Free Words Like Coins by Robin Hobb Page A

taught me was how much water to mix with her rum. And I learned six different places to hide from her when she was drunk. My apprenticeship was the most worthless thing my father ever bought.” Chorly should have taught Mirrifen a hedge-witch’s skills, how to make potions and balms, how to sing spells and how to construct charms to protect crops from deer or make hens lay more eggs. Instead, the hedge-witch had treated her like a servant and taught her only the most trivial charms and tinctures. Mirrifen’s apprenticeship had been spent cleaning the old witch’s ramshackle hut and soothing her disgruntled customers. The old woman had drunk herself to death before she had completed Mirrifen’s training. Chorly’s creditors had turned Mirrifen out of the tumble-down cottage. She couldn’t flee back to her father’s house, for her brothers had filled it with wives and children. She had thought herself too old to wed, until her brother’s wife had told her of a farmer seeking a wife for his younger brother. “Don’t have to be pretty, just willing to work hard, and put up with a man who’s nice enough but not too bright.” 
    Edric was exactly as described. Nice enough, and kind, with the open face and wondering mind of a boy. Being his wife and helping on the farm had been the best year of her life, until the drought descended.
    “A pecksie!” Jami shrieked, jostling her.
    “Where?” Mirrifen demanded, but when Jami pointed, she saw only the swaying silhouette of a tuft of grass. “It’s just a shadow, dear. Let’s go back to bed.”
    “Rats bring pecksies, you know. They hunt rats. My mother always said, ‘Keep a clean house, for if you draw rats, pecksies will follow.’”
    Something rustled behind them. Mirrifen refused to look back. “Come. We’d best sleep now if we are to rise early tomorrow.”
    But when the morning came, Mirrifen rose alone, slipping quietly from Jami’s bed. Since the men had left, she had demanded Mirrifen sleep next to her. Jami was barely nineteen, and sometimes it seemed that her pregnancy had made her more childish than womanly. The blankets mounded over her belly. It couldn’t be much longer. Mirrifen longed for the birth as much as she dreaded it. She’d never attended a birth, and the closest midwife was a half-day’s walk away. “Eda, let all go well,” she prayed and drew the door closed.
    The rat invaders had left their mark on the kitchen. Pelleted droppings and smears of filth marked the rat trails along the base of the walls. Mirrifen seized the broom and swept the droppings out the door. She stingily damped a rag with clean water and erased the rat tracks. Jami was almost irrational about rats now.
    Not that Mirrifen blamed her. The creatures besieged them. No door could be shut tightly enough to keep them out. The ravenous rats gnawed through pantry doors and chewed open flour sacks. They ate the potted preserves, wax seals and all. In the attic, they scampered along the rafters to get at the hanging hams and bacon sides, spoiling what they didn’t eat. They attacked the sleeping chickens on their roosts and stole the eggs.
    Every morning, Mirrifen discovered fresh outrages. And every morning, she struggled to conceal from Jami how precarious their situation was becoming. When the men had left, Drake had quietly told her the stored food should sustain them through the summer. “And by fall, Edric and I will be back, with a pocket full of coins and sacks of seed grain.”
    Brave words. She shook her head and let her work routine absorb her. She woke the fire and fed it.  She set a pot of water to boil, filled the tea kettle and put it on the fire. She now stored the porridge grain in a big clay pot on the kitchen table, with the chairs pulled away from it. She’d weighted the pot cover with a rock. The rats hadn’t gotten into it, but they’d left their ugly traces on the table. Grimacing, she scrubbed them away with the last of the water in the