The Returning (5 page)

“Once, there was a wall built atop the earthworks.” Father pointed. “But the stone was taken from it and used to build—”

“The New Wing,” said Graceful.

“Ha, yes, that's my girl. Oh . . . some hundred fifty years ago! The
New
Wing. Ha, ha.”

Father always stopped the cart at the flats, and always told the same story, and always laughed as if it were funny, a joke. When Graceful had been small, she had laughed too.

The sun was peaking in the sky as they drove through Kayforl. The Ridge Road was empty, and the shops all had their shutters closed against the heat.

Just past the village proper, Father halted. From here they must walk, for the track up to the shrine was too narrow for a cart. Graceful dreaded it. What if they should come upon the Attlings, and must walk with them? But Stepmother linked her arm with Graceful's and she felt much braver. They took the path,
step, step, step,
in time.

The shrine was so old, the wood was worn silver. One whole wall flipped up like a shutter and opened the shrine to the yard, a patch of raked gravel with a high stone wall all about it. The wall was very much grander than the shrine.

Attling's Oldest leaned against a post and watched them come in. The Headman, Da Palfreyman, sat on the step, nodding, as old people did. “I'll tell Da,” Cam said, and without turning, called, “Da! They're come.”

Master Attling came to the doorway, and helped Da Palfreyman to his feet. Together they came over, Da Palfreyman going
ouf, ouf, ouf
under his breath. Graceful thought of Father with his two ends for one means, and understood now what Father's second end had been that day they had driven by the Uplander camp: this, the undoing of her betrothal. The Headman shook Father's hand. “Master Fenister. Mistress.” He bowed, an old man's stiff, creaking bow, to Stepmother, and kissed her hand, then Graceful's.

Father, Stepmother, Master Attling, and Da Palfreyman went within, to talk over the dissolution of her betrothal to Attling's Oldest, and Graceful was left in the yard.

Attling's Oldest stayed propping up the same post. “I didn't know he had that in him, the old rogue.”

“Are you keeping the shrine from falling?” said Graceful. Then she gasped and put her hand to her mouth. It was the sort of thing Father would say to her, and out it had popped, without her even meaning it to.

He smiled, and the day, dark with worry, brightened. “Are you bothering yourself about it?” he asked. “Do not you—Ah, they are wanting us.” He straightened and made to offer her his arm, to lead her up the steps and into the shrine, but Graceful was too shy to take it.

Inside, Master Attling and Da Palfreyman alike showed as much of what they thought as might a lump of stone. Cam, though, smiled a strange cool smile, which touched his eyes with a coolness too, for all his kind words to Graceful.

They each held the end of a rope, Cam Attling and Graceful, a rope braided from flax. Master Attling and Father between them cut it, and Graceful was betrothed to no one.
Where will my road go now?
she wondered.

“Brave girl,” said Stepmother as they walked back down to the cart. “Not a tear.”

“I'm crying them inside.” But she wasn't, for they began falling from her eyes now.

 

FATHER WOKE GRACEFUL late that night, to take her down to the horse paddocks. Alyn the bay mare was foaling.

“Let's see about that wager we made, shall we?”

When they got there, the foal's head and forelegs were out. The mare was standing straddle-legged and stiff-tailed, sweating.

“Poor thing,” said Graceful. “Brave little mare.”

Father took her hand and tucked it, with his, into his pocket. The mare lay down, got up again to pace, lay down, and with every shift Father's fingers clenched so tight on Graceful's that it hurt. “Sorry, Daughter,” he said, and wrung her hand numb again.

The handlers sat on their heels in a corner of the field. One of them would try from time to time to come at the mare, but she always shied off.

“Leave her,” said Father. “Leave her be.” He was saying it to himself.

Alyn wore herself out and lay down, the handlers stroking her sweating neck, whispering love words to her, and then the foal was out and into the world. One handler came tramping over, blood and birth-muck to his elbows. “A filly, My Lord,” he told Father.

“A mare for my Graceful.”

“First you've won from him, little Mistress,” said Garrad.

How strange things were, thought Graceful, for every lost wager with Father had been in its way a win. Perhaps it made sense, then, that she felt this time as if she had lost.

C
ORBAN FARMER HAD glass windows. In all Kayforl, wood or hide was good enough. The new Lord in Dorn-Lannet likely had not better. But Corban Farmer had glass.

Acton sat on the gatepost up on the ridge and gazed at the sun's splintering against the panes. He sat here often and watched Corban Farmer and his man about their work, watched the farm itself, trim and tidy and thriving.

Jinn was high on her haunches, edging down the track, muzzle pointed to the bottom, to the sheep pasture.

“No, Jinn.”

Jinn whined and lay down, nose on her paws.

“Aye, good. Good, Jinn.” Which brought her back to him, tail wagging.

Then.

Acton thought he was fainting, for the air pressed suddenly against his ear and there was a black flashing at the edge of his sight. He fell off the gatepost, forearms flung up against the pressure in his ears. Jinn yelped and dropped on her side.

“Jinn?” Acton waited for her to get up, got up himself, walked a step, then ran to her.

The arrow stuck straight up from Jinn's chest; the gray feathers of the fletching danced just a little with the movement of the air.

“Hold, boy, hold.” Someone jerked his arm so that he was spun half about, almost off his feet. He hung in that grip and stared.

“I did warn you.” Corban Farmer let go, and leaned on his bow. “I'd not have that dog at my stock.”

There was a scream starting in him but his voice only came out shrill and shaking: “She, uhn,
never
!”

“I did tell you, and more often than once.” Neither Farmer's voice, nor his face, gave any hint of what he was feeling. The bow flexed as he put more weight on it, shoved his instep against the tip, and slipped the loop of the bowstring free. He wound the string into a hank, lifted the bow to his shoulder. “It's done now.” And he walked off.

“Killer!”

Did the even tread falter? Acton wasn't sure. Corban Farmer did not stop, did not turn. Bending, Acton scraped up two fistfuls of gravel from the track, hurled them at the man's back.

“KILLER!”

The spraying dirt hit the road with a sound like rain.

Acton touched Jinn's coat. The body looked like Jinn, but it was empty of her. He looked and looked at her, but he still did not know how to put it straight in his mind. Under his fingertips, the body felt wrong. Acton snatched his hand back. Dropping to his knees, he was sick on the road.

 

CORBAN FARMER SPENT the morning with his flock. Acton hovered: about the gatepost, about Jinn. He watched Corban Farmer and his man as they walked back and forth and round and about. Under the noises of the day, of sheep and breeze and tree and traffic, the whine of the arrow kept playing itself over in his ears, and his eyes saw Jinn fall, Jinn fall, Jinn fall.

Townsfolk happened by, only in their ones and twos, for today was not a market day. Corban Farmer's holding was on the Ridge Road that ran through the village, and people came and went: to Isych in the south, or perhaps passing through Kayforl on their way north to Dorn-Lannet.

“Eh, boy. If Farmer does see you here . . .”

“Seems he already has. Do you look at this.”

This
was Jinn.

“Eh, boy.”

“That's hard cruel, that is.” They stood there steadying the baskets on their heads.

“Corban did talk of it. He did tell the boy fair . . .”

Acton sat at the foot of the gatepost and listened to them walk on, talk on. There was a scream building in his head, but with nowhere to sound. Acton thought it would burst his skull.

 

CORBAN FARMER STRODE from the paddock at noontime—back to his dogs, and his man that helped with the milking and mucking and all; back to his house and its sun-snaring windows. Acton made to go, but there was Jinn. There was Jinn, and there was nothing to be done. He paced back and forth along the strip of ridge that ran alongside the farm.

“Ehhh.” Farrow Gorlance stood atop the ridge. “What is this?”

Acton rounded on him. “Leave her be.”

“I'd not lay a finger to her.” Farrow was eating an apple. Around his mouth, where the juice ran, his face was clean. The rest was streaked and patched and dark with dirt. “He does think he is Lord here, does he, shooting of other people's animals?” He pulled at the sling stuck through his belt. “I could smash them fancy windows of his.”

“Does that bring her back?”

“It does show him.”

Acton shook his head.

“Aye, well.” Farrow cast the apple core as far as he could down the hill that sloped green to the green lawn about the farmhouse. “Why'd you not do your puking in his garden?”

In the red light of the last of the day, the to-and-fro of people stopped. Nothing moved in all of the valley. Acton's mind ached with thinking of Jinn.

“You still here?”

Acton started and whirled around. It was Corban's man. Acton swore at him.

“Get!” said Corban's man. “Gutter-gobbed stray. Go on!”

“When he gives me he's sorry, then I'll go.”

“You'll get is what you'll do.”

Acton held to the gatepost and said nothing.

“You did not welk like this when your da passed on.”

“You do not know what I did then.”

Corban's man scuffed him with his shit-clagged shoe and walked around him to the road.

The sun finished its fall earthward, dragging night after it. The lamps were gold in Corban Farmer's glass windows. Acton slid down until he sat, his arms about the gatepost. He had thought the scream too big in him to let him sleep, but despite it his head drooped against the wooden post, his eyes closed.

 

HE WOKE ONCE, THIRSTY. His mouth was too dry to swallow, his tongue, throat. He realized he had neither drunk nor eaten since the morning. He dreamed of water—the cool well-water from the yard at home; the cool running water of the stream—a cool, tall jug of it, flavored with mint leaves.

(“Your mam, she did make water like this.” Da, dropping the sprig of mint into the crock. “There was nothing like it on a hot day, a haying day.”)

He woke again to the ghost-light of the false dawn, and a
shump-shump
of footsteps in the thick dust of the road. Corban's man turned in at the gate, little spurts of dust fountaining up at each step. Though he did not look at Acton as he walked past, as if Acton were not there, he went first to the farmhouse, not to the byre. He stood on the stoop, pointing up the drive at him. Acton pointed right back.

All morning Acton played ghost up on the ridge. If Corban walked north toward his barn and sheds, then so did Acton move north along the ridge; when Corban walked south to his sheep pastures, then south walked Acton, like a living, remote shadow. Corban went in, early and sudden, to his noon meal.

Acton returned to the post, hitched himself up onto it. He turned away from Jinn, a pale hump in the grass. From here all of Kayforl spread, the town along the ridge to the north and the little hillocks of the holdings cupped in the valley, the woods spreading away to the east. That one, that small and shaggy one there, that was home. The Highway to Dorn-Lannet, that Da had taken, ran past its gate; past the tiny Uplander camp down on the river flats.

Acton thought he should go home—that he would and bury Jinn. But home was empty: Mam was only a name, dead; Da was dead; and now Jinn ran only in his mind. He held the scream inside him.

Isla Caross paused with her friend Minnet at the head of the drive. “Poor boy. He did love that dog.”

“Isla Caross, I did
never
!” Minnet canted back from the waist and stuck her hands on her hips; her sweetheart was a distant cousin to Corban Farmer. “This, pah!” Her fingers flicked at Acton. “And over a litter-runt that did ought to have stayed drowned.”

Acton stopped pretending not to be there. “Jinn was no runt.”