Black Spring by Alison Croggon Read Free Book Online Page A

you. And she’s six times more fun.” (This last wasn’t strictly accurate.) “I won’t speak to any of you until you say you’re sorry. You’re all pigs. ” Then she took my hand and marched me home, where we played the games I liked best all afternoon, even though I knew they bored her rigid.
    That day Lina won my undying loyalty. I did get my apologies, and I was never teased by those children again, though it took some time for me to forgive our playmates. Once they apologized, Lina regarded the episode as finished, and she showed no resentment toward any of them. One of her virtues as a child — it changed later, although I never blamed her for that — was that she didn’t bear grudges and was mystified by those who did. It was another reason I excused her excesses. That was the least northern thing about her: in the North, hatreds are nurtured for generations of vendetta, as if they are precious family heirlooms.
    We children treated Lina as if she were a perilous natural element, like the sea: we watched her with caution and fled when she turned nasty. When she was in her sunny moods, no one was more fun: she led us into mischief, even the boys, because she invented the best games and was the most daring of all of us. We all admired her fearlessness, but her generosities inspired our deeper loyalty. Once, when we were caught raiding a neighbor’s orchard for his plums, Lina stepped forward and took the blame for all of us, persuading the angry man to let the rest of us go. She was thrashed for her pains, but, as she said to us with studied carelessness later, he wouldn’t have dared to beat her nearly as hard as he would have beaten us, because she was the Lord Kadar’s daughter.
    Even then she was imperious and stubborn. It was, I suppose, the other side to her courage. My mother did her best to blunt Lina’s edges and to instill in her some sense of womanly modesty, but this was undone by her father, who spoiled and indulged her and whom she adored with a passion made all the sharper by his frequent absences.
    One day the Lord Kadar returned home from a long journey. As was our custom, we all gathered solemnly in the dining room to welcome him home. After he had distributed gifts, he took Lina on his knee and kissed her cheek. She flushed with pleasure and buried her face in his neck, and he put his arm about her and announced, as if he were talking about tomorrow’s breakfast, that we were going to move back north, to Elbasa. “As soon as the house is packed,” he said. “I want to be home for the summer.”
    There was an immediate hubbub of astonishment. “But what about Lina?” asked my mother, her question cutting through the noise. It was typical of her that she thought of Lina first, although even then, young as I was, I knew that she was homesick for the North and for the family she had left behind when the master moved us south all those years before. “What will happen to Lina?”
    The master looked my mother straight in the eye, but he hesitated before he answered her. “Lina too. The king has forgiven my family, and I think it’s time we went home. And we are of royal blood, after all. The Lore doesn’t apply to us.”
    Lina looked up at him with a wicked laughter in her eyes. “I am a princess and a witch!” she said. “No one would dare to touch me!”
    “Neither they would, my darling,” said her father, and kissed her brow. “And a beautiful princess at that!”
    My mother pressed her lips together, for she disapproved of such petting, which only encouraged Lina’s excesses. She said nothing more: it wasn’t her place to have an opinion about the master’s decisions. The rest of the evening was a whirl of gossip in the kitchens as everyone talked about the news. My father, a taciturn man, went so far as to shrug. None of us in the least expected it, not even the master’s manservant, who was a little sulky at being taken by surprise: he felt it demeaned his status in