The Song of Andiene by Elisa Blaisdell Read Free Book Online

could have stayed with her by their rules, but I could not bear to live my life under the shadow of the trees. And the salt sea runs in my veins. I could imagine no other life, for all my joy in wandering.”
    Kare’s laughter rang like a bell. “I was glad to follow him wherever he would go. Gladly I would have stayed, but gladly I went.”
    “They value children,” Hammel said, not to be distracted. “Any village would take her in, with delight. A safe place for her, and it would, in a sense, repay them for the treasure I stole from them.” He and his wife exchanged glances, long and loving.
    “But what of the devils in the forest?” Ilbran asked. “The rissan, the grievers, all the ones I have heard you speak of?”
    “There are dangers everywhere,” Kare said. “You fear the ones you do not know; you respect the ones you do know.”
    Ilbran nodded, though unconvinced, and went to the curtained-off corner by the hearth that had been his sleeping place. He pulled the curtain aside to look at Andiene. Wild stories were told of her in the marketplace, growing wilder each day. Witless jabbering, he had assumed, of how the king’s daughter had spoken in an unknown tongue, she who had never spoken before, and had forced eight-score men to do her will, and so had walked out unharmed from a charnel house.
    He had laughed at that. It had seemed more likely that someone had warned her and she had scrambled out of a window to escape. Now, as he saw the look of power on her face even as she slept, anything seemed possible.
    It was foul weather outside, too foul to set to sea, except in times of desperation. There was little work that Ilbran could do. His hands were stiff and clumsy already—useless for the fine work of mending the nets. He watched Fel, where the courser lay on the blanket near the door where Ilbran had slept the night before, and groomed himself, an infinitely occupying task.
    Andiene woke and came out from her corner and sat watching Kare knotting lace by the window. After a while, she found a piece of wire not yet bent into a fishhook. She hammered it with a stone to straighten it, then hammered a tiny hook into the end of it.
    “What are you doing?” asked Ilbran.
    “Lace making, the way my nurse taught me.” Her voice trembled; she half-whispered. “They killed her when they came for me—already I had half-forgotten. Nane. She had dressed me, she was brushing my hair when they came in … ”
    Kare laid her work down and clasped Andiene’s hands. “You must forget.”
    “But so soon? I feel as though there is a cleft between my life then and my life now. Wider and deeper every time I look back. I look across and that other life was lived by some other person. A little girl that walked here and walked there. They combed her hair and washed her face, and dressed her like a doll.”
    Andiene shook her head. Her voice rose higher. “Now I dream. Every night, I dream. Walls of fire and lakes of blood. Sunlight in a wide valley, and the golden-winged birds circling outside the walls.”
    She looked blindly around the room, not seeming to see the smallness, the dirt that clung to everything, the curtains imperfectly screening off corners of the room, the smoke stains on wall and ceiling, the only chair always occupied by Hammel, the straw mats serving for all other furniture. She seemed to look past all that, as though she could look through the wall out to sea. “And the calling, always a voice calling me. It is like a rat gnawing at my mind.”
    “You will grow older and forget,” Kare said softly. Andiene looked at her for a moment as though she were a grown woman, and Kare but a child. Then she took the roll of thread that Kare offered her and began playing with it, or so it seemed. She twisted it, looped it, pulled loop through loop, catching it on the hooked wire. And to Kare’s amazement, the shape of lace began to make itself clear, a star design, lace made in the air.
    “Your nurse