Skin Read Free Page A

soldier’s craft, he would have been almost twenty summers now.
    I nodded. ‘Blessings upon your return.’ Neha growled under my firm grip. ‘Hush!’
I hissed. ‘Forgive her. She’s cursed with a wolf’s temper.’
    ‘And her mistress?’ He stared at me. ‘Is she so cursed?’
    I answered with a brief smile, then pulled Neha and turned away.
    ‘Do you not offer your name?’
    ‘Ailia,’ I called over my shoulder.
    ‘Skin to Caer Cad?’
    I stopped, wordless. It had been many summers since I had met this question.
    In the silence, a woman’s voice called. ‘She’s unskinned, daughter only to the doorstep!’
    My face burned. There were those who were angered by my place in the Tribequeen’s
kitchen. Years of taunts had taught me to walk away without looking back, lest their
spit wet my face.
    ‘Unskinned?’ said Ruther. ‘Yet you hold your head like a queen.’
    ‘Because she attends the queen’s kitchen,’ called another. ‘And the Cookwoman pets
her like a house dog.’
    I kept walking. Ruther was right to be surprised. Not often would one without skin
move through the town so freely. A pebble struck my shoulder, hard and sharp. I stopped
as the sting gave way to a warm ache and a trickle of blood down my back.
    ‘Cease!’ shouted Ruther into the crowd. ‘Do you strike a maiden’s back? And for nothing
but an accident of birth? Do you still live in this darkness since I have been gone?’
He turned to me. ‘Go home, daughter of the doorstep,’ he said. ‘Be proud of your
boldness.’
    Before I turned the corner, I glanced back. Ruther had unsheathed his sword and was
swiping and twisting it again to a tide of admiring murmurs. Who is he, I wondered,
who cares so little for the laws of skin? ‘Handsome, isn’t he?’ said a townswoman
as she passed.
    ‘If your tastes are such,’ I answered.
    ‘He thought you sweet enough.’
    As I hurried home, I saw the thick smoke of the fringe fires coiling above the town
walls.
    Just beyond the southern gate, wedged along the lower banks of the ramparts, was
a tight-packed warren of stick huts and hide tents, foul with littered bone scraps
and poor drainage. These were the fringes. Home to the skinless. Shunned by the tribe.
    Summer was strong in deer spirit. Except for those who had travelled or married
in—bringing with them skins of the owl, wolf or the river—most born here were skin
to the deer.
    Born to the skinless, or lost to their families before naming, the unskinned were
not claimed by a totem. Their souls were fragmented, unbound to the Singing. If they
remained little seen, they were not despised, not usually harmed. The townspeople
gave them enough grain, cloaks and work, if they would do it. But they could not
live within the town walls because no one could be sure of who they were.
    I quickened my pace and Neha trotted beside me.
    Skin was gifted from mother to child by a song.
    I had no mother. I had no skin.
    But I had been spared. Just.

    ‘Who cast the stone?’ spat Cookmother, dabbing an ointment of comfrey on my back.
    In the quiet of the kitchen, I sat between my worksisters on a long log bench draped
with pelts. We held bowls of bread soaked in goat’s milk and huddled close to the
hearthstones as the morning sun had not yet warmed the thick walls of our roundhouse.
    ‘I did not see.’ I winced as Cookmother covered my wound.
    ‘I’ll strangle them with their own innards if I learn of it.’ She lifted my dress
back onto my shoulders, and I leaned against her warm bulk. It was by Cookmother’s
insistence alone that I remained in the Tribequeen’s kitchen.
    As we ate, I told the girls of the Great Bear’s death, and of my meeting with Ruther.
    ‘It is said he can match twenty Romans with his sword,’ said Ianna, her wide eyes
blinking.
    ‘More likely to share their wine and whores, I’ve heard,’ said Cah.
    ‘Speak not against Orgilos’s son in my kitchen, thanks be,’ said Cookmother, stirring
the fire