!”

I twitch. I should have seen Mother coming, sitting as I am at our hill fort’s highest point. A waft of rosewater precedes her and then she’s towering over me—her shadow blotting out what little sun struggles through the clouds. “What are you doing?” she demands.

My blasphemous fingers are busy weaving a brideog. We make the goddess’s dolls every year for the festival of Imbolc. Gildas, the Christian priest, doesn’t like it, but I find the work soothing; it takes my mind off other things. And from my perch on the steps of the great hall, I can watch the hold tumbling out below me down the hill. Cattle on the lowest level are tiny as a child’s toys.

“I told you to put this practice aside,” Mother says sternly, and I hear the priest in her words. Beneath the queen’s skin runs the blood of old Rome, the jewel of the empire that abandoned us to our fate. Father took her for her blood; he thought it might give him strong sons to guard his lands and legacy. Instead he has two daughters… and me. Rome’s last laugh, I suppose, before the legions left our shores for good.

“We are not prepared for Candlemas on the morrow,” she adds, and the word forces my head up. Bright fox fur frames my mother’s shoulders, her curls tamed into an elegant braid. Her skin is a shade browner than my own, though we share the same dark hair. “And do try to sit graciously. This”—she waves a hand at my trouser-clad legs—“open sprawling is improper.”

My hands clench around the wheat woman. “We’ve always made brideogs, Mother. I don’t see the harm in it.”

“Brigid is no longer our concern. We need candles for the ceremony, enough for every woman who—”

“Why is it only the women who must be ‘purified’ at Candlemas?” I snap, imagining what my sisters might say. Wild Sinne would scoff at the thought, eyes sparkling with some planned mischief. Riva would probably grit her teeth and bear it while murmuring prayers to the old gods under her breath. I almost smile, but it dies when I think about Rome’s god and the way his priests seem to delight in punishing women. Gildas believes all Britons sinners, despite being a Briton himself. He condemns our festivals, our traditions, even our little wheat dolls. But every tale he spins, of revelation and ruin, pushes his Christ further away from me. Gildas’s Saviour is a stranger who died long ago in a hot land I have never seen.

Mother’s gaze briefly strays from my own: part of her agrees with me. But when she says, “Make candles, Keyne,” it is Queen Enica who speaks.

“Let Riva do the candles. You know she cannot weave the—”

“Riva is making them already. And when I find Sinne, she will join you.”

She won’t find Sinne. My younger sister has a talent for making herself scarce whenever there is work to be done. And to Sinne, everything looks like work.

Our home, Dunbriga, is a smudge of smoke on the edge of the world. I know it’s not really—Armorica is just across the water, and ships come from further still, bringing us oil and olives, the taste of sun-drenched lands to the south. I like to imagine cargoes of silks and spices cocooned in ships’ holds, waiting to be abused by our rough hands and palates. But when storms keep the ships away, the walls of Dunbriga close in and the fort seems to shrink. We need travellers to remind us that there’s a world beyond our borders.

I make my way to the workshop, feeling the holdsfolk’s customary stares as I pass. The brideog is coming apart in my hands. I don’t know why I care, except that she’s an antidote to Christ and his earnest suffering. I am tired of being called sinful. Half my father’s hold already thinks me so. I need no help from Gildas and his followers.

At the creak of the door, Riva looks up, her good hand coated in tallow. She’s wearing a bandage around the other, hiding the scarred flesh she cried over every night for years after the fire. No one knows how it started, except Riva herself perhaps, and she claims she doesn’t remember.

“So,” Riva says, as I take the stool beside her in the dim room. “Mother found you.” She’s as tidy as Sinne is tangled, her chestnut hair braided neatly, sober dress crease-free. Riva has a stillness in her that soothes me. She listens where my younger sister would speak.

I nod. “Now she’s after Sinne.”

“She won’t catch her.” We share a fond smile before my sister’s eyes stray to the tattered figure in my arms. “… Brigid.”

I let her fall. “Mother forbade me. I’m to help you with the candles instead.”

Riva scoops the brideog from the rush-strewn floor. The doll is a sorry sight, broken wheat sticking out of her like pins. “Finish her, Keyne,” my sister says. “It’s important the goddess feels welcome here. I’ll see to the candles.”

I force myself to protest. “There are dozens. And you don’t like fire.”

“I am coping.” A tremor in her face. “You can help when you’re done.”

“Thank you.” The words hiss from my lips and I sound ungrateful. I can’t seem to sound any other way these days. Riva, however, just nods and returns to her shaping and dipping.

I know she’s watching as my fingers flash in and out of the brideog, perhaps mocking the dexterity she no longer has. But I don’t move, because it’s warm beside the stinking tallow and the fire that keeps it soft. And that stillness I love in my older sister is here in the room between us. I can feel my earlier anger slowly seeping away.

An hour passes in companionable silence. I stare at Brigid’s blank face. She could be anyone. She doesn’t even resemble a woman, just a figure with arms and legs, trunk and head: human. That’s something we all share. That’s what really matters.

Isn’t it?

Raised voices pull me from my thoughts. Riva and I exchange a glance before we creep to the workshop door. We don’t want to be seen. People clam up around us, the king’s children, as if we’re his spies. I grimace to myself. It might look that way, but Father doesn’t listen to us as he used to do. These days only Mother, his lords—and Gildas—are welcome to speak.

“Hush, Siaun. If someone hears and tells the priest—”

“Then we’ll know who’s a traitor.”

I put my eye to a crack. Three men lurk outside, one checking the yard is empty. I guess they’d never dream of finding the royal children with their hands in a tallow vat.

“Do you want to be caught? The king will lock you up… or worse.”

Siaun snorts. He’s a slight but rangy man in a farmer’s overall and his cheeks are lean with hunger. Last summer’s harvest was the poorest in years and the winter has been hard. “Lock me up for speaking truth?” he demands.

The other man shakes his head. “For speaking against the priest.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“It’s not about sides, Siaun,” the third man hisses from where he’s keeping watch. “Plenty of folk are beginning to listen to the priest. The king listens, so they do too.”

“The king is wrong,” Siaun says, and I hear Riva draw a startled breath beside me. Her eyes are wide in the dim space.

Siaun’s friend clamps a hand over his mouth. “Holy Brigid, Siaun. Say that any louder and you’d be lucky to escape with a whipping.”

I swallow tightly. Siaun’s expression doesn’t change, but his fists are clenched and trembling.

“Will you die for this, Siaun?”

The farmer turns so I can’t see his face. “Our women don’t need purifying for the festival of Imbolc, so why is this Candlemas different? Would you let the priest shame them?”

“Of course not, but what can we do when ’tis the queen’s will for us to follow new ways? Besides, Gildas is not all bad. I hear he’s building proper houses for Brys and his family. Times have hit them hard. And not just them.”

Riva mutters something under her breath and I think, Candlemas is only the beginning.

Once Siaun’s friends have bundled him away, I meet my sister’s eyes. “Is it true what they said? That there are already people who follow the priest?”

Bandaged hand held close to her chest, Riva says, “Gildas doesn’t care a wit for them, so why build them houses? It must be part of his plan to convert us all.” Her face firms. “We should talk to Father. Not to tell tales,” she adds hastily when I open my mouth to protest. “About Gildas. Father allows Mother to honour the priest’s festivals, but perhaps he doesn’t know how far it’s gone. That people are prepared to give up the old ways altogether, that Gildas is essentially bribing them to do so…”

“What if Father does know?” The stink of candles clogs my nose. And what if he doesn’t care?

My numb fingers feel as if they’ve shaped a thousand candles before Mother allows me to return to the women’s quarters. When I open the door, a swell of heat and small talk escapes into the afternoon. I exchange a few nods, impatient. Keyne, Sinne and I share quarters with the other unmarried women from noble families and a few of the higher maidservants. It’s a big hall but feels cramped on winter days when the herb and flower gardens are too cold for women to gather there. Heart already skipping with nerves, I duck behind my wooden screen, pull it across for privacy. It’s painted with willow trees and the healing herbs I favour most.

My hand shakes as I unwrap the bandage, which hides the old scars of the fire that changed my life. Beneath the reek of tallow, I can smell the honey and myrtle packed into the poultice. The words of the song come back to me, the healing song I whispered to Brigid for fear of being overheard by Gildas. “It will work this time,” I murmur under my breath, willing it so. Imbolc is Brigid’s festival, when the goddess is at her most powerful. Goddess of fertility, of spring, of rebirth.

Then why is my hand shaking? It will work, I tell myself again. My healing always works. The last coil of cloth slips free.

Feverishly, I scrape away the paste to see familiar red, the fused lump that used to be a hand, individual fingers. A sob wells, chokes me, and I fling the dirty bandage at the screen. I’ve done everything right, more than right. Although they’d never tell Father to his face, the people of Dunbriga can attest to my skills; over the last year, I’ve probably treated every family at least once. It is an open secret that I can break a fever, set a bone so that it heals in days, not weeks. That I can sew a gash and whisper a word to guard it from infection. That I can stop women in childbirth from bleeding out and ease the suffering of the old so that they pass in peace.

But why can’t I heal myself? Why, though I’ve tried a dozen times or more, can’t I heal the marks of the fire? Disappointment drags my skipping heart to a crawl. I’d thought the festival would make a difference. Perhaps I shouldn’t have whispered the song, but thrown it to the heavens. Perhaps seven years is too long and my wound is now too old for magic. I have to blink to keep the tears from spilling.

“What is that smell?”

Hastily, I wipe the rest of the paste onto a fold of my skirt and look up in time to see Sinne, barrelling into the women’s quarters. She weaves past the screens that divide the welcoming room, its walls hung with detailed loom-work. The central fire pit smokes with a fragrance of sweet cedar. I watch as it curls up into the rafters, where wind from the tiny windows catches and carries it away.

Before she can spot the bandage in the corner, I clamp a blunt knife between my knees and scrape at the tallow that’s set on my good hand after my work with the candles. Sinne wrinkles her nose.

“You could have helped,” I say.

“I’m glad I didn’t. You stink of dead animal.”

I ignore that. Sinne scampers about the room, watched idly by Mother’s ladies. My heart lifts a bit to see her pulling cloth out of chests in her wild way, tutting impatiently. After a few moments, she appears before me, holding up a white dress. I roll my eyes when I see that it’s little more than a nightgown. “Do you think this will do for tonight?” she asks. Before I can tell her she probably won’t be allowed to take part, she bursts into one of the traditional songs.

“Bright mother, dark father

Goddess of hearth

Sing, winter-born king

Hanged One, untamed.”

She has a skylark’s voice, sweet and high and sad, one I can’t hope to match. But still I find myself singing with her, sisters together:

“Stag and fox

Forest beast

Sailor of the last sea

Brother and lover

Seed sower, grain giver

Come, Horned One

Drink of the land its blood.”

“I’ve always thought that a silly last line,” Sinne concludes and I realize my eyes are closed. “The land doesn’t have any blood.”

“How do you know?” I ask with a smile, opening them. The tune has calmed me, its cadence warm in my throat. All the old songs have power.

“Because it’s ridiculous.” Sinne’s cheeks are flushed. She barely looks her fifteen years as she fiddles with a lock of her fair hair.

“What about the battles fought here?” I say, reaching over to tug the lock free before she starts chewing on it. “The great warrior Aurelianus slew thrice a thousand men. What happened to their blood?”

“It dried up in the sun.”

“Some of it. But if you stick a man, he bleeds half a dozen pailfuls. Think how much blood you could get from three thousand men. Where do you think it all went?”

“What do you know about ‘sticking men’? Nothing.” She gives me an impish grin and scoops up the lock again, twisting it around her finger.

I poke her in the ribs. “I know more than you, little sister,” I say and swiftly turn the poke into a tickle.

“Riva.” Sinne’s squeal has covered the sound of the door opening. “If you must talk, recite the Lord’s Prayer.” Mother stares down at me. “I will be ashamed if you misspeak it at Imbo—

Candlemas.”

“Our gods have served us well enough so far.” Except for withholding their powers of healing from you, Riva. I shake off the snide, silent voice and look up at her as defiantly as I dare. “I don’t see why we should forsake them for another. Especially Gildas’s Roman one. The Romans left.”

“He is everyone’s God, Gildas says.” Mother’s lips thin. “And the priest is our honoured guest.”

“I thought guests left too,” Sinne mutters. “The old coot’s been here for months.”

That earns her a slap. Sinne claps a hand to her reddening cheek, her eyes filling. They are big blue eyes, like our father’s, and I’ve been jealous of them since childhood. Sinne’s tears usually buy her instant forgiveness.

But not today. “Get you on, both of you.” Mother stabs a finger at a pile of cloth. “There’s stitching to be done before night.”

As soon as she leaves, in a rustle of linen, Sinne throws herself down to lie on the skins that warm the floorboards. “I wish we still lived at Isca.”

“You don’t remember Isca,” I say, retrieving my needle and thread. I’ve become quite adept at stitching one-handed. “You were a baby when Father abandoned it. Besides, Isca’s the Roman name. It’s Caer Uisc.”

“You don’t remember it either. You were five.”

“Five years is old enough for memories. Thread this for me, please.”

Sinne huffs, but does as I ask. In truth, I remember little of the civitas except stone and an impression of size. When the Romans left, they took their secrets with them. We’re a proud people and Father didn’t like the idea of living in Rome’s shadow—except for the slim dark one cast by my mother. He didn’t like the idea of picking through the ruins of all their clever broken contraptions. So fifteen years ago, he moved the heart of Dumnonia to this chill cliff instead.

Thinking of the scene we’d overheard with Siaun, I wonder whether Father would have made that same decision now.

The door opens a second time. I finish a stitch and glance up as Keyne comes around my screen. She’s in her usual attire: a boy’s tunic and trousers, her lower legs wrapped snugly with leather. Sinne rolls her eyes. “I hope you don’t intend to wear that at Candlemas.” She gives Keyne her impish smile. “Gildas won’t like it.”

Keyne’s hands clench. The priest doesn’t care for any of us royal children, but he reserves a special vitriol for my sister. I think she angers him, striding around in male garb, her face as distant as the stars. And I think she unnerves him too, much as she unnerves the rest of us when she looks a certain way. Her eyes, dark and flecked blackbird-beak’s yellow, seem to see more than she lets on. Occasionally I glimpse someone else peering out of them, curious, bitter and knowing. Even with those eyes, Keyne had once smiled freely. Now, at seventeen, grimness clings to her like winter mist that rarely cedes to sunshine.

“I don’t think Gildas likes anything,” I say, trying to thaw the ice in Keyne’s face. “Except Jesus.”

“And he’s dead,” puts in Sinne helpfully.

Keyne shrugs, as if she doesn’t care. I know she does.

It’s hard to deny the effect Gildas has on our household. He is like one of the dark beeswax candles reserved for my parents: tall, slim and burning with zeal. No one knows how old he is, but he sweeps about Dunbriga as if he were king, his quiet steps easy to miss until he’s upon you.

“Why does Father put up with him?” I ask in a voice pitched just for the two of them. “It can’t only be because Mother invited him here.”

Keyne grimaces. “Gildas has powerful friends, or so he claims. Perhaps Father is worried we may need to call on them against the Saxons.”

“What friends?” Sinne says loudly and winces. “Other kings?” she adds in a lower voice, dashing a glance over her shoulder at the women by the fire.

“God?” Keyne softens the word with a raised brow. “But probably other kings. Lots are embracing Christianity.”

“And Gildas is an educated man,” I remind them. “Fluent in Latin, Greek and history. Perhaps Father thinks the priest’s learning will rub off on him. Like charcoal.”

“Even so,” Keyne says darkly, “I don’t see what harm our traditions do. Which reminds me”—she nods at my blankets—“give me the clothes for Imbolc. I’ll go and hang them outside. We remember the old ways.”

I reach under the bolster for the tunics hidden there. All over the hold, other women will be doing the same, furtively so the priest doesn’t see. I smile at my sisters and they smile back. Gildas hates anything to do with magic and our traditions, but he can’t stop us all. “We’ll make sure Brigid feels welcome here,” I whisper, stroking my thumb over the cloth.

Sinne’s smile fades and she collapses back on her heels. “I know it’s tradition, but I’m not sure why you bother with this part.” I don’t miss the disparaging glance she gives the tunics. “We do it every year and every year is the same. No special blessings.” She mutters the next bit under her breath. “No wishes coming true.”

“You don’t think our continued prosperity a blessing?” I ask, a bit nettled. “While the rest of Britain falls to the Saxons, our culture lost, our men slain—”

“Our men?” Sinne scoffs. “You don’t have a man, Riva.”

My skin prickles, a hot flush of embarrassment. “This isn’t about me. The point is—”

“We should be grateful for what we have,” Keyne finishes, but she doesn’t sound as if she means it. And, after hearing Siaun’s rebellious words, I find I’m not in the mood for doomsaying either.

“I’ll take these myself.” I grab the bundle of tunics, and rise unsteadily. Pain spikes in my damaged foot, as soon as I put weight on it. My hand isn’t the only part of me the fire touched. I grit my teeth.

“Don’t forget to leave your own clothes out for Brigid,” Sinne calls after me. “She might make you less of a sourpuss.”

She doesn’t mean it, but even a small jibe stings. Keyne motions as if to comfort me. I push past her, Brigid’s tunics clutched tight to my breast.

Sinne’s teasing words stay with me as I search for a place to hang the clothes. I can’t put them by the entrance—Gildas or Mother will see and I’ll be ordered to take them down again. I clench my good hand around the cloth, angry at them for disdaining the old ways, irritated at Sinne’s needling when we three only have each other as friends, as confidantes.

Maybe I can hang the tunics from the eaves behind the women’s quarters, hidden in the shadows. The wooden building that houses us isn’t tall, but neither am I and, no matter how I stretch, I can’t reach. Curses. I look about for a crate or barrel to stand upon. Nothing. Annoyed, I jump and my foot gives way with a spiteful flare, sending me sprawling, burned hand twisted beneath me.

I cradle it, grazed from the rough landing, and hot tears threaten; Brigid’s tunics have landed in a puddle. I gaze at my boot, as if I can see through the leather to the foot it encases. I stare and I wish that I’d never argued with my sister the day of the fire, that I’d never gone to the old smokehouse. I can almost hear my own screams again, echoing between the walls as the fire ate at my skin. A child sobs in the background: Sinne? Her face is one of the only things I remember before darkness took me.

“Riva, stop.”

The voice filters down from a distance and I realize I’ve been crying, trying to tear the tunics, my throat raw with the awful memory. Someone catches my arm and holds it still. When I squirm to get free, the grip tightens, and I suddenly know to whom it belongs. “Let go, Arlyn.”

When the smith’s apprentice ignores my command, affront knocks the memory away. I am the king’s daughter. “Let me go, I said.”

Arlyn looks at me with serious eyes. “Are you sure you won’t start up again?”

“I’m sure,” I grate. “Now let go.”

As if I am a bucking horse in need of calming, Arlyn slowly releases his hold. I snatch my arm back, and bury my grazed hand in the folds of my dress.

“What were you doing?” he asks, helping me to my feet.

I know Arlyn won’t run to tell Gildas. “Trying to hang up Brigid’s tunics.”

He clicks his tongue. “You know what I mean. Why were you sitting here, crying?”

I don’t answer. It’s none of his business, after all.

“Riva.” His wide, placid eyes are on my face and I cannot meet them. “Why?”

“I hate feeling so helpless,” I hear myself whisper, looking at my hand. “None of the healing I try on myself works.”

Arlyn doesn’t reply. Instead he takes the clothes, brushes the mud off, and—stretching—just manages to hook them over a protruding spar of wood. We watch them billow for a few moments, the wind filling out the bellies of the tunics.

“We ought to clean that,” he nods at my hand. “Wash the dirt off.”

The wind or his words have hollowed me out. I suddenly feel weary. “All right,” I say and let him steer me through the hold.

At the forge, I have to stop myself shying from the open flames like the nervous mare he thinks me. I choose a stool furthest from the furnace and the banked fire in the corner. Although it’s taken years of effort, I can usually hold myself together around fire. But the memories crowd close today.

Swords hang suspended from hooks; weapon-racks of spears and daggers line the walls. A few pieces of leather armour are scattered here and there, and the iron framework of an unfinished helm waits on a workbench. Pots and cauldrons take up the other side of the room, eating knives and the like: the tools required by a busy household.

“Farrar keeps you working hard.” My voice shakes a little.

“Aye, he does.” Arlyn pokes the fire awake and hooks a pail over the flames. Though I long for warmth, I cannot bear to pull my stool closer. While the water heats, I watch as he sweeps the packed earth floor, retrieves stray tools and replaces them in their holders. Farrar is famous for punishing sloppiness. Arlyn’s arms, I notice, are tanned, corded with muscle from working the forge.

My eyes return to the swords. “More weapons than usual,” I note, studying their hilts.

“King Cador’s request.” He shoots me a sidelong look. “There are rumours that Saxon scouts have been seen as far west