The woman had a look of puzzlement on her face, clouding to mingled curiosity and suspicion. “A shivering child alone in the woods. Are you ghost or flesh?”
But before the boy could answer, the horse shook his head and smiled with sharp teeth in a very unhorselike way. A faint red light shone in the beast’s eyes, then, as if it were the most natural thing in the word, the creature spoke: “Alive. Sweaty. Rank. An ordinary living child, by the smell. Though, he’ll be a ghost soon enough, if he doesn’t warm up. Hur.”
Her tone changed and her face relaxed. “What are you doing wandering in the woods? Are you lost?” There was concern in her voice–like an older sister wondering aloud how a wayward brother could possibly have come to be in such as state.
But the boy only stared at the horse. “Your… your… he talks… your horse…”
“Talks? I suppose you could call it talking.” She slid away the half-drawn sword, making a soft clunk as the blade vanished. Then she smiled, wryly, and rolled her eyes. “Dapplegrim natters and he gossips and he complains and he moans and he goes on and on about everything and nothing. But.. that said, yes. I suppose you could call it talking.”
“I’m wasted on present company, thoroughly wasted,” said the horse-creature, but he didn’t seem upset. He just lowered his head to rest on the ground and twitched his ears. In that position he spoke again: “So what is it child, are you lost then? Your dadda and momma eaten by Troldes? Hur. Speak up.”
The woman eased herself back until she was in a half-reclined position. “And come closer. Dapple’s right. You look half-frozen. Sit. Warm yourself. We have some dinner leftover, if you’re hungry?”
He was hungry. He nodded vigorously without even thinking. And what if she was a witch or Faer creature? The fire was warm. There was food. It was certainly better than freezing to death.
The boy spider-crawled up to the fire, keeping it between himself and the strange lady with her considerably stranger horse. But he accepted a bowl of lukewarm food gratefully, all the same, and he ate it greedily and without a word. It was good, really good. A sort of pottage with wild greens and mutton fat, boiled bacon and lots of fat barley grains. There was wood-pigeon in it too, he thought. It was better than anything he’d had in weeks and weeks.
“Hur,” said the horse whose name was evidently Dapplegrim. “You could say, thanks. And slow down. You’ll choke on a bone.”
“Thanks…” murmured the boy through a mouthful. “I really was hungry. Still am, a bit.” He eyed the pot, sitting beside the fire.
She smiled. “Go ahead.”
He did. The woman and the horse waited for him to be done, watching quietly as he stuffed himself. Finally, he put the bowl aside and burped. Then, remembering himself, he felt immediately embarrassed and looked down at the ground, uncomfortably.
The woman just smiled. She leaned a little closer, looking at him across the flames. “Sounds like you needed that. Now, child, tell me your name? Then tell me what you’re doing out here?”
“I don’t have a name,” he said, truthfully.
“What?”
“I don’t have a name. Or, rather, I guess I do have a name, but only my Ma’ called me by it, and I was still barely out of being a babe when my Da’ sold her to the slave-takers from up north–leastways, that’s what the other folk in the village have always said when I asked. My Da’ never told me anything about what happened. He always just said my Ma’ was gone and not to ask stupid questions. And he never called me by any name ‘cept boy, and you there, and worthless and other things.” He wiped a sleeve over his mouth between sentences.
The woman and horse exchanged glances. She spoke. “Your father sold your mother for a slave?”
“He wanted coin for his business, but his business was bad cause he drank all the time, and worked none of the time, so he just drank all the money and then his shop burned down, and we was poor again. And my Ma’ was gone.” He felt strangely hollow to say it out loud. It was an emptiness of a truth that had been a part of his life since he was old enough to talk. The other village children had teased him about it, because children can be cruel. Of course, The adults can be cruel too, but they were less obvious about it: there were tuts and frowns and hushed words behind hands. A few, like Old Keezer were nice to him. But most of them just whispered their whispers. It was one thing to sell someone else’s family to the slave-takers who came regularly out of Sorthe–but selling your own family? There’s something just not right about it.
Must be there’s something wrong with a family like that. Something broken deep down inside.
In the blood. In the soul.
He had heard that so many times in his life that he had half-come to believe it himself. Maybe there was something awful and bad in him? An evil inherited from his father.
Father and son both were encircled by the same disdain. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d barely been a toddler when it happened.
He shrugged and did what he always did when the topic came up, which was to try and push the thought away. He focused a sudden intense interest on scraping out the last morsels from his bowl. “And Da’ got it into his head to try and sell me too.” Scrape. Tap. Tap. “So I figured it was time for me to get myself going. I’m not waiting around to be taken off by Sorthemen.”
“I see.” A small crease appeared at the bridge of her nose. “But I can’t just call you no-name, or child, can I? Didn’t your father have another name for you? What did they call you in your village?”
“They had a lot of things to call me.” He concentrated: “There was Tremble, and Scantheart, Faintheart too, and Cringer, Cringe, Underfoot, Worthless, Halfheart, Flinch, Flincher, Flinchie, and… let me see… Littleheart, Chookheart, Thinblood, Spittlespine, Leanmarrow, Whiteblood, Rattle, Smudge, Cloudhead, Clod-for-Nothing, Clodloaf, Lugnoggin, Mousepiss, Pallid, Thimble, Simper, Mumble, Fallowheart, Stammer, Huddle, Sniff, Scantyheart and Wince.” He ran through the list in his head. “I think that’s about all of them.”
“I’m not going to call you by any of those names. They’re all awful, and none of them are proper names at all. You’ve really never known your own true name?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“You’re father never called you by your name?”
He shrugged. “Never. Far as I know, at least.”
“That’s interesting…” She sounded as if she were considering something, like one of the gambling men in the village drinkhouse considering whether to wager just one coin or the whole pile. “But what do you call yourself?”
“Just me. The boy. I guess, mostly, I just call myself, myself.”
“But that won’t do. I can’t call you ‘boy’. Or ‘myself’. That will get confusing.”
He looked at her, feeling confused. “Yes.” He wanted to ask her why it mattered. Why did she care? They would go their separate ways in the morning anyway.
Seeming to give up a little, she relaxed away from the fire. “I guess I will just call you Child then, for now. It could be useful of course.”
“Caewen!” snapped the horse.
“What?”
“We cannot take some raggedy little woods-brat with us off to who-knows-where. That’s what. I know what you’re thinking. I know it. It’ll be just like that time in Bernoth. You can’t save everyone you meet.”
She waved a hand at him. “That worked out fine in the end.”
He shook his mane and his eyes glowed brighter, like wood-coals in the fire. “Only after I saved your skin. Hur. Going about trying to fix this, and fix that. You’re going to get us both killed.”
“Why?”
“What?” said the woman.
“What?” said the horse.
He felt strange with both of them staring at him. He tried again, voice small, “Why would it be useful?”