Blood Ties by Pamela Freeman Read Free Book Online Page B

I’m taking a youngling on, soon.”
    This was news. Sylvie had refused to take an apprentice for all the time I had known her. “Who is it?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “I don’t know. Someone’s due to turn up any day now. That’s why I thought I’d get the thatch done. So it’ll be over and done with by the time he comes.”
    “So . . . it’s a he. What else do the stones say?”
    “You don’t want to know.” Sylvie shook her gray hair over her eyes and peered up at me, like a storyteller pretending to be a stonecaster, and spoke in a long, wavering voice. “Oh, good sir, you don’t want to know the future! It’s too terrible.”
    I smiled. It was a very good impersonation of Piselea, a story-teller who’d drunk his way through the inn’s beer all summer. “Tell me anyway.”
    “They say it’s time you got married,” she said briskly, shaking back her hair. “I did a casting for you this morning. I had a feeling in my bones.”
    “Married. Me — married.” I smiled wider. “Very funny.”
    But she was serious.
    “The stones say it, and they mean it, my friend. Married before Midwinter’s Eve.”
    Well, it was a shock. I’d lived alone for four years, since Niwe, my sister, had died. Married. Who? There was no one in the village, and though I traveled for my work throughout the district, still, I’d not met anyone who’d taken my fancy for . . . well, not since Merris married Foegen the butcher, over at Connay. And that was six years since. No, seven.
    Married. Who?
    I lashed and hooked the reed all day, and if Sylvie had a watertight roof come winter, it was because my hands knew their job better than I did, at times, and I could tie my herringbone lashing blind drunk and three parts asleep, if I had to. For certain, my mind was elsewhere.
    All day on the ladder I went over the roll of women I knew, talking each one over with the reed and dismissing each. For Mathe was as ill-tempered as a vixen, and Sel was too young, and Aedwina much too old, besides having that young bull of a son living with her. I puzzled over it mightily, I can tell you, and as the short autumn dusk closed in, I climbed down the ladder and knocked at Sylvie’s door to ask for a casting. She sat me down on the rug.
    “Who is it?” I asked, and spat in my palm.
    She spat in hers and joined hands with me. As our hands locked I looked at Sylvie with new eyes, feeling the strength in her grip and the softness of her palm. Not her, surely?
    She drew the five stones from her bag and cast them out. They were all faceup, plain as day.
    “The Familiar,” she said, and raised her eyebrows. “Woman. Well, no surprise there. Child. Love. Death.” She brooded over them, touching them lightly. “So. A woman you know, with one or more children, someone you love or will love, brought to you by death. Accidental death, I think.” Her eyes grew compassionate. “It may not be who you think, Udall.”
    “No?” I broke the handhold, and sat back on my heels. “Someone I love, or will love, with a child. It has to be Merris. Who else? So Foegen dies?”
    “It may be. It may be not so. Don’t try to look further than the stones show you. Don’t try to change your future.”
    “Are you saying the future’s fixed? That I don’t have any say in what happens to me at all?”
    “Udall, I sit on this rug and cast the future. And I see folk try to avert what’s to happen to them. I see them frantic, trying to change what’s been foretold. And every time, the very thing they do to try to change things is what brings their fate to them. This is the way of it. Act selfishly, to change your fate, and it brings that fate rushing to your door.”
    So I got up and walked out. I packed up the thatch and left all tidy, and next morning I was back to finish the job, though I’d had little sleep the night before. The lashing straw went over and under, around and between, and so did my thoughts. If I went to warn Foegen, would I merely