Motherwine

By the time the shouting started, I had already brought the good glasses down from the top shelf.

That is the sort of thing one learns after twenty-two years behind a tavern counter. Men who intend real violence do not announce it. They grow quiet, make room in their shoulders, and stop looking at one another directly. Men who are still shouting may yet be turned. On that winter evening I had six wool merchants from Harth at the center table, four drovers from the east road near the hearth, and enough old weather in the room to sour everyone’s manners before supper was served. All it took was one careless remark about short measures and mountain breeds, and suddenly benches were scraping, fingers were jabbing, and every man in the room had remembered a grievance older than the snow outside.

My daughter Lysa looked to me from the kitchen door, flour to her elbows and worry plain on her face. I gave her the small nod that meant she should stay where she was. Then I turned, reached into the locked cabinet beneath the casks, and brought out the dark green bottle I had been saving for Midwinter. Even before I set it on the counter, the nearest patrons had seen the seal and gone quiet enough to notice it. The Finest of Motherwine carried that effect all by itself. The bottle was long-necked and dustless, the glass thick with that soft old sheen good cellars give to treasured things. The wax seal bore the mark of the western terraces, where the mothervines are said to sink their roots through three generations of stone before anyone dares cut them back. I had bought the bottle eleven years earlier from a vintner who swore it had turned a border council away from war, though vintners say many things after the second cup.

“Master Deren,” one of the merchants said, half offended and half distracted, “this is no time for ceremony.”

“It is exactly the time,” I told him, and I meant it. Motherwine is wasted on cheerful company. Any ordinary red can accompany laughter. The old vineyards make Motherwine for the hour when anger has ripened too fast and people are looking for a reason to call it righteousness. I took my best knife, cut the wax, and worked the cork free in one slow pull. The room filled at once with the scent of black fruit, cedar, damp earth, and something gentler beneath it that I have never found a proper word for. Some say it smells like the kitchens of childhood, others say the first summer rain after burying someone you loved. I have poured it for enough people to know it does not smell the same to everyone, only that it always finds the softest place a temper forgot it had.

Nobody sat down when I first began to pour, but nobody moved closer to a fight either. I filled one glass and handed it to Orun Pell, who had started the worst of the shouting and who had a face built for stubbornness. He frowned at the wine as though I had insulted him with hospitality, yet he took the glass because refusing a host in a full room is its own kind of surrender. Across from him, Jaska of the east road still held his jaw set hard enough to crack teeth, so I poured for him next. When the first two had tasted, the rest came in silence, each accepting a glass with the solemnity of men who did not wish to appear curious.

The change was never as dramatic as stories make it. Motherwine does not charm the mind or empty a man of his will. It only loosens the knot pride pulls tight. That evening I watched it happen as I always do: shoulders lowered by degrees, breath slowed, the hard little pauses between words softened just enough to let thought arrive before insult. Orun took a second swallow and stared into the bowl of his glass as though it contained news from far away. Jaska sat down first. One of the drovers laughed under his breath at nothing in particular, then seemed surprised to hear himself do it. By the time I finished pouring for the room, the merchants had remembered they were exhausted, the drovers had remembered they were hungry, and everyone had rediscovered the embarrassment that follows an honest glimpse of one’s own foolishness.

It was Orun who finally spoke, though his voice had lost the brittle edge it carried a moment before. “My mother kept a plum tree behind her house,” he said, still looking at the wine. “Every year she swore the birds took the best fruit, though she never once covered it with netting.” The remark had no obvious connection to wool measures or mountain breeds. That is another thing Motherwine does well: it guides men away from the speeches they had prepared and toward the truths beneath them. Jaska rested both forearms on the table and gave the smallest smile I had seen on him all winter. “Mine threw a spoon at my father when he came home roaring,” he said. “Missed him every time until she meant it.” The room laughed then, properly and with relief, and the danger went out of it like smoke leaving a chimney.

Later, after the merchants and drovers had eaten from the same pot and begun trading stories instead of accusations, Lysa came to stand beside me while I corked what remained of the bottle. “Is that the magic of it?” she asked in a whisper. “Does it make people kinder?”

I looked across the room at men who had been one hard word away from splitting each other’s lips and who were now arguing over whether plum preserves keep better with cinnamon or clove. “No,” I said. “It reminds them they already know how.”

She considered that with the seriousness of the young. Outside, the wind scraped sleet across the shutters. Inside, the hearth burned low and steady, and the tavern sounded again like a place meant for living.

I put the bottle back in the cabinet with less wine in it and more value than before. The Finest of Motherwine had done what it always did at its best. It had not ended disagreement. It had simply made room for people to remain human while having one.