The Owl Killers

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iF YOU DON’T GET UP this instant, you’ll get no breakfast,” Mam yelled.

I pushed off the blanket and shivered. It wasn’t even light yet, but Mam had flung the shutters and door wide to save lighting a rush candle. William shuffled over to the bench, still yawning and rubbing sleep from his eyes. We both knew she meant it about the breakfast.

The bread was dry, flat, and hard. It broke into crumbs as soon as Mam tried to cut it. She stared at it as if she was trying to decide what to do with it. In the end she scraped the crumbs onto a wooden trencher and set it between us. It wasn’t real bread. Mam had pounded up some shrivelled old beans and peas and mixed them with some ground-up bulrush roots, but there were hardly any of those. She turned to the fire to ladle the broth from the big iron pot that swung above it. The broth was thin, mostly sorrel leaves, and it stank.

When she wasn’t looking, William pulled a face.

“There’s no use you turning up your nose like that, my lad.” Mam could see everything, even when you thought she wasn’t looking. “You’ll learn to like it or go hungry, because it’s all you’ll be getting until the harvest comes in.”

“I bet Father isn’t eating this,” William muttered, sniffing the broth in disgust.

“Aye, well, he will be when he gets home, just like the rest of us.” Mam wrapped her hand in her skirt and swung the pot from the fire. “What he earns away at the salterns won’t be enough to buy grain this side of Lammas, not with the prices they’re charging for it at the minute.”

Mam’s mouth was pinched tight. I knew it wasn’t Father she was mad at, but the Owl Masters. They’d taken a whole cake of salt in payment for sweeping the burning branch from the midsummer fire round our cottage to drive out the hungry ghosts. Mam said the salt was worth twice as much as the dried fish and grain they’d taken from others in the road. And the ghosts were still gobbling up our food.

Mam tipped some of the crumbled bread into her own bowl and pressed it down in the broth to soften it. She pointed her spoon at us. “And don’t either of you go taking any bread off Lettice. She’s a kind old biddy, give you the last bite from her pot if you asked her, but she makes moon bread from poppy and hemp seeds, sometimes darnel too when she’s nothing else. And I don’t want you eating it, hear?”

“Bet it tastes better than this,” William whispered to me behind his hand.

“So it might.” Mam’s hearing was as sharp as a cat’s. “But it’ll drive you mad. There’s grown men who’ve run out into the marsh thinking it solid ground after they’d eaten it. My own mam’s cousin threw herself off the church tower saying she could fly. Though she went a touch fey anyway after her man was drowned at sea, it was the moon bread that turned her, so you take heed.”

She scraped the last of the broth and bread crumbs into her mouth and set down her bowl. “Right, my lass, William and I are off to the haymaking. Bailiff wants to start at first light while this dry weather holds. Make sure you fetch the water and wood for supper, and put a new rush candle out ready and trimmed for dark, because we’ll not be back till light’s gone. Then you get yourself out and get to work, do you hear me?”

I didn’t want to go purefinding. It wasn’t fair. William didn’t have to. A day spent in the warm hay meadow was a lot nicer than picking up pieces of dog shit all day in the hot sun.

“Why can’t I come haymaking with you?” I wailed.

“You know as well as I do that the bailiff won’t pay you because you’re not tall enough to toss hay into the wain. You’d be working for nothing.” Mam was winding a long band of cloth around her hair to keep it from the dust. “At least working the road you’ll earn something, and make sure you only take your pail to the tanner when it’s completely full, otherwise he’ll find an excuse not to pay you.”

“But, Mam…”

“You heard! Are you finished, William? Then out the door with you.”

The cottage was silent. As if she knew Mam had gone, a small brown hen came wandering in through the open door and fluttered up onto the table. Bryde, she was my favourite. She had a white flash in her wing where a cat had once clawed out her feathers. When the feathers grew back, they grew back white just like a scar.

Mam said I shouldn’t give the hens names because if I did, I’d cry when their necks were wrung. But I wouldn’t ever let them wring Bryde’s neck. She was special. I brushed some crumbs of pea bread from the wooden trencher into my hand. Bryde stared at my hand sideways, her bright black eye blinked, and then she took a peck at the crumbs. She made a kind of gurgling in her throat, like she always did when she was happy.

I held my hand very still for Bryde in the long thin stream of light that was just starting to creep in through the window. My fingers were ugly. I now knew they were. I’d never thought about them much before the tumblers came. The tumbler’s girl had long beautiful fingers that curled around the pole and, when she lifted her arms to balance, her fingers spread out wide in the air, like flowers opening. And her hands were both exactly the same. Mine were different.

The two middle fingers on my right hand were stuck together, webbed, like Mam’s and Father’s. Nearly everyone in the village had got one hand different from the other. Not the D’Acasters, but Father said they were outlanders generations back, so they didn’t count, but most of the villagers had a web. Father said it was so you could tell your left hand from your right in the dark.

Mam said it showed you belonged to the village. Once she told me about her uncle who was a sailor. He sailed all the way to France and he was supping in an inn there and this stranger came up to him and said, “You’re from Ulewic. I reckon we’re cousins.” He could tell, you see, from my uncle’s hand. Mam said, no matter where you went, you never really left Ulewic as long as you’d got the web, for it always drew you back, like a charm.

William’s fingers weren’t webbed though. It was the only thing he never teased me about. I think he would like to have had webbed fingers, like Henry and his other friends. I saw him sometimes staring at Father’s webbed hand, then he’d tuck his own hands under his armpits as if he was ashamed of them. I thought William was lucky. I wished my hands were the same, like the tumbler’s girl, then I could run far away and they’d never be able to pull me back by my web.

GREAT CLOUDS OF FLIES hung over the pail and buzzed round my head. I had to keep my mouth shut tight in case I swallowed one. They crawled over my face, arms, and legs, making me itch until I nearly screamed. Most of the dog dung was inside the village, but the lads always tried to beat me to the best bits. Sometimes they grabbed my pail and emptied it into their own. It was no good telling Mam. “Learn to stand up for yourself” was all she’d say. So I’d walked by myself as far away from the village as I dared, along the road that led to the house of women.

Mam said I wasn’t to go near it, but I couldn’t go the other way out of the village along the forest road. Mam said I was never to go there either, not without William to mind me, in case I got lost. I shuddered at the thought. Old Lettice said there once was a terrible monster that hunted in the forest. I knew it was still in there, cause sometimes when I was in bed at night, I could hear it shrieking.

“Would you run an errand for me, child?”

I spun round, almost knocking over the pail. One of the grey ladies was standing behind me with a basket in her arms. She was fatter than old Lettice. She smelt of honey, roasted pork fat, and spices, like you could eat her.

“Some of the beguines and all of the children are up there haymaking.” She pointed up to one of the meadows on the side of the hill. “They’ve onions, bread, and cheese with them, but I’m sure it won’t be enough. The children will be starving after all that work. So I’ve made a batch of fresh griddle cakes. Would you be a blessed sweeting and take them up to the meadow? If I went climbing there in this heat, I’d melt like a lump of lard in fire.” She chuckled and under her heavy grey skirts her belly wobbled up and down. Her face was dripping with sweat as if she’d already started to melt.

I wriggled my toes in the dust. “Have to fill the pail. Mam’ll be as mad as a wasp if I don’t.”

“How much do you get paid for a pail?”

“Penny.” I was afraid to look at her face. Old Lettice says you must never look a witch in the eye else she’ll hex you.

She dug around in a small leather scrip fastened to her waist and held out a coin. “Here’s your penny. And if you make yourself useful and help with the hay when you get there, you’ll earn another. Now off you go and don’t eat all the cakes before you get there.”

I looked up, before I remembered not to, but she was still smiling; even her eyes were crinkled up in their own grin. “I can eat a cake?” My stomach was growling.

She opened the basket and thrust one into my hand. It was still warm and oozing with honey. I licked the honey off my fingers so as not to waste one drop, then took a huge bite.

Mam said to stay away from the house of women, but I hadn’t gone inside, had I? I glanced up and down the empty road. If I didn’t tell, no one’d ever find out.