Ahnee

FROM THE MANUSCRIPT · READING EXCERPT

Enter the story

Ahnee had wrapped one foot when someone hammered on the kitchen door.

She held the loose end between her teeth, listening. Three blows, a pause, then two more. A guest would have tried the latch. Her father would have called her name. Whoever stood outside wanted the whole house awake without admitting that was what they wanted.

“If you've brought fish,” Belsha called from the kitchen, “you can take them away again.”

“It's flour.”

“Then you can come in.”

Ahnee drew the cloth snug beneath her arch. She had folded an extra square beneath each forefoot and heel; yesterday's rain would have washed the soft earth from the upper path, leaving the stones bare. She worked a finger under the last turn, making certain it would not pinch when her feet warmed, and pulled on her shoes.

In the kitchen a flour carrier stood beside two sacks. His youngest son, still half asleep, leaned against the door with his cheek on the latch. Belsha had both fists planted in a mound of dough.

“There should be four,” she said.

“There were four when we left.”

Ahnee stopped tying her hair. “What happened to the others?”

The man glanced from her running clothes to her bare arms, as if she had already left the house in some important sense. “Held at the crossing.”

“By whom?”

“Depends which end you're standing on.”

Belsha lifted her hands. The dough rose with them, stretched, and settled back on the board.

Ahnee took the cup beside the water jar and handed it to the child. “Sit down before you drop.”

“I'm not tired.”

He sat immediately.

The carrier produced two narrow slips from inside his tunic. One was damp at the fold. Ahnee laid them beside the flour, well away from Belsha's working space. The first acknowledged a road payment at the eastern landing. The second recorded an assessment for repairs to the western approach. Different marks. Different hands. Both dated that morning.

“You paid twice?”

“I paid once. The second man took the sacks.”

“Then why does this say payment received?”

“He said flour was payment.”

Belsha made a small, disbelieving sound. She cut the dough into portions with such force that the board knocked against the wall.

Ahnee read both slips again. The second gave no quantity, only the carrier's name and a mark where an amount should have been.

“Did you see him write this?”

“Of course.”

“Did he read it to you?”

The man's expression changed.

She kept her voice level. “Leave these with me. Belsha, can we make breakfast with what we have?”

“We can make breakfast. Supper will be a discussion.”

“I'll be back before that.”

“You always say that when you put those shoes on.”

Ahnee smiled and slipped through the door before the cook could find another duty for her. Behind her, Belsha asked the boy whether a person who wasn't tired might nevertheless manage a piece of yesterday's bread.

The yard smelled of wet timber and the sharp green mash her father fed to the coastal mounts. Under the stable roof her grey Neradorn lifted its head. Moss-green plates along the neck caught the first light; the loose edge of its crest trembled as it shook a fly away. Ahnee scratched the warm place beneath its jaw, checked that the water trough was full, and went out through the side gate.

She ran north along the river.

For the first few hundred paces she wanted to turn back. Her legs were heavy from carrying wash water upstairs the night before, and one knot of hair kept slipping against her cheek. Then her breath settled. She found the comfortable reach of her stride, the slight forward lean that carried her up the orchard slope, and the morning became something she could move through without being asked to mend it.

Mist lay in the lower branches. Beyond the orchard, a flight of small, copper-throated flyers spilled from a tree and wheeled over the river. Their four-beat calls passed from bank to bank. Something larger moved in the reeds below her, bending the stems in a slow line toward open water. She watched long enough to see a broad, scaled back, then kept to the higher path.

◆

End of excerpt. This site presents a selection from the manuscript.