Read Online Watersmeet by Ellen Jensen Abbott - Free Book Online

getting breakfast and made her walk in circles until she was drenched in sweat. Stroking his beard, he would mutter things like, “We have a difficult journey, and you are puny and weak like all of your kind.” With a cold look at Haret, Abisina would pick up her pace.
    Hoysta clicked her tongue at Haret when she heard him speak like this to Abisina. “Don’t wear her out!” she reprimanded as she fixed another bowl of her foul soup. “You saw how skinny she was when we first found her. And her journey here through the snow!” Hoysta had explained to Abisina that the closest human village was a four-day journey.
    “That’s four human days,” Haret had interjected. “A dwarf can do it in two days and a night.”
    But Abisina had never remembered anything from those four days, though other memories of her last day in Vranille returned. Did she sleep in the snow? Did she find anything to eat? Did she bother to look? The fact that she still had her feet, not to mention her life, told Abisina that she hadn’t encountered any centaurs. But how had she broken her arm or cut her head?
    As Abisina grew stronger, she helped Hoysta with her work. In the far reaches of the cave, Hoysta bred moles, mice, badgers, and rabbits for food and fur. Now Abisina and Hoysta culled the flocks—smoking what seemed like hundreds of moles in a hollow log; knitting silky rabbit fur into hats, mittens, leggings, and under-shirts; piecing various skins into snug sleeping rolls. They baked batch after batch of flatbread made of root flour, and they mended cloaks—including the one Abisina was wearing when Haret found her. Hoysta chewed leather to a supple softness to make Abisina a new pair of boots.
    Abisina saw plenty of evidence of the “dirty and repugnant” dwarf habits she had heard so much of in Vranille. It was hard for her to watch Hoysta’s warty hands immersed in root flour or her filthy fingers straining pans of badgers’ milk. The voices of the Elders rang through her head: The foul mud-dwellers wallow in their own filth, hiding their ugliness in the ground. It was true that their food tasted of mud, each bite gritty on her teeth; Hoysta’s hands and face were black with dirt; and Abisina had watched both Haret and Hoysta rub their hands in an urn of dirt before eating.
    But after a few weeks, Abisina could not deny that she had more flesh on her bones than she ever did in Vranille, and she was getting stronger. The Elders would not have given the widows half this much food, to say nothing of the outcasts. And the Elders had seen Abisina herself as no better than a dwarf—hadn’t the villagers called her “dwarf-dirty” for as long as she could remember? And eventually, Abisina realized that Hoysta and Haret’s skin was not as dirty as she thought; it was darker. Like hers . And they weren’t washing in that urn of earth before eating; they were thanking the Earth for the gift of roots and animals that sustained them.
    But Abisina still avoided Hoysta’s comforting pats and pulled away from her frequent hugs. She told herself it was because of the dwarf’s musty odor, but she knew she was lying, and her conscience pricked her. Hoysta healed and cared for me, while the people of Vranille refused even to touch me, she berated herself. Only my mother would have cared more for me .
    There were other things Hoysta did for Abisina that reminded her of her mother—and each memory brought a grief that blotted out other thoughts. Several times the old dwarf tried to get Abisina to drink a cup of cool feverfew tea. “Been through a lot, dearie. Drink this and you’ll feel better,” she said, patting Abisina’s hand. But Abisina couldn’t swallow the bitter infusion. As a small child, before she learned to hide her feelings, Abisina had returned to her hut to weep out the pain of the other children’s taunts and tricks. Sina, too, had comforted her with a cool cup of feverfew tea.
    Hoysta’s feverfew did make Abisina