The Raven and the Reindeer by T. Kingfisher Read Free Book Online

smiled.
    The girl fed Gerta a large lunch, with farmhouse cheese and bread stuffed with fish and a few apples. Gerta braced herself to decline tea or small beer, but she was apparently not considered an important enough guest for anything but water.  
    The girl wrapped another few apples up in a cloth, with a roll and a wedge of cheese. “It’s a long way to the next town,” she said, handing them over. Her eyes lingered again on the gaps in Gerta’s clothing. “Did you leave someone’s service?”
    “Sort of,” said Gerta. “It’s…complicated.”  
    “I will trade you a shirt,” said the girl. She stood with her hand braced against her back, leaning back against the weight of her belly. “Mine’s not such a good fabric as yours, but it will fit you better.”
    Gerta looked up, startled.
    “People will think you’ve stolen that cloak,” she said. “And perhaps you have, but it’s no business of mine. I’d guess by the look of you that somebody turned you off without your wages. You worked hard for me, so whatever it was for, it wasn’t shirking.”
    “I didn’t steal it,” said Gerta, licking dry lips.  
    “Then you’ll do better with a shirt that fits,” said the pregnant girl. “Otherwise people will wonder where you got the money for a cloak like that, when you can’t afford a shirt.”
    Gerta bowed her head. “Thank you,” she mumbled, feeling hot with embarrassment. How must she look, covered in hay dust, with her shirt hanging open?
    She was glad to leave the house. Even though the girl had been kind enough, and more than fair in her payment for the work, it had been awkward.  
    The new shirt was rough homespun, and it did fit better, particularly across the chest. The girl had gotten a bargain, since Gerta’s old shirt was linen, but there was no point in carrying around a linen shirt that didn’t fit, particularly when it made her look like a servant girl who had been turned off from her employer without her wages.  
    She walked on.

CHAPTER NINE

    It was a warm autumn day, the sort that can happen right into October. Gerta pushed her cloak back and put the muff in her pack.  
    The road surface was drier here, and walking was easier. Since she did not need to watch her feet, she looked around.  
    There was not a great deal of scenery. Trees marked the divisions between fields, and there was a blue band on the horizon that might be more trees. The fields were mown stubble and the weathered fences looked the same as weathered fences have looked since time immemorial. The ditches were full of dried grasses, which rattled in the breeze.  
    A few fields had a single tall tree in the middle, but not many. Her grandmother had said that such trees were sacred to Ukko, but perhaps no one cared about that any longer.  
    She kept an eye out for movement. Occasionally, a horse and rider would cross one of the fields, far away.  
    Mostly, though, she tried to remember the last seven months.  
    There was almost nothing left to her of those days, except for the dreams. She worried at it like a loose tooth, prodding from all angles, and was rewarded with fragments—a cup of tea, a fire, the red quilt covered in roses. Tying up beans and cutting down the withered stems of the peas.  
    There were slugs on the roses , she thought, staring over the landscape of brown and grey and white. I picked slugs off the roses. But surely I didn’t do that for an entire seven months!
    Even now, it was hard to believe that it had been so long. She did not even have a sense that time had passed.
    But it was autumn. And her clothes no longer fit. Her breasts had grown, which was not entirely a blessing, and her thighs had thickened and her arms were more muscular. Her face, when she had seen it in the farm-wife’s glass, was sharper around the cheekbones.  
    To her deep digust, she had not grown even a fraction of an inch taller.  
    Seven months. And all I have to show is dreams about plants. A whole