The Daughter of Odren Read Free

names of the ships and all the lords and leaders? You can hear them sing all that down in the port, in the ‘Lay of the Isle-Pirates.’ All I can tell you is that the ships weren’t back by winter, when we looked for them. Nor in spring did they come back. Nor in summer, no, nor the next winter.”
    After a long silence the guest murmured, “Mistress, your telling is better than any Lay.”
    The innkeeper was impassive, though evidently not displeased. It was a while before she took up the story. She shelled a few beans without looking at them, or at anything. “My sister’s daughter Fern worked in the great house at Odren in those years,” she said, and paused again. Her hands rested in her lap. “She was the youngest of the lady’s women, and something of a pet to her. I myself went up often to carry fresh butter, for we weren’t keeping the inn then but dairying. I could talk with Fern. So this is no hearsay or gossip I tell you, but the truth as you won’t hear it from any other mouth. But the cause of the trouble, anyone can tell you that. My lord sails away and leaves his lady, and with her he leaves a handsome young man, a sorcerer who has no more work to do, since the ship is built and gone. Yet there he stays. The lady puts out word that the great house is in need of rebuilding, and the sorcerer’s staying on to see to that work. And indeed some scaffolds were set up and some roofing seen to. But what need for sorcery, with slate right to hand at Velery, and workmen willing and able? And then the lady says that the sorcerer, wizard she calls him, is staying on at Odren to work spells of safety on the house and its children, and such stuff.
    â€œNobody spoke well about it, but few spoke much ill about it either. The lady was the mistress and Ash was a sorcerer. You never know what such a man may hear or do. But my niece Fern and other women in the house told me it was a wicked thing how the boy and girl were treated now. And I myself saw the girl dressed poorly, always out in the gardens and fields with her little brother.
    â€œThen the people at the great house heard that the sorcerer had seen our ship and all its people lost. He saw the battle in his water-mirror. That’s a bowl with spelled water in it. He looked and saw the pirates boarding, and the fighting and fire, saw the ship sink. He rushed through the house, crying out, ‘They are gone, gone down, they are gone!’ And my niece said when she heard his cry it was as if she saw the ships before her own eyes in a great whirl of fire and seawater red as blood. The people of the household wept and screamed, and the lady sank down as if struck by a stone.
    â€œBut after she rose up, she gathered all the people of the house togetherand told them that they mustn’t speak of what the sorcerer had seen in his bowl. For though her heart told her it was true, yet better not to grieve so many people before the word came from the east, and maybe there was hope for other ships of the fleet, if not for the
Lady of Odren.
    â€œShe said that name as steady as any other name, my niece told me.
    â€œThe daughter of Odren was a girl of sixteen then. When she heard what her mother said she cried out that it was a lie and her father was not dead. The lady tried to calm her, but the girl raged and stormed and ran away from her and from the sorcerer, shouting that she would not have them touch her.
    â€œAfter that she kept as far from her mother as she could. She was called Lily, as her mother was, but she changed her use-name and told the people they must call her Weed, and her brother, Little Garnet, she called Clay. He was about ten then. The mother let them do as they pleased, even to changing their names. Truth was, she paid them no heed at all, Fern told me. She was always with the sorcerer, combing his long tar-black hair and caressing his cheeks and unlacing his sandals and stroking his feet,