Page 26 of Heart of Snow
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“I was recalling the horrors of the mines.” Not entirely true. “At what age did your mother first send you to work there?”
He cleared his throat. “My mother never sent me. I met the miners after I’d been traveling through the forest and caught a chill. When I knocked on their door, they took me in without question, nursing me back to health. Then I stayed on, not having anywhere else to go.”
“And when did you find your way to the bowyer?”
“Soon after I left the mines.”
His answers were always so brief. “Does it pain you to speak of your past? You seem reluctant to talk about it.”
“I’m reluctant to be a bore. I can’t imagine how this dull accounting of my life could possibly interest you.”
“And yet it does.”
His sigh stirred the hairs by my ear. “I traveled to Wildungen to look for work with the tradesmen. They each had apprentices already, but the bowyer was kind enough to take me on as an unofficial apprentice, second to his nephew. After the old man’s death, the new bowyer’s fists fell too heavy on me, so I took to the vagrant life.”
“Only to be caught poaching and sent off to war.” I shifted in the saddle, cocking an eyebrow toward him.
“Well, it did take them a few years to catch me.” His impish smile brought back the fluttering in my stomach. “And what is your story? Where did you go after we met at the mines?”
Clearing my thoughts of Friedrich’s grin, I turned forward. “To Waldeck for a time, to live with my father’s cousins, and then I was sent to the Netherlands as a ward of my mother’s brother.” I nibbled my lip as I pondered. “It’s strange being back here. Atfirst, I dreaded it, returning to the place of the plague. Sleeping in the same bed where I slept while my mother and baby sister died—and I fairly with them. I’ve always seen the place as a scene of death and sadness and regret, but being here now, it’s somehow different. There’s still sadness, but now it’s touched with something... sweet.” I murmured the last word.
The pulse of Friedrich’s heartbeat drummed on my back, and I found myself leaning into it. There was a tautness, a buzzing in the air around us that words would only taint, and I held very still, afraid that if I moved, I’d destroy it.
Friedrich seemed to sense it too. He didn’t trouble himself to speak for some time, but when he finally did interrupt the silence, his voice was gruff. “We’re nearing the mining village.”
Chapter 12
Margaretha
We broke out of theforest, chasing the setting sun into a grassy meadowland dotted with half-timbered cabins of wood and white plaster. Friedrich directed me toward one tucked snuggly against the wood-laden hills, indistinguishable from the other cottages save for the strange smell, which struck us before we’d even dismounted. It grew stronger as we approached the cabin door.
Belinda and I covered our noses against the scent of curdled milk and spoiled meat but quickly dropped our arms to our sides when Friedrich lifted his hand to the door. Before his fist met the wood, we heard shouting, then a crash from inside the cabin. Friedrich didn’t bother knocking. Charging through the door, he headed straight for a pair of boys, catching the arm of one boy mid-swing and ducking from the blows of the other. He shouldered himself between the boys and pushed them apart.
“Heinrich, Emil, stop fighting,” Friedrich ordered.
Surprise, then recognition registered on the boys’ faces, and a momentary peace ensued as they both greeted their old friend. But it passed as the older boy began to justify himself in the fight, and the younger defended his part. Other, older voices joined the argument, and I wondered just how many men lived inside this tiny cottage.
While the boys continued their squabbling, I followed Friedrich into the orangey glow of a small, firelit room, nearly tripping on an overturned chair beside the door. Pushing it upright, I carried it around shoes strewn here and there to nest it beneath the dish-littered table. The feet of the chair squealed over the dusty wood floor, echoing in the sudden, conspicuous silence, and I felt the weight of every eye upon me. Doing my best to ignore the dumbfounded stares of the men and boysstanding about the room, I fixed a smile upon my face, but the silence had me shifting between my feet. I gave Friedrich a pointed plea with my eyes.
“Oh, yes.” He moved beside me, announcing to the cabin, “Everyone, this is...” He paused, and I realized we hadn’t made a plan for what name I should take. “Margaretha,” he finally finished. I tensed with the initial surprise of hearing him speak my Christian name. It was startling how much I liked the sound of it on his lips.
“Guten tag.” I curtsied as a young maid should. Gesturing to Belinda still standing beside the door, I said, “This is my friend, Belinda. We’ve come to visit you.”
The miners continued to gape. My cheeks ached with the pain of a forced smile until Friedrich picked up a loose shoe, throwing it to land with a thud against one boy’s chest. The boy startled to awareness.
“Glückauf,” the boy said.
I looked at Friedrich for clarity. “I don’t know this expression.”
He bent his head to mine. “It’s a miner’s greeting. To offer luck in finding veins of ore.”
“Oh.Glückaufto you,” I addressed the young man. “And what is your name?”
“Forgive me,” Friedrich said. “I forgot the introductions. Margaretha,”—I felt a strange invigoration as he said my name again—“our two fighters here are brothers. The ugly one is Heinrich.”
Heinrich picked up another shoe and launched it at Friedrich’s head, but Friedrich ducked in time for the shoe to bash against the plastered wall. It left behind a hand-sized dent, one of many pockmarking the cottage.
