Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar

Instead, she decided that she wasn’t going to get any creative work done, she might as well give the place a thorough cleaning. She did have the very bad habit of leaving things she knew she would want later piled up next to her chair, beside the bed, or on the table. She hadn’t organized the yarn since spring. For that matter, she hadn’t done more than give the place a cursory sweep and dust since spring.

She spent the morning turning things inside out. The floor got a scrubbing, the mattress was turned, aired and the bed remade, the blankets all came down out of winter storage and got a good wash. Every surface got a scouring. She reorganized the yarn properly. She stacked all the rectangles of knitting in order on a little table beside the chair so she could finally sew them together. She went through her clothing, relegating a few things to be given away since they had shrunk or never actually fitted in the first place. She brought in all the dry blankets and laid them in lavender in the blanket chest at the foot of the bed. She looked at the number of knitted tunics she had and decided that her next project was going to be to use up the yarn ends in making another blanket.

By noon, the little cottage was clean, but her temper was still high. She decided that since the wretched Heralds hadn’t let a closed door stop them from pestering her, she was going to finish her interrupted shopping. Serve them right if they turned up again and she wasn’t there.

She was close-mouthed to the point of monosyllabic with the village merchants, but they were used to that. Usually it was because she was, in her mind, still back at her loom. It wasn’t often that her temper was as frayed as it was today. But as she bought her bread and meat pies, her winter squash and her cut oats for porridge, her fruit and her soap and candles, she noticed that the shopkeepers were just as preoccupied as she was.

It was abundantly clear why. The entire village was abuzz with talk about Danet. And now, of course, everyone had suspected the worst of him. Even his own father, who held court in the taproom of his inn, holding forth about how his ne’er-do-well son had been a devil from the day he was born, and how no matter how hard he was beaten, all he did was shrug the punishment off and go and do what he liked.

This much, at least, Marya knew was a lie. Danet’s father had never so much as laid a willowwand to his back. Everyone knew how Danet could charm his way out of any scrape he got into. But Innkeeper Stens brewed the only decent ale and beer to be had in the village and imported the only mead and wine, so no one wanted to nay-say him. And as for the innkeeper, well, he was making sure that memories were being “corrected” by pouring with a freer hand than usual and forgetting to charge now and again.

So the only one in the village today who wasn’t singing the new song was Marya. And of course, everyone remembered that Danet was supposed to marry her. Looks both superior and pitying were cast on her, and plenty of curious ones too. But no one asked her anything. Perhaps they had already heard about the reception that Stefan and the Heralds themselves had gotten. Perhaps the black storm behind her eyes was more obvious than she had thought.

The upshot of it all was that she went back to her little cottage in the same temper that she had left it—and behind that temper was a sinking feeling. This was going to be a prime topic of conversation for the entire winter. And there was not one thing that she could do about it. Until something just as sensational took their minds off it, she’d be gawked at and talked about and whispered over until the thaw and hard work took peoples’ minds off scandal.

She put her purchases away, put the eggs to boil, cleaned out a squash and tucked it into a corner of the fireplace to bake, then stood at her window and found that she was torn between wanting to sit down on the floor and bawl like a child, and wanting to break something. She and her family had always been odd ducks here—the only people whose income came from outside the village, and the only ones who made things that no one in the village could afford. They had always kept to themselves, and when Marya’s father had gone off to be a Herald—

—and had he gone off to be a Herald, after all?—

That isolation had only increased.