Black Spring by Alison Croggon Read Free Book Online Page B

the household. Later my mother was uncharacteristically impatient with me as she washed me and put me to bed, and I knew she was worried.
    “Will they really try to kill Lina?” I asked, for like everyone else I had heard dark rumors of the savage ways of the North, although my mother never told those stories. I mostly picked them up from my southerner friends, when they wanted to tease me. And sometimes — always led by Lina — we had played hunt the witch, with Lina in the principal role. We dressed up as highland wizards, with sticks for our staffs, and dragged Lina from hiding, her hands tragically clasped, and we pretended to set her on fire while she cast her eyes to heaven and called down curses upon our heads. I have sometimes thought, although her father would never have countenanced such a vulgar occupation, that she should have stayed in the South and worked in the theaters of the city: she was a born actress.
    My mother didn’t answer me for a time, as if she were turning over things in her head. Then she said, “The master is right. She won’t be killed, at least not by the common people, and maybe her royal blood will protect her from the wizards. I doubt she’ll have an easy time of it on the Plateau. Things are different there. But it is not for you or me, child, to question the will of the master.”
    And that was that.

I t was early spring, and the weather was still uncertain: everything that was to go north must be wrapped in sacking and oiled tarpaulins and packed on the drays in straw, and my mother, as chief housekeeper, had the responsibility of making sure that all the fine china and glassware didn’t arrive in Elbasa shivered to smithereens. I had to leave behind my best friend, Clar, the red-headed daughter of the dairyman (Lina never counted as a friend so much as a condition of nature, to be borne as best I could). Once I realized I would likely never see Clar again, the gloss fell off the excitement for me; I cried myself to sleep every night for a week, and we knotted bracelets of colored wool for each other and swore never to forget our friendship. Lina, on the other hand, was radiant with excitement. She told everybody who would listen that she was going to claim her birthright as a princess of the blood, even after we were all heartily sick of hearing about it, and was determined to help with the packing. Although she was continually told off for being underfoot, not even the most severe scolding could darken her disposition.
    I don’t remember much of the journey, except that it was very slow and that it seemed to rain every day. I sat on the cart, numb with cold and misery, hating everything. Our arrival in Elbasa surprised me out of my glums, all the same: even though the master was to follow us later, the whole village turned out to welcome us back, crowding into the square in their best church clothes, which looked rude and strange to my southern eyes. In the North, a village without its lord is a village abandoned. No matter the scandal that attached to the master’s wedding and his dead wife and, even more, to his witch-eyed daughter, blood is blood, and in this country, blood is everything.
    I met my grandparents and uncles and aunts for the first time, and my cousins gave me dark looks and stuck out their tongues behind the backs of the adults, which made me act likewise and earned me a cuff from my father. Perversely, this had the effect of cheering me up: it seemed children up north were not so different from children down south, for all their crude clothes and muddy boots. I kept a wary eye out for the upland wizards, of whom I had heard much, and was disappointed when I saw no one who looked in the least wizardly, but there was some entertainment to be had from watching Lina, who took my breath away with her audacity. She ignored the children and greeted the town dignitaries with the gravity of a highborn lady of the South. Such was her seriousness that nobody dared to