She had used them no more than once or twice a year in her youth — only when the need was very great indeed. Even now, she did not much use the magic except in small things like her weaving, as the Wise Woman had taught her; the use of it could attract some evil to the user, and by extension, to her people. And so she had never become even so much as a Wise Woman, much less one of the Wizardly kind.
Veikko had also gotten mixed runes, Warrior and Mage. Most boys at twelve would have practically turned themselves inside out to get such runes. He had been calm — so calm! Happy, yes, even content. But also calm and sure. But there were no teachers for either the path of the Warrior or that of the Magician in so small a village — oh, everyone could use weapons, but not with the skill that could be attained by one so rune-marked. And as for Magic — how was she to teach the hard path of the Magic? She only knew the earth-ways, not the Iron-ways. Accordingly, he had waited until he was a fairly skilled warrior by village standards, then went in search of a Warrior Magician to teach him. For that, too, was the way of the Sammi; if a teacher did not come to you, it was up to you to find the teacher. Perhaps so many generations of following the reindeer herds had made them more willing to go great distances in order to obtain a desired goal.
He had left behind not only his mother, but his sweetheart, Kaari — Kaari, the darling of the village, Kaari of the sweet voice and gentle hand, with hair like spun sunlight and the face of a flower. Their parting had been a reluctant one; Veikko would much rather that a teacher had come to him. Annukka loved the girl almost as much as her son did, and would gladly have had her living in the house as a daughter. But Kaari would not hear of it, refused to displace Annukka from the place she had held for so long. “When Veikko returns, we will have a house of our own,” she said with quiet certainty. “I will never displace you, Mother Annukka. This will always be your place.”
Truth to tell, that had pleased Annukka. She had not been looking forward to giving up her room and the big bed to Veikko and Kaari, of having to climb that ladder to the loft every night, nor to eventually having to lose the peace of her working to the wails of babies and the mischief of toddlers. She had made the offer twice more after Veikko left, and had been twice refused with the same gentle courtesy. That made it final by Sammi custom. And so Kaari remained in her father's house — though Annukka did not stint on gifts of her own making for the bride-chest. This cloak, for instance, was intended for Kaari, and besides protection, Annukka was weaving in a wealth of love.
She brushed her hand over the warp-threads and listened to the whisper, like the ghost of a harp-thrum. She gathered to herself the warmth of the sun on her back, the memory of this golden afternoon, and wove that, too, into her cloth.
The sun was westering, and even though the garden was warm and inviting — the earth giving up a scent of rich life, the herbs reminding her with their mingled aromas that she needed to be gathering and drying them — it was time to get more water for dinner, and that was Kaari's job.
It was laundry day as well — also Kaari's job. She liked laundry day; there was something infinitely satisfying about spreading the freshly washed things to dry, although she could do without carrying the baskets of wet clothing up from the edge of the river. Squinting a little against the later afternoon sun, Kaari arranged the wooden yoke over her shoulders, balanced the buckets on the hooks on either end of it and headed for the well at the center of the village. Her mother was too old to be burdened with this now, and her brothers were all at their own work, so that left her. Of course, for Kaari, every trip to the well took twice as long as it did for anyone except the most inveterate of gossips. Everyone had to stop and greet her, so that had to factor into the time she took. And even though it was the last thing she wanted to do on a day already overfilled with chores, she had to stop as well. It was, after all, the polite thing to do. And by now, her parents were more than used to it.
Virtually everything she did that brought her out of the house took more time because of this. And it was all because of her runes. Sometimes she thought that if she heard one more person tell her, “You must be the luckiest girl in the world,” she was going to do something drastic. Scream, anyway. But of course, she never did, because she fundamentally had too sweet a temper. Having runes like hers — well, she suspected that you either had a sweet temper to begin with, or you got one in a hurry, because you had to.
Or else you went to the bad…and that did not bear thinking a bout.
When Kaari was born, her runes were read then and there, because there was a Wise Woman already in the village reading for several older children. It was unusual, but by no means unheard of, for an infant to be read, and since the woman was there, her parents must have thought, “What's the harm?” And at that time, the Wise Woman had pulled a strange face, for three runes had turned up instead of the usual one or two. Hearth, as expected. Also Craft.
But then came the third rune, one that her parents didn't recognize, the one that the Wise Woman pursed her lips over. She told them not to worry about it, and went on her way, with only a single, slightly odd, admonition.
“Don't spoil her.”
Not that they were likely to do anything of the sort. She might have been the baby of the family, but it was a very large family, with many hands reaching for, and many mouths clamoring for, anything that happened to be desirable. Her brothers only considered another sister to be another nuisance. Her sisters already had enough of babysitting to regard the arrival of yet another child with resignation. Kaari had been destined to go through childhood wearing the hand-me-downs of four sisters, mended and re-dyed, turned and turned again, or cut down from much larger garments. Her toys were those her siblings had outgrown. She slept packed in the bed with all four of her older sisters, either too warm in the middle, or hanging on for dear life to her sliver of bed on the edge.
And yet, she had sailed through her childhood with no real difficulty. By nature sweet-tempered, by the gift of the gods a lovely child, the older she grew, the more everyone wanted her around and made a kind of pet out of her, even her siblings. If it was a lean season, people found ways of slipping her tidbits; if the season was bountiful, they still slipped her treats, but always the juiciest apple, the most succulent grape, the most perfect venison pasty. Older children took her with them on adventures or dressed her up like a kind of live doll; younger ones looked at her in awe. And no one thought twice about it.
Not until Kaari came of age and the same Wise Woman read her runes again, did she discover what that third one was. Because it turned up again.
Kaari could still see it, in her mind's eye, the little brown stone, flat, speckled with white, and the strange rune she could not read carved into it and filled with black paint. It had looked so harmless, and yet there was some feeling of portent about it, a heaviness in her chest, the sense that something was watching her.
“This rune,” the woman had said, stirring the stone with her finger. “This rune is Heart.”