Robin LaFevers is published in the UK by Andersen Press on June 7th, and it sounds brilliant! Below is a summary from Amazon and you can see the book trailer
BRITTANY 1485
I bear a deep red stain that runs from my left shoulder down
to my right hip, a trail left by the herbwitch’s poison that my
mother used to try to expel me from her womb. That I
survived, according to the herbwitch, is no miracle but a sign
I have been sired by the god of death himself.
I am told my father flew into a rage and raised his hand to
my mother even as she lay weak and bleeding on the birthing
bed. Until the herbwitch pointed out to him that if my
mother had lain with the god of death, surely He would not
stand idly by while my father beat her.
I risk a glance up at my husband-to-be,Guillo, and wonder
if my father has told him of my lineage. I am guessing not, for
who would pay three silver coins for what I am? Besides,
Guillo looks far too placid to know of my true nature. If my
father has tricked him, it will not bode well for our union.
That we are being married in Guillo’s cottage rather than a
church further adds to my unease.
I feel my father’s heavy gaze upon me and look up. The
triumph in his eyes frightens me, for if he has triumphed,
then I have surely lost in some way I do not yet understand.
even so, I smile, wanting to convince him I am happy – for
there is nothing that upsets him more than my happiness.
But while I can easily lie to my father, it is harder to lie to
myself. I am afraid, sorely afraid of this man to whom I will
now belong. I look down at his big, wide hands. Just like my
father, he has dirt caked under his fingernails and stains in the
creases of his skin.Will the semblance end there? or will he,
too, wield those hands like a cudgel?
It is a new beginning, I remind myself, and in spite of all my
trepidations, I cannot extinguish a tiny spark of hope.Guillo
wants me enough to pay three silver coins. Surely where there
is want, there is room for kindness? It is the one thing that
keeps my knees from knocking and my hands from
trembling.That and the priest who has come to officiate, for
while he is naught but a hedge priest, the furtive glance he
sends me over his prayer book causes me to believe he knows
who and what I am.
As he mutters the ceremony’s final words, I stare at the
rough hempen prayer cord with the nine wooden beads that
proclaim him a follower of the old ways. even when he ties
the cord around our hands and lays the blessings of God and
the nine old saints upon our union, I keep my gaze downcast,
afraid to see the smugness in my father’s eyes or what my
husband’s face might reveal.
When the priest is done, he pads away on dirty feet, his
rough leather sandals flapping noisily.He does not even pause
long enough to raise a tankard to our union. Nor does my
father. Before the dust from my father’s departing cart has
settled, my new husband swats my rump and grunts toward
the upstairs loft.
I clench my fists to hide their trembling and cross to the
rickety stairs.While Guillo fortifies himself with one last
tankard of ale, I climb up to the loft and the bed I will now
share with him. I sorely miss my mother, for even though she
was afraid of me, surely she would have given me a woman’s
counsel on my wedding night. But both she and my sister
fled long ago, one back into the arms of death, and the other
into the arms of a passing tinker.
I know, of course, what goes on between a man and a
woman.our cottage is small and my father loud.There was
many a night when urgent movement accompanied by groans
filled our dark cottage.The next day my father always looked
slightly less bad-tempered, and my mother more so. I try to
convince myself that no matter how distasteful the marriage
bed is, surely it cannot be any worse than my father’s raw
temper and meaty fists.
The loft is a close,musty place that smells as if the rough
shutters on the far wall have never been opened. A timber
and rope bed frame holds a mattress of straw. other than
that, there are only a few pegs to hang clothes on and a plain
chest at the foot of the bed.
I sit on the edge of the chest and wait. It does not take
long. A heavy creak from the stairs warns me that Guillo is
on his way.My mouth turns dry and my stomach sour. Not
wanting to give him the advantage of height, I stand.
When he reaches the room, I finally force myself to look
at his face. His piggish eyes gorge themselves on my body,
going from the top of my head down to my ankles, then back
up to my breasts.
My father’s insistence on lacing my gown
so tight has worked, as Guillo can look at little else. He
gestures with his tankard toward my bodice, slopping ale over
the sides so that it dribbles to the floor. “Remove it.”Desire
thickens his voice.
I stare at the wall behind him, my fingers trembling as I
raise them to my laces. But not fast enough. Never fast
enough. He takes three giant strides toward me and strikes
me hard across the cheek. “Now!” he roars as my head snaps
back.
Bile rises in my throat and I fear I will be sick. So this is
how it will be between us.This is why he was willing to pay
three silver coins.
My laces are finally undone, and I remove my bodice so
that I stand before him in my skirt and shift. The stale air,
which only moments before was too warm, is now cold as it
presses against my skin.
“your skirt,” he barks, breathing heavily.
I untie the strings and step out of my skirt.As I turn to lay
it on the nearby bench, Guillo reaches for me. He is
surprisingly quick for one so large and stupid, but I am
quicker. I have had long years of practice escaping my father’s
rages.
I jerk away, spinning out of his reach, infuriating him. In
truth, I give no thought to where I will run, wishing only to
hold off the inevitable a little longer.
There is a loud crash as his half-empty tankard hits the
wall behind me, sending a shower of ale into the room.
He snarls and lunges, but something inside me will not – cannot
– make this easy for him. I leap out of his reach.
But not far enough. I feel a tug, then hear a rip of cloth as
he tears my thin, worn chemise.
Silence fills the loft – a silence so thick with shock that
even his coarse breathing has stopped. I feel his eyes rake
down my back, take in the ugly red welts and scars the poison
left behind. I look over my shoulder to see his face has gone
white as new cheese, his eyes wide.When our glances meet,
he knows – knows – that he has been duped. He bellows
then, a long, deep note of rage that holds equal parts fury
and fear.
Then his rough hand cracks against my skull and sends
me to my knees. The pain of hope dying is worse than his
fists and boots.
When Guillo’s rage is spent, he reaches down and grabs
me by the hair. “I will go for a real priest this time.He will
burn you or drown you.Maybe both.”He drags me down
the steps, my knees bumping painfully against each one.
He continues dragging me through the kitchen, then
shoves me into a small root cellar, slams the door, and
locks it.
Bruised and possibly broken, I lie on the floor with my
battered cheek pressed into the cool dirt. Unable to stop
myself, I smile.
I have avoided the fate my father had planned for me.
Surely it is I who has won, not he.
The sound of the bolt lifting jerks me awake. I shove
myself to a sitting position and clutch the tattered remains of
my chemise around me.When the door opens, I am stunned
to see the hedge priest, the same small rabbit of a man who’d
blessed our marriage only hours before. Guillo is not with
him, and any moment that does not contain my father or
Guillo is a happy one by my reckoning.
The priest looks over his shoulder, then motions for me to
follow.
I rise to my feet, and the root cellar spins dizzily. I put a
hand to the wall and wait for the feeling to pass.The priest
motions again,more urgently. “We’ve not much time before
he returns.”
His words clear my head as nothing else can. If he
is acting without Guillo’s knowledge, then he is most
assuredly helping me. “I’m coming.” I push away from the
wall, step carefully over a sack of onions, and follow
the hedge priest into the kitchen. It is dark; the only light
comes from the banked embers in the hearth. I should
wonder how the priest found me, why he is helping me,
but I do not care. All I can think is that he is not Guillo
and not my father. The rest does not matter.
He leads me to the back door, and in a day full of surprises,
I find one more as I recognize the old herbwitch from our
village hovering nearby. If I did not need to concentrate so
hard on putting one foot in front of the other, I would ask her
what she is doing here, but it is all I can do to stay upright
and keep from falling on my face in the dirt.
As I step into the night, a sigh of relief escapes me.
It is dark out, and darkness has always been my friend.
A cart waits nearby. Touching me as little as possible, the
hedge priest helps me into the back of it before hurrying
around to the driver’s bench and climbing in. The priest
glances over his shoulder at me, then averts his eyes as if
he’s been burned. “There’s a blanket back there,”he mutters
as he steers the nag out onto the cobbled lane. “Cover
yourself.”
The unyielding wood of the cart presses painfully into my
bruised bones, and the thin blanket scratches and reeks of
donkey. even so, I wish they’d brought a second one for
padding. “Where are you taking me?”
“To the boat.”
A boat means water, and crossing water means I will be
far from the reach of my father and Guillo and the Church.
“Where is this boat taking me?” I ask, but the priest says
nothing. exhaustion overwhelms me. I do not have the
strength to pluck answers from him like meager berries from
a thorny bush. I lie down in the cart and give myself over to
the horse’s jolting gait.
And so my journey across Brittany begins. I am smuggled
like some forbidden cargo, hidden among turnips or in hay in
the back of carts, awakened by furtive voices and fumbling
hands as I am passed from hedge priest to herbwife, a hidden
chain of those who live in accordance with the old saints and
are determined to keep me from the Church. The hedge
priests, with their awkward movements and musty, stale
robes, are kind enough, but their fingers are unschooled in
tenderness or compassion. It is the herbwitches I like most.
Their chapped, raw hands are gentle as lamb’s wool, and the
sharp, pungent smell of a hundred different herbs clings
to them like a fragrant shadow. often as not, they give
me a tincture of poppy for my injuries, while the priests
merely give me their sympathy, and some begrudgingly at
that.
When I awake on what I reckon to be the fifth night of my
journey, I smell the salty tang of the sea and remember the
promise of a boat. I struggle to sit up, pleased to find my
bruises pain me less and my ribs do not burn.We are passing
through a small fishing village. I pull the blanket close against
the chill and wonder what will happen next.
At the very edge of the village sits a stone church. It is to
this that the latest hedge priest steers our cart and I am
relieved to see the door bears the sacred anchor of St.Mer,
one of the old saints.The priest reins his horse to a stop. “Get
out.”
I cannot tell if it is fatigue or disdain I hear in his voice,
but, either way,my journey is almost done, so I ignore it and
clamber out of the cart, sure to keep the blanket clutched
tight around me lest I offend his modesty.
Once he secures the horse, he leads me toward the beach,
where a lone boat waits.The inky black ocean spreads out as
far and wide as my eye can see,making the vessel seem very
small.
An old sailor sits hunched in the prow. A shell bleached
white as bone hangs from a cord at his neck, marking him as
a worshiper of St. Mer. I wonder what he thinks of being
woken in the middle of the night and made to row strangers
out into the dark sea.
The sailor’s faded blue eyes skim over me.He nods. “Climb
in.We en’t got all night.”He thrusts an oar at me, and I grasp
it to steady myself as I get into the boat.
The small vessel dips and rocks, and for a moment I am
afraid it will tip me into the icy water. But it rights itself and
then the priest steps in, causing the hull to sink even lower.
The old sailor grunts, then returns the oar to its pin and
begins rowing.
We reach the small island just as dawn pinkens the eastern
horizon. It looks barren in the early, spare light. As we draw
closer, I see a standing stone next to a church and realize
we’ve come to one of the old places of worship.
Gravel crunches under the hull of the boat as the old sailor
rows right up onto the beach. He jerks his head toward the
stone fortress. “Get out then. The abbess of St.Mortain be
expectin’ ye.”
Saint Mortain? The patron saint of death. A tremor of
unease washes through me. I look at the priest, who averts
his eyes, as if looking at me is too great a mortal temptation.
Still clutching the blanket close around me, I climb
awkwardly from the boat and step into the shallows. Torn
between gratitude and annoyance, I curtsy slightly, careful to
let the blanket slip from my shoulder for the merest of
seconds.
It is enough. Satisfied at the priest’s gasp and the old
sailor’s cluck of his tongue, I turn and slog through the cold
water to the beach. In truth, I have never flashed so much as
an ankle before, but I am sorely vexed at being treated like
a temptress when all I feel is bruised and broken.
When I reach the patchy grass that grows between the
rocks, I look back toward the boat, but it has already put out
to sea. I turn and begin making my way to the convent, eager
to see what those who worship Death want of me.
Thee right of Robin LaFevers to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Copyright © Robin LaFevers, 2012
