Cat in Glass by Nancy Etchemendy Read Free Book Online Page B

that the time was not yet right.
    Jacinth caught his hand and wove her fingers through his. “Though I wish it were otherwise,” she said, “we must be patient awhile longer.”
    A shadow fell across Joth’s face, and his eyes grew dark for a moment. “Have I overstepped myself?” he asked. The question seemed simple, but in the sound of his voice and the way he held his head, Jacinth saw that he had left much unasked. She held his hand tighter.
    “No, dear Joth,” she said. “You are like the sun to me. No day seems whole without you anymore. No task seems meaningful. But there is something I must do first.” She gazed at him, thinking of the tapestry, of the lily she had never received, and of the bitterness that lingered in spite of her love for Joth. From a thicket across the stream came the hollow cry of a short-eared owl.
    So it came to pass that in the early summer Jacinth prepared to join the lily hunt. She told no one the exact nature of her plan, not even Joth, though she was sometimes certain hehad guessed it. She made herself a pair of stout, coarse trousers and a sturdy jerkin the color of thick forests. The smith of Aranho gazed at her quizzically when she bought a tempered dirk from him; the fletcher frowned at her request for a bow and a quiver of ashwood arrows. But in the end, her gold was as good as anyone else’s, and they accepted her money though she offered no explanations. Last of all, she straightened her back and strode into the shop of Bot the cobbler, as if she were any other customer.
    Bot was old, and his hands too gnarled for proper cobbling, so Joth did the fine work while Bot cut leather and cajoled his customers. Jacinth ordered a pair of tall leather boots from him, finished with beeswax to keep out the cold and damp.
    “I’ll be walking a long way,” she said as Bot measured her. “Sometimes through deep mud and sometimes over rocks.”
    She looked up and saw Joth watching her as he worked at his last, one eyebrow raised. Her heart quickened with fear and excitement at the thought of the task she was about to undertake.
    At last the appointed morning arrived. In the chill light of dawn, Jacinth dressed carefully, as she imagined a knight might dress before battle, pale and filled with the need to trust something larger than herself, a set of rules, a ritual made right by centuries of practice. She tugged the new boots over her calves, slipped the dirk through her belt and the quiver over her shoulders. Then she knotted a bag of journey bread at her hip, took up her bow, and started down the road to Aranho, looking neither right nor left.
    By the time she reached the village, a crowd of young men had already gathered in the square, all laughter and nerves in the first copper light of the sun. As she approached, a hush fell over them. The muscles of her stomach tightened as she waited to see what would happen.
    “What are you doing here, one-eye, dressed up as if you were a man?” asked one of them.
    Jacinth fought the old fury and pain as she replied quietly, “I am walking with you to the forest.”
    Several of the young men cried out at once. “But you can’t! … But you’re a woman! … You have no right to join in the lily hunt!”
    Jacinth laid her hand on her dirk. “I have a right to walk wherever I please, whenever I choose. And if any of you think otherwise, then I invite you to stop me, at the expense of your own blood or mine.”
    A low muttering rippled through the crowd, and Jacinth tightened her grip on the dirk.
    At that moment, a clear voice cut across the morning air, as sharp as the cry of a meadowlark. There stood the high elder of Aranho, a man who was old long before Jacinth or the lily hunters had been born. He rested withered hands on thin hips and said, “Who among you ever offered her a lily?”
    Silence fell on the crowd once more as men looked away across the fields or watched their own feet shuffling uneasily in the dust. No one