The Forest at the Edge of the World (42 page)

Heth slammed the door.

“And they thought our father was the idiot,” he mumbled as he fell back into bed.

---

It took Dormin almost two weeks to get back from where he started, reaching the village by the middle of Harvest Season, just before the Festival. First he finished out the week removing rubbish in Idumea, then told his supervisor he was quitting. He travelled by night along the rivers, avoiding other loners also trying not to be noticed. Eventually he found himself at the small house that sent him. It was before dawn, but he knew he was expected to knock on the back door, no matter the hour.

A few moments later it opened up to reveal a small, middle-age man blinking sleep out of his narrow black eyes. They popped open when he saw who stood there.

“Come in, come in!” he said quickly, pulling Dormin into his small kitchen. “Are you safe? Have you been seen?”

Dormin smiled at the man who seemed genuinely happy to see him. “I’m fine and safe, Rector Yung. No one recognized me.”

Rector Yung looked up at the ceiling. “Thank you!” he called as if the Creator lived in the attic.

“Who is it, dear?” a woman’s voice came from behind a partia
lly closed door.

“Our wandering lamb, my love!”

“Dormin’s back? Is he all right?” She sounded just as Dormin always thought a mother should: pleasantly worried.

“I am, Mrs. Yung,” he called back. “I’m sorrow to bother you so early.”

“Not at all!” said a cheerful voice. “Let me start breakfast. I’ll be right out.”

“Come in, son. Tell me everything!” Rector Yung led Dormin out of the kitchen and to a small sofa in the gathering room.

Dormin sat down. “I saw him, but Rector, I failed. He wouldn’t even take it.” He pulled his pack off his back and retrieved the copy of The Writings the rector had given him almost a season before.

“Ah, well. We had to try, didn’t we?” The rector took back the book as he sat next to Dormin. He ran his fingers through his black hair speckled with white, as if remembering he hadn’t yet combed it that morning. “I suspec
ted it was a long shot, but like feeding an abandoned puppy, sometimes we have to try again and again until it finally accepts the milk that will sustain it.”

“Well, the puppy hates me,” Dormin exhaled. “Always has. And I didn’t do much to
win him over, either. He’s always been so arrogant, so annoying . . .”

Rector Yung patted him kindly on the back. “Siblings have a way of recognizing our most sensitive points, then stabbing at them, don’t they?”

“Yes!” Dormin groused. “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have let him control me like that, and for a while I did all right. It’s just that . . . I failed. I lost my temper, but I
did
tell him what you said to tell him.”

“And how did he respond?”

“By showing me the door,” Dormin groaned. “You said it would make me feel better. I must have said the words wrong, because it didn’t work.”

“The words ‘I love you’ do indeed have power, but not the kind I think you’re expecting. Trust me, Dormin—someday you
will
be glad you said them. At least you’ll know that he heard them once from you.”

“Whatever you say, Rector,” Dormin said wearily. “You’ve been right about most everything else.”

Yung chuckled. “Well, thank you for that enormous display of faith, son.”

“Sorry. So
now
what do I do?”

Rector Yung looked at him in the muted light of the dawn, the sky beginning to lighten and tinting everything a pale orange, matc
hing the dozens of pumpkins growing around the rector’s small home. “Now, you will eat some breakfast, then take a very long nap in our guest room—”

“I mean, with my life!” Dormin slumped against the sofa. “Re
ctor, I took work as a rubbish collector! Me, the son of King Oren, the descendent of all the kings, removing rubbish!”

“And that was the noblest work anyone in your family line has done in six generations, Dormin,” Rector Yung declared.

“Ha!” Dormin scoffed. “Whatever. I have no skills, Rector. The tutors I had as a boy—I realize now they never told me anything true. Merely more rubbish. Maybe that’s why I was good at removing it. My supervisor even said I had a
knack
,” he shuddered. “Said in maybe five or six years, with ‘consistent performance’ and ‘continued perseverance’ I could become a head remover,” he said dismally.

Yung swallowed. “Head
what?
”

“Removing
trash,
Rector. Not
heads.
No, I haven’t joined my great grandparents’ killing squads, although who knows—maybe that would have been the only
other
thing I could be successful at.”

Rector Yung patted him on the arm. “Dormin, you have r
emarkable skills. You’ve been gone for nearly a season getting by on your wits, finding yourself work, keeping yourself from being discovered, and . . . where was it that you finally found your brother?”

“In the dormitory. Command School,” Dormin said dully. “Stopped by my aunt’s and there was a message for me about him.”

Yung blinked in surprise. “Did you get
in
to the dorms?”

Dormin nodded. “Snuck in at night. Watched the guards for a while to time their routes. Talked to Sonoforen—
Heth
, as he now calls himself—then snuck back out again.”

“And no one but your brother saw you?”

“I guess not.”

Yung breathed out. “Remarkable skills, indeed! Dormin, do you realize how hard it is to get in and out of the Command School do
rmitory? To be on campus and not be stopped?”

“No one cares about rubbish men,” Dormin explained. “I fi
gured that was the best way to slip in and out.”

Yung had a smile tugging at both ends of his mouth. “
Very
remarkable, Dormin. Sometimes our skills lie in what we’ve learned, but other skills are natural. I think we’ve found your natural ability.”

“Great,” Dormin rolled his eyes. “I’m good at taking out the rubbish and sneaking in to talk to my brother who cares nothing for me. What’s the point, Rector? I know you keep telling me this life is a test, but I’m failing it. I’ve got no more family—at least, none that cares about me—no friends, and no one that would even notice if didn’t exist. In fact, I can think of one or two older men who’d be happy to hear I was no longer alive so I won’t pose any threat to their rule. I just take up space, Rector. I’m even a waste of
that
space. I’m rubbish, too.”

Rector Yung couldn’t help himself. He leaned over and e
mbraced Dormin.

Dormin’s
chin trembled, but finally he put his arms around the rector and squeezed him back.

“You are a son of the Creator, Dormin,” Rector Yung whi
spered, “and that’s far more significant than being descended from some old kings.”

“Thanks,” Dormin murmured.

Rector Yung released him a moment later. “You’ve lived such a narrow existence that you simply don’t know all there is to know. Well, I know of something you
can
do, something amazing to match your remarkable skills. But I warn you, this may
take some time.”

“Time is what I’ve got plenty of, Rector,” the young man mu
mbled. “No gold or silver or home or food or purpose, but plenty of time.”

“Time is the most valuable gift the Creator gives us, Dormin. Trust me.”

He shrugged. “So what can I do?”

“You will stay with us, Dormin, as our hired hand,” Yung d
ecided. “No one here knows you or your heritage. We can say you’re our nephew. As scruffy as you appear right now, not even your mother would’ve recognized you. You can work for us, we’ll feed and house you, and during our evenings, I’ll teach a few things. Things you’ve never imagined. But how long this takes depends on your response to one question.”

             
Dormin eyed the rector suspiciously. “All right. I guess I would be foolish to reject your offer.”

“If ever you don’t want to continue, Dormin, you are free to leave,” Yung assured him. “I’m not forcing you, just giving you an option. You’ll not be a prisoner in
my
house.”

“A
prisoner,
” Dormin whispered with growing dread. “How did you know about that?”

“Your family may think they kept quiet the fact that for three generations they enslaved their servants, but Dormin, word has way of trickling out of even the most tightly kept houses,” Yung whi
spered back. “Just know that I know, and I’d never treat you in such a way.”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Dormin said apologetically. “And I’m grateful for the offer. Actually, I can’t think of anywhere I’d r
ather be than with you and Mrs. Yung. She makes the best biscuits.”

“That she does!” Rector Yung said, sniffing the air that was a
lready filling with the scents of breakfast.

“So,” Dormin said, clapping his hands on his legs. “What’s your question?”

Rector Yung studied him. “Dormin, what color is the sky?”

“Blue,” he answered automatically. He didn’t even glance out the window at the blazing orange that leaked into the room, tingeing everything around them in a carroty hue. “Everyone knows that.”

Rector Yung glanced out the window at the ignored evidence and sighed.

“Dormin, you’re going to be enjoying my wife’s cooking for a
very
long time. But that’s all right. That’s why we’re here.”

---

A full moons’ period after his brother’s late night visit, Lieutenant Heth left his last class, marched out onto the greens of the campus, and over a slight rise at the edge of it. The cool Harvest Season air showed his breath as he walked. A few minutes later he strode down the gentle hillside and over to the massive Administrative Headquarters. He kept his cap down low over his eyes, marched up the white stone stairs, and through the grand entrance doors.

The last time he did that, he had a butchering knife in his hands and a flock of guards on his tail. Today no one thought twice about another young man in a uniform entering the Headquarters.

He walked past the old gold and leather throne still on display and proceeded towards a large outer office. He paused at the desk and nodded to the two men in red jackets.

“Lieutenant Heth, sirs.”

One checked the ledger. “He’s expecting you, Lieutenant. Go right in.”

Heth turned towards the large double doors, opened them, walked through, and shut them behind him.

“A much better entry than six moons ago. Sit down, Heth,” Chairman Mal nodded to a seat in front of him.

Heth sat obediently in the chair he occupied back in Planting Season and waited.

“Normally I would begin by quizzing you on some of your past exam material,” Mal explained, “but you’re not a typical officer-in-training, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Dormin came to see you, didn’t he?” Mal casually sprung on him. “About a full moons ago?”

Heth’s
mouth dropped open. “Uh, yes . . . yes he did. How did you know—”

Mal clasped his hands in front of him. “I know all kinds of things, Lieutenant. Why didn’t you tell me?” His tone turned sharp.

Heth swallowed. “It wasn’t a good visit, sir. He wouldn’t have been interested in what you could offer him.”

“Are you sure?” Mal asked harshly.

Heth nodded and answered swiftly, “Yes sir! He was trying to give me a copy of The Writings. Wanted me to read them.”

Mal pulled a face. “The Writings?
Hm. That’s too bad,” he reluctantly admitted. “He had a good mind. Could have used him.”

Heth shifted uncomfortably, having been under the impression that
he
was the one with a “good mind.”

“Did he question you about your new position?”

“He did. I told him that my great-grandmother left me the gold to pay for Command School.”

“And he believed that?”

“He did, sir.”

“Good. Did he ask why you were here?”

“Yes, sir. Told him I had nothing better to do.”

Mal squinted. “And his response to that was . . .”

Heth shrugged. “He believed it.”

“Coming from you, I suppose it’s not unexpected.”

Heth wondered if he had just been slighted. “When he left, he said he didn’t know if I would ever see him again.”

“Where does he live, Heth?”

“I . . . I don’t know, sir,” he confessed.

Mal leaned forward. “Do you recall that I asked you specifically to find out where he lives if ever you saw him again?”

“You did, sir.” He gulped.