Osh follows his bad feeling

All down the path Osh had been having what the Old Man would have called a bad feeling. The ladies had merely been fussing over the babies in the hall, but there was a sharpness in their clucking and cooing that he did not like. It reminded him of the chicken coop in the hours before their half-​wild Scottish hens would turn suddenly—and seemingly without warning to anyone but him—against one of their number and peck her to death.

When they met him and Paul at the door, Osh thought at first he was the chosen victim. Flann was squawking his name, and Cat was flailing her arms right and left and wailing something about “burning the house down next,” and both of them were demanding that he “just wait until you’ve seen!”

Paul understood their accented English better than he, and moreover he had a wild enough temper of his own not to be impressed even by the combined outrage of his wife and her sister.

“What did she do?” he asked mildly.

Osh understood then that they had been talking about Kraaia.

“Just wait until you’ve seen!” Flann glowered.

Cat added, “Next thing you know she’ll be burning the house down around our heads! We knew a family that had it done!”

“Not around mine,” Paul grinned.

Osh braced himself.

“Oh won’t she?” Cat howled. “And if you ever leave the house as you just did? With me and the baby in it? Paul?”

“Even Lena could put out a house fire, Mina,” Paul sighed. “The one fate least likely to meet this house is a fire. Unless Lena and Penedict and I all throw a tantrum at the same time.”

“Then she’ll be poisoning the well!” Cat cried.

“We knew a family that had it done!” Flann declared.

“What a lot of violent families you must have known,” Paul said.

He sent a wry smile over his shoulder at his father, but Osh could only grimace. He had a bad feeling.

“It’s not the families but the foundlings!” Cat shouted. “Fie! Ungrateful savages!”

Paul caught her flailing arm and held it so fast that she shook her body briefly in its stead.

“Did she try to kill someone here?” he demanded. All his mild and wry merriment had abruptly burned to ash.

Cat muttered a sullen, “No.”

“But wait until you see what she did do!” Flann said defiantly.

She was too far away from Paul for him to grab her arm too. Though he had a bad feeling about it all, Osh would have to do his duty as her husband.

“What did she do?” he asked gravely.

Flann wailed, “Just wait until you see!” She lifted the hem of her swirling skirts and stomped off and away up the stairs.

Cat echoed, “Just wait!” Paul released her arm in time for her to go stomping after her sister.

“Why don’t you just tell us?” Paul groaned, exasperated enough by now to make his own boots clomp more loudly than necessary on the steps.

Osh watched them until they had reached the top without him. He closed the door and peeked into the hall to see Lena and Derbail sitting with the babies.

“Just wait until you see,” Derbail said ominously.

Osh turned and begin his slow ascent.

Already Flann and Cat were gabbling in Kraaia’s room: look-​at, look-​at, look-​at-​what-​she-​did, like starlings scolding from a tree. Paul was stunned enough to say nothing at all. Kraaia had not made a sound since they had come in.

Try as his mind might to convince him it could not be so, Osh’s heart seemed to have an imagination of its own. Every thudding step illuminated its shadowy landscape like lightning, and against the blank sky he saw a silhouette whose meaning he knew from forty winters spent emptying snares: a lovely body hanging limply by its neck, all the more heartbreakingly beautiful in death because it had been so breathtakingly beautiful in life.

Then he heard Paul ask, “Did she hurt herself?”

Osh took the last three steps in one bound and dashed into the doorway. Kraaia was not in the room at all.

“Where is she?” he demanded. If she was not here he would find her. If she was not here…

“I locked her in Muirenn’s room!” Cat said. “Look at what she did!”

If she had been left alone…

Osh braced himself in the doorway and howled her name from the depths of his lungs: “Kraaia!”

No one answered, but he heard a scuffling in the maid’s room. Osh leaned against the doorframe and tried to catch his breath.

“She’ll not get out of there!” Cat said, thinking he had only feared she had fled. “Now look at what she did!”

“Look, Osh!” Flann demanded.

Osh saw nothing amiss at all. Even the bed was made.

“Look at what?” he asked fearfully.

“Your fine painting, Osh!” Flann sobbed.

Cat waved her hands helplessly at the wall beside the bed. “Blood all over the wall! Tell me she’s not a savage!”

“Did she hurt herself?” Paul repeated.

“No, she didn’t hurt herself!” Flann huffed.

“She says she picked a scab on her knee,” Cat explained. “Think of it!” She slapped at her own cheeks in outrage. “Picking a scab to do that!”

“Look at it, Osh!” Flann groaned. “My pretty little house all bloody! Look at it!”

“I don’t want to see it,” Osh said hoarsely.

Paul sent him a pleading look, but Osh could not come to his aid. His body was going not limp but leaden.

Cat stamped her foot and shook her hands at the wall. “Just because I wouldn’t let her go see Flann’s wolf yesterday! Just for that—that! What won’t she do if I forbid her to do something she truly wants? Poison the well, I daresay!”

“Look, Osh!” Flann demanded.

At last, her patience run out, she stomped around the bed, dragged him into the room, and shoved him nearly against Cat. Frail as she was, Osh was too stunned to resist.

“Look at what she did!”

He opened his eyes and looked. Even his heart’s imagination had not prepared him for the shock of red over his dim gray; for the angry smears effacing the brushstrokes he had so carefully, so lovingly laid.

“My sweet house!” Flann blubbered. “My little house that I was looking at every night and dreaming I might have some day!”

Out of desperation as much as habit, Osh lifted his fingers to retrace the old lines and recall the unutterable poetry he had written there. In his heart’s imagination he still saw the shaggy thatch, the deep eaves, the winking windows—so clearly he might have tried to touch them through the blood.

Flann sobbed, “Osh!” and stopped him in time. “My poor house!”

Even at a distance a hint of the unuttered anger in the stain leapt out into his hand like a spark.

“Do you not like the real house I am making for you, Flann?” he demanded.

“Aye, but I loved this house!” she wailed.

“You do not need this house any longer.”

“Don’t you even care?” Cat howled. “All the hours you spent and she spoiled!”

“No, I do not care about this painting!” Osh thundered. “It is nothing! I make a thousand others!”

Cat fell abruptly silent, but Flann had too hot a temper to appreciate the frigid storm of his.

“But they won’t be my sweet house!” she squeaked.

“Is that all you see?” he gasped.

He looked desperately between Flann and Cat, but the one was looking miserable and the other both defiant and ashamed. Paul simply looked stunned.

They looked like overwrought children, Osh realized suddenly. They were scarcely more than children themselves: children only just learning the knack of babies—who still believed that caring for the four or five predictable needs of babies was the most difficult part of parenthood and that it would only get easier from here.

Osh decided a day too late that no one with less than twelve years experience as a parent had any business playing parent to a troubled twelve-​year-​old. He himself, in spite of twenty-​two years of tempestuous Paul, had no idea what to do now.

“Flann,” he pleaded, trying to speak in terms she would understand, “imagine how you feel when you hear Liadan crying.”

“But, Osh—”

“And you too, Cat, how you feel when you hear a baby cry and cry. Think of that feeling now.”

Cat blinked her dark eyes at him, holding his gaze firmly as though to protect from even his sight the belly she was subtly caressing.

“But, Osh!” Flann interrupted.

Osh held up a finger to silence her, and as he so often had with tempestuous Paul, he spoke in his mildest voice to oblige her to be quiet and listen well.

“Now imagine a baby who cries and cries and nobody ever hears,” he murmured to both ladies. “That is all I see.”

Flann dropped her arms in sullen surrender and pouted with her lower lip like a child.

Cat still stared at him out of her dark eyes that seemed a little wiser than they had a moment before.

“What should we do now?” she asked softly.

“Give me the key. I go talk to her now.”

“What are you meaning to say to her, Osh?”

“I don’t know what to say,” Osh admitted sadly. “But someone must answer her. Anything is better than nothing now.”