Chapter 4: The Greywater Table

Greywater fed me for three days and would not let me say thank you.

On the third morning I came down to a long kitchen table crowded with people who all wanted to hold my daughter.

An old cook put a bowl of oat porridge in front of me and refused to let me carry it to the table.

"Sit," she said. "You grew a person. Sit."

A girl of about twelve arrived with a stack of clean baby blankets and a knitted hat with ears.

Linnet got passed down the table from lap to lap. By the time she reached me again she smelled like bread.

I had not eaten a meal in a room full of laughing people since I was a child in the servants' wing.

Torin came in from the yard with mud on his boots and sat down across from me.

"You look better," he said.

"I look like I lost a fight with a porch."

"You won the fight with the porch. I saw the hunter's boot." He took a roll from the basket. "The women want to wash your hair."

I touched the brown ends of it. "I washed it yesterday."

"Not properly. The cook will insist."

"Why?"

"She says you smell like a stranger's soap. If you refuse, she'll bring it up at supper for a month."

The old cook pointed her wooden spoon at me from the stove.

So I let three Greywater women march me upstairs to a tub of steaming water with lavender in it.

They poured warm water over my head. They scrubbed hard.

The water ran brown into the tub.

It ran brown for a long time.

I looked down and saw the dye come out in a long dark thread from my left temple.

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