Mire

Chapter 2

I spent my mornings exploring the village until the other children finished their chores. When they were done, I followed them and watched them play. I was too timid to join in. It wouldn't have made a difference; every time I crept too close the children would throw stones or run away. Their parents had warned them about the river demon, but I knew they were more frightened of their fathers' belts and their mothers' sharp nails than they were of me. Only a few of the boys faced me down. They were twice my age, and had no patience for ghost stories. Their hearts were filled with so much stubbornness that it could not be beaten out of them.

My mother would never have let me near boys like that, but as the weeks passed and I forgot her, the stern warnings left my ears. The boys were sullen and whispered about me, but as soon as their parents were out of earshot they stopped being cruel. I don't mean that they were friendly; bullying me was just too much of an effort. They had a scant few hours to play every day before the sun set, and they were determined to indulge themselves for every minute of it.

Goading an easy target lost its charm within a week, and after two I was allowed to creep closer and join in their games. When they explored, I trailed along behind them. When they fought, I clapped and cheered for whoever was winning, and when they chased each other I was always the last to be tagged.

One day they had a race to the caves and back. My short legs couldn't run fast enough to keep up. I stopped, choking back sobs, and flung myself down to beat my fists into the soft mulch. A shadow fell over me, and the oldest boy hauled me to my feet. He ran after the others carrying me on his back. I hid my face against his blonde hair when we reached them. The insults soon started – but they weren't for me! My faithful steed grinned and jeered back at his friends until they laughed and started a new game.

"Thank you." I whispered. He laughed again and put me down.

"You are an odd thing. I hardly felt you. My puppy weighs more than you do!"

"I did not mean thank you for carrying me." I stumbled over the words, and then I blushed bright red. How ungrateful I sounded! I stopped, confused, and the boy slapped me hard on the back. It took me a second to realise that it was an affectionate gesture.

The boy's name was Jonas. By listening in on Petra's nightly gossip, I found out that he was the carpenter's son. He was brash, and rude, and every week he seemed to find a new way to shock the entire village. He climbed up the sheer cliffs above the spring and threw bird eggs down into buckets and onto heads. He hated the crowded cabin his family shared, and slept out in the woods – which would have been fine, except that it meant he slept until noon and missed whole days of work. He goaded his tribe of boys into playing tricks on the younger children, and he catcalled the courting youths until they forgot about each other and greeted Jonas with their fists.

I thought he was utterly wonderful.

Nobody ever punished him. Jonas had no notion of a father. There was a distant older man who barely knew his name, and who was rarely sober enough to do more nurturing than a few lashes with his belt. Similarly, Jonas believed that a mother was someone who was slow and heavy, more bovine than human. The maternal creature always had an infant in or on her body, and had no time for any offspring who was old enough to walk out of the front door.

The sad thing was that this garrotted family was the same as many of the peasant families on the Mainland. The treacherous mountains wiped whole villages off the map, and several generations could be entirely forgotten with one unlucky landslide. Singen had stood for an impressive few generations in its sheltering gully, but the men upriver had diverted the torrent so carelessly that it had washed away half of the fields.

Jonas hated my wide-eyed adoration, but he never chased me off. I knew to scuttle away when he glared at me, but when we all walked home at sunset he let me slide my tiny hand into his, and he held it tight. If I grew tired he would lift me up without a word. I would lay my head against his shoulders and breathe in the smell of sawdust and leaf mould that clung to his hair. He would carry me into the village, to the sticky, muddy puddle outside of the inn. He nonchalantly dumped me down right into the middle of it before grinning and strutting away.