A shower of hailstones pummelled the bay window where a lone figure sat. A pair of large, tilted eyes, so dark to be almost black, watched the trees in the garden beyond, as they thrashed their branches in a wild dance with the wind. The eyes grew glassy and red-rimmed as rivulets of melted ice laced the windows with a network of clear veins. The small, raven-haired girl who owned those eyes hadn’t moved for more than an hour. Every so often, however, her gaze would clear and focus suddenly on some spot on the lawn, and then dart from side to side as though following something invisible that moved amongst the shivering flower heads, or hovered in the branches of naked, ice-pocked saplings. Then the young face would strain to peer past the garden gate, across the stream and into the sheer wall of trees that lay beyond.
“Dectora!”
The book in the girl’s hands jerked open with an audible crack. Her heart sank. Its stiff binding had given her away. A woman stood framed in the doorway. Lean and tired-looking, her long hands were wrapped around some tangle of clay-matted roots.
Unbidden, a voice in the back of the little girl’s head whispered the word, “Fennel”. She whipped around and looked into the trees again, bewildered, her heart racing. Then she turned guiltily back to her mother, holding out the book. It was upside-down.
“I was reading.”
The woman’s mouth quirked. She seemed caught somewhere between amusement and exasperation. “You can’t read.”
“But I was learning.”
Again, Lora Brodigan’s mouth twitched before she finally allowed herself a smile. “I’m sure you were. Now come away from the window.” She held out a muddy hand and Dectora curled her own chubby fingers around it. She felt the gritty coolness of clay rubbing from her mother’s skin to her own. It was the only contact she’d had with outside in days.
“Say goodbye to Daddy.”
“No!”
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to say goodbye to her father; she didn’t want him to go at all! It wasn’t that he would be gone for long, or would be very far away from her; he was simply shutting himself in his study for a day. He’d never be more than a door’s-breath away from them.
If Dectora had been a little older, she would have wondered why he brought his sword in there with him. It fascinated her, that sword. It was a beautiful, deadly thing that she wasn’t allowed “to look at sideways” which didn’t bother her when all she really wanted to do was hold it. She might have also asked why he always carried that half-used, filthy candle stub that, old as it was, never seemed to burn away.
Another rule in the Brodigan household, was that Dectora didn’t play near the door of the study – not even if she played quietly. She thought she understood this, because she had already figured out that it mustn’t be a very pleasant room, if her father emerged – as he often did - with his hair singed, smelling of fire or worse things or sometimes even bleeding. There were days when he’d stagger into the hallway, hands pressed to one wound or another, calling for Dectora’s mother. Healers are not the kind of people who panic when someone is pooling blood on the carpet, not even when it’s their husband. Lora’s heart could watch from the back seat, and Dectora knew she had to keep well out of the way while she picked leaves straight from the garden and took down jars from the “don’t even think about it” cupboard. She would grind them into pastes to spread on Alec’s cuts and burns, or force him to drink the tea that she’d made from their contents before she stitched up the gaping tears in his skin. The tea would always make him look better, but often he would be so weak that he couldn’t ride his horse for days afterwards. When Lora had to exercis his giant chestnut mare, he would lie on the sofa and joke that he has more stitches in him than Molly, Dectora’s rag doll.
