The Returning (2 page)

“How did you know, that I was only thinking?”

“And not sulking? Mam did used to say it to me too.” Cam ground slowly, using his knees to steady the bowl.

“You grind faster now.” Pin fed more grain for him to mill.

“I'm learning, how to make the left hand do for the right.”

Pin had heard people call Cam a cripple, but a cripple couldn't mill wheat, couldn't lift Pin into the air. “It's people who have to learn
you,
with your one arm doing for both.”

“Clever Pin.”

“Why have I to wear my pattens after tea?”

“Ah,” said Cam, and just as Da had done, he winked.

 

THE WHEAT WAS milled, and Mam had turned it into dough that now sat rising by the fire. Cam paced out the four walls of the cot, picking things up, putting them down again.

“I'll bother Da for something to do.”

“Do that,” said Mam.

“Glad to see the back of me.” Cam spoke in that sort of loud whisper that was meant to be heard.

“Get on with you.” Mam flapped her hands at Cam as he went out the door.

Pin trotted after him—trotted because Cam walked very fast—from cot to shed to terrace. Da was plowing the lower terrace, hot and heavy work. He stopped when he saw them and leaned on the plow.

“You've a very little shadow, for such a great strong fellow.” Da spoke to Cam, but he winked at Pin.

Cam turned, and Pin ran to stay behind him. “I've come to help.”

“I don't need help, lad.” Da's face was red and sweatshiny. “But I could do with a drink. There—no, there, Pin-little. In the shade of the hedge.”

Pin found the flask and lugged it over to Da.

“If you won't have my help,” said Cam, “at least hitch the gray to the plow.”

Da shook his head. “Not that beast. A Lord's horse, that.”

“And I a Kayforl farmer's son.”

“Ah, you rest. You've done enough.”

Cam kicked at the ground with the toe of his boot. “I've done nothing. Nothing. Since I did come home.”

“You fought; you've done enough.”

“Enough for who? For what? To rot the rest of my days?”

Pin trailed Cam back up the hill. She wasn't ready for him, when he whirled about and picked her up.

“Ha! Never caught my own shadow before.” He carried her upside down through the cot door and set her on the floor by the hearth. “I did find a strange-looking sack of flour out there, Mam.”

“Aye. Strange indeed.” Mam was laughing. “Full of weevils, from the way it's wriggling.”

Pin was squirming about on the floor.

“I'm off to the tavern.” Cam unwound Pin's fingers from his ankle. “So my shadow stays here.”

Mam halted in her work and just looked at Cam.

“At least I've something I can do there.” Cam blew her a kiss and left.

 

“SNAIL HUNT TONIGHT,” said Da over tea.

“Da?” Pin asked. “Where is Cam? Ow!”

Edord had kicked her under the table.

Hughar tipped his head back and mimed pouring a drink down his throat. “Glug, glug.” He wobbled his head about and crossed his eyes.

Edord shoved at him. “Get off.”

Da cuffed them both about the ears.

“Not fair,” said Hughar, but in a whisper. “It isn't me at the tav—” Mam was looking knives at him, and that squashed Hughar's impudence.

“I come home from the fighting, and for what?”

Pin jumped. There was Cam, leaning in the doorway. Maybe he had been to the tavern, but his eyes weren't crossed. Pin looked closely.

“More slaughter.” Cam grinned.

Hughar whacked the flat of his hand on the table. “Splat. It's great!” He looked at Pin and ground the heel of his palm against the wood. “Euuw. It's squishing between my fingers. Nyer. Snail guts.”

He reached across the table, fingers wiggling. Slapping his hands away, Pin squealed.

“You do have your pattens on, Pin?”

“Aye Da, but why?”

“Tell her, Hughar.”

“Squish them snails.”

Pin thought of her nice clean pattens, the steel black and shining and the wood scrubbed pale. “Da?” she said. “I do not want to.”

“Fffft,”
said Da. “No better weapon against snails than a small girl in pattens.”

“But—”

“It is them or us, and I did plant those lettuces. They do be mine, they and the barter they get us at market.”

“Right.” Cam opened the door wide behind him and bowed. “Let's hunt.”

Mam got the crock of beer.

“Do not waste it on pests,” said Cam. “I'll be rid of it for you, if that is what you are wanting.”

She took the saucers from under the teacups, and Da held the torches in the fire until they took and burned. He gave them to the twins to hold.

“Don't you two set yourselves afire.”

Outside, the sky was big; black at the edges where it touched the earth, starlight-bleached in the middle. The house sat on the side of the hill, both house and hill round and low and dumpy. In the daylight you could see the little lumpen hillocks that lifted all across the valley, each with its round cot and terraces, all of them together making up the village of Kayforl. But now only the lamps showed, like yellow, earthbound stars.

Down on the terraces of the holding, the fruit trees lifted their leafy fingers high and brushed them, hissing, together. Shadows hung under the boughs, but they would not pounce tonight, not with Cam here, and Da and Mam and the boys with the torches. Pin walked at Mam's side, her pattens clumping loud on the ground. It was fun being scared when everyone was out there, not like it was going to the outhouse on her own.

Hughar and Edord were already in among the lettuces, throwing snails on the ground and squashing them. Their feet went
stomp, stomp, stomp
and the snails made small, wet cracks and were no more. Mam was scooping shallow holes in the ground and setting the saucers in them, and Cam and Da went around filling each one with beer.

“One for me,” said Cam, and swigged from the bottle. “One for thee.” He held the crock out to Da. For a moment Da stood and glared at Cam, then he took the crock. “Did you not wet your whistle enough, earlier?”

“Bah.”

“By all the great gods, you're a thorny one.”

“What would you know about it, Old Man?”

Shaking his head, Da filled a saucer with beer.

Cam shrugged. “And one for they.”

Then they moved to the next saucer to do it again, and the next and the next. Pin followed them, watching it all under the uneven torchlight.

“Snails like a beer near as much as your brother,” said Da, at length. “Best way to lure them.”

“Tcch.” Mam's voice came out of the dark. “Leave him be.”

“You listen to my mam,” said Cam. “Leave me be.”

 

CAM TOOK PIN riding on his shoulders, under the trees and around. “The Uplanders, they took the old Lord of Dorn-Lannet's castle, and old Lord Garaman himself, like this: Covered both the north and south approaches and stormed it. We'd only half the garrison there, so we had to run up and down that wall”—he climbed up on the orchard wall and trotted the length of it, Pin jouncing like a rag doll—“and down and up it, putting arrows into them. Those at the front, they gave back, but there were always more of them, and they kept coming.”

“They did take the castle, didn't they, Cam?” Pin knew the story, for Cam never stopped telling it.

“That they did, and all of us who lived. The Uplanders were numerous as those snails, and they just climbed over the wall, yelling to stop the heart in you.” He jumped down the far side of the orchard wall and ran howling across the field.

“That is when they cut off your arm,” cried Pin.

“Aye.”

“They did come over the wall and take you prisoner!”

Her brother stopped. “Yet they did not. That is what I cannot figure,” he said, his left hand warm on her ankle. “Healed me, cared for me, and I their enemy and they mine. But why? Why?”

Pin was bored with Lords and war. She took a hank of Cam's long hair in each hand. “Giddap!” She snapped the hair-reins. And Cam, horse-brother, galloped back to the others, bucking and snorting like the veriest wild, unbroken colt.

In among the vegetables, Mam was weeding, quick and quiet, for all that it was dark. She was bent and round as the cottage. Crouching, Da watched his saucers of beer.

“Do you see any, Da?” Pin came and leaned against him.

“You look, Pin-girl.”

She bent down and looked close. The saucers were full of drunk, drowning snails.

“Poor things,” said Cam.

Pin made a face and retreated to the fruit trees. Under their heavy shadows she stamped around as she had seen Hughar and Edord do, until the smell of the bruised grass was thick in the air.

When the thought came to her, she stilled. “Cam?” she said. “Your arm . . . it did hurt?”

She thought perhaps he had not heard, even though Mam glanced up sharply, because Cam only looked over her head.

Then Mam said, “What do they do, those boys?”

Pin forgot her question, for Hughar and Edord were daring each other to eat a snail. They stood nose to nose, each holding one ready. Hughar ate anything: He had eaten grass, tadpoles, fish eyes for dares. He opened his mouth and went
chomp
. Edord dropped his snail down the back of Hughar's shirt. Hughar yelled, fished the snail out, and came up to Pin. “Yum, yum.”

Pin screamed and ran, Hughar right behind her, until she cried.

“Bed for you, my maid,” said Mam. She tried to hug Pin good night, but Pin wriggled free.

Da walked her back to the cottage. He stopped to show her the pictures in the stars. “There's the arrow, can you see it? Shooting its way to the warrior, there.”

Pin could not see the star pictures, but she so liked this quiet time with Da that she nodded and looked where he pointed.

“Cam,” said Da. “You mustn't mind him.”

Pin didn't mind him, not one bit.

“It is different for him. He was the only child we had, ha! Thought we'd never have another, but every year your mam, she gave to the Goddess, and the Goddess heard her at last, for the twins came along. Then you, the surprise baby and a girl to boot, coming three years after the twins. Well, he on his own all the time, it was different for him. And then what happens but he ups and leaves us for the war. He's come back not whole, not our Cam. What do we do with him, eh, do you see?”

Pin nodded, though she did not see.

In bed, she thought about the stars, heeling in the black wheel of the sky, and dreamed of them. And a dress of green lettuce. And the new Lord of Dorn-Lannet's snails.

B
ROWN AND GOLD, that was how the valley was colored, this end of the summer. The streams had dried to brown water holes, and the hills pitched blond flanks at the sky. Graceful hung over the fence, looking. At the line of trees that marked the road, and hid Cam Attling's holding.

Graceful was twelve, and she knew whom she was going to marry. She knew when she would marry him and where and how. She knew that he would come to live here, at Fenister Fort Farm, take her name, as did any who married a firstborn Fenister, and die here, as she would.

She knew, oh, that every summer she would cut the flax with the women of the house; that every winter she would weave it; the names of her children (firstborn son after Father, second-born after her husband, third after his father, firstborn daughter after Mother, second-born daughter after Stepmother, third after herself).

The course of her life was laid out like the Highway was laid through the valley. It entered through the pass in the hills to the north, and vanished in the forest to the south. If the Highway was her life, then she was about
there,
not quite at Castle Cross, but still coming downhill from the pass.

There were two things Graceful did not know about her life: how many children she would have, and when she would die. If she thought about not knowing these two huge things, her stomach went tight. It was fear and it was joy, that tightness, all at once and all mixed up.

She took one last look, then pushed herself off the fence. “I cannot see the messenger yet.”

Father wasn't listening. “It will be a colt,” he said. Down in the paddock the bay mare cropped gold grass. Her sides bulged.

“Filly,” said Garrad, who was Father's leading hand. “Do you look how it sits wide, rather than deep.”