The Tale of Oriel by Cynthia Voigt Page B

greasy white curtain. Then she seemed to see the fire, as if she hadn’t known it was there. She pushed herself up, her hand like a claw on his shoulder, picked up the netful of fish and dumped it all onto the flames.
    The fire hissed. Smoke rose. Fish lay like seaweed over the fire. There were no coals yet, to burn on beneath the layer of fish. The fish hadn’t been gutted. There wouldn’t be much eating here, unless you had a taste for undercooked ungutted fish.
    â€œLet me show you my babies,” the old woman said. “Both of you, good lads both, come—little birds in the nest, my little birds in the nest where they are safe—” As she spoke, she got down onto her hands and knees and pulled out from under the bed a long flat wooden box, covered with a blanket.
    â€œHush now. You must be quiet for now they sleep. All the pretty little birdies, asleep.”
    Oriel bent down, looking over one of her shoulders. Griff stood at the other. Kneeling beside the box, she folded back the blanket.
    A row of sixteen bundles lay in it, each one wrapped tightly around with cloth, each about the size of a six-month shoat. The old woman reached in and picked one up, cradling it in her arms.
    The doll-baby she cradled crackled in her embrace, like a straw mattress. Some of the doll-babies were formed from branches, he saw, and some from field grass, and some—he averted his eyes—looked like human babies, only old and dried up like salted fish. Over the old woman’s bent head, his eyes met Griff’s.
    â€œForty-one winters hang off my shoulders now,” the old woman said, her face turning from one of them to the other. “Oh but there was a time . . . I birthed my first babe when I was fourteen summers. He was to have my man’s basket shop, this son of mine, and the tools, and the withy brakes down by the river, all was to be his when he grew. But he got the summer fever, but there were other sons by then, to have the shop and tools and learn the weaving ways, but one went to be a soldier for Matteus and one to Karle and then, you see, the soldiers would come and bring their armies behind them, and they took the girls. So I hid my babies, and my man built this hiding place for them, this nest. You see them? They never give a peep. They know, my babies, they know this world. Or course, after my man left— He grew tired of the babies, the way men do. And I couldn’t stay in the town, with my babies. And they carried me out here in a cart, and gave me this house so that when the armies come south from Celindon there will be warning to Selby. They bring me my food, too. I’m old now. But I used to be—thirteen summers, and I was as young as you, a lass to your lads, and my breasts were round and white and sweet as moonflowers.” She pulled the doll-baby in close to her chest. “She’s safe now, from all of you,” the old woman said, hunched there.
    Oriel told Griff, “Something must be done. Something, about this.” He didn’t know what he meant, but he felt it strongly. There was a fire in his heart. He didn’t know what he might do, but he felt—like wings spreading out underneath him, for flight—that he was the man who might do it. “Something.”
    Griff understood him.
    The old woman put the doll-baby back in place, folded the blanket back over the box, and pushed it back under the bed, with so much grunting that Griff and Oriel knelt beside her, to help. The wooden box scraped against the wooden floor, like bone against bone. Then she returned to the fire. She plucked at the fish. The top layer she dropped into a bucket, but those beneath she piled onto a wooden platter. “Eat,” she said. “I must eat to keep my strength up, to keep the watch,” she explained. “How did you get here?” she asked. “I watch the woods.”
    â€œWe came by boat,” Griff told her.
    They