Authors: Nathan Lowell
She’d been able to dismiss the dream of the raven’s flying. Just a dream, of course, she didn’t really see the men through a raven’s eye. But what of the morning? How could she have known about the spy in the wood if not for the raven? “Madness.” She hissed the word. “Madness.” Suddenly conscious that she stood in the middle of the track, she drew herself up, gathering her strength and straightening her tunic. A cup of chamomile tea would set her right. She was sure of it. With her resolve held firmly like a shield, she resumed her sedate stroll to the hut. As she entered she studiously ignored the streak of white bird droppings on the roof.
Chapter 14
After Madness, Laundry
The chamomile tea helped sooth her nerves as did focusing on washing out her meager supply of clothing. She spread the wet clothes on the grass outside her back door and let her mind idle on the idea that she might be going mad.
“You’re not going mad.” She said it to herself but had difficulty accepting it in the face of her experiences.
She poured a bit more hot water over the chamomile and pulled a chair up to the hearth. The exertion of laundry had warmed her body, but she still felt cold inside. The warmth of the fire, and the growing warmth of the day, slowly unwound her and she sipped her tea in contemplation. Whatever was happening, it was not madness. She’d had a vision that seemed real. “Twice!” she reminded herself. The first could have been a dream. The second might have been as well except that she’d taken Frank and investigated only to find that the man–or somebody–had actually been there. “Not madness.” She said the words distinctly aloud as if to convince herself.
She breathed easier. “Not madness.” She repeated it softly and stared into the fire. “Not madness.”
The sound of feet outside her door and the whisperings of children interrupted her revery. A timid knock sounded followed by a polite silence.
She smiled and crossed to open the door. Riley stood there with several of his small chums. In their arms they carried her clothing. “Riley? What’s all this?”
“Sorry to disturb you, mum, but we found these blowin’ away.”
She looked out and realized that what had been a calm morning had turned into a breezy afternoon. She laughed and held out her hands. “Thank you so much for rounding these up.”
The children all stepped up and placed the articles of clothing into her hands, as if jewels to the queen. She had to bite back her laughter at their solemnity. When all the clothing had been delivered–what little of it there actually was–she bowed to the assembly. “Thank you very kindly. I’ll take pains to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Riley stepped forward and held out a small coil of rope. “Ma sent this over, mum. She says you should ask any time you need help.”
“Thank you, Riley, and thank your mother for me. This’ll help a great deal.”
“You’re welcome, mum.” He stood expectantly.
“Is there something else, Riley?”
“Yes, mum, we was wonderin’ if we could help you gather herbs and stuff.”
His entourage stood like good little soldiers and looked hopeful, if a bit awe struck.
Her eyes went to the tree line and she considered. It wouldn’t do to take the children into the forest, but perhaps there was something they could do. “Yes, Riley. I think you can. There are some very valuable materials right here in the village that should be harvested and set to drying before the frosts come and destroy them.” She looked from small face to small dirty face and smiled. “Would you like to help me?”
They all nodded happily.
“Excellent. Then one moment while I put away my clothes and I’ll be right out and we can begin.”
She stepped down into the hut and tossed the clothing onto the cot. She pulled out the gleaner’s bag and dumped the collection of nuts and fruit onto the hearthstone. She pricked several of the chestnuts with her belt knife and slid them into the hot ash for later. She slapped her hat on her head, picked up her staff and stepped back out into the early afternoon sun.
“What’ll we pick, mum?” A little girl with wavy blonde hair was looking up at her with wide green eyes.
“Mints, I think.” She leaned down to get at the little girl’s level. “And who are you?”
“I’m Sandy, mum!” She announced it proudly. “I’m Megan and Harry’s offshoot!”
Tanyth smiled at the gap-toothed grin looking up. “Well, Sandy, let’s go find some mint. Do you know what mint is?”
Tanyth headed off to the back of the hut where she’d already noticed that Mother Alderton had some very healthy stands of peppermint and cat mint.
Sandy fell in beside her on one side and Riley, not to be outdone, took the other. The three of them led the parade of small people around the corner and into the taller plants. “I do, mum. Mint is a weed!”
“A weed?”
“Yes, mum! Momma says that every time she finds the mint has jumped the fence and gotten into the garden! ’Get this weed out of my vegetable patch!’” Sandy smiled up winningly. “She usually uses a bad word that I’m not allowed to say.”
Tanyth controlled her grin with an effort. “Well, mints are very robust plants. They spread easily and grow very fast.”
“Is that a good thing, mum?” Riley asked.
“Yes, Riley. Unless you’re trying to grow vegetables and the mint keeps getting in the way.”
He nodded sagely. “Yes, mum, I can see that.”
Tanyth stopped in a weedy looking patch that was so rich in mint varieties that the aroma nearly overwhelmed her. “Well, here we are!”
The children looked disappointed, and Riley spoke up. “I thought we were gonna go collectin’, mum!”
“We are.” She smiled at them. “And you’re all going to be very helpful, I know.”
Sandy tugged on her pants leg. “But we di’n’t go anywheres, mum. Just behind your house.”
Tanyth nodded. “Yes. That’s because I need to collect all this before the winter kills it. Almost all of these plants are different kinds of mints. They have different smells, and different flowers, and different shapes, but they all have two things in common.”
The children all looked up at her expectantly.
She reached down and pulled a couple of leaves from a nearby plant, crushing them between her fingers before holding her hand out to the children, one at a time. “Smell. What do you smell?”
“Smells green.” Sandy looked up at her after almost rubbing her nose in the crushed leaves.
Tanyth nodded happily. “Yes, it does. That’s a very good description. That green smell is the smell of mint. All these plants have that same smell. Not exactly the same, mind you, but enough to tell it’s a mint.”
When all the children had sniffed her hand, she smiled. “And the other thing is that they all have square stems!”
The children’s eyes all grew large and they started looking at the plants around them. Tanyth crouched, trimmed a stalk of gray catmint off at the base with her knife, and stood up again showing them all the four cornered cross section of the stem.
“Any plant that has a square stem and smells green like that is a mint. They smell good, make nice tea, and sometimes people even make mint jelly!”
Sandy announced clearly. “I like jelly. It’s very good on bread.”
Tanyth laughed. “Yes, young miss, it is indeed.”
Riley looked about him. “How much of this do we have to collect?”
Tanyth could see him measuring and calculating how long the mint collecting might go on and he wasn’t happy with the answer. “All of this needs to be harvested before frost kills it.” She watched his face drop before taking pity on him. “But we’ll only gather a few stalks to set to dry today. We can get more tomorrow.” That announcement cheered them greatly.
She took off her gleaners bag and handed it to Sandy. “If you’d hold that for me, Sandy?”
She nodded solemnly.
“Just hold the top open so everybody can put their stalks of mint into it.” She turned the the half dozen children around her. “I’ll cut, you each take a bundle and put it into the bag that Sandy’s holding, cut end down and leafy end up. Understand?”
They nodded but not very convincingly.
“Good!” She got down on her knees in the drying soil and pulled her belt knife once more. She collected a handful of mint stalks, used the knife to slice them off just above ground level and passed the handful to the nearest child. She grabbed the next handful and repeated the process. She collected like types together, collecting several handfuls of common green peppermint before moving on to collect a large bundle of gray-leaved catmint. The more she cut, the more she identified, and the more she came to admire Mother Alderton’s work in getting all these mints in one place.
They worked for almost a whole hour before the children became bored with the process. On the plus side, they’d nearly filled the gleaner’s bag with various mints from common green mint to a pungent peppermint and a musky, gray-leaved catmint. There was even some lavender mint–not the woody lavender ground cover but a mint that carried some of the same oils and aromas that the woody lavender had. She called a halt to the gathering, thanked the children lavishly for their aid, and dismissed them with a wave before clambering ponderously to her feet. Her knees didn’t want to unbend and she groaned quietly as the circulation took a more vertical path. She hefted the gleaner’s bag onto her shoulder. The bag weighed more than she expected and she realized that it was probably a good thing that they’d stopped. She needed to bind and hang the freshly cut stems for drying and that much plant matter would take a bit of time to sort and bind properly.
She hobbled across the short distance to her back door–hips and knees letting her know that next time she should have the shorter members of her gathering crew kneel on the ground. A few items of small clothes had not blown away earlier so she collected those and took the whole lot into the hut. As she lowered herself gingerly down the steps, she was surprised to realize she felt renewed. Breathing the fresh scents of earth and plant, feeling the sun on her back and the breeze in her face had given her new spirit, new strength after two terrifying days. The boyos were still lurking in the undergrowth and there was still the curious relationship with the ravens, but she felt like these were, somehow, more manageable.
She smiled to herself. Being with the children for the afternoon didn’t hurt either. They were so young, so earnest. Riley reminded her a bit of her own Robert as a small boy, all sturdy leg and nut brown summertime skin. She sighed half in regret, but half in contentment as well.
Inside the hut, she stoked up the fire and cleared the table so she had room to work. With front and back doors open the day’s light provided all the illumination she needed and, indeed, it felt good to get out of the direct sun. The heat of the day still carried weight, even so close to the equinox.
Mother Alderton had left a ball of string on her shelves and Tanyth used the rough twine to bind the stalks of mint together, twining the stem and string in a way that left them collected together neatly without being crushed. As her fingers worked the string and stalks, her mind gnawed at the problem of the riders, and as terrifying as the dream episodes had been, she found herself wondering if she could use them to find the men and see what they were doing; to see if they were still out there somewhere, ready to make trouble. She used her broom to lift the bundles up to iron nails driven into the rafters where only a few days before she and Amber had pulled down the old and musty crop of dried materials. It didn’t seem possible to her that so much had happened in so short a time.
With the last of the cuttings bound and hung, the hut took on the pungent aroma of fresh mint. Tanyth found it quite relaxing and a pleasant change from the neutral–and slightly dusty–aromas of ash and grass that had permeated the hut. She drew a deep breath and thought again of the raven.
She closed the doors, casting the interior into near darkness except for a cheery flame in the hearth. She crossed to the cot and folded up her small clothes, stowing them in her pack once more and feeling satisfied that she’d have fresh clothes on the morrow. With the bedroll cleared, she stretched out and deliberately closed her eyes thinking of the ravens and the boyos and willing herself to see what the men were up to. In moments she fell asleep.
After what seemed like only a few moments she awoke again. The light had shifted to late afternoon and her fire had burned down to a few embers. She felt quite rested but slightly disappointed that she’d not been able to contact the ravens and that she didn’t know what the men might be up to, or even if they were still there.
She rose sighing and used the poker to pull the roasted chestnuts out of the hot ash before poking up the coals and adding a couple of fresh sticks. Her woodbox was getting a bit empty and filling her tea kettle almost emptied the water bucket. She wondered if she could impose on young Riley to refill one or the other for her.
“You’re gettin’ lazy in your dotage, old woman.” She scolded herself good naturedly, but she had to admit, that having somebody take care of these two particular chores made life much more pleasant.
Chapter 15
A Warning
While the tea kettle warmed, Tanyth took her bucket to the well. As she stepped out the front door, she saw Frank sitting on the ground in front of his hut across the way. He was whittling on a stick, and judging from the pile of slivers around him, he’d been at it quite awhile. He smiled when he saw her and gave a jaunty salute with the tip of the blade.
She waved back and continued on to the well. By the time she’d gotten there, Frank and Riley had fallen in beside her, man on one side, boy on the other. She was amused and a bit taken aback by the attention.
“Afternoon, mum.” Frank’s weather-creased face carried a gentle smile around the eyes.
“Hello, Frank.” She turned to the boy. “And hello, Riley. Recovered from our gathering?”
He looked up at her. “Yes’m. Actually t’was fun. Woulda been funner if we coulda cut some.” He shrugged. “But ’twas fun learnin’ about the different mints. Ma says I can have some mint tea tonight with dinner.”