Kraaia hears the other voices

Kraaia did not think her heart would ever stop pounding until whatever was about to happen had happened, or until she died of the strain.

She had made Leofric howl, she had made Alred thunder, and she had made Egelric roar, but she had never heard an earthly sound like Osh’s bellowing of her name. She had never made an elf angry before. She had realized too late that she did not know what to expect, and she was afraid.

She was not heartened by the meek little knock and the meek little voice calling, “Kraaia?” At twelve she had already learned that the men who spoke most sweetly to her wished her the most harm. She did not answer.

After a while Osh knocked again and called more loudly, “Kraaia, do you hear me? It is only Osh.”

Still she said nothing. In any case she was certain ears such as his could have heard her heart even through the door, thudding like hoof beats never getting any farther away.

Finally the key clanked in the lock, and the door opened just far enough to smack against the table she had shoved against it.

“You can’t get in here!” Kraaia taunted. “You can lock me in, but I can lock you out too!”

He leaned against the door, and the table scraped an inch across the floor until it bumped into the chest she had pulled up against it. It would slow him for a few seconds, but Kraaia knew that all the furniture she could muster would never stand against the strength of an elf.

She shoved the chair against her barricade and set the candle upon it, in such a rush that she spilled a thin trail of waxen pearls across the seat.

“You can’t come in here!” she shouted frantically. “If you keep pushing you’ll just knock over the candle and I’ll burn all up and you’ll be a murderer!”

Osh leaned his face into the crack. “May I please come in?” he asked softly.

Now that he could see her, Kraaia made much show of rolling her eyes. “Can’t you just yell at me through the door?”

“No, because I do not come to yell at you.”

Then he waited, as though he knew waiting was the hardest thing to bear. Kraaia only wanted whatever was about to happen to happen. That was the only relief she could have.

At last she snorted and tossed her hair to mark her displeasure, but she took the candle from the chair and set it carefully on the floor, well clear of the jumbled furniture. Then she threw herself into the corner and glared at the door with her most magnificent scorn.

“Try,” she growled.

Gently Osh leaned, and the furniture scraped and slid. Kraaia pretended to ignore him, but she watched him warily through her pale lashes. He was so slender he scarcely had to open the door at all. He slipped through like a ray of light and closed it softly behind him.

He might have glanced at her in the first instant, but he only watched his feet as he stepped over the chest, and afterwards he turned to carefully rearrange the furniture as she had put it – even to the candle on the seat of the chair.

He seemed so very tall and thin from where she stood, like a December shadow.

He might have sat on the chest or bed, but instead he settled cross-​​legged on the floor, as grown men never sat with girls, and as grown elves sat with each other.

He folded one hand into the other and said softly, “I was worried you were hurt.”

Kraaia laughed at him. “Why? Because I was bleeding? I just picked a scab.”

Kraaia loved to say that word. It sounded as ugly as it was, and it always made the girls squirm.

Osh was not squirming yet. “May I see it?” he asked politely.

“It’s on my knee!”

Osh cocked his head. “Has anyone seen it?”

Kraaia’s face flushed with a memory of gruesome glee. “Gwynn and Connie sure did!”

She flopped down onto the floor before him.

“Did Hetty or any grown-​​up lady see?”

“No, not Hetty. She would probably faint and fall on her baby or something, and then they’d hang me.”

“Show me,” he said softly. “I promise I don’t faint.”

Kraaia laughed giddily. “Don’t make promises you don’t know you can keep!”

Osh bowed his head. “Come, Kraaia. Let one grown-​​up person see how much you are hurt, and then you don’t worry about that any more.”

“I am not hurt,” she growled, though she wondered why he had supposed she was worried. Still, she clenched the hem of her skirt in her fists and yanked it up to bare her knee.

She grunted at the shock as if she were seeing it for the first time: the fresh black scab of the night before, and the shiny, pale purple skin all its many forebears had laid around it as they shrank and grew and migrated across her knee in the direction her flesh was most deeply ripped away.

She had delighted to show it to Gwynn for the fun of making her squeal and moan, but she was more embarrassed now to show her bare knee to Osh than she might have been to lift her skirts all the way to her chin before some other man.

She pulled her dress down quickly enough that she could hope Osh had not clearly seen, but the queasy pallor of his face proved he had.

“I think you have that since a long time,” he said hoarsely.

“Not even Shus can save me now!” she cackled.

“He could, and so could you, Kraaia. A scab, it means your body tries to heal herself. Please give her time to do. It makes me sad to see a so ugly scar on a so beautiful girl.”

“It is on my knee!” Kraaia groaned. “Nobody is ever going to see it except a rapist or someone. And a rapist would probably just cut me up and kill me anyway, so who cares about my stupid knee?”

Osh swallowed and wiped the sweat from his pale forehead with his palm and the back of his hand. Oh, she could shake him. It was a relief to see that she had.

“No one will let that happen to you, Kraaia.”

“No one can stop it! Everyone says I’ll get hurt one of these days if I keep running away, and I know what that means! No one ever tells boys they’ll get hurt! That means get raped! I almost wish it – ”

She closed her eyes and let her galloping thoughts carry her on, leaving her voice behind in a cloud of choking dust. Sometimes she wished whatever was going to happen to her would hurry up and happen. It would be some relief. Then she could bleed.

“We won’t let that happen to you,” Osh said.

She found her voice and giggled cruelly through a throatful of gravel. “Don’t make promises you don’t know you can keep, Osh!”

“I won’t let that happen to you,” Osh said gravely.

Kraaia stopped giggling, shaken. There was something different in his voice, in his eyes… or perhaps there was something in his “I”.

This was not one of the vague Somebody Nobody Anybody promises adults always made her. It was the oath of one elf. She did not know how to argue against that. She could not even meet his eyes.

Nevertheless she who was so often gazed upon knew he was staring at her. When he had stared past all politeness, she grunted, “What?”

He opened his folded hands like a book.

“I am only trying to wonder why you did that in your room.”

His voice had gone soft again – or perhaps, she thought, elves had two voices as birds had two lids to their eyes.

“Because I was mad!” she blurted. “Why else? Because it was so unfair! If I’m going to get punished then by God’s name I’m going to do something bad!”

She watched to see how Osh would take her blasphemy, but it seemed Osh had not been a Christian long enough to care.

“Because you could not see yesterday the wolf?” he asked mildly. “Because of what you said at dinner?”

“Because I didn’t do anything wrong! Nobody ever let me explain! I was just telling the truth and now suddenly that’s a crime!”

“You may explain to me.”

Kraaia hesitated. She had been expecting an immediate justification of Cat’s decision: the sort of “Well, Kraaia, you ought to know” explanation adults always gave her as though she were too stupid to understand the difference between wrong and right and merely blundered into wrong.

She took a breath and tried to regain her momentum.

“It should be obvious!” she snapped. “Anyone ought to rather be a whore than a mistress, because at least a whore knows she gets paid and she can buy what she wants, and a mistress just has to hope for presents and usually gets stuck with nothing in the end. That’s why. It’s just plain logic. That doesn’t mean I want to be a whore just because I don’t want to be a mistress,” she added. “But nobody let me explain!”

Osh nodded slowly.

“And anyway Lena wasn’t even offended by it. She told me so and I told her to tell Cat but I guess she never did.”

“I do not know about that,” Osh said, “but I think Cat wanted to show that young ladies do not talk about these things at table.”

“It was just a family dinner, wasn’t it?” she groaned. “Or I guess I’m not family so it wasn’t.”

She watched him keenly, but he did not seem to hear her question.

“At any table, Kraaia. And what is more important, you were talking about a matter about which you do not know very much, and in such case it is better to be silent.”

“I guess I do know a lot about it!” she cried. “My own mother was a whore!”

She was a little sorry she had so quickly given the reason for her knowledge. His first shock was as fair to see and fleeting as lightning.

“I think she probably was,” she added.

“I believed you did not know about your mother,” he said softly.

“I don’t, but I guess that’s probably what she was. If she was married then why didn’t she keep me? She was that or a mistress but I think probably a whore because a mistress would probably want to keep me out of love. So I think she was a whore and didn’t care about my father or didn’t even know him, and she just threw me in a ditch when I was born so she could get back to work. And I think the crows fed me until someone found me and that’s why I’m called Kraaia.”

She knew she ought not to dilute the stark ugliness of her story with this beloved detail, but she so rarely told her story to anyone, she could not bear to let slip the opportunity.

Osh rubbed his beard thoughtfully.

“Perhaps you have crow nature,” he mused.

Kraaia hesitated, torn between her longing to hear an elf speculate on her “nature” and her urgent need to shock and disgust him into retreat.

“Anyway I guess I’m glad she didn’t keep me, because then she would raise me up to be a whore too. And some men will pay a lot to mess with a kid, so I would probably be done for already. I might have had a kid myself already. Maybe she was a kid when she had me.”

Kraaia stopped abruptly, for her own breath had run away from her and left her in a cloud of choking, eye-​​stinging dust. She so rarely told her story – so rarely let her tongue blather on about ideas she never carried to their plainly logical conclusion in her head – she had unwittingly shocked herself.

For the first twelve years of her life her mother had necessarily been older. Kraaia had always imagined her face lined, her eyes weary, her mouth harsh and bitter in spite of her beauty: a sort of crone before her years. She had never imagined her mother as a girl.

Now, at twelve, her mother might have been her own age. Her mother might have been her: a skinny blonde girl with elbows and knees too big for her limbs, pale lashes, insignificant breasts… small and light enough to be flipped over onto her back and lie helpless and kicking like a beetle…

Osh curled one hand into a ball that was not a fist and stroked it gently with the other.

“She may have been,” he agreed. “I wish her peace, wherever she may be.”

“I don’t!” Kraaia cried in outrage.

Osh sighed softly and stared at her until she stopped huffing and tossing her head, and met his eyes.

“The elves say a saying,” he told her. “The most difficult generosity is to give to someone what he has taken from you. But it is the only way to not lose.”

Kraaia blinked her wet eyes at him, frustrated and angry at his elven wisdom that made no sense.

“That is the stupidest saying yet!” she declared.

He shrugged with the palms of his hands. “My English is the stupidest English yet. I am sorry. Also however this saying takes a long time to understand, many years or many times of loss.”

“Say it in your language,” Kraaia demanded. “It can’t possibly make less sense,” she grumbled.

He said it: a strange, purling phrase that dried up too soon. The elf Osh had a third voice such as she had never heard.

She wanted to ask him to teach her to say some words in his language, but she thought she had already asked for too many favors and put herself too far in his debt.

“If anything that was less absurd,” she muttered.

“It will make sense when you have learnt more,” he said.

“Of your language?” she asked with ill-​​concealed hopefulness.

“And of life.” His knitted fingers unfurled like petals to bare his empty hands. “We shall try to make the easy lessons when we can. However, this is not what I was trying to wonder.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wonder: why did you do this thing on the wall. I know why you were angry at Cat, but I try to wonder why this thing and not some other thing. Paul always liked to break things.”

“I do that too,” Kraaia muttered.

“I think he liked the sound. But you, I think I understand a little.”

“You understand me?” she laughed harshly.

“Because, you see: when I see beautiful things it makes me want to paint beautiful things. And you, because you see ugly things, you paint ugly things.”

Kraaia gaped at him. “You call that painting?”

He shrugged. “I call it ugly.”

“Well, thanks! It’s supposed to be!”

He nodded.

“But that doesn’t mean you’re right! Because you see beautiful things,” she sneered in a whining voice she meant to mock his gentleness. “Don’t you ever see ugly things? What do you do then?”

“Also, when I see ugly things, I want to paint beautiful things.”

Kraaia smacked her hand conclusively into the palm of the other.

“That is the stupidest thing you have said to me yet! Then why don’t I?” she demanded.

Osh leaned his elbow on his knee and tapped his lower lip with his finger. Kraaia noticed the tips of all his fingers were faintly stained.

“You ask the difficult questions,” he finally said. “It is like this elf saying I just say to you. Because the world is ugly sometimes, I give it beauty as much as I can. But I did not always do. When I was young I thought as you.”

Kraaia rolled her eyes and sighed. It was only another “you’ll understand when you’re older” speech, which were no better than “don’t bother trying to understand now.” Kraaia wanted to understand now. She was certain she could.

“You’re rather full of yourself, aren’t you?” she muttered. “Making beauty and wah wah wah. Just because you paint stupid flowers and stupid birds you think it’s beauty. You’re talking to the wrong girl. You should be talking to Gwynn. I think it’s stupid.”

Osh nodded slowly, swaying his body like a leaf-​​laden tree in the wind, but he did not seem offended. Kraaia huffed in frustration. She wanted to see him crack.

“I tell you a secret, Kraaia.” He spoke so softly she was forced to lean her head closer to his. “Something I never tell,” he whispered. “I do not paint flowers and birds. I paint petals and feathers and leaves.”

Kraaia jerked her head back and gaped at him. “You’re completely insane!” she laughed dazedly.

He lifted his finger in the air to silence her, or merely to make his point. The side of it was stained with pale gold.

“Look closely as I do,” he said. “I paint petals since all my life. Ugly petals sometimes, and beautiful petals sometimes. And always the flowers look the same.”

Kraaia laughed as cruelly as she could. “You’ve been reading too many Bible verses. You think you’re Jesus Christ making parables.”

“I only tell you the truth I have always known. As you say, it is not a crime. Now, however, if you do not like my paintings on your walls, I shall paint something else for you. Anything you like. Or paint it all blank, as you like. And if you want to paint any kind of thing yourself, only tell me and I shall give you paint. Only do not paint with your blood again, Kraaia. There is no need.”

Kraaia looked into her lap in mute despair. She did not mourn the ruin of the stupid little house, but the hills were sacred – and she did not know how to tell him so.

“Don’t bother painting anything,” she muttered. “I won’t be here long enough anyway.”

Rather than trying to convince her otherwise, he simply asked, “Where will you go after?”

“I don’t know,” she grumbled. “It isn’t as if anyone ever asked me where I wanted to go. Whoever gets stuck with me next when Cat has her fill of me.”

She watched him keenly through her pale lashes.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked.

Her heart pounded until she thought she might die from the strain. Whatever would or would not happen would happen so soon, so fast, or not at all.

She licked her lips and swallowed, but her mouth was so dry.

“Did you ever see my house?” he asked.

She shook her head. She strained like a rider with a runaway horse against her desire to wail that she had not been allowed, that she did not care, that it was probably stupid anyway.

“It is properly called a barn,” he confided. “It has not much room, and it is a little cold upstairs, but there is such a big window upstairs, whoever has that room someday can see half the sky from the bed.”

“Which half?” she asked with a cracked voice.

“The west sky. Always the setting sun.”

He moved his hands in strange arcs, as though such things as skies and sunsets could be communicated with gestures. Perhaps the elves did, she thought, or perhaps it was a private language only Osh could understand.

“But at night,” he said dreamily, “east and west, they do not mean so much. The stars turn like a small wheel in the night and like a big wheel in the year. Whoever stays a long time can see them almost all.”

Finally Kraaia managed to grumble, “Who gets that room? Muirenn?”

“I think it would be Liadan’s room someday, but she is still so small and sleeps with us for quite a while.” He shrugged. “Would you like to go see my house?”

“And see Frost?” she asked warily.

“If she is there.”

“Just you and me?”

“If you like.”

“Right now?” Her voice was strained like useless reins.

Osh closed his eyes and bowed his head into a graceful nod. Kraaia could take no more of his mildness.

“Oh, no!” she barked. “Forget it! I’ll just get my hopes up! No!”

He blinked at her. “Your hopes up?”

“You’ll just make me think I can go there and then change your mind or Flann will say no or something. No!”

“I only show you, so you may decide. But you are welcome there.”

“Right! If you’re good or something! I’m not falling for that again! Holding if you’re good over my head until I crack and then No!”

Osh only shook his head. Kraaia could not argue with that.

“Let us go see,” he suggested softly.

“You’ll change your mind!” she threatened. “You won’t last a week! I’ll have blood all over the place!”

“There will be no need for blood in that place,” he sighed. “But even if, I will last.”

Kraaia’s cruel giggling shook her like a runaway horse cantering over furrows. She never could stop it when it did. Some brave bystander would have to catch the bridle.

“You have no idea what you’re getting into,” she cackled.

He opened his palms to her in a mysterious elven or Oshen gesture.

“I will last, Kraaia. I only make promises I know I can keep.”