In the morning I told Ashti what the neighbours had said but she said it was nonsense. “They were born on the Feast of Timoine, we’ll name them on the day of Anshen!” So I went into town with Lady Rava’s purse. First to the Apple, where the landlord was just opening shutters and putting stools upright that had been on the tables. “Hey, you’re early!” he said, then recognised me. “You’re the painted woman’s man, right? How is she?” “Splendid, and so are the twins! We’re having the name-giving tomorrow. I’d like a barrel of apple wine, and a barrel of beer. Our eldest kid brews these days, but not nearly enough!” He laughed. “And pie?” He started writing on a slate. “And pie! There are a lot more people coming than we’d thought. Dozens.” I rattled the purse. “I can pay, no problem.” “Oh, we’ll send you a bill, If it isn’t what you expect –” “I’ll pipe up,” I said. “No, you won’t,” he said with a grin that made it clear that the bill would probably be too low rather than too high. “Do I get sweets in the Síthi quarter?” I asked. “Yes, the best […]

Having new babies in the house is exhausting! Only the babies got enough sleep. Ashti and I didn’t, and not even Arni who did all the shopping and most of the other work we didn’t get round to. Thank the gods for the neighbours who were in at all hours with food and drink and clean laundry! Just as we thought it was finally quiet there was a knock at the door. More visitors! The children were just back from school so Raisse ran to open. We heard her voice, “You are the lady who we stayed with and you said we couldn’t live in your house forever.” “Yes, I am,” we heard Lady Rava’s voice say, “and I see you now have a house of your own to live in!” “And you are the lady that everybody had to make a seal so the whole town wouldn’t hear you fuck,” Raisse said. “Yes, that’s who I am,” we heard Doctor Cora’s voice say. And then both of the ladies came in and cooed over the babies. Neither of them had ever had twins, though Lady Rava had eleven children. “You know, I think I’m pregnant again,” Doctor Cora said, […]

With all the things Maile had told us to get for winter, and what people gave us, we had a really good winter! Now winter is always warm here, but Halla’s hens kept laying almost until the Feast of Naigha and she thought that was unusual, too. And then the Ishey also gave us a jar of pickled eggs to use when Halla’s eggs ran out. Raisse and Arni learned to brew so well that we always had some beer, mostly good enough, sometimes really excellent. The Ishey hadn’t only given us eggs and caught a boar, but they’d also made a crib, all carved wood! Two very black young men came to bring the pieces and put them together. They took the two small cribs apart and stored them in our attic so there was room next to the big children’s bed, and the crib was on wheels so we could easily move it wherever we wanted. The more I looked at the carvings, the more I was sure they’d used Ashti’s skin paintings as a model, even the hedgehog and fox mothers were there! “Perhaps you can make a little straw mattress to fit,” I said to Raisse. […]

Dear Ma, First I didn’t dare write because there were still people around who wanted to catch me, and then I was too busy to even think of writing, but now I  have news that I must write to you: you are a grandmother! Twice over! Because my and Ashti’s daughter and son, Lysna (called after Ashti’s grandmother) and Doran (called after Da), were born on the Feast of Timoine. Yes, that’s not a day that priestesses of Naigha’s children are born, but Ashti isn’t a priestess any more and we’re getting married at Midsummer. We also have Ashti’s other children, Arvin and Sidhan, and Raisse, a little girl we adopted in Valdis when her mother and sister died of the measles, so we’re the parents of a large family though Ashti is only eighteen and I’m only just fourteen. I don’t know how much of the news from Nalenay reached Ashinay but I’m sure you know that I haven’t been with Master Rhanion for a year now. I think the queen had him hanged! Because he and his sister and some other people did a lot of horrible things. They made kids younger than me who should really be […]

The day after the Feast we all went back to work again. If I’d really wanted to see the wrestling I could perhaps have got a couple of hours off for it, but Master Mernath had told us that the first week after the Feast of Mizran was when the Ishey sent their twelve-year-olds to learn about iron. “And we teach them as much as they can learn but they never put that knowledge and skill into practice,” he said with a scowl. “Why not?” I asked. “They’ve never used iron, it’s not what Ishey do. But they send us their boys to learn that they can master the power of iron, it makes them into men. They’re strange people. But they pay well, and teaching someone who has to learn the very beginnings of the craft is one of the best ways to learn.” When I arrived at the workshop Jichan was opening up, and I saw with a shock that there was no fire at all! The whole forge had been cleared and swept out. Just as the master came from upstairs five young people came into the workshop, all dressed as Ishey men in blankets though at […]

Suddenly it was nearly the Feast of Mizran. We’d been in Rhinla and Jeran’s workshop, and Rhinla had been in our house, several times a week, and the drawings on Ashti’s skin were almost finished! It only needed a bit of shadow here and there. Rhinla had had a new idea about the breasts: on the left there was a hedgehog suckling cubs (if hedgehogs have cubs, anyway baby hedgehogs) and on the right a fox suckling cubs. She’d avoided the nipples and the bit of dark skin around it, because “when your babies are born they should have proper milk, not milk with charcoal in it!” Master Mernath called us all together at the start of the working day. “Today we clean the workshop. Everything. Tomorrow we get the books in order. The baroness and the prince are in Veray, they’ll be here tomorrow or the day after at the latest, and we’ll present the sword in a small ceremony. The games start the day after the Feast. You’ll have the day before the Feast, the Feast itself and the day of the fencing competition off, except that I want you” –that was me– “to come to the Temple […]

We haven’t actually played out any lessons from Master Mernath yet so I can’t write about those, but some have definitely taken place. It was still warm. We still lived mostly outside. Ashti went to the Guild school to read books in the library, like the book the size of a baby crib with all the animals in the world. She’d be able to tell her class much more about animals when the school started again! But she didn’t find the woman with a fish tail that had been in our priestess’ animal book, perhaps because it wasn’t a real animal at all! Sometimes she took books home to read under the alder tree, aloud to the children if they were the right kind of books, like history. It was a pity I was never at home for that because I always liked history when I was in school and I’d like to know more! But we were working very hard at the smithy, the hot weather didn’t matter there because it was hot work anyway. On the Day of Anshen Ashti wanted to go and talk to the painter girl about the mice on her feet. We saw her […]

Ashti didn’t have to go to the school any more until the Feast of Mizran. The children who’d still had things to catch up with were all finished. Master Fian did pay her, though! Even without any work to do. Otherwise it wouldn’t be fair, he said. That meant she had time to do things around the house, and one of the things she was going to do was to go into the wood with Arni and the children to collect herb seeds so we could plant them behind the house instead of the overgrown weed patch that the neighbours had dug up. “Chickens would be nice too,” she said. “Oh, and we should visit Asa, let’s do that tonight. It’s the done thing, to make a visit back.” Everybody at work was very merry for some reason. Well, except Master Mernath, I’d never seen him laugh, the best I’d seen was a tiny smile when someone did something really well. We were all joking with each other, so much that the master had to call for attention a couple of times, and then he said “As you all seem to know exactly how to do this, you make the […]

I wish I remembered who offered Mernath as an example of what happens when someone who is intrinsically absolutely good gets in with the wrong side. It sounds like Airath. The next morning my jaw felt like nothing had ever happened to it. When I got to the workshop it was Jichan opening up, “it’s Cynla’s late morning”, he said, but Cynla came from upstairs as soon as I was in and started to put bread and cheese and small beer on the table. I’d eaten some bread from home on the way, but I didn’t mind another breakfast! “It’s only a half-day,” Master Mernath said, “so let’s get in some practice!” And he showed Cynla how a sword was put together and let her make different sorts of pins to attach the blade to the hilt, and Jichan and Jeran and I got more sharp edges to do. The master must earn a lot from the things he finishes if he can afford to let us do so much work that doesn’t bring in money! At the end of the morning he told us to stop working and took a bit of steel, about the size for a knife, […]

Ashti took me home from the temple of Dayati. Well, not at once, because we were talking about what Doctor Airath had said about Arni, and Ashti thought it would be a good thing to ask Doctor Cora for the money. After all she was the owner of the brothel! The children that our children had been playing with asked if they’d come again, and we said “perhaps you should come to our house to play next time! Wade in the river, catch fishes!” A little boy said that it was all right to catch fishes, but they’d have to put them back, because you didn’t eat fishes! Well, we’d catch our fishes for eating another time. “Let’s go to Doctor Cora right away,” Ashti said. “She lives next to the Guild school, doesn’t she?” We didn’t even have trouble finding it, we were getting to know our way around Turenay. We got to a little square where there was a fountain that made me laugh and Ashti blush: a copper statue of a girl lifting her skirt and pissing water! “She needs a piss-pot,” Arvin said, and when I asked Raisse and Sidhan if they could piss standing up […]