Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [58]
When we came back from the mine that night, Diamonda's fever had broken and she met us at the door. If she had seemed a broken flower beside our hearth, she towered above us now, no longer a touchable goddess, but bright and inaccessible as truth.
"Bless you all," she said, her hair freshly combed and braided down her back. She turned to Ferin with a smile that twisted the innards of every man in the room and struck poor Ferin dumb. As she talked, he could no longer look the sun in its face and instead stared trancelike at his boots. "The soup you brought me this morning has worked wonders, Little Physician. For, as you can see, I'm quite recovered." She lifted the hem of her skirt as if it were a ball gown and spun around the room.
Her dance and the slice of thigh it revealed left us dizzy; no one could think of a response more clever than to moan and sigh as if we ourselves had fallen sick. "I wanted to fix you a feast to repay your kindness, but I am afraid all I could find was potatoes and cornmeal."
She chattered happily as she led us to the table. She had only covered it with a cloth, but somehow it looked different—more precise, more to be reckoned with than it had ever seemed before. There were eight places set, and she escorted each of us to a seat as if we were noblemen attending a banquet. "Here's your place, Good Doctor Ferin. And this chair's for you, Rowan. Now, Sir Dynll, if you will be so kind. And Corwyn. And Gwiffert. Here, Lord Timias. And you here, Fair Erin."
Dynll was the first to come to his senses. "How," he asked, "did you remember all our names?" His forehead, broad and corded with veins, wrinkled like a beggar's belly. His eyes misted with admiration.
She laughed. "How do you think I could ever forget them? Night and day while I was sick, I said them over like a cate-chism."
I sank into the chair she had pulled back for me. "Fair Erin," she had called me. I was torn between hope and humiliation. Was she singling me out for a joke? I looked at my brothers, their swollen heads bobbing and gleaming in the lamplight. Was I, last born of seven freaks, the most freakish? Of the distorted carnival masks turned like dark flowers toward her brightness, was mine the most hideous of all?
Warily, I studied my Diamonda as she filled each plate with the pebbly pancakes she had coaxed from our potatoes and meal. Her eyes shone with pride and good intentions; there was no hint of the disgust that had flashed across them when we met. And her lips? They were parted in a smile, full as a child's and as impossible not to return. They exonerated her completely.
She had spoken without malice. But did that mean, I wondered late into the night while the others slept, that I was actually not hard for her to look at? I had seen the children at Genfall Fair whisper and draw back, tiny rosebuds closing all along my way. I myself had stirred my reflection in a stream, frothing the water until the shards of face under my hand could have been anyone's, even a normal man's. I knew better than to hope that she found me handsome or fine-featured. But still, alone with the sort of timid dream that springs to life only near sleep, I thought perhaps Diamonda might have found me a well-turned dwarf!
It was weeks before she trusted us with her secret, weeks that seem now the gentlest of preludes, idle days free from whispers and bolted doors. It was then that I took Diamonda ice fishing in the pond that lies past Fairny Caves. While the wind of envy rattled