Peaceweaver by Rebecca Barnhouse

way and she found herself sinking to the ground, but someone grabbed her elbow and hauled her up. Men came running—guards, she thought, but she couldn’t seem to focus—and a hand took her other elbow, squeezing it so tightly she would have slapped it away if the world had still been real. But it wasn’t, and the pain in her arm was just another sensation she couldn’t interpret, any more than she could comprehend why her body wouldn’t stop shaking.
    She knew enough to recognize the gate when they marched her through it. When she next opened her eyes, she was in the hall, surrounded by images that resolved themselves into people, a whole group of them. She felt as if she were a small child trapped in a press of grown-ups, theirwool garments cutting out light and sound, or as if she were lost in a forest so thick that fir branches pressed into her body. Only fir branches wouldn’t reek of blood, would they?
    There were voices, voices so loud they hurt her head, and then a finger pointed at her, jabbing toward her face. She sank to the floor again, and again she was yanked upward. Why was she here? She couldn’t remember.
    Then the pain in her elbow stopped and a gentle arm slipped around her and a scent she knew and loved filled her nostrils. Her head fell to her mother’s shoulder, and even though she didn’t hear the words her mother was saying, relief washed around her as if she were waking from a nightmare. She slipped into darkness.
    When she opened her eyes, she was in her own cabinet bed, carved cats chasing mice in an endless procession around the wooden trim. The bed’s doors hung open and firelight cast shadows on its ceiling. Hild lay silent, listening, wondering. Something had happened, but she couldn’t remember what, or why she was in bed when the fire was still dancing on the hearth. Her head pounded. Had she been ill?
    A movement made her turn. It was her mother, crossing the room to look down at her, her face grave, one finger on her lips, warning her to silence. Why?
    Hild gazed across the floorboards to the loom beside the door. Her loom—she had been working at it when Arinbjörn had come looking for her.
    Remembrance came flooding back, and she looked at her mother. Without thinking, she opened her mouth to speak.
    Her mother’s hand came down quickly, gently, cool fingers covering her lips, quieting her. She held Hild’s eye until Hild nodded that she understood she was to remain silent. Then her mother walked toward the closed door and stood listening. Seeming satisfied, she moved back to Hild, silently pulled the stool to the bedside, and sat, looking into the bed frame as if it were a window into Hild’s world. “Tell me,” she breathed, her finger to her lips again.
    “Arinbjörn,” Hild whispered. “Is he all right?”
    Her mother nodded.
    Hild stared into her mother’s dark eyes, at the golden flecks of firelight illuminated in them, at the creases in the skin around them. “They were going to kill him.”
    Her mother said nothing.
    “I—I knew they were, I don’t know how.”
    Did her mother believe her? Hild couldn’t tell.
    “The red-haired man. His dagger—the blade was poisoned.” Hild blinked in surprise. How had she known that? She didn’t remember knowing it before, but now it was a certainty. The fire snapped and she looked up at the bed’s ceiling, at the twisting pattern, lines interlaced like a slave girl’s braid, carved into the wood. Where they met the trim, the lines turned into cats’ tails.
    Her mother exhaled; it was the loudest sound she’dmade since Hild had woken. “Your grandmother was a far-minded woman.”
    Hild looked at her. Of course her grandmother had been far-minded; everyone knew the stories about her. But what did her grandmother, dead long before Hild was born, have to do with her?
    “Her grandmother was, too. So they say.” Her mother touched the fine wool blanket, smoothing its ridges and valleys into a flat plain. “I’ve