The Miller's SonL. M. Conrad
7100 words Every man comes to his death in his own way. My cousin Brelmayn was thrown from a horse when he was eight years old, and spent three days in agony with a broken back before his mother came for the right herbs to let him die. Some years later, she succumbed to grief and guilt, choosing drink over her children. My uncle found her drowned in her own sick. He later died of a different kind of sickness. My sister Elora came to her death in pursuit of life—in childbed, like so many women do. Our father’s heart gave out one day, working in the fields. He raised his scythe before the wheat, and fell stone dead, crushing the ripe stalks. It was my baby brother who found him. I was years gone by then. I came to death because of an afternoon. It was in the downturn of the year, after my father and I had brought in the last of the harvest and the widows gleaned from the fields—the war with Kar’keth was in full bloodletting, and had spotted even our village with widows. I was sixteen years old. The air was crisp, smelling of oncoming winter and the smoke of woodstoves, the clean-cut scent of crops and of wood. I was in the swath of grass down the slope from home, watching the goats graze and splitting logs for firewood. My father liked to store the wood in the barn with the goats and the horses. It was always my brothers and I made to carry it up the hill to heat our home when winter clawed at the door. I saw her shimmering against the wheat, and I thought she was a widow. But she called my name in greeting, and when I stood and wiped the sweat from my eyes I saw Gretla Amnil, the miller’s wife, crossing the field toward me. She shielded her eyes from the gold of the late afternoon sun, and smiled, and stopped a respectable distance away for a married woman. All I could think was how much sweat I had worked in the cold, and how I hoped she couldn’t smell me. “Can I help you, Dam Amnil?” I expected that she wanted to bargain for something—a hog or a chicken, something she could squirrel away and then, in the darkest hours of winter, surprise her husband with a nice meal. It was the sort of thing my mother did for my father. We had slaughtered the hogs, and the meat was already curing, but I knew we had some to spare. My father had strict ideas about what we could barter for what, and I had just this past spring been allowed to start striking deals, but I had never had the opportunity to do it without him looking over my shoulder. So I was pleased to get to deal with the miller’s wife on my own. Doubly so that it gave me the opportunity to look at her. Gretla Amnil was a striking woman, ten or so years my senior. Tall, nearly as tall as her husband, with fair skin unpocked by the scars of the blistering plague. She had coils of hair like wheat swaying in the afternoon sunlight, piled and pinned atop her head in a way that she made regal, majestic, statuesque. Her eyes gleamed like new coins, if ever a coin was as blue as a summer lake. When she smiled at me again, the lightness in my chest could have floated me right out of my boots. “Dalim.” She said my name like a prayer. “I wonder if you could help me.” “I’ll certainly do my best.” I would have done anything she asked. It was a somewhat delicate matter, she told me, and it would be best if we spoke in private. There was no one to hear us but the goats, but she had asked, so I put down the axe and led her to the barn. The horses were out—my father and my brothers were taking the last of the wheat to the mill. My mother was midwifing for another cousin, and would be gone a few more days. There was no one to hear us, not even the wind as I shut the door. As lovely as she was, Gretla Amnil was a harsh woman—mean when it was unearned, and blunt. And she told me very plainly what she wanted. She had been married for eight years, she told me, and her husband had never once gotten her with child. She thought him no longer capable. But I looked like the miller, she told me. I would do. The miller was tall, and I was tall. We both had dark hair, in different ways. This was where our likeness ended, but for her it was enough. I was too stunned, too struck by her and too caught by the surge of passions that come from being sixteen and only imagining a woman unclothed, but never having seen one. She unlaced the bodice of her dress enough to show me her breasts, but I didn’t need even that much provocation. I wouldn’t say no, and she wouldn’t have heard it. That first time, she pulled me down in the hay and hiked up her skirts, and pushed herself onto me like I was a chore she was eager to get through. I finished fast, and she laughed and told me she would come back the next afternoon. I laid there, listening to the stillness of the barn. I was late returning to my own chores, and when my father returned home and I was still chopping wood, he whipped me with the soft end of his belt. I told my brothers nothing. The four of us—me, Talbin, Golwin, and Paldim, the baby—slept together in the loft. We always spent the waking part of the night talking: our days, our hopes, strange dreams and nightmares. But I didn’t dare breathe a word of Gretla Amnil. I think I was half-convinced she too had been a dream. She came back the next day. And the day after that, and the day after. When my mother returned home and the first winter snows set in, I thought that would be the end. But as Gretla rose from our tryst, brushing stray strands of straw from her dress and her hair, she said: “You’ll be here tomorrow too.” “I have other chores around the house.” This wasn’t precisely true—we did still have work in the winter, mainly the mending of tools and the house itself—but I found I was less inclined than I’d thought to keep this up. When Talbin, who was older than me, talked about meeting girls for trysts, they were always happy. They kissed. They laughed. They enjoyed each other. Gretla never kissed me, and I’m not fool enough to think she enjoyed me either. Aside from the elation of that first time, and the moments I finished, I hardly did. We never even saw one another fully unclothed, which Talbin assured me was magical. “Find a reason to come to the barn. You never take long.” She laced herself up and strode off without looking back. I found a reason to come to the barn. In truth, I was afraid of what she might do if I failed to turn up. I knew she couldn’t turn up at the house and demand my mother hand me over, but I was certain she could do something worse. So I came, and I kept coming. For three weeks out of every month, all through the winter, we met in the barn. It was always the same—she was on top, and I never knew if it was because she wanted more power over me, or only that she wanted to leave the moment she could. During the early thaw, before the ground was soft enough for planting, she stopped appearing in the barn. It was planting season before I learned from overhearing my mother talking to Elora—who was with child then herself, and married, and living just across the way—that the miller’s wife was finally expecting a child, after a decade of everyone thinking her barren. Elora and our mother were both thrilled for her. I know it sounds foolish. But from the time that Gretla Amnil first came to see me, it had never occurred to me that I was going to be a father until that moment. Because I was never going to be a father. The miller was going to be a father—I was just a useful tool along the way. But hearing my mother and sister talk, I was struck dizzy by the fact that this was my child, and they would never know it. The miller would never know the truth, about the child or himself. This was tragic in a way that I was too young to fully get my head around, but my heart understood it. My head knew only that it didn’t matter. This would be the miller’s child because it had to be. Anything else would have been shame, and the ruination of so many lives. Late in the spring that year, just after I turned seventeen, my brother Talbin married. He had gotten a girl with child himself, and her father had beaten her until she told him who’d done it. Her father had arrived at our door two weeks before, hauling the girl by her arm, demanding that my father make this right. “I don’t want to marry her,” Talbin whispered to us later that night. “She’s sweet, and soft, but she’s dumber than a cow. In good light she’s not even very comely.” “Why did you lie down with her then?” I asked, but I was thinking about how cruel Gretla Amnil had always been to me. Talbin snorted. “Dalim, the first time you get a girl into the woods with you, you’ll understand.” I bit my tongue. Golwin, who was two years younger than I was, said: “I think she’s comely.” “You marry her, then.” The wedding was on a warm night, filled with music and drinking. Golwin and I both drank too much, and we stumbled home arm in arm to the loft, where Paldim, who was eight, was already asleep. “Do you think Talbin is enjoying his wedding night?” Golwin asked, half-laughing and half-leering, his eyes shining drunk in the lamplight. “I don’t think he’s half as miserable as you’ll be come morning,” I said, and pushed him down to sleep. I thought he had dropped off immediately, but some minutes later his voice rose again in the dark. “I miss Talbin.” The loft did feel empty without him, even with Paldim splayed out like a cat asleep in the sun. “Me too, Gol.” I knew it would never be the same in our loft again, but I did not expect the immediacy with which I would leave it behind forever. Near Midsummer, I accompanied my father to the market with Talbin and his wife Miya. It was just after Elora’s death, and the four of us were like ghasts in our mourning black. Golwin and Paldim had stayed behind with our mother, who still could not leave the house. We had baskets of berries and vegetables, all too glaring bright when the world had so recently become so grim for us. Talbin and Miya went for a walk through the market, perhaps to escape the glowering shadow of our father, who sat like a black mountain at our stall. I never strayed far. I didn’t want to leave him alone, and someone had to attempt to sell what we’d brought. Bit by bit and basket by basket I bargained to exchange the fruits of our fields for cloth, or tools, other things we could not make, a few small coins. Toward the market day’s end, a girl approached the stall. I recognized her—she came from a nearby village, and we saw each other now and then at markets and grand festivals, though we had never learned each other’s names. She was willowy and freckled, her blonde hair tinged with fire, eyes like the lush wilds beyond the mountains. “I hope I’m not too late,” she said as she approached. “Do you still have strawberries?” We scarcely had anything left. I helped her search through the baskets and I looked again through the wagon, but I could hardly find a handful of bright berries, slightly bruised. “Take them,” I told her. We wouldn’t have been able to sell them anyway, but she smiled like I offered her the world. “Thank you.” She tucked them in her basket, and this time her smile was so soft it felt like the first warm ray of spring dawning after the winter. “I’m Reha, by the way. I’m terribly sorry about your sister.” I had almost forgotten the mourning clothes, and the guilt of forgetting Elora washed away some of the light that shone around Reha. But only briefly. “How did you know?” “My mother is a midwife too. I’m her apprentice.” To my surprise, she reached to take my hand. I expected her to tell me that she had been there, to impart some last wisdom or loving word Elora had wanted to share with us all. “I know your mother is still in her sealing. But do you think she would mind if we visited?” My father was still a black mountain at the stall, and I could hardly tell whether he knew that Reha and I were alive in the world. But he had given me the power to make these choices. “I think it would do her well, to have company.” Reha and her mother came to visit us the next week. They brought a pot of stew and a basket of little cakes made from oats and honey and bits of dried fruit, and while Reha made tea and sat at the table with my mother who would not eat, her mother bustled quietly about the house, tidying, sweeping, doing all the womanly chores that my mother had rightly abandoned in her grief, and that my brothers and fathers and I never thought to do. My father had decided that this was women’s time, and though we had done our work in the fields for the day he set my brothers and I about with tasks—tending horses that wanted no tending, scraping dirt from the side of the house, checking to see if the hens had laid new eggs since the morning. He sent Paldim off to chase the goats, which was done joyously. But I couldn’t focus on any pointless task, and I kept making excuses to go back to the house, to catch glimpses of Reha at the table, or hear her voice in the still air. Just once, while I was scraping away at dirt that wasn’t on the house, I caught her eye through the window. Her sweet, lightning-brief smile made me forget every other smile but hers. For weeks they returned, and slowly coaxed my mother to eat, and speak again. One day when her sealing was done, Reha’s mother led her on a walk to the center of the village, only to have a place to go. Reha stayed behind, mending one of my mother’s dresses that wasn’t black. I promised Golwin three silver coins I’d never had if he would lure our father’s attention, and I went to the house. I stood in the kitchen, just watching Reha work. She had delicate, deft hands, and she hummed as she worked. It was utterly without tune and the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. I just stood there staring at her, because I couldn’t find any words to say. I wasn’t sure I wanted any words, or only wanted to watch her. Even when the humming stopped, I was enthralled. Reha looked up, and smiled one of those soft smiles that changed every moment of my world. “Do you want something, Dalim?” I was sure I did, but I didn’t know how to say so. I thought of Gretla Amnil, and the cold, precise way she’d told me just what she wanted with me. I didn’t want anything like that with Reha. I didn’t want to just take her out to the barn, or the forest, or up to the loft while no one else was home. I wanted what Talbin had always described, whispering about girls in the dark. I wanted her to actually favor me, the way I favored her. “No. I just like being here with you.” She laughed, and it was merry and light, and nothing like the way Gretla Amnil had laughed at me. “You like watching me sew?” She had pressed the needle into the cloth, and now picked it up again. “I think I could watch you do anything.” Her fingers moved nimbly over the fabric. It was a pale blue dress, one my mother had loved before the mourning. “I like seeing you too, you know,” Reha said. “The next time we visit, we’ll have to take a walk together.” And we did, of sorts. Her mother and mine sat under the tree behind the house, and bid us stay in sight. But Reha and I could walk hand in hand, and I marveled at how small her hand was in mine. She was small all over; she came barely up to my shoulder, and when we sat side by side in the grass I could put my arm around her, and hide her near completely from sight. “Do you think you’ll stay here forever?” she asked, on our second such outing. I had learned already that she was thoughtful, that she had keen ideas about what she wanted and who she wanted to be. She could read, something I had never learned, aside from how to sign my name and mark figures. The dreams she spoke of seemed like fantasies painted in the smoke of a storyteller’s fire, but if either of us could have made them real, I knew it would be her. “In the village, I mean.” I knew already that she meant to leave her village. She wanted to go to Anvar, or Cenbath, or some other such stone-wrought town filled with people, where she could be more than a midwife, could care for the sick and injured from the war, and the women who had been abandoned. I wanted to be good enough to go with her, but I couldn’t imagine who I could be, to live such a life. “I don’t know,” I told her, as if I could be convinced. “Before I met you, I never thought about leaving. I just thought I would be a farmer like my father.” I knew I should tell her about Gretla Amnil, about the child she was soon going to have that was mine and never would be. If I left, maybe I could forget that it wasn’t the miller’s. “Do you want to be a farmer?” “It’s a living,” I told her. “I have no other skills.” I looked off to the west, like I might see the smoke of Kar’keth smudged over the horizon. “If there’s another call, I could join the war. That might be the only way I could leave.” Her little hand tightened on mine. “I would hate to think of you doing that,” she said. “You’d break my heart.” “I might not have a choice.” The specter of war hung differently over men and women, I knew. “When the call came before, Talbin was only just too young. If it came now, we’d both have to go.” “I hope it doesn’t.” Then after a moment, she added: “I’d wait for you. So you know.” The thought made my chest feel heavy, and for a moment that weight stuck in me, and I couldn’t speak around it. “You wouldn’t have to.” “I’d want to.” She brought her other hand up to my cheek, and pulled me into a kiss. I was seventeen years old. I had already had an affair, if one could call it that, with a married woman, and gotten her with child. And yet, this was my first kiss, as sweet as the strawberries I had given Reha on the day we met at the market. Our betrothal was fixed not long after that. My mother and her mother had long been fond acquaintances, but now they were steadfast friends. The war had taken Reha’s father to the west, and it was her mother now who ran the household, and my mother who persuaded my father, though I doubt it took much persuading. It would be a long betrothal, because we were both still so young. And in truth, because we all expected a second call in the next year, and no one wanted to create more young widows. As Reha and I were allowed to spend time talking out of earshot of our mothers, we were also able to make plans to meet one another, away from any eyes. It was a feat of longing. There were two hours walking between her village and mine, and we would have to find our way in darkness, or near enough. In the daylight that brimmed at the edge of summer, we took Paldim with us to keep us honest as we strolled through the forest, looking for mushrooms for him, and a place for us to meet. We came home with an armful of ivory buttons, and a well-hidden copse of alder trees. I have always thought it was the will of the stars which led me there that night. That or Reha and I had some inexplicable strand linking our souls, perhaps sewn in by her own needle, which drew us together. But I was not waiting long beneath the alders before I heard the soft fall of her footsteps in the loam, and she stepped into the moonlight in the copse. Her red-gold hair spilled freely about her shoulders, and a faint blush crept beneath her freckles as she approached and pulled me close. We took our time. After that first embrace, we undressed, and for a time we only looked at one another. Every curve and dimple and freckle on her body was a new revelation. She had so many freckles. On her shoulders, her thighs. They even spotted her breasts and belly. I wanted to kiss every one. When she first touched me, I thought we might both dissolve, effervesce together into something greater than the sum of our shared bodies. We laid together in the grass, on a blanket she’d brought, and for the first time learned how every moment might be pleasure. After we had both finished we just lay there holding one another, as though the stars were endless. But the stars faded, as they always do, and as the sky began to lighten we realized we both had stayed too long. We dressed. We abandoned the blanket in the copse like a hope we might come back, and after a too-brief kiss goodbye, we ran in opposing directions. The sun was peering over the horizon when I made it back to our fields, and when I’d crested the slope, my father was just coming out of the house. “You missed breakfast,” he told me, and pointed toward the barn. “Go feed the horses.” That was all we spoke of it, though I expect he and my mother knew exactly where I had been. As the harvest season dawned, Reha and I saw less of one another. She and her mother still visited every other week, to grow the bond between our families, but I reaped in the wheat fields for much of the day with my father and brothers, and found other chores to do, to avoid taking wheat to mill. And so when the man came riding up on a piebald mare, shouting for my mother, I was on the roof repairing thatch. My stomach dropped at once—there was only one woman in the village nearing labor, and only one reason for a man to ride up shouting for the midwife. I had forgotten, staring from the roof like a dumb gargoyle, that my mother was also the closest thing we had to a doctor. Gretla Amnil was not yet in labor. But Theric Amnil, the miller, had been kicked by his spooked horse. The man on the piebald mare was my father, who had been the one to witness it—he and Golwin carried the miller into his home to rest, and my father rode to fetch my mother. He rode away again with her on his horse, shouting to me to saddle our guests’ horses so Reha and her mother could follow. I readied the horses, and I watched them ride away from the roof, where I could focus on my work and imagine that all of this had nothing to do with me. Nights in the loft had grown quiet since Talbin married. Golwin asked me now and then about Reha, but it turns out, it wasn’t just Gretla Amnil—I just wasn’t a talker, the way my brother was about girls. There was too much about Reha that I never wanted to share. That night I laid awake, listening to my brothers snore, and I knew I should have told Reha the truth. Before we met beneath the alders. Before we were ever betrothed. Now, it was a secret I could never tell her. To unburden myself would only hurt her, and potentially the miller and his wife and child as well. I knew I couldn’t let myself ruin so many lives. But I never rested easy with knowing it, especially when death lingered ever so close. The miller languished for three days in his bed before he died. There was nothing any midwife or doctor could have done. The horse had only broken the miller’s leg, but when he fell he struck his skull upon the stone foundation of his own mill. He never fully woke, and barely opened his eyes while the side of his head grew swollen and purple, then black. And then he came to his death. Gretla Amnil donned her mourning black just as my family and I were putting it aside. Three days after we buried the miller, she appeared like a phantom on the slope behind the house. No gleaning widow, but only waiting. Waiting for me, I knew, because she seemed to melt out of the barn’s shadows the moment I descended the slope to tend the goats. “Dalim. I would have a word.” I knew her motherhood was imminent, and I had seen many pregnant women before. I remembered well when my own mother had been pregnant with Paldim. Yet I was stunned by how enormous she had grown, how round, even though her tall frame held it well. “Yes, Dam Amnil?” “I expect you’ll do for your child.” You’ll do. Gods, how she must have loved those words. “I don’t know what you mean. I have no children.” As the words left my lips, it was only mine and Reha’s lives I was concerned about ruining. I suspected what Gretla Amnil must want—either to make me admit the child was mine, and marry her in place of the miller, as I had lain in his place before, or to play the merry widow while she forced me to send her support. “You know what I mean,” she told me in a voice like winter glass. “This is your child, and you’ll care for it.” Last year, I had so feared her. Feared what she would do if I refused her, or asked for any kindness. Feared what the miller would do if he learned about the barn. But in the early harvest season, I could not have said what had ever made me so afraid. Who would ever believe her? Especially when I had never bragged to my brothers about her, and never showed much interest in girls except for Reha. After all, the miller and I were both tall and dark of hair. The child could just as easily be his. So I did the only thing I thought I could—I walked away. I walked back to the house, and found my mother and Miya churning butter together, talking in soft voices. Miya too was swelled by her coming child, but not as round, I thought, as Gretla Amnil. “Mother,” I said, as both women looked up at me. “I’m concerned about the widow Amnil. I think she came to glean, but she saw me with the goats, and she’s now telling me that I’m her husband and she’s having my child.” My mother’s brows pinched concern. Miya came in at once on my side: “You do look a bit like poor Theric. From a distance,” she said in an apologetic tone. “It’s your hair.” My father and brothers were all blonde, but I had hair like my mother and Elora. “This sort of thing can happen,” said my mother. “I’ll go speak with her. Send Pali to tend to the goats.” Words move like wind through a village, particularly when they come from the lips of the midwife, who knows more of women’s troubles than anyone. By sundown everyone knew that poor Gretla Amnil had, between her grief and her delicate condition, succumbed to a temporary madness which made her believe that I was her child’s father, and should be her husband. She had even violated her own sealing to talk to me about my responsibilities. There was sympathy for both of us. But no one thought we could go on like this, so my parents made a decision. Reha and her mother had been long without a man in their home, and if I were out of sight, perhaps the widow Amnil would recover herself. So Reha and I were swiftly married, and I was sent off to live in their village, and work their family farm while her father and brother were away at the war. The fields had lain two years fallow, the tools left to rust, and I set to work as well I could while the winter encroached around us. They would never return. Her brother took an arrow through the eye in the Siege of Mintolwer, and her father came to his death by way of an infection fever three months later. And the next year, at the end of planting season, the call came again. It took Golwin, Talbin, and me, along with half a dozen young men from both our villages. Reha’s first pregnancy had already quickened, but she still fought bitterly for the right to come with us, to live out the dreams she had spun in the fields. But I was not the only man leaving his pregnant wife behind, and her mother needed her. So Reha relented, and stayed home, and a shade of light went out of her. There is nothing quite like a dream to raise your heart up, only to dash it down all the harder when it never comes true. I was three years at war, until Kar’keth and Turavain made a treaty that allowed the survivors to come home, with nothing to show for the war but our memories and wounds. I had seen many young men no different than myself go to their deaths, and I had sent a few there myself. My brother Talbin went to his death on the end of a spear four days before the treaty was called, leaving his widow with two small children. My brother Golwin lost an eye and half of his nose. With no other prospects at hand, he married Talbin’s widow. When I returned home, my son Dalin was already almost three. We were strangers to one another. But I devoted myself to knowing him, and by the time my daughter Rema was born, he loved me as his father. Over the years, Reha and I had two more sons and one more daughter who did not come to death in infancy, and they all grew strong. By the time my brother Paldim was old enough to marry a girl from our same village, I was living the same life I had always lived, in the role of my father. I never thought much of Gretla Amnil’s son. She had named him Therim, and I would see him from time to time, on market days or at festivals. He was tall, and dark-haired, and had his mother’s eyes and nose. He never came to speak to us, and we had no reason to speak with them. But now and then, when my back was turned or when I spoke to someone else, I would feel his eyes upon me. Through the seasons and over the years, his gaze never wavered. For her part, Gretla Amnil had never remarried, although she had long since ceased to claim me as hers. Instead of taking a second husband, she set herself up as the village miller, something which everyone found audacious, but excused thanks to what she had undergone with Theric’s death so late in her pregnancy. It was dismissed as a new kind of mania, but everyone respected her as the miller because my mother assured them it would only benefit Gretla’s health. Reha thought this a bold and admirable move, especially as the years turned and the respect grew genuine. Over those years, I would sometimes wake in the night from nightmares of Gretla Amnil, and have to wrap my arms around Reha and press my face into her hair to ease myself back into sleep. The year Dalin turned seventeen, civil war shook the kingdom, and its echoes ripped through the holds. Villages set against villages, and families set against families. All we knew was that someone—stories varied about who, precisely, was responsible—had stormed into the palace and beheaded the king and his children. In some variations of the tale, the young prince Velen, who was the king’s grandson, was being held captive. Some of the hold lords called their banners in support of the king, and some in support of his killers, and some refused to call. Likewise, some of us in the villages felt strongly, and some of us, many of us who had been part of the war with Kar’keth, wanted no more of bloodletting that would avail us nothing. I only wanted stability, for myself and my children. And I had earned enough respect in my village that I could hold it, even when those who were on one side or the other were eager to send each other to their deaths. In the chaos of civil war, the village where I had been born had been devoured in a furor clamoring for revolution and supporting the murder of the king, and my brother Golwin had to flee to us, along with Miya, the children, and our ailing mother. They had only just escaped—Miya’s oldest son, by Talbin, had been killed while his family escaped. Paldim, who had made himself a fierce would-be revolutionary, took over the land stained in the blood of his nephew. When the eager rebels had stomped down those who loved the king, many ran away to war. I never learned what it was they wanted from their revolution, or what the men who killed the king had wanted. Stories flew like crows, each as clever and each as untrustworthy. Reha, who had always condemned the king for his part in the war with Kar’kesh, condemned his beheading with just as much vinegar, when it was just me to listen. On some nights, when Miya was nearing the end of her last late pregnancy and Reha and our mother would sit up with her, Golwin and I would sleep up in the loft like we had as boys, though like old men we griped in the morning about the climb down. I had done well enough for myself that my sons shared a bedroom, as did my daughters. Now Golwin and Miya’s children shared with mine, and our mother slept on a bed in the kitchen near the warmth of the stove, and Golwin and Miya had taken the loft until Miya could no longer climb, and Reha had offered them our bed. On the nights my brother and I shared the loft, we would talk as we used to, and much more earnestly than we ever had. “I never would have thought it out of Pali.” Golwin had said this more than once, but it was a topic which always bloomed new. “He killed my son. He killed Tal’s son, Dal.” The grief was still raw in him, and he kept opening his bandages to pick at the wound again. “And Taliya’s husband is one of them.” Any talk of Paldim pained us both, for we both knew we had lost our brother, no matter which way the war winds blew. If the rebels failed, he would be killed. If they succeeded, he would still be the man who had killed our nephew, and overtaken our family’s land. “He would have killed you.” No matter how many times I said it, I never wanted to make myself believe it. “He would have.” His profile was framed in the moonlight that glinted in his eye, and the pain there was harder to look at than his ruined nose. “Talbin died for the damned king; I had no love for him, gods know. But I always thought what killed the rest of us would be years if we were blessed, and the Kar’kethi coming back to finish what they started if we weren’t. Not our brother and our nephews.” And not our sons. Within the year, the rebels claimed Turahn, and then Mintolwer. They nearly had Cenbath. But the winter came early that year, and went hard and long. By the late spring thaw the cities were starved nearly to death, and there were rumors even as far out as we were that the rebels had first eaten their armor leather, and then turned to eating children. They had no more allies in the capitol, and in the height of spring the army that had risen in support of the king, that had stayed the winter well-fed, swept in and lined the walls of Turahn with the heads of the men who would have ruled it. They went next to Mintolwer and Cenbath, and did the same, before they crowned a new king. The end of the civil war brought no peace to the villages. In the far rural reaches of the holds, the flames of rebellion had not yet been snuffed. We had long memories, and we remembered who had supported the crown, who had supported the rebels, and who had done neither. I prayed for Paldim’s safety even as I cursed what he had done. I imagined we had a fragile sort of peace—in that he had never come after Golwin and his family. But Paldim’s stayed hand never stopped other rebels from raiding the farm, and Golwin and our sons and I had always to be on our guards. The night I came to my own death began as any other. It was a hot, high summer night. We all ate as a family—any talk of Golwin and Miya ever leaving had long ceased, and my brother and I had crafted a long table which could fit our whole families. Reha and I had our bedroom back, for Golwin and Miya shared their own bedroom now, and our older children shared the other bedrooms while our younger boys slept in the loft. A man should spend his last night alive in his own bed. Reha and I laid in one another’s arms a while and talked of our first grandchild, who was due to be born in the early winter to Dalin and his wife Pia. We fell asleep there, and woke in the midst of the night to smoke and shouting. Reha and Miya gathered the girls, small children, and our mother and huddled in the cellar for safety. Golwin and I, along with our older sons, rushed out into the field to see the wheat ablaze, devouring the stars like a sunrise. We forgot all pretense of fighting and rushed to defend the farm the only way we could. Golwin ran to the well to haul water, and I shouted to our sons to form a line, to bring buckets out as far and fast as we could. I could see already that it was hopeless—the fire was so vast already, and we so few. “We’ll cut it off at the midline,” I told Dalin. “Let it burn out the wheat in the west field.” I seized a pair of empty buckets and ran for the trenches dug for irrigation, between two swathes of the blaze. It had been weeks without rain and the water was low; I had to climb halfway down the muddy lip to fill the buckets. When I climbed back up, death stood there waiting for me. He was tall, and dark of hair, and clutched a pitchfork in his thick hands. He had his mother’s cruel eyes, and her fine nose, and his mouth snarled at me. “Father,” Therim Amnil spat. In the blaze of the fire, I saw him differently than I ever had. He looked like his mother, yes. But he looked like his father too. For he had Theric Amnil’s thick neck, and Theric Amnil’s ears, and Theric Amnil’s broad hands. Broad hands holding the pitchfork, which he pointed at my heart. I stood eye to seething eye with the miller’s son, who thought I was his father, and I could nearly taste the crispness in the air that autumn day when Gretla Amnil had come to make use of me. And I could no more help the laugh that billowed up from my guts than smoke can help rising from a burning wheat field. A man should not come laughing to his death, but surprise paused Therim Amnil only for a moment. I was still laughing when the pitchfork ran through me, and when the blood welled up in my throat instead. The miller’s son would come to his death that night at the hands of my son Dalin, who would never suspect what Therim thought he knew. Most of the farm would be saved—enough, at least, to see our families through the winter, and when Dalin’s first son is born, everyone will think it right to name the infant after me. |
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L. M. Conrad
L. M. Conrad is a disabled, queer writer living in New York. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University and an MA from Goethe University Frankfurt, where her studies focused on the relationships between history, memory, and historical fiction. She has worked in publishing, bookselling, and academia.
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