EIGHT YEARS LATER
Miran shoved her feet into her boots and headed downstairs. The first of the servants were starting to wake up, and she closed the kitchen door behind her softly as she went out into the garden. There was a door there, half-hidden with vines and covered in rust. The path outside the gate was a shortcut into town if one was walking, but it was left in disrepair no matter how many times she asked the gardeners or the butlers to get it repaired. There was something about the gate that made other people in the manor avoid it.
She stepped away from the gate and broke into a full run, leaping over the gate and landing onto the soft grass on the other side on the balls of her feet. It was a feat she was used to, perfected to an art through years of escaping the manor. She liked to imagine the grooves in the ground that met her feet had been formed by her over the years. It was impossible for her to have such precision in her landing, but the grooves were there, even if serendipitously.
The town of Ashward was small compared to most towns, but it was livelier than the manor. In her loose trousers and her hair tucked under a wide-brimmed hat, she was just another farmworker walking in from the fields. In fact, she was a familiar face to them. Some days, in the days she was supposed to be resting from one of her grandmother's tests, she came to the town instead and worked as a farmhand.
At first, the work had been hard. After she had beaten Amos, it had become easier and easier to win. The swordmaster lost to her a few weeks later, and that was when the tournaments started. At first, she had been taken to the tournaments. She was carted around like a fighting bull, unleashed onto jousting grounds and taken back home the second she collected her rewards and glory.
Then the tournaments came back to her. Humiliated opponents and eager young warriors came to the manor eager to test their skills, restore their lost pride. They all left deflated. She grew to hide the ease of the fights, to satisfy their egos with false missteps. Her grandmother grew quieter as time passed, so much that the only words that passed between them were greetings and farewells. Miran gave her no room for criticism, and giving praise was not in Taro's nature.
It was the beginning of the harvest season, and the farmers needed as many hands as they could get. Miran read of things like famines and droughts in history books, but those things seemed to be stuck between the pages, incapable of affecting her country. Their harvests were always bountiful.
There was a farmer by the edge of the town, a widowed woman with a small child, who she often visited and worked with. Wilda wasn't able to pay her as much as the other farmers, but she was the one that needed her help the most. Her daughter Del was seven, losing her baby teeth one by one and offering toothless smiles and refreshments to all who came upon their door, friend or stranger. They knew Miran as Mira, the daughter of one of the manor's maids.
Kindness without cause, she thought to herself. It made sense to her as the years passed. Rei did not visit her so often nowadays. They were busy, sometimes slipping for a moment before she slept or brief visits at dawn. The sorcerer kept them busy, as he would soon keep her. She had not been called yet, but the sense of apprehension was growing each day.
Del opened the door and grabbed her by the hand. The house was warm, the smell of cooking meat in the air and laughter coming from the main room. Wilda was too young to be a widow, too young to be a mother. She was all of a twenty-five, with the experience of a much older woman.
She hung her hat up by the door and walked into the room. The room was filled with unfamiliar men. They had recently arrived, and from somewhere far. Bags rested at the corner of the room, and their boots were caked in mud from more than a few days' travel. She frowned at the amount of luggage. It wasn't the amount people brought when they meant to visit. These were people who intended on staying.
Wilda never mentioned visitors, let alone people who might be something more. Miran walked into the kitchen hesitantly. Wilda stood in front of a sweltering kitchen fire, stirring a large pot of stew. There was another woman in the room, sitting at the rough wooden table and eating the crusts off a loaf of bread. The woman was frail herself but wore a voluminous brown dress that hung loose at every part.
The woman was a diluted, unhappier version of Wilda. The bread she ate filled her cheeks, giving her the appearance of a frightened rodent. She flinched at the bursts of laughter that came from the main room.
"Mira," Wilda sighed in relief. "Thank goodness you're here. We have guests."
It was the worst time for a family to have guests. There was too much work to be done and not enough time to do it. She doubted the frail woman or the men outside would offer to help. There was a quality of indolence about the men, and one of weariness in the woman.
"I'll take care of the meal, sister,�� she said. "You take a rest."
She called out to Del, still in the main room, serving refreshments to the men.
"Del, go collect the eggs from the coop and bring them here. Be gentle, now."
She was strict with the girl. Sometimes she wondered if it was because she had never seen children raised any other way. She was not her grandmother, but she was not like Wilda, who let Del roam around the farm and do as she wished, with no responsibilities or repercussions to her actions.
Del was not wary of strangers or distrusting of people like Miran had. But she worried for the child. Del had a happy childhood, but Miran wondered if it was better to maintain innocence until it was destroyed by adulthood, or to be jaded and an adult from the beginning.
She wanted to ask Wilda who the strangers were, and why they felt so at home in a place that was not their home. But the woman eating kept directing furtive glances her way. There were a few disapproving looks towards her trousers.
Miran took the ladle from Wilda's hands and watched over the simmering stew. It was an indulgent meal for merely breaking fast, filled with meat and spices. The meals in Wilda's home were usually more spartan.
The strange woman finally left, her hands clasped in front of her body. Miran craned her neck and looked into the main room. The men were more boisterous now. One of them had his arm wrapped around the woman's waist, pulling her close to himself in a manner more possessive than tender.
"Who are those people?" she asked. Wilda placed heavy wooden bowls onto the kitchen table and Miran ladled out the stew into them.
"My cousins," Wilda said. "Gritt and Grishma."
"And why are they here?"
"To help me," Wilda said. "We're all alone here, me and Del. They're going to stay here from now on."
Miran frowned. People who wanted to help would've come straight after the last snow. All through the summer everyone toiled under the sun to grow their crops. They saved valuable grains from pests and drought and cared for the plants like children. Farmers were magicians of a kind, turning dirt and seeds into life-giving food.
She looked at the three new people once more. They came at the easiest time, the time when the crops were harvested and collected, sold off to the visiting merchants from various cities.
"You should've said no," Miran mumbled. People whispered in the village that the house at the edge of the town needed a man for protection. But Wilda had refrained from marrying again. Perhaps it was her love for her late husband, or maybe it was her fear of how a stranger would treat Del, but she stayed strong and alone. It didn't make sense for her to accept new members into their family now.
Wilda placed a blistered hand on Miran's forearm. Those hands worked harder than most men in the village, and when she came back home from the fields, she was a devoted mother to Del.
"I didn't have a choice, Mira. According to the laws, Gritt could stake a claim on this farm."
The rulers of the country were complacent, and so the rules were archaic. The laws had not been changed for two decades, and while people used their common sense, writing their properties in their daughters' and wives' names. Avaricious relatives frequently contested the wills, and depending on the magistrate in charge of their cases, sometimes won.
Ashward's magistrate was an old man named Avis Zorich. A bachelor despite his life-long attempts at matrimony, he had asked Wilda to marry him the year before. He was wealthy, thanks to a population of people who were willing to pay the magistrate's tax on top of the national one. Avis was a petty man, and he remembered his most recent rejection the most acutely. If Gritt made a claim on the farm, it was almost certain he would win it.
Miran stared at the man that had crawled into Wilda's home, with such greed in his heart and such entitlement. He stood at the hearth as if it was his already, his arm hanging carelessly next to the porcelain urn that held Wilda's husband's remains.
He stood so assuredly, comfortable in the knowledge that Wilda was at his mercy. He looked around at the house Wilda's father built with his own hands and judged its contents. She saw him pause at the cabinet filled with delicate porcelain dinnerware. The set of plates and tea cups were a family heirloom and valuable, and the merchants from the city would arrive in a few days.
"What are you looking at?" Miran asked. Her voice was a whip, the question demanding an answer. She felt the line of anger between her eyebrows, and so did Gritt. She possessed her grandmother's authority, although when she had gained it Miran did not know.
Gritt held back from opening his mouth, clenched his jaw and instead frowned at Wilda. He was a man who believed his eyes and his fingers were entitled to all he wanted to see and touch and have. The young girl was perhaps a servant. He hadn't thought his cousin was wealthy enough to afford a servant. Wilda certainly did not look well off. In fact, her servant looked better than his cousin. Her boots were fine oiled leather, and the trousers she wore were tailored for her and relatively new.
His family moved to the neighboring country when he was a child, selling their farmland to Wilda's parents as they left. It was before the war, when the country of Cildoran was growing by the day, its treasuries overflowing and its armies swarming the world without loss. But now, Cildoran was home to poverty and famine. The lands they had conquered had been lost, and the contents of the treasury were near empty. The king was on his deathbed, and the heir was a sickly young man who might soon follow his father.
The country still survived, but the wealth his parents dreamed of was elusive. In the early days they had ascended from their state of landless servants to owning a dress shop on the main streets. Their younger sister ran the shop now, and it was only barely enough to feed her and their parents.
Gritt came back to Ashward hoping to find work. His father told him that there might be work on their family farm, but he had come back to discover something even better. The farm had no male heir, and was run by a widow and her female child. The laws of inheritance meant he could inherit the land and house.
He would have pity on the young widow and her child. She was a pretty woman, though older than he preferred. Cousin marriages were going out of style in Cildoran, but not frowned upon in the country of Vazira as of yet. The servant was still looking at him. He didn't like the defiant, mocking look in her eyes. He wanted to throw her question back at her, ask her what she was looking at. Gritt sensed she wouldn't respond with silence. The girl had a tongue on her. He could tell.
He turned away from her, looking at the dying fire in the hearth. Wilda called him and his brother-in-law Denis in for the morning meal and he went eagerly. The stew was filling. Meat was a welcome change from stale bread and wildberries. He drank the honeyed milk and cursed the days when he'd had to make do with river water that tasted of the rocks it passed over.
"How long do you intend to stay?"
It was a ridiculous question. They all knew that the farm was all but his in name. All he needed to do was visit the magistrate, and from what he had heard from two towns over, the magistrate of Ashward was a man who did not believe in female autonomy. He looked at Wilda, but she was not the one who had asked.
The servant stood at the corner of the room with her arms crossed, one feet placed behind the other. He cleared his throat and ignored her. The food was delicious, the house was warm and his. In the evening, after he saw his farmlands and the crops, he would show the insolent servant how a real master dealt with disrespect.