“Eat it!” snapped Aunt Beck.
So I did, and it made me feel somewhat better – better enough anyway to trudge to my narrow little bed and fall asleep there until the sun had turned back down the sky in the early afternoon. I might have slept even longer, except that someone came knocking at Aunt Beck’s door.
“Open!” he said pompously. “Open in the name of the King!”
It turned out to be the Logran boy, very proud of the way his voice had broken all deep and manly. Only last week he was squeaking and roaring all over the place and people were laughing at him even more than usual. Aunt Beck opened the door and he came striding in, looking quite grand in a new uniform with the heavy pleats of the King’s plaid swinging over one shoulder.
People up at the castle may despise him and call him “The Ogre from Logra”, but I will say this for my distant cousin the King: he keeps the boy well provided for. He is always well-dressed and is as well-educated as I am – and I go up to the castle for lessons three days a week – and I think they train him in arms too. Anyway, he had a fine sword belted across his skinny hips over the combed-out sheepskin of his new jacket. I suspect he was prouder of that sword than he was even of his big new voice.
He came marching in in all his splendour and then stopped dead, staring and stammering. He had never been in our house before. First, he was obviously dismayed at how small the room was, with me propped up on one elbow in bed just beyond the cooking fire, and then he was astonished at Aunt Beck’s paintings. Aunt Beck is quite an artist. She says it is the chief gift of us people of Skarr. Our room is surrounded in paintings – there are portraits of me, of my poor dead mother and of any shepherd or fisherman who is rash enough to agree to sit still for her. My favourite is a lovely group of the castle children gathered squabbling and giggling on the steps up to the hall with the light all slantways over them in golden zigzags up the steps. But there are landscapes too, mountains, moors and sea, and several paintings of boats. Aunt Beck has even painted the screen that hides her bed to look like one of the walls, with shelves of jars and vials and a string of onions on it.
This boy – his name is a strange Logran one that sounds like Ogo, which accounts for his nickname – stared at all of it with his big smooth head thrust forward and his white spotty face wrinkled in astonishment. He had to stare hard at the screen before he could decide that this was a painting too. His ugly face flushed all pink then because he had thought it was a real wall at first.
“What’s the matter, Ogo?” said Aunt Beck. Like everyone else, she is a bit sarcastic with him.
“Th-these,” he stammered. “This is all so beautiful, so real. And—” he pointed to the group of children on the steps – “I am in this one.”
He was too, though I had never realised it before. He was the smallest one, being shoved off the bottom step by a bigger boy who was probably my cousin Ivar. Aunt Beck is very clever. She had done them all from quick charcoal sketches and none of them had ever known they were being painted.
A smug, gratified expression gathered in the creases of Aunt Beck’s lean face. She is not immune to praise, but she likes everyone to think she is strict and passionless. “Don’t forget to give your message,” she said. “What was it?”
“Oh yes.” Ogo stood to attention, with his head almost brushing the beams. He had grown a lot recently and was even taller than Aunt Beck. “I am to fetch both of you to the castle for dinner,” he said. “The King wishes to consult with you.”
“In that case,” said Aunt Beck, “will you take a mug of my beer and sit outside while Aileen gets herself dressed?”
Ogo shot a flustered look somewhere in the direction of the shelves over my head. He was very embarrassed at seeing me in bed wearing next to nothing and had been avoiding looking anywhere near me up to then. “If she’s ill,” he blustered, “she ought not to come.”
“You’re very considerate,” said Aunt Beck, “but she’s not ill – just a little tired – and we’ll both be ready directly. Outside with you now.” And she pushed a mug into his large pink hands and steered him out of the door again to the bench that catches the sun and the view of the sea. “Hurry up,” she said to me as she clapped the door shut behind him. “The blue dress and the best plaid and don’t forget to wash first. I’ll do your hair when you’re ready.”
I got up with a groan as Aunt Beck vanished behind the painted screen. I was stiff all over and still inclined to shiver. And Aunt Beck is so fussy about washing. I felt I had washed half to death yesterday and here she was expecting me to get wet all over again. But I didn’t dare disobey. I knew from bitter experience that she could always tell when I’d only wet the bowl and the face flannel. She never said she knew, but the hair-combing that followed was always punishing.
I dressed gloomily, wondering what King Kenig wanted now. He consults Aunt Beck once a week anyway, but he seldom bothers to include me. In fact, there’s quite a battle there because Aunt Beck nearly always takes me along as part of my education. Then my distant cousin King Kenig scowls and rakes at his beard, and snarls something about not needing the infantry, and Aunt Beck just gives him one of her diamond-hard smiles, very sweetly, and I usually have to stay, listening to the King asking about the omens for a raid on his neighbours or what to do about the crops this year.
The only interesting times are when Aunt Beck calls for the silver bowl to be filled and does a scrying for him. I like to watch that – not that I can ever see anything in the bowl, but I like to watch my aunt seeing. It gives you an exciting sort of shiver up your back when she says, in a strange, groaning voice, “I see fires up on the Peak of Storms and cattle stampeding.” She’s always right too. When she said that, the clans of Cormack raided from the next kingship, but thanks to Aunt Beck, our people were ready for them. I even got to see a bit of the fighting.
Anyway, as you will have gathered from this, Aunt Beck is a Wise Woman as well as a magic-worker, as all the women of our family are. The men born to us marry outside the family. This is how King Kenig comes to be a distant cousin. My great-great-grandmother’s brother married the sister of the then King and their son was King Kenig’s grandfather. At one time, our family was a large one, reputed to be the best Wise Women on the entire huge island of Skarr, but that was in the time of the Twelve Sisters of Kenneal. Now Aunt Beck and I are the only ones left. But Aunt Beck is still said to be the best there is.
She looked the part too, when she came out from behind the screen in her best dress and set about combing out my hair. My hair was still damp and there was a lot of tugging to get the stray bits of herb out of it.
It is a couple of miles to the castle, over the moor and down to the foreland, but it seemed longer because a mist came down and hid all the distances. I was tired. I trudged through the heather behind the other two, feeling small and untidy and a failure. Some of the time I was trying not to cry at the idea of having to spend another night in the Place in a month’s time.
Even if I did get initiated, then I knew with a dreadful certainty that I would never, ever be the equal of Aunt Beck. Oh, I had memorised the cantrips and procedures all right, and I knew all my herbs and weatherlore, but it takes more than that to be a proper magicwoman. I had only to look at my aunt’s tall, narrow figure striding elegantly ahead, with her plaid stylishly not quite wrapping her small, dark, neatly-plaited head, to know that. Aunt Beck’s best boots had red cork heels – they cost the earth because they came from Logra before the blockade – and never once did a splash of mud or spray of heather cling to those gleaming scarlet cubes.
My feet were muddy all over already. My hair is a messy pale brown and nothing seems to stop wisps of it separating from my pigtails. They