The Returning (4 page)

Graceful gazed at Cam, his dark hair lifting in the wind.
A . . . a . . . a black flag
, she thought.

Kayforl proper was a ridge, the village dotted along its spine and the Highway running at its feet. Where the Highway met the village road, at the intersection called Castle Cross, Father pulled upon the reins. “Whoa, my beauty.”

There was sudden quiet, then the noise of the day made itself heard: wind in the trees and grass; a mattock cutting into soil,
tunk, tunk, tunk
. Graceful pulled her scarf straight.

The thick, dark forest that covered Hollen Hill thinned as it reached the creek flats. Graceful was looking at a blanket hung from a bough to make a shelter; a fire, with steam rising from a pot; a man, a woman, and two–three children. Uplanders, and just that bit too distant to see clearly, though Graceful looked and looked.

So this was why Father had driven a circuit right through the village, and back again along the Highway. Abruptly the woman got up from the fire and gathered the children into the blanket-tent; only the man remained crouching by the fire. He did not look at them, not up at all, but gazed at the flames, seeming altogether absorbed. As with the woods near Fenister Fort Farm, the undergrowth had been cleared, and low boughs trimmed off, except the one that held up the tent.

“Father? Is this our land too?”

“Of course not.”

Graceful thought of Attling's Oldest watching her and Father. She squirmed on her seat. “Why must you check it?”

“Be still, my maid.” Father stopped his staring and drew the reins tight. “And what do they do there?” He wasn't asking Graceful. To Agerst he said, “Come up!”

As they drove home, Graceful watched Fenister Fort Hill sort itself clear from the other hillocks of the valley; the roofs sort themselves clear from the hill; the buildings stand tall beneath them.

Isla waited for them at the foot of the drive.

“It's the Coverlasts, Master,” said Isla. “Mistress sent me to let you know.”

“Know what?”

“They're here, the whole clan, and do want words with you.”

Father went ahead, leaving Graceful to walk up the drive with Isla. “For I do not know what I shall find going on up there. The Mistress is all right, Isla, you are sure of that?”

“Aye, Master. She's sat them about the yard and was giving them tea when I came down.”

Isla, friend and servant and nursemaid, hurried Graceful along, seeming hardly to want to walk with her. “He shouldn't,” she said. “I say it of one who's been that good to me, but he shouldn't.”

Graceful did not understand.

The yard was empty. Graceful pointed to the house. “Isla?”

Isla stood where she was, pushing the dust of the yard into piles with the toe of her shoe. “I've my work to do, pardon me, Miss Graceful.”

Graceful folded her arms across her chest. “Gar.” She used Da's swearword.

Inside, where a step led up from the stone flags of the kitchen to the wood of the passage, Graceful slipped off her shoes and padded along the boards. The hall doors were closed. Graceful stepped closer, right up to them, and listened.

“I don't know about the war changing things.” It was Mam Coverlast speaking. “But with your gamekeeper setting borders that never used to be, it's hurting our livelihood.”

Graceful leaned on the doors and peered through the gap between. Shadows shifted, making it hard to see, then the light caught on something. An eye, pressed to the crack. One of the Coverlasts was looking right at her through the crack, and clear as anything Graceful saw his eye close and open, winking; then he must have moved away, for the gap was empty.

Graceful ran all the way to the kitchen. The hall doors opened, and the passage was suddenly full of Coverlasts, small and wiry and weatherworn. Coverlasts, Father and Stepmother. Not one of the hands or maidservants was about. Father followed the Coverlasts at a Lordly distance, halting at the gate to watch them troop down the drive.

“Make a village entire of themselves,” he said, coming back to the house. “Wish my horses bred like they do.”

“Hush, Arno.”

“Father? Must we clear that land? Merrydance is so large a field already.”

Father took her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm. “Come, my little Graceful, and let's see how that mare does.”

Garrad was standing by the horse paddocks, watching the mare. “She's bagging up, Master. You look, her udder's enlarged. Won't be long now.”

Father for once could not be distracted by horses. “There.” He swept his forefinger in an are that covered the whole of Merrydance field, with its one little seedling. “Just a start, that. Imagine, the whole field full of mulberry trees. Grow the height of a man, more than, in a year. And it's not just the worms.”

Worms?
Graceful blinked at Father.

“We'll have fruit, wood, why, even wicker of them!”

“You'll be breeding them with the horses yet,” said Garrad.

Graceful couldn't even laugh.

Father would say, “If the one means can achieve two ends, well, all the better.” The one end was always announced; the other was not acknowledged until it had been achieved. Merrydance field and the trees were the one thing. Graceful wondered what the other would be.

 

GRACEFUL SAT ON a footstool, so that Isla could brush her hair.

“Did he—” Isla jerked her head at the hall, meaning Father. “He did speak with the Attlings then?”

“No-o.” It was strange. There was a way these things had to be done. Attling's Oldest had been away a long time, and before he could start courting visits, Father must first pay a visit to him. They would drink ale and talk farming, and somehow that would clear the way for him to see her. But Father had yet to do so, and Graceful could only see her betrothed from the cart, all joggled with the speed of their going, all at a distance across the terraces. It was strange that they had not stopped at Attling's holding. “No. We went to the Headman's, to Master Palfreyman's.”

“Hey?”

“We drove past Attling's holding too fast for them to hail us.”

“What's he about, your da?”

Graceful spread her hands:
I don't know
.

“But you did see him, Cam Attling?”

“Yes. He looked like . . .” Graceful hunted in her mind for words. “He looked like songs, sung to life. He looked like faraway places, planted here in Kayforl.”

“Oh aye,” said Isla. “All the maids in the village do have a fancy for him.”

“His arm,” said Graceful. “It's so . . .”

“Sad,” said Isla.

“Heroic.”

“And that's one hundred.” Isla set the brush down, stroked Graceful's hair with her hand. “There, soft and shiny, like silk.”

Maybe
, thought Graceful. But not soft and shining like Stepmother's hair; that was long and thick and white-gold as flax.

“You know how they make it, don't you?” Isla said to her. “The silk?”

“Well . . .” Graceful knew how they made linen, but . . . “Well . . .”

“They boil the cocoons, to kill the caterpillars before they can hatch and damage the silk thread.”

“Oh!” said Graceful. How did Isla always know these things? “The poor caterpillars.”

“Aye.”

Why did Father want to change the order of things? It made her insides jump. Father was sun and earth and all things between, and no one was greater than him, not even the gods, but Fenister Fort Farm had boundaries, boundaries set so long ago that no one knew who or how or why, but that they were set. And Father was pushing them around. Merrydance field would grow, eating the forest so that it could be planted all over again with trees, trees of a different kind, Uplander trees. How strange the world looked this evening. Before it had been light or dark, but now it was both mixed together and there was no sorting them one from the other.

 

PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES of the land meant pushing the people of the village. Kayforl pushed back. It pushed back at her, Graceful.

She went one day to Kayforl village with Father. Father was inside Sanderlin's store and Graceful outside, waiting for him. Around her a crowd of village women and children grew.

“Always do think of their pockets, that lot,” said the women. “Sell their own mams off they would.”

“Scrull,” a boy hissed.

“Eeeh!” That came from all of them, all laughing. They looked at her with cold eyes. They'd always looked at her with eyes cold and laughing!

One leaned close. “Uplander toadies.”

Laughing no more, the women wandered back to their stoops, to stand and sweep and stare. The children stayed.

“Fat scrull,” said the same boy.

Graceful wished she had gone in with Father.

“Fat, ugly scrull.”

The children held their bellies and staggered about, legless with laughter. Graceful stared at them, shame burning in her face, and thought,
Ugly? Am I?

“Fat, ugly, ah!” The boy was hanging by his collar, and his collar was fisted in Cam Attling's hand. “Leave her be, Farrow Gorlance,” he said. “Or I'll be hearing about it.”

The children scattered.

Said her betrothed, “Miss Graceful, are you all right?”

“Oh!” said Graceful. “Yes.” She felt the red run up her face to her headscarf, down her neck under her collar. “Oh, yes.”

The village pushed back, but her betrothed did not.

He smiled, and though he was dark as Stepmother was pale, his smile was like hers because it warmed Graceful. “I'll be going, until your da pays his Welcome Visit.” And off he strode.
Cam Fenister
, thought Graceful.
Cam and Graceful Fenister
. She blushed again.

“Gar!” Father had, at last, come out of the store. “Will you look! Dung to his trew cuffs.”

Graceful thought him magnificent. “Father? Will you be visiting him soon?”

But Father was busy chirruping at Agerst, and didn't hear her.

 

GRACEFUL SAT TO dinner in the hall. She spilled her tea, refused her meat, was refused dessert.

“Whatever is the matter with you?” said Stepmother.

Graceful did not know. She watched tears
plip-plop
onto her plate. “Why will you not visit Attling's Oldest?”

“Moppet.” Stepmother put her arms about her. “Moppet . . . ”

“I'll tell her, Vivrain.”

Father took her on his knee. “You are getting too big for me to do this much longer, my little Graceful.”

There was something awful to come, Graceful knew it.

“Your betrothal to Attling's Oldest is to be undone.”

Graceful wailed. “But it can't be.”

“You did not want to be betrothed to him in the first instance.”

“Well, now I do.”

“Oh!” Stepmother patted Graceful's back. “I knew she'd fixed her fancy on him.”

“She's a maid, and maids do change their fancy like they change their underlinen.”

“Arno!”

“He has not even a full count of limbs. How could he well look after her, my Graceful?”

 

ISLA HELPED GRACEFUL dress in her best gown and surcoat.

“A fortnight ago, I was securely betrothed.”

“Didn't take your da long to arrange for it all to be undone.” Isla pinned a small bunch of wildflowers to her collar. “Love Knots,” she said. “All the maids do wear them, in summer, to draw their sweethearts.”

Graceful went downstairs to toy with her morning meal. Afterward she sat so Stepmother could do her hair. Not because she had a lot of it, but because she did not. It was fine as baby hair, and as thin—limp here, flying away there—and it never grew past her shoulders. Graceful could not get it all up or nicely down, but Stepmother's clever hands could.

“Moppet,” said Stepmother. “Are you still worrying? Like as not, the Attlings will be glad to be reimbursed what they gave when you were betrothed. And your father wishes you to marry well, for your own sake, that you will be happy.”

Garrad had the cart out and Agerst in the shafts. Father stood to help Stepmother, and then Graceful, up.

“I can get up myself.” And she did, ignoring Father.

“Ah. Like that, is it? It'll be a long ride in to the village, then.”

“Oh Father, I really do not want to.”

“It is better so.” Father tucked the riding blanket about her, to protect her skirts from dust.

“You listen to your father.” Stepmother turned and smiled at her. “When is he ever wrong?”

Father hitched his belt up under his belly. “And you listen to your stepmother, for she is always right. Ha, ha!” His weight pulled the cart down on that side as he stepped up to the seat. He sat and it settled on its springs, still canted to his side. “I want the best for my Graceful.”

Who,
wondered Graceful, if the Attlings, important as they were in the village, were not best enough?

“Come up!” Father slapped the reins and Agerst's huge shoulders leaned into the collar, his huge feathered hooves lifted, and they moved sedately out of the yard.

The drive ran out of the gate and wound around and down the hill to the flats, where it met the East Road. There, Father stopped the cart.

“I'll tell you something funny, Daughter. You look at the wall.”

A low earth wall circled the breast of the hill. It was gone in places: dug away to let the driveway in; a whole section carried downhill in a mudslide one sopping spring.