The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,25

away.

It’s hard to say, now, how much of this happened and how much was made up later, by them as took Dandrake’s words and kept them. I know this much though: anyone who talks about the right way to live, as if there was only just the one, is blind in one eye or maybe both and is not worth listening to.

I seen Spinner a few times after Molo died. I was one of the three that volunteered to clean and tidy at the tannery, so I was oftentimes in her company. She said she was glad I was there, for she could cry around me without feeling foolish and smile without feeling heartless and unnatural.

“You ain’t nothing of that kind,” I says. “You got every good thing in your heart, Spinner, and nothing else.”

“Nobody’s altogether good, Koli,” she told me. But she hugged me, and I hugged her back, and I think she took some comfort from me. Selfish though I was, I was glad to give it.

Spinner give me something in return too. Right after we spread the room with rue and rosemary for the soul-send prayer (another Dandrake ritual that I did not have no patience for), she opened up a cupboard and handed me a pair of boots that was inside.

“Here, Koli,” she said. “I want you to have these. My da was working on them right up to when he died, and I finished them last night. I can’t think of nobody I’d sooner give them to.”

The boots was lovely things, made of tawny leather that was soft but strong, and finished with stitches so fine you almost couldn’t see them. The laces was leather too, and topped with weighted rings of white iron.

“I can’t take these, Spinner,” I said.

She kissed me on the cheek. “Yeah, you can,” she said. “You got to, for they’re a remembrance of my da, and I know you would want to honour him.”

Which I did, but I knowed even then that I wouldn’t never think of Molo when I put them boots on, but of Spinner’s hand sewing the last stitches.

We walked out of the tannery side by side, and she shut the gate behind us. “It’s so strange,” she said, “to think I’ll only come back here to work from now on, and not to live. It’s like there’s two of me, and one of them is dead.”

I knowed that feeling well enough. I felt the same way after Jud got took away, and it lasted a long time. But life is a lot stronger in us than we think, and always pulls us back even when our hearts is pulling the other way. I told Spinner that, and she said she believed it.

We said goodbye at the door of Rampart Hold, and I watched her go inside.

“Thank you for the boots,” I called, but I said it as the door closed and she didn’t hear me.

And now I think the time is come for me to talk about Ursala.

14

Ursala come to Mythen Rood in Spring and again in Falling Time. In Falling Time, she always come between the yellowing of the leaves and the first snow. That was a wide window, but then she walked a wide range – all across the valley and the hills around it, to Tabor in the east and Burnt Lea in the far west. She even went as far as Half-Ax, back when that road was still open. Nobody ever wandered so far or seen so much – or so I thought then. Every year we thought she might not come back, having met something on the road that was too much for her, but every year she turned up the same as always. “She never yet promised Catrin a time,” my mother said. “She never promises anything. But if you made a wager on her you wouldn’t lose by it.”

I remember what it felt like, as a child, to see her walking up the straight street to the gather-ground. To see them, I should say, for Ursala-from-Elsewhere didn’t come alone. She come with her striding friend, the drudge, which was a piece of tech the like it’s not easy to describe.

The drudge was like a horse, if a horse was made all of metal and didn’t have no head. Four limbs it had, and a wide, rounded body with signs all on it from the before-times. And over that, a great number of bags and harnesses that Ursala had set