Once out into the village, she moved just as surefooted. She not only counted her footsteps through the crooked streets, but her ears pricked to the rhythmic hammering of Smithy’s Row to her left. The steady ringing helped guide her path. Her nose also lifted to the pungent smoke and heady spices of markets, where fishes and eels were already frying under the midday sun. Even her skin noted the thickening air and growing dampness as she reached Brayk’s outskirts. Here the stone-and-plaster palacios closer to the school’s walls declined to more modest homes and storehouses with wooden walls and thatched roofs.
Still, she continued onward until a new smell filled her world. It was a heavy brume of sodden hair, sweet shite, trampled mud, and sulfurous belch. She felt her fears shedding from her shoulders as she drew nearer, enveloping herself in the rich odors.
It meant home.
Her arrival did not go unnoticed. A rumbling bellow greeted her, followed by another, and another. Splashing headed her way.
She crossed forward until her hands found the stacked stone fence that marked off the bullock pens at the swamp’s edge. A heavy shuffle aimed toward her, accompanied by a softer grunting and a few plaintive bleats, as if the great lumbering beasts thought themselves to blame for her long absence. She lifted a hand until a wet nose, covered in cold phlegm, settled into her palm. Her fingers were nosed up and gently nuzzled. From its size and the shape, she knew this snout as readily as she did the village and school.
“It’s good to see you, too, Gramblebuck.”
She freed her hand and reached up. She dug her fingers through the thick matted fur between the stubby horns until her nails found skin. She scratched him hard where he always liked it, earning a contented huff of hot air against her chest. Gramblebuck was the eldest of the herd, nearly a century old. He rarely pulled the sledges through the rushes and marshes any longer, but he remained lord of the bullocks. Most of the shaggy herd here could trace their blood to this one beast.
She reached up both arms and gripped his horns. Even with his head bowed low, she had to lift to her toes to get hold. She pulled his head to hers, his crown as wide as her chest. She inhaled his wet musk, leaned into the warm hearth of his bulk.
“I missed you, too,” she whispered.
He grunted back and tried to haul her up by arching his short neck.
She laughed and let go of his horns before she was carried aloft. “I don’t have time to go for a ride with you. Maybe on my midsummer break.”
Though Gramblebuck no longer pulled the sledges, he still loved to trek the swamps. All her life, she had spent many a long day on his wide back, traversing the marshes. His long legs and splayed hooves made easy passage through its bogs and streams, while his size and curled tusks discouraged any predators from daring to approach.
She patted his cheek. “Soon. I promise you.”
As she headed down the fencerow, running her fingertips along the posts, she hoped it was a promise she could keep. Other bullocks shuffled and sidled up, wanting attention, too. She knew most of them by touch and smell. But her time was limited. The bells would soon be summoning her back to her studies.
She hurried toward the corner of the hundred-acre bullock pen, where a homestead stood. Its foundation was anchored to the stone shore but also stretched out atop a massive dock, which extended a quarter league into the swamps. The home’s walls were stacked stones matching the fence, its roof thatched like the homes nearby. Higher up, a rock chimney pointed at the skies, where the shadows of low clouds scudded across the brightness, roll ing ever eastward, carrying the freezing cold of the dark toward the searing scorch on the other side of the world.
She crossed to the stout door, lifted the iron latch, and shoved inside without a knock or a shout. As she stepped into the deeper shadows, her world shrank, but not in a disconcerting way. It was like being wrapped in a warm, familiar blanket. She was immediately struck by a mélange of odors that meant home: the smell of old wool, the oily polish of wood, the smoke of dying coals, the melting beeswax from the tiny candles in the home’s corner altar. Even the waft of composting silage from the twin stone silos that flanked the docks pervaded everything.
Her ears piqued to a shuffle of limbs and creak of wood near the ruddy glow of the hearth. A voice, wry with amusement, rose from there. “Trouble again, is it?” her dah asked. “Is there any other reason you tumble back home nowadays, lass? And without your cane?”
She hung her head, staring down at her empty hands. She wanted to dismiss his words but could not.
A gentle laugh softened his judgement. “Come sit and tell me about it.”
* * *
WITH HER BACK to the fire, Nyx finished her litany of the morning’s humiliations and fears. It lightened her spirit simply to unburden them.
All the while, her dah sat silently, puffing on a pipe smoldering with snakeroot. The tincture in the smoke helped with the crick and rasp of his joints. But she suspected his silence was less about tempering any pain than it was to allow her the time to fill the quiet with her complaints.
She let out a sigh to announce the ending.
Her dah sucked on his pipe and exhaled one long bitter breath of smoke. “Let me ken it better for you. You certainly tweaked the nose of the nonne who taught you this last quarter.”
Nyx rubbed the bruise from Sister Reed’s bony fingers and nodded.
“But you also impressed yourself upon the prioress of the entire school. Not a small feat, I imagine.”
“She was being kindly at best. And I don’t think my clumsiness helped the situation. Especially breaking the school’s treasured orrery.”
“No matter. What is broken can always be set aright. On the balance of it, I’d say you fared well for one morning. You’ll finish your seventhyear in another turn of the moon. Leaving only the eighthyear to go until the final culling to the ninth and highest tier. It seems, under such circumstances, earning the good graces of the prioress herself versus irking a single nonne—a sister who you’ll soon leave behind anyway—is not a bad trade.”
His words helped further temper her misgivings. Maybe he was right. She had certainly endured far harsher obstacles to reach the seventh tier. And now I’m so close to the top. She shoved that hope down deep, fearing even wishing it might dash her chances.
As if reading her thoughts, her dah underscored her luck. “Look where you started. A babe of six moons mewling atop a floating raft of fenweed. If not for your bellyaching, we wouldn’t aheard ya. Gramblebuck would have dragged my sledge right past ya.”
She attempted to smile. The story of her being found abandoned in the bog was a point of joy to her dah. He had two strong sons—both in their third decade now, who managed the paddocks and ran the sledges—but the man’s wife had died giving birth to his only daughter, losing both at the same time. He took Nyx’s discovery in the swamps as some gift from the Mother, especially as there was no evidence of who had left the infant naked and crying in the bog. The spread of fenweed, a fragile and temperamental plant, exhibited no evidence of any treadfall around her body. Even the tender blooms that covered the floating mat’s surface showed no bruise to their petals. It was as if she had been dropped from the skies as a reward for the devout and hardworking swamper.