Chapter 24: My Only Trade

Reads: 174

I tie Aunty to the outside of the cottage and the overseer lets me come inside to sleep. My hands shake and my body shivers. Something about the sprites - and the bad light - sucks the warmth out of the body. I can barely feel my feet.

“Stamp around,” says the overseer when I say that. He offers me peasant bread and ale and he speaks kindly, but I remember how he would not let me and Aunty in, even when it is the sprites that are here.

The ale and bread sit in my stomach like a rock as I curl up to try to sleep. I don’t think I will, but I do sleep. The peddler shakes me awake.

“Feed the old woman,” he says. “We only have a little way to go.”

Our party walks along the path, as before. I see Sabill as she falls back behind her father and the peddler on the road. Lianth sets the pace for his carters, walking, as he does, right behind the cart.

Sabill hasn’t spoken to me except for that once and I wonder if I’m allowed to talk to her. I wonder how long the peddler means to travel with them.

The path curves around to the left and the land between us and the edge rises. This is farther from the edge than the path usually is. After a while, the peddler calls a halt.

“Walk her across the path,” he tells me. “You can help her step light, if you want.”

I wrap my arm around Aunty Alete - who is very light - and try to bear her weight so that she puts less of it on the shards of the path.

She screams and cries with each step. When we reach the other side, I hear her say, “Jirry Oxflat,” just as a tiny sigh as she sinks down pulling shards from her feet.

“Here, Bessil,” the peddler says. I don’t mark him using my name, although you’d think I would. He gives me a bone. It’s a radius or half of one. I recognize a bit of bones from the work my father did. It is carved all around. I do not read, yet, so I only recognize one or two symbols. “Take this and lead her through the breech. Give it to the people there and they will take her.”

“What is to happen to her?” I ask.

“Take it,” he says. “Go.”

I take the bone in my weak hand and the lead in my strong and walk where he points me. I don’t ask why he sends me alone. He’s given me tasks since he took me on and doesn’t care whether I know why, so I just go.

The land rises into a gentle hill with another just beyond and a low point between the two. It’s been walked on enough to see the way, but there is no mistaking it for a path, either dirt or shell. Over the rise between the hills, I see a low wall and a longhouse.

I suppose it’s peasants, but what good is that to me? They can tell me nothing.

I walk up to the wall - which comes to my thigh and get ready to call out when one of the people calls to me.

“Hey, there!” she says.

“Hello,” I say. “Who are you?”

“Well, who are you?” she asks, walking across the field toward the gate. She waves a stick in front of her. “And where are you? Speak again.”

“I’m Bessil,” I say. She’s close enough for me to see her face and see the scars all around her eye sockets.

“Is there someone with you?” she asks, her stick finally tapping the low rock wall between us.

“I’m to bring her here,” I say. “Her name is Alete. She is afflicted.”

My new acquaintance snorts at this. “Afflicted? Like me?” she asks, now standing right in front of me and looking right at me with her empty eyes.

“Yes,” I say. I wonder if it’s rude to call it that, but is not blindness an affliction?

“Hello, Alete,” she says.

“She can’t hear,” I say.

“But she must also be blind,” she objects.

“Yes,” I say. “They took out her eyes when they banished her.”

“Generous,” she says.

“I don’t think so,” I say. “But they say they had to to keep away the goblins.”

She laughs at that, a grown-up laugh, layered with odd meanings.

“Give me her hand,” she says.

I put the lead in her hand.

“I said her hand,” she says, slapping the rope away.

“She’ll run off,” I say. “She’s tried to run off, tried to run back. It calls her.”

“Give me her hand. Hold the rope yourself, if you must.”

I put Aunty’s hand in her outstretched hand.

“Jirry Oxflat,” she says. She feels the new hand in hers. “Tell him, tell the boy. Jirry Oxflat.”

“What is that?” she asks, looking back and forth between me and Aunty, as if she could see.

“She wants me to find out if her son is at rest. Not sure when he died or when he’ll be put in his ossuary. I’m to give you this,” I say, remembering the carved bone in my weak hand.

She takes it and runs her fingers over it.

“I don’t know what it says,” I say.

“Well, I can read it for myself.”

“Did the goblins get you?” I ask.

She puts her weak hand up to her eye sockets. Up close, I can see the scars all around the sockets.

“Yes, two got on me. I used to be a beauty.”

“I think you’re still pretty,” I say. I don’t know why.

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” she says. “I can’t see myself in the glass, so it doesn’t matter what I look like.”

“Did it hurt?”

“I’m tired of your questions, boy.”

“Is this where she’s to live?” I ask.

“There’s no goblins here,” she says. “This is the place for people like us.”

“Don’t let her off the lead,” I say. “Don’t let her run off and fall or run back to Fearsmere. It wouldn’t be right.”

“Very well,” she says. “Give me the rope.”

Four other women are approaching, speaking among themselves.

“What’s your name?” I ask, giving her the lead.

She makes a grown up sound, a snort, dismissive and complicated, like all grown up things.

I help Aunty over the little wall. The women gather around her and I see the first woman telling them things.

“Good bye, boy,” the first woman tells me, walking away. I’m about to say goodbye when she turns and calls back. “Will do you it?” she asks. “Check if her boy - what was his name?”

“Jirry Oxflat,” I say.

“Will you check whether Jirry Oxflat is laid to rest? Say a prayer over his ossuary?”

“If you tell me your name,” I say. “If you tell me your name, I promise I will.”

“Brianna,” she calls, smiling a bit. Then she turns and walks away.

I have no bone for a marker, so I look around on the ground until I find a pebble in weeds. I can’t mark stone, of course, even if I have a scribe and witness and know the right symbols, but I tuck the stone away, in hopes that I will remember to look for Jirry Oxflat, by and by, next time I’m in Fearsmere.

Even if he is not yet in his ossuary, I can burn a prayer candle for him.

And that was the only trade I made while in service to the peddler.

Submitted: June 22, 2023

Fantasy sprite goblins bones