Einar sighed. He rose with an effort from where he knelt on the ground, then moved over to sit beside her on the skins. They both stared at the fire.
“I best tell you the why, first, so you understand.”
Claire nodded, knowing she would need to tell him her own why when the time came.
Spatters of sleet tapped against the roof of the shed. But they were warm inside.
“I never knew my mum,” he began. “She died when she birthed me. Alys came, they said, and helped, but I was big and she labored too long, and bled, and she died. It happens sometimes.”
Claire nodded. Alys had told her that it did. She remembered how interested Alys had been, hearing her tell her own story, of the cutting. “It be different here,” Alys had said.
“My father was a fisherman, and he was out with the boats. It was this time of year, with the cold and the wind. He likely had a bad time of it too. But he was a hard man, my father. Strong. Used to the weather.”
He shrugged. “As I am,” he added.
“But you’re not hard, Einar.”
“Hardened to the weather, I am. I must be, for the creatures.”
She knew he meant his flock of sheep.
“I don’t feel the cold as you do,” he told her.
“You’ve always been here. You’ve learned to live with it.”
They sat silently for a moment. Then he began again to talk. “They say he came in from the sea that evening, and emptied his nets and tied his boat. All who saw him fell silent, for no one wanted to be the one to tell him that his son was birthed healthy but his wife was already stiffening and being readied for a coffin.”
He looked away. Then he said, “They say he had wanted a son. But not the one what took his wife.”
Outside, a branch broke in the wind, skittered across the dooryard of his shed, and slammed against the wall. Claire could picture the fisherman arriving home in weather just like this to find a squalling infant and a wife turned blue and lost.
“It was Alys kept him from flinging me into the fire. Others came and held him down. He roared into the night, they say, cursing all flesh and the wind and the gods, even cursing the sea that be his livelihood.
“He was a hard man to start, they say. My mum, she softened him a bit, but when she was gone he turned to stone. And the stone had an edge to it, sharpened against me, for I had killed her.”
“But it wasn’t—” Claire began, then stopped. He hadn’t heard her.
“Others raised me. Village women. Then, when I was old enough, he tooken me back. Said it was time for me to pay for what I done.”
“What did that mean, ‘old enough’? How old were you?”
He thought. “Six years, mayhap? My front teeth had fallen out.”
She shuddered at the thought of a little boy expected to atone for his mother’s death.
“I didn’t know him. It was as if a stranger took me. I went to his cottage, for they said I must, and that night he gave me food and drink, and a blanket to wrap around me as I slept on a pile of straw. In the morning he kicked me awake before it was light and told me he would make a fisherman of me, for I owed him.
“After that, every day, until I was growed, I went with him to the boat and on the boat out onto the sea. He never spoke a soft word. Never told me about the kinds of leaves, or creatures, or pointed to the stars in the sky. Never sang a song to me, or held my hand. Just kicked me across the deck if I be clumsy, laughed when I be twisted in the ropes and sliding pure froze in the water that washed aboard. Slapped me in the head when the sea was rough and I puked over the side. He hoped I would wash overboard and drown. He told me that.
“He made me climb the mast to untangle the lines and he laughed when my hands slid from the salty wood and I fell onto the deck. When I broke my arm he kept me on the sea all day, hauling nets, then sent me to Alys that night and told her to have it fixed by morning or he’d break the other.”
“You should have killed him,” Claire said in a low voice.
He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “I had already killed my mother.”
He stood suddenly, leaning on his stick. He went to the door, cracked it open, and breathed the wind. She was afraid he was going to go out into the bitter cold, that telling her his past had now forced him to punish himself in some way. But after a moment he pulled the door tightly closed and came back. He sat down again, leaning his stick against the wall, and took several deep breaths.
“I growed very strong,” he said.
“I know.”
“I growed taller than my father and so strong, I could have picked him up and flung him into the sea. But I never thought to do that. I stayed silent. I obeyed him. I cooked for him like a wife and washed his clothes and was a wife in other ways too terrible to mention. I made myself into stone. I willed myself deaf when he cursed me and blind to the look of hatred in his eyes. I waited.”
“Waited for what?”
“To be old enough, strong enough, brave enough, to leave. To climb out.”
“What went wrong?” she asked him.
“Naught in the climbing out. I trained for it. I was ready. I knew I could do it and I did. It went wrong after.” Einar moved one damaged foot slightly, staring at it. His tone was bitter. Then it changed and became more gentle, and curious. “Why do you be asking about this?”
“I must try,” Claire told him. “I must try to climb out.”
He stared at her. “No woman ever done so,” he said.
“I must. I have a child out there. A son. I must find him.”
She had known he wouldn’t be scornful, for that was not his nature. She had thought, though, that he might laugh at the impossibility of her plan. But he did not. And she realized that he already knew of the child, that he had heard the talk of it.
He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Push against this.” He extended his arm toward her, his hand held out upright at if to shove something away.
“Like this?” Claire held her hand up against his.
He nodded. “Push.”
She did, summoning her strength to try to move his hand, to bend his arm. It was firm. Rigid. Immobile. Her own arm trembled with her effort. Finally she gave up. Her hand dropped back into her lap. It ached.
Einar nodded. “You’re strong, at least in the arms. Can you climb?”