Skin Read Online Free Page A

honourable war.’
    ‘But can we win such a war?’
    Llwyd paused. ‘We will win it if the Mothers desire it.’
    ‘We will win it if our armies are strong enough,’ said Fraid.
    I looked to her. It was not her way to speak so irreverently.
    Llwyd frowned.
    ‘Forgive me,’ Fraid sighed. ‘It is only my worry speaking. But I cannot share your
good faith, Journeyman. The messengers have long spoken that the fool Emperor Claudius
searches for glory. The Romans are awaiting the right moment to strike, and this
time they will not allow themselves to fail.’
    As I dried Fraid’s feet, I could not tell if it was her words or Beltane nerves that
made my belly clench. I loosened her night braid, setting her dark hair tumbling
down her back. As I retied it, the pulse in her neck throbbed under my fingers.
    ‘You speak freely in front of this girl.’ Llwyd stared at me.
    ‘She can be trusted,’ Fraid said. ‘What do you think, Ailia? How will we fare under
another Roman attack?’
    My mouth fell open in surprise. I knew nothing of statecraft or the arts of war.
I could not read omens in the night sky or the spilled innards of a slain lamb. I
shook my head. ‘I don’t know.’
    Fraid laughed. ‘Of course you don’t. It is festival eve, not the time for such questions.’
She turned to Llwyd. ‘I will speak on this with the council when the fires have burned
down.’ She held out her fingers to be cleaned and I gathered my sticks and brushes.
It was a mark of shame for nails to be ragged or dirty and I was the only one she
permitted to tend them.
    Fraid was bold in keeping me as her attendant. She chose me because she liked my
touch and she said that, of all the girls, I was the most at ease with a woman of
power.
    I was fortunate beyond words. Privileged in ways others without skin can only dream
of.
    Why was it not enough?

    I walked down to the well near the southern gate, murmuring thanks to the Mothers
before I cast my bucket into the long, dark drop.
    The passage from womb to world was only half a birth—the body’s birth. Our souls
were born when we were plunged, as babes, into river water, screaming at the cold
shock of it, given our name and called to skin.
    Deer. Salmon. Stone. Beetle. The North wind. Skin was our greeting, our mother, our
ancestors, our land. Nothing existed outside its reach.
    Beyond skin there was only darkness. Only chaos.
    Because I was without skin I could not be plunged or named. I was half-born, born
in body but not in soul. Born to the world but not to the tribe. I could never marry
lest skin taboos were unknowingly betrayed. Deer did not marry well to owl. Owl to
oak. At Ceremony I had to be silent, and keep to the edges. For where would I stand?
What would I chant?
    I lived with these losses, but the one that hollowed my chest was that I was not
permitted to learn. All learning began and ended with the songs of skin. I ached
to learn. Weaponcraft, oak-lore, the knowledge of the stars. I hungered for the poems
that brought shape to this world of earth and water—the hardworld—and mapped the
spirit places of the Mothers’ realm. Poems that told us what had come before, what
made a life right and true.
    I pulled up the bucket brimming with water from deep in the mountain.
    When Fraid gave me my freedom, I would find my family. I did not know how, but there
would be a way. I would find my birthplace, my kin and my skinsong, and then I would
be able to learn.
    Then I would be born.

We eat enough, but pay fines if our belts become too large.
    We couple freely, but never with force.
    We observe the rise and set, the wax and wane, the winter and summer.
    What we take from the forest, we give back.
    ‘S ALT FOR THE grain cakes. Mustard.’ Cookmother called out the list for market as
she fossicked through the pots crammed on the shelves and floor. She was always promising
to tidy her stores but never did, and refused to let anyone else. ‘Honey, of course.
Not the watered-down sap