The Returning (9 page)

“He . . .” Cam's eyes gazed inward. “His sword did swing and the blood, it did just . . . jump from my arm and hit him, face and chest and hands, and he . . . he staggered back and fell over a body, so he was kneeling there, righting himself, using his sword as a prop, and I was looking at him, and his eyes met mine and it wasn't . . . They look different, don't they, but his eyes showed the same, I mean, a person, just a person. Like me.” Cam jabbed and jabbed at the fire with a stick.

“Hold.” Ban laid his hand over Cam's, stilling it, then letting go again. “Keep on like that and you'll have the fire out.”

THE WINTER WAS bitter; the cold wore everyone down. Ardow belabored Ban, every night when Ban was held captive by the milking, every night until the goats' milk dried up.

“Where were you the day?”

“Out causing trouble, it may be.”

“I'd know about it if you did.”

“So why ask?”

“Not helping, that much I do know.”

“Where can I be but in the woods, if I don't want to be beaten by you with words, by all of you, always so many, so close.” Ban slammed out of the cot and marched down the track to Kayforl.

He went to the tavern to be warm, to be with Cam. Once inside, though, there was a stiffness in the air. “Cam, I would rather the cold without.”

But Cam seemed set where he was.

“Bailey,” said Bubbo Nelsan. He stood over Cam, hooked his boot-toe around the leg of the stool Cam sat on, and jerked it. Cam looked up at him, and Bubbo leaned down. “My brother Bailey did march with you to the war. What of him then?”

Ban waited for Cam to speak, but he did not. Finn Pacenot slashed the air with his riding crop. “Oda.”
Ssslash.
“Brae.” Cousins to Finn on his father's side. “Why do you not tell us?”

Cam shoved his stool back, legs screeching on the stone flags. Bubbo was taken off guard and stumbled back, nearly falling. “How often do I need to ask you, to let me forget?”

The tap-maid leaned forward, breasts squished against the bar. “Oda was my sweetheart and he never did come home. How do I know he didn't just take up with some loose maid up north? Dead! If he's dead, why do you not just tell me!”

Cam was angry, Ban could see it, but it seemed a cold, cold rage. He lifted his beaker and sipped a slow mouthful of beer. “Oda took a fever on the road.” He set the beaker down. “It was Brae who went first, though. Fighting. Oda did lose heart, I think, and so the fever got him. Bailey, he was murdered at rest. Layne Gorlance was took later on.”

Roan Mattow said, “The Gorlances lost their best with him.”

Cam lifted his gaze up and onto one face, and the next and the next. “It was only Callen Mansto and me, at the very last. He went in the Battle for Dorn-Lannet.”

“And now you,” said Bubbo. “Of all of that marched off to the fighting?”

“Most of me.” Cam lifted the stump of his arm.

“Aye, and a stolen horse!”

“No need for that.” Ban could not believe he had spoken Big Bubbo Nelsan down.

“Leave out of it, Ban,” said Cam.

It stung. It worse than stung; it bit, it bored into him.

The silence was like glass, brittle and all edges. Behind the bar, the tap-maid began to weep.

“How did Bailey die?” Bubbo shouted into the quiet.

“I'm away out of this.” Cam shoved and elbowed his way to the door.

CAM STAMPED AROUND the clearing in the moonlight, taking big swipes at the trees with a stick, swipes like sword cuts,
whap!

“What do they want me to tell them, that they keep asking? I killed them all and sold my sword to the Uplanders? That is what they want.”
Whap!

“It's you coming back alone, of all of them who went.” Should he tell him of Ardow and his warnings? Ban hesitated, held his tongue. Keeping his eyes from Cam's, he mimicked the sword swings. “You said you were a bowman . . . ?”

That halted Cam's pacing and slashing. “Ban, I cannot tell you any more. I cannot. I do just want that you all let—me—be.”

The knot was back inside Ban, pulling every which way at once.

“Did you steal him? Geyard?”

Silence.

“You did say he was given you, by our new Lord, our old enemy.”

Cam hurled the stick at a tree bole so hard that it splintered. “Don't you turn, don't you start looking twice at all I say! You're as bad as the village. Choose which one you like best.” He turned his back.

Ban watched the shift of Cam's shoulders beneath the cloth of his shirt.

“Ban?”

And the way the tail of his hair hung against his spine.

“Ban?” Cam twisted to face him.

It wasn't that his face had changed, it was that Ban was seeing it differently. He stepped back, and fell. Cam leaped to help him.

Ban hit at him. “Leave out of it, Cam.”

Cam simply stood there holding out his one hand, looking not like the grown man he was, but like a boy, awkward and unsure. “Ban?”

“I do think Ardow was right.”

“I . . .” Cam rocked back a step. “I'll see you back to—”

“Think I need your help to get back?”

Cam's face closed. “Right about what?” He spun on his heel, and walked away as fast as the forest would let him.

Ban curled on the leaf mold and wished himself dead.

 

BAN WAITED BY the water hole day after day, for as long as he could stand the cold. He walked the pine forest, but there were no hoof prints around the ruin of the witch's hut. He crept through the game wood, empty but for Fenister's gamekeeper. Cam was not coming. He was not coming, and it must be Ban who went to him.

Walking into the tavern, Ban felt himself going red, white, red again.

“Face long as a wet week.”

“Broke with your sweetheart, did you?”

Break you, is what I will do
. But he didn't say that until he was out of the inn and standing alone on the street.

They none of them had seen Cam.

Next morning he skited off to Attling's holding, the knot in his gut drawing tight. Mam Attling just jerked her head at the terraces. Da Attling was there, the little maid, Cam's young sister, sitting on the earthwall watching him. Ban looked away, away from her black eyes the same as Cam's, the way they looked into him, the same.

“He's gone.” Da Attling leaned on his fork and shouted it up to Ban, where he stood on the levee. “Did take off, and where or when or what-all, he didn't say.” He spat. At Ban? At Cam? Ban did not know.

The little maid jumped down from the wall and ran weeping to her da. There was nothing for Ban to do but walk back home.

He went to the water hole. He tried to see himself—on the road to Dorn-Lannet, going there to seek Cam out. But how? That would finish things at home. And why, for what, when Cam would not think of him once, not like that, not him, Ban Coverlast.

C
AM HAD A hunger in him. He didn't know what it was, and he didn't know how to assuage it. It was an always-hunger, but worse now, in this after-the-war stillness.

“Moving does help,” he had told Ban. “You know, moving on.”

Ban had asked, like everyone asked, “Where? Moving where?”

Cam shrugged. “Don't know.” Over this hill, maybe. Across that valley, perhaps. “Perhaps something is waiting, just around the corner.”

“What,
something
? You do mean what?”

“Don't know.”
Completeness?
But that still wasn't it, didn't explain what he felt.

The hunger pushed him to the stable that dark evening, to saddle the gray, ready to ride away from them all. The going was a tearing inside, but the
to
, that was a lightness.

WHEN CAM WAS small, long before the war had fought its way down from the Uplands in the north, the Smiling Women came. Cam and Roan and all of the boys were filching peaches from Da Farmer's orchard.

“It's the Smiling Women,” said Gillert Smithson. He was sat up on Da Farmer's orchard wall, looking out for him or his sons. “On the road.”

“Smiling?” said Cam.

“Aye, they've a chair and all.”

So the rest climbed up to see a train of women in white, their walking stirring up the dust enough to hide their feet, so that they looked as if they glided, with a big man ahorse to the fore of them, and four more men, bigger yet, carrying the chair among them. The chair was white, like the women's dresses.

“Let's go to Castle Cross.”

They jumped from the wall and were off across the paths the earthwalls made, zigzagging toward the crossroads. Cam was last, partly because he was youngest, partly because of Geyard. He hesitated before leaping from the wall, for the ground was really quite far down, and jumping so often became falling, and horses could hurt themselves with a jump like that.

“Leave that old stick,” said Roan. “Or do I take it home for firewood?”

So Cam jumped, and it was none so bad. Then he ran, clicking his tongue to make galloping sounds, the stick that was Geyard joggling between his legs and tripping him.

“Not a stick,” he said, panting. “A horse.”

Castle Cross was where the East Road laid itself east–west over the Highway—the castle road that went north to Dorn-Lannet and south . . . well, who knew where it went south. Cam did not.

The Lady came, the women. Their white dresses shone lights under the sun, all stitched with little spits and chips of crystal. Even their sandals glinted. As they walked they sang, and as they sang they smiled. The Lady held the curtains of the chair aside and looked out, gold at her throat and thick on her wrists, and it was gold that glittered on her dress.