The Returning (8 page)

Ardow said Cam was changed since he went to war. Ban had been eleven then and Cam twelve. There would be some change, Ban had argued, from eleven to seventeen, from twelve to eighteen.

“And what did he see, do, all those years of fighting, to come back half Uplander?” Ardow was in very earnest. “Some say he fought for the Uplanders, not ours. Some say he killed all ours, else how did he come back so fine, horse and sword and all, Uplander in his ways?”

“Shame on them, and on you,” Ban had said.

This Cam, his Cam, led him stealthily now, through Fenister's new game wood. Once he stopped.

“One rabbit is not enough to feed thirteen.” And Cam worked them closer and closer to the big stone farmhouse to get another rabbit. Ban began to lag.

“Come on!” Cam paused, waiting for him. “Do I have to carry you?”

It wasn't the walking that slowed Ban, it was being so close to Master Fenister. They crouched by the yard's very walls, and then it happened. One of the hands came to piss over the yard wall and, catching sight of them, set up a hue and cry.

They ran again, and this time Ban led, no longer trying to be quiet.

They stopped to catch their breath.

“Lost them,” Cam whispered. “Have we not?”

“Not, but we will. After me.”

Their eyes met and they laughed. Ban felt fear turn to excitement.

He lost Cam, where the forest was still given over to itself, undergrowth stringing cat's cradles between the tree trunks and the trees themselves grown smaller, knottier. As soon as he realized, he stopped. The moon perched fat and low on the horizon, not so much lighting the woods as dappling them with an eerie glow. Ban waited, dread growing in him. At last he thought of the water hole and made his way there. Cam sat on the diving rock, face all scratched.

Ban hung back in the trees. “He . . . he did see you?”

“Uh-uh.” Cam shook his head.

Ban came out from cover. “What happened?” He touched his own face.

Cam did not answer, only touched the back of his hand to his cut cheek, but Ban thought he knew. He could see Cam, running, not slowing even to shove the branches aside, as if Fenister's farmhand had become an Uplander soldier, as if the war was still being fought.

 

“DON'T TELL ME I'm not pulling my weight.” Ban threw the game down upon the table.

Mam upped and slapped him. Ban yelped and dodged back.

“How did you come by that?”

“The Fenisters do bleed us. This does just even it up a little.”

He was shouted down.

“Even? Even what?”

“That's never your thinking, Ban.”

“If Fenisters do have, and Coverlasts do not, then that is what each does deserve, in this life.”

“No!” Ban slammed his fists upon the table. “It is not.”

“Cam Attling,” said Ardow. And everyone fell silent.

Ardow put his hand on Ban's shoulder. Ban could not speak, was looking down and willing the tears dry in his eyes.

It was strange, he thought later, how something he was so sure about could turn around and become another thing altogether.

 

YET HE WANTED something that matched the poaching, and which . . . which was not following. It wasn't just words that Cam was drawing out of him. All day he thought about it, and finally it came to him.

Late though it was, Cam was still at the tavern. Drunk, but not as drunk as he might be for the time he spent there. Ban helped him to down some more. “How much does an arm weigh?” he asked. “It is that extra weight to one side that does throw you off, I do think.”

Cam's eyes narrowed with laughter. “Do you avoid thinking, Ban. A better thing for us all.”

Don't
, thought Ban, but did not know how to make that one word come out. What he did say was, “I've something to show you.”

The look Cam gave Ban then had the warmth rising in Ban's face, and with it the thought,
He does!
Then,
No. Not like that, not me, Ban Coverlast
.

It was dark once they were past the lights of the tavern. In this part of the Ridge Road the houses were larger, with low walls that showed an arm's span of gravel, a stone lantern, the cloud-puffs of clipped pine trees.

Ban halted. “Down here.”
Here
was a narrow lane between two buildings, dark. Cam made them stop to drink some wine. “Here,” said Ban again, and looked up at a high wall, the top of it white in the starlight, the rest blue-black.

Ban tried boosting Cam up so he could grab the top of the wall, but Cam was taller and more solid, and Ban simply staggered under his weight, fetching up bruisingly against the opposite wall and dropping him. They lay in the lane laughing, hands over their mouths to quiet their noise.

“I'll lift you,” Cam said. And shoved Ban over the wall so firmly that he was aflight, landed hard. Ban found a barrel to stand on and stuck his head over the wall.

“Jump and I'll catch and pull you up.”

Cam's weight nearly dragged Ban back over the wall and into the lane again. In the end, Ban let Cam in a side gate.

“What! A gate here all the time, and you made us carry out that show?”

“More fun, I thought.”

“What do we do here?”

“Ah.” They were whispering, but drunk as they were, it probably carried as loudly as shouting. “Can you get these open?” Ban shook the shutters to Sanderlin's store.

Cam slipped the blade of that Northerner dagger of his in between the shutters and lifted the bar that secured them, working it back on the knife blade. “Be good only for buttering bread after this.”

One shutter opened, swinging outward. Cam reached in, caught the bar before it could fall aclatter on the counter, and opened the other. Getting a leg up, he vanished inside. More slowly, Ban took hold of the upper sill and clambered in after him.

“We do need some light.” Ban pulled the candle from his pocket.

“You want us to get caught?”

But the wick had already taken.

“Here.” Ban produced Sanderlin's scale. When he saw it, Cam realized what Ban intended, and doubled over in silent laughter. They weighed his arm on the scale. Cam leaned forward, bending his head. His hair stroked Ban's face, his lips brushed his ear. “That much!” The breath jammed in Ban's throat.

Cam was already moving toward the window. “I'll feel easier if we don't overstay our welcome!”

Ban held to the counter a moment, grinning.

Outside and away he said, “No wondering, that you are off balance.”

Cam only laughed. He laughed the wall back up between them.

At home, Ban lay in his place farthest from the fire.
He does not
, he told himself,
would not think of me . . . no
. It didn't stop him touching his ear, as if to feel Cam's breath there again; running his hand up under his shirt, down under the waist of his trews, wishing it was Cam's hand.

 

IF IT WAS taking some time for his family to forgive him for poaching, it was taking Ban as long to forgive them the things they had said about Cam. Then Hale came in with the dark, the evening after they had weighed Cam's arm, jumping with the news he had.

“Sanderlin's store was broken into, last night.”

“It what?” Mam's mending dropped from her hands to the floor. “Such a thing!” She reached blindly for it. “It has
never
happened here.”

Ban felt the color come and recede in his face, but in his stomach was a sick feeling that did not go.

“They say it was Uplanders, come up from their camp, looking for food, most likely.”

Ban slipped out to milk the goats. Ardow followed him, bailed him up against the shed. Not one word did he say, only looked at Ban, looked him up and down, and released him.

In the noisy dark of the hut that night, Ban lay wakeful. If Ardow was right about Cam . . . He could not follow that thought through.

 

THE WEATHER WAS close to turning, and the year. It was not frosty enough to bring out full autumn colors, and the trees were tatty with brown leaves, the terraces all cleared to stubble or dirt. It was all dying and drear, and Ban's mood matched it. The Attlings had crops to bring in.
Cam will be worn out with harvesting. He will not be there.
These were the things that Ban told himself as he stayed away and stayed away from the water hole.

Finally he began to pull his weight, took up tasks the rest of the family had done in his place all the summer long.

“You managed that well,” said Da. “Turning dutiful in our downtime.”

Ardow clasped his shoulder. “You back with us?”

“Never went.”

“Better you're out of all that.”

“Cam, you mean.”

“Aye, I do mean him.”

“His da keeps him busy.” Ban thought that sounded convincing.

“Attlings,” said Ardow. “They do all right, but they work hard for it.”

The Coverlasts worked hard too, but differently. Ban took the goats out and into the opens, clearings with names like Ling Open, Old Open. Da was the mushroom man: He liked to pick under the moon, and he and Hale and Ban would be out in that cold ghost-light, filling pails with them.

Mam and Jerric made cheeses from goat's milk. “He has the right touch,” Mam always said of Jerric. Dance and Ardow hawked the cheese around Kayforl and Isych, walking and calling their wares: “Fresh goat's che-eese. Fresh goat's che-eese.”

Still Ban did not go to the river, the game wood, the tavern, while autumn died with barely a whimper and winter roared in from the south.

 

“BAN.” CAM LOOMED over him, atop his great gray horse, and looked down from that height. “Where have you been? All autumn Third Month, I did not see you.”

Ban dropped the firewood he had gathered and tipped his head back to look at Cam.

Cam wrapped the reins about the saddle-horn and held out his hand. After a moment, Ban reached up. Cam's fingers closed about Ban's wrist, Ban's about his, and Ban was lurching up and behind him. The horse danced a little and tried for more rein. “You did vanish these last weeks.”

“I have never been ahorse before.”

“That all you do have to say?” Cam laughed, bright in the drab winter day.

The horse shifted, was walking. Ban clutched the back of Cam's belt in both hands. His knuckles touched the bare skin of Cam's back, where his shirt was untucked.
They are all wrong
. The tangled pulls on his heart cleared.
Wrong about Cam, all of them
.

Cam slapped his hands away. “You cling like an old grandmam. Move with him, it's easier. He's a lovely smooth stride, Geyard.”

“Smooth, aye?”

“See? I had a hobbyhorse called Geyard, when I was small. Whoa! Duck!” He dropped abruptly to one side.

Ban thought,
Duck?
And watched the branch spring at him. It swept him clear off the horse's rump, the ground hitting the breath from him. Cam looked down, laughed and laughed.

“Goddess, gods. Ban, ha, I am sorry but . . .” Laughing, he held out his hand. “Come up. I'll teach you how to ride.”

“I don't want to learn. It's not for me. It is enough to look at him.”
And you fussing over him
. “Such a fine horse; you are lucky to have him.”

Cam patted the gray neck, big hearty slaps of affection. “Geyard was my friend, in Dorn-Lannet. He did not care that I was Downlander, or that I had only one arm. And then the Lord's son gave him to me, when I left.”

“So high a sign of regard?” Ban could not help the words, they were out before he knew. But Cam seemed hardly to hear, so busy was he with the set of the halter and the long dark-gray mane.

They went to the riverbank, where the water hole was cool in summer. The water churned, clear and frigid. Ban felt the chill of it from where he stood. “It will begin to freeze soon.”

“I could dive straight now.”

“Go on then, I am watching.”

“Ha.” Cam shoved at him, friendly-wise. “Why have you stayed away?”

“It's too cold to stop here.” Ban started walking, then thought of something to distract Cam. “I would show you something.”

The woods had secrets, but not many it could keep from him. Deep in the forest the pines grew big, blocking the light.

“They look like they have stood here since all life began.” Cam was gazing around him.

“Aye.” Ban gestured for Cam to keep moving. “But my grandda did remember their planting. Here.”

It was a hut, or had been, now only four time-broken walls.

“I'd heard the forest was haunted, but never of any holding left to grow over.” Cam stuck his head through the door frame, but did not go in. “Strange, that no trees do root themselves inside the walls.”

“Grandda said it was a witch lived here. When she died they planted the trees, to clean the land, take it back.”

“Reminds me of up north. Camping out in houses and their owners fled or dead.” Cam shuddered. “I'll make the fire out here.”

Ban propped his shoulders against the wall and watched Cam: head bent, dark hair falling on either side of his neck.
Two steps. Touch. Him. I could
. He dragged his knuckles against the rough stone at his back.

“They did think I was one of them, from behind.” Cam arranged the wood piece by piece, handling the rough pine as if it were eggshell frail.

“You're dark enough.”

“Aye.”

“Is that why you do not hate them?”