to pay for that insult,” Fer said.
Again, Catrin didn’t offer no answer. Her eyes was still on me, with that same hard look in them. “So here we’ve got a key that belongs to Jemiu,” she said. “And you used it to steal from us. If we were minded to, we could arrest your mother too and call it conspiracy.”
“What’s conspiracy?” I asked, my voice going to a rat squeak again.
“It’s when bad people come together to do a bad thing. It might be two people, like you and your mother. Or four, if Athen and Mull was in it too. Was they, Koli?”
“No!”
“Was anyone?”
“No! No! I come on my own, Dam Catrin. I done it on my own. They didn’t even know until the wedding. You seen their faces! You got to know it’s true!”
The lantern flame guttered. Catrin paused a moment to tap the glass, knocking a grain of soot off the wick, and it went up straight again. She kept on looking at me the whole time she done it.
“I’d like to think so, Koli,” she says. “This is a bad enough business as it is, with just you having to abide our judgement. I’d hate to draw any more in if it can be helped. You understand me?”
I nodded again, though I guess I didn’t understand at all. Why had she said that about my ma and my sisters if she didn’t mean to do no harm to them? It seemed cruel, when she had not been cruel up to then.
“One more question, Koli. Not the last one, but the next to last. Do you know what a faceless man is?”
I opened my mouth, but no word come out. Of course I knowed it.
So I knowed what was to become of me. And though it was not death, it was as near to death as didn’t make no difference.
“I see you do,” Catrin said. “Listen to me now, and mark me. Nobody has come looking for you this whole time, because they thought you was already gone. The story we told was that Fer got a better look at that music player when you was walking to the mill alongside of her, and she seen it for what it was. She knew it was tech that had been ours, and was not found but stolen. So then she tasked you with how you come by it, and you run away. You got to the grass-grail before she could stop you. She might have ordered Mardew to strike you down with the cutter, but she forbore to do it, and through her mercy you got away. And that was the last anyone seen of you, though we sent out some searchers the day after, and the day after that. Wherever it is you went to, it don’t seem likely you’re coming back, for if you did it would be to face a trial and a whipping at the very least.”
She stopped to let that sink into me. I knowed at once it was the truth, and the pain of it went all through me. That everyone thought that of me – that I was a thief and a coward and a liar and every other bad thing you could think of. It may seem strange to you, that I could care so much what people thought of me with my life still hanging like that grain of soot in the lantern, half in and half out of the flame. But I did care, and hot tears come into my eyes with the shame of it.
For it was mostly true, what Fer told the village. I did steal the DreamSleeve. And I did stand up in front of everyone at the wedding and say I found it in the woods. So thief was right, and liar was right, and I guess coward was right too since I knowed what I knowed and never spoke it.
“So that’s the story,” Catrin says. “And yet here you are. Your family’s living shame and a problem we got to manage.”
“It’s your family’s shame we’re talking about though,” I answered her through those tears. “If you got a sense of shame left to you. You Vennastins set yourself over everyone with tricks and stories, and then you—”
Catrin give me a mighty slap right across my face. The bitter blood taste in my mouth let me know she split my lip with that slap. There wasn’t no anger in her face though. What she