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Chapter 19 - The First Blow Falls

Morning broke clear and cool, with a promise of wind. Pierrette considered Marie's limited wardrobe, and chose a brown homespun dress. She shouldered a jar of oil and a basket of full clay bottles. She wished to be firmly established in her spot at the market before anyone else arrived—anyone but Granna, always first to arrive and last to leave.

Hurrying through the narrow streets, she encountered no one at close range. Granna was already arranging her wares. "I wondered how long it'd take."

"How . . . how long have you known?"

"Maybe a year? I was worried when your voice didn't change, so I kept an eye on you. When you let your hair grow . . ."

"Does everyone know?" The old woman was known to gossip.

Granna chuckled. "The women do. It's like those patterns Moors carve—first you see one thing, like an upside-down stairway. Then your eye fiddles with it, and turns it right-side up. After that, you wonder how you ever saw it the other way."

Then there would be no great to-do, no laughter. "Why didn't anyone say anything?" Pierrette asked.

"You had to have a reason." Her eyebrows rose in a question.

Pierrette explained about her father and the olive grove. Granna was familiar with the problem. In the old Roman days, inheritance had been fixed by laws. Migrations and invasions had brought new customs. Now, depending on whether one considered herself Roman, Celt, Visigoth or Frank, different rules applied, and because everyone intermarried, there was no clear precedent. It was like having no laws at all.

"Besides," Granna continued, "more than one woman would be glad to be a man. It's easier. `Fetch this, give me that,' or `Where's my dinner?' No sneaking the occasional penny or saving spoonsful of salt to trade for a few yards of cloth, or needles to sew it. Sitting home when a husband goes to the inn for wine." She shook her head. "You used to go there with Gilles. You won't be welcome there any more."

Pierrette had not considered that.

"For all you know about being a girl—or a woman—you might have been born yesterday," Granna mused.

Pierrette felt cold, despite the sunlight. Jerome had said that too. Had she, a "boy" all her life, taken too much for granted? Of course the men would not welcome a woman, who might tell their wives how much they drank and spent, and of drunken revelations that would get them in trouble at home. Women wielded sharp-honed tongues. Would she be reduced to that?

Yet her situation was unique. She had always exercised a degree of control over Gilles. Why would that change?

* * *

Pierrette's metamorphosis caused little stir. Summer wore into fall, and she settled into her new role. There was gossip—but what was there, really, to be said? She had done nothing scandalous, had not harmed anyone.

As a girl, Pierrette maintained a brown, mousy appearance. She did not wish to be exceptional, only accepted—but that eluded her. Women treated her no differently than before. She did not become an intimate member of the clusters of girls who huddled together at noontime, eating, laughing, and gossiping. Girls her age had long since formed their friendships. They had known—and mostly ignored—the boy Piers, and they continued to do so. They did not know the girl Pierrette, and were not interested, except as an object of curiosity. No one rushed up to ask, "What was it like, being a boy?" They only looked—and those looks kept her apart.

She only felt like a woman with Anselm. After his initial surprise, the mage's behavior shifted in some subtle male fashion.

The supplicants who came had weighty things on their minds, and paid little attention to her, as a person. Of course her position as Anselm's apprentice caused talk, but few Christians wished their visits to the sorcerer known. What was said was always attributed at second- or third-hand: "So-and-so told me she heard . . ."

No one seemed to notice that her arrivals and departures were almost simultaneous. To an observer, she would have appeared to enter through the gate, then to have come right back out again—though for her, hours, even days, elapsed inside.

She tried to reason out that paradox. If she arrived, ate a meal, read a book or scroll, and only then answered the bell's ringing when visitors came, how could she eat again after they left—their requests heard, their ills healed—at the same moment she had arrived? No matter how she struggled to force time to do her bidding—to become understandable—she never gained more than a headache.

She could not ask visitors about their perceptions of time's passage. Those who passed her in street or marketplace pointedly avoided her. Consorting with sorcerers, or their apprentices, was not openly acceptable.

* * *

Pierrette heard the crash of breaking pottery as she neared the house. "It's not here!" cried her father. Leaving her jars, she opened the door upon a shambles. Broken pots were strewn across the floor. The room reeked of spilled wine and spices. Bedding, clothing, and utensils lay in heaps, and furniture was overturned.

Gilles glared with sick anger. "What have you done with my silver?"

"Papa! You're drunk! Your money is where you hid it." She went to the hearth, and wiggled the loose stone free. "It's right here . . . It . . . Father! Did you move it again?" The niche was empty.

Twice before, brooding on the security of his money, Gilles had hidden it, then forgotten where. Pierrette checked the window ledge. "I'll look in the cellar," she said.

"It's not there!" Gilles wept.

"I'll look anyway."

The small opening was a tighter fit than when she had been a child. There was a snake. The same one she had entertained with her experiments, long ago? It was lodged against the foundation where she wished to reach. Despite her decision to find out if snakes, like light, were affected by people's assumptions, now was hardly the time. Nevertheless, she reached past the snake's fat coils, groping. Gilles's bag was not there.

"Someday, " she murmured, "we'll discuss magic—and the nature of your kind—but I must go." Getting out was no easier than getting in. By the time she ascended the stairs, she was bruised and scraped.

"My money!" Gilles wailed.

"Father! Hush! Do you want neighbors to hear there's a lost treasure? You'll remember where you hid it. Now help me clean up. We can't find anything in this confusion." She directed Gilles in the heavy tasks of righting table and bed, and heaped soaked clothing and bedding by the door.

"You'll have to sleep on straw tonight," she said. "It's too late to wash your things."

"My money!" he cried softly.

"We'll find it. Now I must find something for us to eat. You ruined everything here." She went out, leaving him with his head in his hands. It would not be long, she reflected sadly, before the knight got his way with the olive grove. Some of Gilles's befuddlement was wine, but not all. His mind was crumbling. When that happened, the body did not maintain itself long. He could no longer climb a ladder, or wield a pruning saw. A year, she thought. Two at most.

Anselm had been little help. "Only magic—or a miracle—could cure him. Would you dare wield such a spell?" He pointed to a shelf of ancient scrolls. "Would you trust yourself to determine what postulates have changed, and in what manner, in the thousand years since those were last tested?" Pierrette was proud of her success with small spells, but had no illusions about great ones, written when the world was new and vastly different.

Now, climbing the stairs with a loaf of bread and a salted redfish, she considered one of those "safe" spells, one she had successfully tested not a week before. . . .

* * *

"Wedh' arhentom" she incanted, for the fifth time, laying down the tiny coin. "Yemos trof' yemo . . . Oh, it's no use, pater. The silver is not here, or the spell is wrong . . . I don't know."

"I'm poor again," Gilles said dully. "I have no pennies for wine, no . . ."

"Is that all you can think of? I'll buy wine, tomorrow. There is the oil money. But now you must sleep." Relenting her earlier statement, she said, "You may use my bed. My bones will suffer less from the hard floor."

When Gilles's snores became loud, Pierrette stood, holding the bit of silver in her tight fist. She had lied; the spell worked . . . and was working still. "Silver, find your way home," she had said in her mother's tongue. "Like to like, twin finding twin." Even now, the coin pulled—but not toward any hiding place within the house.

Pierrette worked her way eastward through narrow, moon-shadowed streets, her arm extended, held up less by her will than pulled by the coin, which was eager to be reunited with its kin.

Her direction hinted at a destination, but dread forced her to keep an open mind. Then she emerged on the soldiers' practice field by Jerome's house. The silver was beyond her reach.

Jerome had stolen it—or had one of his men do so. But why? She whispered quiet words, and the coin ceased tugging. The knight had not repossessed the money for its own sake.

Whose motives? she asked herself. Jerome the Burgundian's? The Celt god Cernunnos'? Or the unfathomable wishes of the dark one who consumed gods and drew power from their spirits? If the horned one had desire, it was not for silver, but for some condition the silver's loss would cause. But what?

Darkness, when the moon lowered itself behind the rooftops, thickened. As surely as the coin had pulled her hence, her feet now set her on the way to the cape and to Anselm.

* * *

"This much is clear," the old mage stated—though he no longer looked old. Black strands threaded his white hair. "The first blow has fallen. It's safe to assume that your father's impoverishment is incidental, and that you are the blow's target."

He sighed, sipped wine, and shrugged. "One such blow is a surprise, from which little can be learned. To discern a direction, a plan, we must wait for the next blow to fall. Two points define a line, after all. How many blows must be endured—how many points located—before we see the shape of things?"

Pierrette considered that with no great joy. The next blow, if she were not prepared, could be fatal. "It's possible," she mused, "that this is the second blow."

"What do you mean?"

Pierrette explained what had transpired at the priest's house. "My willingness to part with the olive grove was an unintentional parry on my part. The deflected blow was Otho's letter to the bishop. Jerome intended to strike at me through Guihen and Starved John—and through you."

"Then there will be another attack. We must be ready for it." Those were optimistic words, but though Pierrette and her mentor hashed them over through many hours of endless noon, they could only guess at the direction from which that attack would come.

 

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