Feald — Part 1

“You promised,” whined Elda, squirming as I braided her long, yellow hair.
I pinched her arm, holding the three strands apart with the fingers of my left hand. “Hold still, fish.” The morning cold was making my fingers stiff and uncooperative, and that, added to her usual restlessness, was making her braid crooked.
“You promised me a picnic before the first snows, and Grommedar is white this morning! I saw it when I went out to draw water!”
“I know I promised,” I said. Elda’s eighth year was quickly becoming a year of broken promises, as she saw it. The girl had a memory like a old fir. My mother reminded me often to watch my tongue, but some lessons come slowly.
Elda began to sob dramatically.
“Elda!” I tied her hair off with a strip of cloth, and took her shoulders. “Stop that!”
“But you promised!” she cried, turning to face me. Tears hung in her eyelashes, and her lips quivered and pouted.
“And we’re still going,” I said. “But you have to let me pick the day.”
“How about today?” she asked, in a normal voice, tears still glistening on her face.
“You’re impossible,” I said, shaking my head. “Fine, today. But it has to be our secret, yes?”
Elda rubbed her face dry with her sleeve and beamed up at me. “Yes!”
“After I am finished with the bread, I will bring a basket to the copse on the other side of the smithy. We can sit in the meadow, all right?”
“Can I help with the bread?”
“Of course, you can help me as much as you like.” Elda rushed from the room, leaving me wondering just what her ‘help’ was going to consist of. Her household duties, such as drawing water and caring for the chickens, allowed for an impetuousness that didn’t help while waiting for bread to rise. By the time she was large enough to handle a kneading trough, perhaps she would have learned some steadiness.
Truth be told, I felt flattered that Elda still liked to spend time with me, limited though it was. If my father hadn’t told me the night before that he didn’t want us wandering off into the woods alone, I would have made the picnic a grand event, walking out to Elda’s favorite swimming pool for one last time before it grew too cold to dip even our toes into the mountain stream. As it was, the meadow was as far from the house as I dared to venture after Father’s warning. If we could avoid cowpats from Mert Hannon’s herd, we could still have a good time.
The rickety wooden fence around our village served more as a notice that we considered ourselves a settlement than as any sort of barrier. Houses straggled inside or out of it at will, and we often had to fetch chickens from the lower branches of forest trees to save them from the skunks and raccoons that would have loved to feast on them. Bears were rare but exciting visitors, usually brought down by a young spearman and archers working together under the direction of their trainers.
I heard my father’s hammer as I snuck around the back of the house, keeping out of sight of the stables and the open front of the smithy. The basket I took with me as I hopped over the fence was light, holding only some bread and cheese. We would pick wild apples if we could find them, and Elda was sure to insist on looking.
“Feald!” I heard a shriek from above, and looked up to see Elda upside-down on a tree branch, her dress hanging around her ears and her braid reaching nearly to my face.
“I see you!” I said back to her. “But you’d better hope nobody else does, your smallclothes are nearly falling off of you.”
She swung around and used her arms to pull herself up to a sitting position.
“And if you rip that dress, Mother will make you mend it with your own hide,” I added, wincing at the rough bark and broken branches around her, ready to snag the carefully woven material.
Elda ineffectually smoothed her skirts, then climbed down the tree trunk.
“Let’s go!” she said, rushing away toward the meadow and stream just over the hill.
I ran after her, laughing at her enthusiasm.
We spend an idyllic hour in the meadow, teasing the cows and making up to them with bunches of tender willow branches torn from high in the trees, above where they had already stripped the branches clean. Elda fell into the creek, and splashed me mercilessly when I refused to come in with her.
“I’ve got to get back,” I called to her, retreating back to the basket. “Mother will already have had to finish the bread, and I have to finish Drake’s new breeches before he starts running around naked.”
“And then my new dress!” Elda said, rushing wetly up the creek bed.
“Only if you promise me you’ll treat the new one better than you have this one,” I said, frowning at the mess standing before me. “I think we’ll have to wait for you to dry off before heading back.”
It was much later than I had planned when Elda’s dress, still discolored with dirt, was dry enough to make an appearance at home again. I washed the apple juices and dirt off of her face, and rebraided her hair. We trudged back towards the copse to climb the fence. I hoped we could appease mother with the basket of apples, in exchange for leaving her to finish the bread and watch the babies alone. Father would still be working on harness fittings and horseshoes in preparation for harvest, unless we were very unlucky.