The Daughter of Odren Read Free Page B

and the grounds seeking them, silent, like a mother cat whose kittens have been taken to drown, Fern said. And that went on for hours, until the sorcerer gave her a potion to quiet her.”
    After a while the listener asked, “And they none of them ever came back?”
    The innkeeper smiled a bit grimly. “The girl turned up just the next day. She’d run off with her brother across the fields. A farmer took them in overnight. Farmer Bay, it was, who’d lately lost his young wife in childbirth. His mother was there with the baby, so there were women in the house. Next day Bay sent word to the lady and she sent for the children, but the girl wouldn’t come nor let her brother go. She said she’d die before she entered her house until her father was there. The mother went to see her, but the girl would have kept her out of the farmer’s house if the farmer had dared forbid her, and she wouldn’t look at her or speak to her, and the little boy clung to his sister and wouldn’t go to his mother for all she coaxed. So at last, to keep the scandal down, the Lady Lily said that if her daughter and son chose to stay with Farmer Bay while the great house was all in grief and mourning, she would permit it. And she went back across the fields.
    â€œThere was a show of seeking for Lord Garnet and sending boats out to look for the ship, but that all died down before very long. It was as if his return had been a dream, all but for the men who’d sailed with him and were back home now, or had been killed in the battles, like our two villagers. And again there wasn’t much talk. The lady rules at Odren, and the sorcerer rules the lady, that’s how it is, people said, and they made the best of it.
    â€œWell, after maybe a fortnight, the boy Clay, the son of Odren, goes missing from Hill Farm—gone, like his dad, no one knows where! But that wasn’t sorcery. The girl said to her mother, ‘I sent him away. I’ve saved him from the wicked man you live with. He’s safe with a good man. I don’t know where he has gone, and if I did I’d never tell you.’ The girl wasn’t moved by pleading or by threats. So the Lady Lily said to her in fury, ‘You’ve debased yourself, running away, living with a farmer. So you shall marry him.’ And the girl says, ‘I’d sooner marry Bay than ever see Ash again.’ And with that, the lady orders the farmer to marry the girl.
    â€œSo, if you came seeking the daughter of Odren, she’s Bay’s wife Weed, and stepmother of his daughter. As for the boy, and the gardener Hovy . . . Well. I have a good memory for faces. Still, I couldn’t think who your husband was till I was in the midst of my story. Weed sent her brother away with him. Is that it?”
    The guest was silent. She sighed. “I’m Hovy’s sister, Linnet, not his wife,” she said, subdued but steady. “And I’m all the mother Clay’s had since he was ten.” She looked up at the innkeeper. “But I’ll tell you, mistress, I’m in fear for us now, me and my brother! I’m in fear. What are we doing here among these terrible people? It was the boy’s will. He would come back. Hovy’s always done his bidding.”
    The innkeeper shook her head. “We all do the masters’ will. We’re swept up in it, along with them, like leaves in the wind. And what now? Where will the ill wind blow us now?”
    They had long since finished shelling the beans. The innkeeper got up and went inside to draw them each a clay mug of thin beer, for the autumn day had grown quite warm. “Have this, now,” she said, sitting down companionably. “Have a swig of this, Missis Linnet, and tell me, how much of my story did you know before I told it?”
    â€œLittle but the names, missis. I know only the story Clay told, the story his sister told him. She told him he must