The smile she gave him was cold and brittle. “I have come to understand many things that were hidden from me as a child. But let me finish my story and you can judge for yourself. What matters in all of this is that just before I left to apprentice to the potter, I began hearing things about my father. I was eleven by then and already knew that I would be apprenticed at twelve. I knew I would be leaving my home, and I suppose it made me consider seriously for the first time the scope and meaning of the wider world. Traders and trappers and tinkers passed through our village, so I knew there were other places to see, places far away. I wondered sometimes if my father was out there somewhere, waiting. I wondered if he knew of me. I had determined in my own childlike way that my parents had not married and so had not lived together as husband and wife. My mother bore me alone, my father already gone. What of him, then? No one would say. I thought to ask more than once, but there was something in the way my providers spoke of my mother and her life that made it clear I was not to ask. My mother had transgressed in some way, and she was forgiven her transgression only because she had died giving birth to me. I was a part of her transgression, but it was not clear to me how or why.
“When I was old enough to know that secrets were being kept from me, I began to want to uncover them. I was eleven—old enough to recognize deception and old enough to practice it. I began to ask questions about my mother, small and inconsequential questions that would not arouse anger or suspicion. I asked them mostly of my foster mother, because she was the less taciturn of the pair. I would ask the questions when we were alone, then listen at night at the door of my sleeping room to hear what she would say to her husband. Sometimes she would say nothing. Sometimes the words were obscured by the closed door. But once or twice I caught a sentence or two, a phrase, a word—some small mention of my father. It was not the words themselves that revealed so much, but the way in which they were spoken. My father was an outsider who passed through the village, stayed briefly, returned once or twice, and then disappeared. The people of the village shunned him, all save my mother. She was attracted to him. No reason for this was offered. Was she attracted to him for the way he looked or the words he spoke or the life he led? I could not learn. But it was clear they feared and disliked him, and some part of that fear and dislike had been transferred to me.”
She went quiet for a moment, gathering her thoughts. She seemed small and vulnerable, but Bremen knew that impression was false. He waited, letting her eyes continue to hold his in the deep night silence.
“I knew even then that I was not like anyone else. I knew I had the magic, even though it was just beginning to manifest itself in me, not yet come to maturity, so that it was mostly vague stirrings and small mutterings in my child’s body. It seemed logical to conclude that it was the magic that was feared and disliked, and it was this that I had inherited from my father. Magic was mistrusted in general in my village—it was the unwanted legacy of the First War of the Races, when Men had been subverted by the rebel Druid Brona and defeated in a war with the other Races and driven south into exile. Magic had caused all this, and it was a vast, dark unknown that lurked at the comers of the subconscious and threatened the unwary. The people of my village were superstitious and not well educated and were frightened of many things. Magic could be blamed for much of what they didn’t understand. I think the people who raised me believed that I might grow into some manifestation of my father, the bearer of his magic’s seed, and so they could never quite accept me as their child. In the eleventh year of my life, I began to understand why this was so.
“The potter knew my history as well, though he did not speak of it to me in the beginning when I went to work for him. He would not admit that he was afraid of a child, even one with my history, and he took pride in the fact that he took me in when no one else would. I did not realize that at first, but he told me later.
“‘No one would have you—that’s why you’re here. Be grateful to me.’ He would say that when he had drunk too much and was thinking about beating me. His drinking loosened his tongue and gave him a boldness that was otherwise absent. The longer I was with him, the more he drank—but it was not because of me. He had been drinking too much for most of his life, and it was the aging and the incumbent failure to achieve success of any kind that encouraged him. As his drinking increased, his work time and output lessened. I took his place many times, taking on the tasks I could manage. I taught myself a great deal and acquired an early skill.”
She shook her head sadly, a distance creeping into her voice. “I was fifteen when I left him. He tried once too often to beat me for no reason, and I fought back. By then, I had matured. I had my magic to protect me. I did not understand the extent of its power until the day I fought back. Then I knew. I almost killed him. I ran from the village and its people and my life, knowing I would never go back. I realized something on that day that I had only suspected before. I realized that I was indeed my father’s child.”
She paused, her face intense, a fierce resolve apparent in her dark eyes. “I had discovered the truth about my father, you see The potter had gotten drunk one too many times and told me. He would drink until he could barely stand, and then he would taunt me. He would say it over and over. ‘Don’t you know who you are? Don’t you know what you are? Your father’s child! A black spot on the earth, birthed by a demon and his bitch! You have the eyes, little girl! You have the stain of his blood and his dark presence’.
“‘Worthless to all but me, so better listen when I tell you to do something! Better heed what I say! Else you’ll have no place in the world at all!’
“So it went, followed each time by a new beating. I didn’t feel the blows much by then. I knew how to cover myself and how to say what he wished to hear so that he would stop. But I grew tired of it. I grew angry at my degradation. On the day I left him, I knew before he tried to strike me that I would resist. When he began to shout at me about my father, I laughed in his face. I called him a liar and a drunk. I told him he didn’t know anything about my father. He lost control of himself completely. He called me things I will not repeat. He told me that my father had come down out of the north, out of the border country where his black order made its home. He told me my father was a conjurer of magic and a stealer of souls. ‘A demon disguised as a man! Him in his black robes! With his wolfs eyes! Your father, girl! Oh, we knew what he was! We knew his dark secret! And you, made in such a perfect image of him, secretive and sharp-eyed! You think we don’t see, but we do! We all do, the whole village! Why do you think you were given to me? Why do you think those people who raised you were so anxious to be rid of you? They knew what you were! They knew you were a Druid’s whelp!’ ”
She took a long, slow breath, looking at him, waiting for him to speak. She wanted to hear his reaction, he could tell. She was hungry for it. But he did not answer.
“I knew he was right,” she said finally, the words a low hiss of challenge unmistakably directed at him. “I think I had known for some time. There was talk now and again of the black-robed men who prowled the Four Lands, the ones who kept their order at the castle of Paranor. Conjurers of magic, all-powerful and all-seeing, creatures more spirit than human, the cause of so much pain and suffering among the people of the Southland. They spoke of how now and again one would pass close by. ‘Once,’ it was whispered when the speaker did not realize I could hear, ‘one stayed. There was a woman seduced by him. There was a child!’ Then hands would lift in a warding motion and the voice would go still. My father. That was who they were speaking of in their hushed, frightened voices. My father!”