The Returning (3 page)

“That's right, a colt.”

“I had much rather a filly,” said Graceful. “It will be a filly. I am sure of it.”

“What will you stake, Daughter?”

Graceful thought about it. “A filly and it's mine; a colt and it's yours.” She put her hand out.

Father grasped it—“That sure are you?”—and that was the wager sealed.

Graceful caught Garrad's eye; he was watching them, sucking his cheeks in and a grin with it.

“Master,” said Garrad.

There was a rider on the valley floor.

“Well.” Father let Graceful's hand go. “Best we get to the house yard.”

The flat top of Fenister Fort Hill was shaped like two rectangles, one abutting the other. The western one was the horse paddocks; the other, the eastern one, was the yard, with the house and outbuildings framing it about. A low stone wall divided the two. Graceful trotted after Father and Garrad, across the paddock and through the gate in the wall, from one rectangle to the other.

Stepmother waited for them in the yard. “Moppet.” She linked her arm with Graceful's, lifted her face to Father's, for him to kiss. Stepmother was tall (so was Graceful tall), slender (Graceful was not), all gold and white, skin and hair. Standing next to her was like standing next to the sun, and when she smiled it was like standing in sunshine.

The household entire was in the yard and jammed about the messenger. He was an Uplander, and he was here, in her yard. One hand on his hip, a leather wallet in the other, he flicked his cloak back over his shoulders and looked from the corners of his eyes at Stepmother. The work hands stood like a wall about her. At the messenger's feet was a seedling, roots wrapped in sacking.

Father and the messenger carried out a sort of mummery, bowing and pointing to the north, their only words the name of the new Lord in Dorn-Lannet,
Lord Ryuu,
repeated again and again. Father, smiling, steered Graceful forward.

“Do you curtsy,” said Stepmother in Graceful's ear, so she did, bent her head and curtsied, but the messenger looked no more at her; he'd already turned back to Father and Father to him.

Stepmother, tugging on Graceful's hand, led her into the house.

 

THEY ATE THE evening meal around the messenger's delivery. The seedling stood half Graceful's height, with palish bark and leaves as wide as Graceful's spread hand.

“Was he an Uplander, the messenger?”

“Was he an—no, no, Daughter. He runs their messages, but he is not one of them.”

Graceful was disappointed.

Stepmother said, “He looked to be from Lodden, or the middle lands thereabouts. Those born there can be very Uplander in their looks.”

Father was more interested in what the messenger had brought. “Do you look at this.” He untied the leather wallet and brought out a package wrapped in paper, then in cloth, then again in paper: a length of fabric, the same rose color of Stepmother's cheeks.

“Silk.” Father thwacked the roll of fabric with the back of his hand. “That's what the Uplander Lords and ladies like.”

“Fenister linen is famed throughout the South,” said Stepmother. “Why would it not become as well-liked among the Uplanders?”

Father draped the cloth about her shoulders. “Why not Fenister silk?”

“O-oh, feel it, Moppet.”

Graceful took a handful and held it to her face. It passed over her skin like a breath of air. “Why did the messenger give you a tree?”

“Worms,” said Father. He was not listening to her—or was he? “That little tree, it's a mulberry, and silkworms live on mulberry trees. How'd you like a silk gown, Fenister silk, eh?”

After supper they walked the boundaries of the house yard, through the long summer dusk. The lamps in the village speckled the ridge and spread into the valley.

“I'm to have Alyn's foal, if it's a filly.”

“Arno,” said Stepmother. “You did not, did you?”

“Gar, Vivrain. She's an old hand at this, my Graceful.”

It was true. The wagers had started when she was small. Father had been readying himself to ride out, and she had not wanted to go with him. “You shall,” Father had said. So Graceful had lain upon the stable floor, refusing to move or speak, or even to cry. Promises, threats, they all came to nothing.

“So.” Father had squatted on his heels, rocking on the balls of his feet. “You won't get up.”

“Not unless I can stay.” Graceful's voice came out all squashed through her hands.

“That your stake, then? You get up and you can stay?”

She nodded.

“Here is mine. You get up and you get a pony.”

Graceful had lowered her hands.

Of course Father had won. He always won. But somehow she always ended up on top, though she lost every bet they had between them, every single one.

Graceful had called the pony Puck. He'd had a white saddle and reins, and bells strung on them—still did.

“Father? Do you remember how I got Puck?”

“I remember. It was your betrothal to Attling's Oldest. Oh! You did not want to go.”

“My dears,” said Stepmother, yet she was laughing. “As long as you keep such commerce in the stable yard where it belongs.”

Father winked at Graceful.

 

“SILK OR NOT, the flax should be good and soft,” Stepmother said next morning. “It's had two score days on the grass.”

All the women of Fenister Fort—Graceful and Stepmother, Isla (who milked the cows, gathered the eggs, churned butter, cleaned and did all around the house), Carin (who was Stepmother's sister's husband's cousin), and Carin's daughter, Posey—they hitched their skirts up to their knees, tied scarves over their hair, and walked barefoot down to the drying field. Spread on the grass were bunches of pulled flax, dried to a kind of straw. Flax became linen: Graceful's dress was linen, and her cap and smock and top petticoat, as were Stepmother's, as were Father's shirt and breeks. Linen was what had built Fenister Fort. Linen was what kept it rich.

In midsummer they had spread the flax out in Leat Side, the field that faced south and got the least sun. Week upon week the flax had lain on the grass retting—softening, wet with dew and drying with the sun; wet with dew again and the moisture off the leat. Then the whole lot had been humped uphill and spread to dry on the sunny, westerly face of the hillside.

Now they rolled it up, Graceful and Stepmother, Isla and Carin and Posey. With their skirts showing their bare scratched calves and their scarves sticking wet to their foreheads, the women made their way in a line to the threshing shed, lugging bundle after bundle, the sun dropping white summer heat down on them.

They ate the noon meal in the drying field. Isla sought Graceful out. “I do have a new game for you.” Showing Graceful the rhythm to clap, Isla taught her:

“WHERE'S MY GRACEFUL?” Father's bellow echoed clear through the threshing shed, where Graceful and Stepmother were at work. The threshing shed was really part of the barn. Here the women scutched the flax, spreading it on the scutch-tables and pounding it with wooden paddles, the scutchers, to break the flax stems.

Father held the little seedling in one arm. “I thought you might want to put this one in, your own special mulberry.”

“Oh, yes!” Graceful looked to Stepmother for permission. In answer, Stepmother pulled Graceful's headscarf straight. She and Father kissed, as they always did, any time they parted.

Father carried a spade and Graceful the tree.

“Once upon a time, Dorn-Lannet and Fenister Fort”—he swung the spade like a sword—“were equals, part of a line of defense, and in the charge of Lords.”

“Fenister Fort is not in the charge of Lords now, for we are farmers!” Graceful skipped to keep up.

“Humph.”

She wondered why that was a wrong thing to say.

“You know what those Lords did, my Graceful? They fought one another, when there was no enemy to fight. Some didn't fight, didn't want to. They married their daughters to the Lords of other keeps, to put a stop to the fighting.” Father laughed. “Or to increase their holdings. It went on until there was only one Lord left.”

“In Dorn-Lannet.”

“Aye, in Dorn-Lannet—just as the Uplander Lord has done, he fought them all until there was only him left. Now, he didn't want the other keeps making trouble for him, this Lord of old, so he had them pull down their walls and disband their men-at-arms.”

Graceful thought of the men sent home after the war, men she had seen pass through Kayforl, heading south to their own villages. They had a look to them, the same look . . . Was it war that gave them that look, or was it being set adrift by their Lord to find their way home, having left it in the first place to fight for him?

Graceful thought of Cam Attling, sent back not by the old Lord but by the new, they said, with a horse, as if that could make up for his arm. But he wasn't adrift, was he? He had his family to come home to, their holding.

“And so . . .” Father took her hand and helped her down the side of the hill. “So, the keeps became farms, the men-at-arms took up holdings, and all together they made up villages.”

“I see,” said Graceful, and she did. But there was something else there for her to see, and she couldn't quite.

“There, Daughter.” Father stopped, pointing to the edge of the forest, where the land was newly cleared. “What will you name it, this new field?” All the fields of Fenister Fort Farm had names.

Graceful put the seedling down. It had grown heavy during the walk down the hill. “The woods look different.” It was not just because of the trees that had been felled around the base of Fenister Fort Hill. Farther into the woods, the knotted mess of saplings and shrubs and fallen branches had been cleared. Father had hired a woodsman. Now there was space among the trees that no longer looked to hide goblins or wolves, space she thought she might like to walk in.

“I thought Wildwood.” Father walked to the edge of the cleared ground and stood looking into the forest, hands stuck in his belt under his belly.

“We should call it Merrydance, for Stepmother.”

Merrydance had been Stepmother's name, until she had married Father and become a Fenister.

“Merrydance is a fine name.” Father set his spade at the soil.

“Isla says plants grow better if you talk to them.”

“Gar.”

“Plants grow or they do not, and talking has no part of it.” Graceful started. It was Father's woodsman, who'd come silently from the trees to stand behind them. He was not a Kayforl man, but an outsider, from Apstead. (Apstead being a day's ride away southward.) It wasn't just his being an outsider that no one liked, Isla had said to Graceful—it was that he didn't smile except at Father, and Graceful. When he saw them, he lifted his hat and put a friendly mask over his more usual surly one.

“Them Coverlasts are seeing I don't get to the trees about their cot, right. They set their traps and what-all and I near walk into them, right, and I break them up but they make more and set them again.”

Father leaned on his spade. His face had a look on it that Graceful knew but saw only if she had been very naughty.

“Don't come to me with this; you should know what to do. They'll want work, they always want work, that lot. Put them to it, clearing the land.”

Graceful watched the woodsman trudge back in among the trees. Then, with Father helping, she set the seedling in the ground. “I name this field Merrydance,” she said, and Father threw his hat in the air.

 

AGERST THE DRAFT horse was trotting. “Come up. Come up, sir.” Father slapped the reins and Agerst sped up. His great hooves beat the earth like drums, and the cart rattled and shook.

“. . . this is something like!” Even Father's big, booming voice could not quite carry over the din of their going. “Fast enough for you?”

Laughing, Graceful hung on, to the cart, to her headscarf. Their way was taking them past Attling's holding. Graceful had watched for it before they came to the curve in the road, was watching still so that her chin propped on her shoulder. There he was on the terraces, Cam Attling, her betrothed.

“Gar,” said Father. “They don't do as well for themselves as they would have people think.”