“Leandra.” He caught himself, but the realization of what he’d said only fueled his anger, as if she had cleverly diverted him. Provoked him. After that, almost her every error or act of defiance was equated with something Leandra had done, although he never spoke the name except in anger, because he refused to acknowledge that he had ever had a sister except when too angry to help himself.
Leandra. Her mother.
TWO
A name was almost the only thing she knew of her mother—but the lacuna hadn’t been apparent before her kidnapper had tried to assume the role. And while that was impossible because Leandra was dead, the impersonation lifted the pall on her knowledge and she saw that nothing lay beneath it, nothing of her mother beyond that name, spoken only in anger.
She was to learn nothing more of her parents until she ran away from home at the age of ten.
Running away had become something of a routine by then. Initially it was herself she fled from—part of her believed her uncle’s accusations, believed that she had been responsible for her grandparents’ deaths, and she tried to escape her guilt to no avail. Dymphana was sensitive to her pain, however, and comforted her when Gousier wasn’t around, telling her, “You are not to blame for this misery, and you mustn’t think that you are. You’re a little girl. You had no experience with such people as tried to hurt you, and those who are older than you ought to have been looking out for you. They should have protected you. Your grandfather knew this, and I think it wore him down. He blamed himself. Your uncle…his way of adjusting is to cast the blame on everyone else. And you are everyone else this time. It is not your fault, child. It never was.” The more times she heard this, the more she accepted it. For a while this was enough to compel her not to hate him for the things he said. But her compliance seemed only to anger Gousier more. When another worker quit and he condemned her to the odious job of cleaning the day’s catch in Fishkill Cavern, she ran away from him. The problem was, there was no place for her to run to. She didn’t dare run to Ningle again, and she knew only a little of the island. She’d long ago been scared off exploring its mysteries, too, with ominous warnings about things that lurked in trees, in bushes, in the dark. Her knowledge of the world was so small as to be nonexistent, and Gousier had only to wait for her certain return in order to effect retribution for her misconduct.
In the past when she’d run away, she had escaped to Tenikemac, where Gousier could always hunt her down. The village in general considered her tainted, contaminated by her association with Ningle and with a family that did business there daily; but most of the villagers overlooked this censure, since most of them did business with Gousier, too. She was, after all, a mere child. They always gave her up when he came looking.
She had two playmates in the village—a girl, Kusahema, and a boy named Tastion, neither of whom at that age would have understood the proscriptions against fraternizing with her. That would come later, or perhaps they were expected to discover it on their own. Within a few years Tastion would prove to be her only friend in that village.
However, on that particular day, she broke the pattern and didn’t flee to the village. Instead she ran to Soter, never imagining that this one element of change would alter the rest of her life.
Soter had taken up residence in an old smokehouse back in the woods, where he lived in relative seclusion. The family—her grandparents—had offered it to him as a reward for having brought Leodora home to them, and thank the ocean they had been alive back then. Her uncle surely would not have let Soter remain on the island.
Soter kept two vats brewing most of the time: His concoctions were always either cooking or fermenting. The main ingredients were fruits he picked himself. She knew that he sometimes went off by himself to the far side of Bouyan and returned days later, dragging bags of fruits behind him. Other items he purchased on Ningle. The product—those quantities he didn’t consume himself, for even then he was prone to imbibe—he sold to Tenikemac. Although they held him in no higher