Cayfall

Cayfall’s sleeping room was only that:  it had in it a bed, a simple one and not much more than a cot.  Beneath were two low chests, the larger made of rope bound canvas, and the other unembellished wood.  The larger held those few articles of clothing, almost ceremonial, that he only wore when under threat.  His spare britches and two clean shirts were in the basket by the door, keeping company with neatly mended drawers.  The three pegs on the wall were empty most of the time, but held his daily clothing while he slept.  His knee length sleeping shirt, he folded beneath the pillow for the day.

The wooden box beneath the bed, rubbed with bees wax thinned with oils of sandalwood and bitter orange, contained those few things of home he could not seem to do without, but did not want to see.  That only one small item within had come with him and all the rest he had discovered in the market made none the less precious to him, or less the cause of pain.

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The girl approaching looked defiant, and beneath that ready to be cowed by any harsh remark.  Her skin announced a farm girl of some stripe, rough weathered even in one so young.  Her hair the blonde of last year’s straw left too long in too many rains said she had not been in the country sun for seasons.

“The girls,” she said, “down to the Feather say that you can read for us that can’t.  And you been made to be and honest one by those who know their letters, too.  It’s said you keep a quiet mouth and don’t spread things you learn around and thin, as some will do.”

Cayfall accepted the packet she awkwardly removed from the little drawstring cache purse tied to her left wrist.  He wondered who had come behind him some time in the recent past, verifying him a fair and honest lettered man.  A girl from Feather’s Tickle would be trusting one of her own.  And he did remember from his second day of sitting dusty on the bare ground outside the market with just his pen and ink and the few sheets of paper he could afford, his first customer, and the sharp-eyed friend who stood behind her.  That one, whose tongue was no milder than her gaze, would be their authority.  He wondered why they came to him.

The package had been sealed with a frugal spot of wax, and bore the marks of having been passed around through many hands to reach its mark

Cayfall looked at the letter, a single sheet of poor quality, nothing he would have produced for a client.  The name, Poppy Churchwell of Burnside, was lettered carefully.  The destination had been the mother house of the Harvest Moon church in Kings Portage, two days away by foot, and two lifetimes away from the Feather Tickle.
She caught his thoughts and said:  I stopped there on the road and sent to tell my mother I was safe.  I never knew until this came did they give her word or not.  The moon women were a foul pack of bitches and threw me out the gate.
Not unlikely if she had no money for their hospitality, but more violent than their usual reaction.  The letter seemed unopened, perhaps the crude paper itself was a message.  He considered that while waiting for permission to break the seal, and when none was forthcoming from his pause and subtle hint, he asked outright:  Will you open it, or shall I?  A courtesy that flustered her.  She blushed, nodded, and gave a gesture with her hand that might have been dismissal of the whole thing.
He opened and silently read the barely legible document, the scrawling of a semi-literate assistant to some backwood priest.  With no explanation or qualification, it proclaimed her anathema, a thief and heretic, and if that were not enough declared her excised from the village register.  Poppy Churchwell of Burnside no longer existed.  Had never been, and could not die in sanctity.  He closed his mind to questions and to sympathy, and read the thing to her.
She stood there through the words, face as bleak as winter dirt, eyes reddening but not giving in to tears, silent to the last flourish of the Harvest Moon priest’s hand.  He wished she had brought a friend along, someone like the whore who might have sent her to him, to catch her if her wobbling knees gave way.  Someone to voice his own thought:  He has no right to do that to her.
But he knew that even though she was newer to this life than even he, she would never doubt the church’s power.
“So it’s over then.”
“They can do what he says, and have,” he told her.  “But this is Kings Town.”  Then he proceeded to explain what had taken him more than a week of patience, careful questionings, and no small amount of informal labor in absence of money for bribes.  But learned, he had, and thoroughly.  Poppy laughed and hurried off, clutching the despised thing that would be her proof to Kings Town’s civil register that she did, indeed, exist.  The tax roles cared not one speck for theology.
She came back later, embarassed that she hadn’t paid, but beaming.  “You see, I’m not a thief,” she said.  “It was a set of penitant’s robes the churchman gave me when I went to ask what being one of them was like.  He took my own good clothes, skin out and sold them to the ragman, and set me to working in the kitchen.  Then he wanted things from me come night that had nothing to do with churches.
“Now, if I do the same, I do it without scrubbing pots, and for a living wage.
“You did not tell me that the town would let me have a name I picked out for myself.  I was struck almost dumb when that register woman—woman—asked me how I wanted myself styled here.  She had to tell me what that meant.”
“And did you give yourself a new name?”
“Well, I stayed with Poppy, or I wouldn’t know someone was calling me to meals, so to speak.  But you know at the Feather they will call us after birds?  The Missus says I mind her of a sparrow, for all I’m not so small, and I like that.  I could see myself an old lady with that name.  So you can write down on your ledger that you read a letter for Poppy Churchwell and wrote back an answer from Poppy Sparrow.