The Falcon in the Barn (Book 4 Forest at the Edge series) (18 page)

And this afternoon, as she had stared at the
back garden, it wasn’t because she was intentionally avoiding her
mother; it was because she was planning what to do to that pathetic
garden, but didn’t have the foggiest idea of where to start. She
was so caught up in trying to decide if all the weeds should go
first, or the rocks, that she didn’t even realize her mother had
come out of the house. Those green weeds poking up out of the
ground were pleading—
pleading
—to be pulled, but Jaytsy
didn’t want Mahrree to know just yet how she desperately wanted to
fix up their yard. She worried about offending her mother, or even
shocking her. In a way Mahrree still seemed to Jaytsy a bit
fragile, needing of careful handling. It was the same emotion she
experienced whenever Grandmother Peto handed her one of her
porcelain cups; she loved it, she admired it, but she worried about
breaking it.

Not that Jaytsy thought she’d actually break
her mother, she considered as she walked through the reception
area, but she didn’t know what to
do
with her.

But she did know it was time to confess a few
things, such as her love of farming. That thought put a smile on
her face as she climbed the stairs to the tower. Mahrree’s shocked
expression would be worth capturing in a portrait, Jaytsy decided
with a quiet giggle. She would have to make her announcement in
front of Father, Peto, and Uncle Shem so they could all enjoy her
reaction.

Too wrapped up in her thoughts, Jaytsy hardly
noticed that she reached the top of the stairs until she bumped
into a soldier hurrying on his way down.

“
Oh!” she laughed as she
collided into jacket that stopped her on the steps. “I’m sorry . .
. Corporal Wen,” she read his chest, looked up into his face and
smiled. “I’ve been daydreaming again.”

Corporal Wen grinned back as he made his way
slowly past her on the top stair. “Dream all you like, miss! And to
think I was dreading coming up here. I wished I had known my trip
down would be so pleasant.”

He tipped his cap and Jaytsy giggled, turning
to go to her father’s office.

But blocking her path was Thorne: hands
behind his back, feet apart, chest heaving angrily, and his cold
blue eyes stern.

“
Thorne,” Colonel Shin
called from his office. “Is that my daughter out there? I thought I
heard a giggle.”

“
Yes, sir,” the captain
said. His voice was calm but his face was furious.

Jaytsy didn’t understand why.

“
Well then let her in—I’m
starving!”

Thorne stepped slowly away, never taking his
eyes off of her.

Jaytsy pushed past him and into her father’s
office, slamming the door behind her.

Half an hour later, after they’d finished
eating and Jaytsy had told him of her plan to shock her mother—it
was wonderful to hear him laughing again—Jaytsy peeked out his door
to the outer office. It was empty except for a private in the
corner, whose handwriting looked very similar to the colonel’s,
painstakingly copying reports to be sent to Idumea.

“
What are you looking for,
Jayts?” her father asked. “He’s gone, if that’s what you are
wondering.”

She turned back to him. “Actually, yes.
Thorne.”

Perrin left his desk, took a peek out the
door himself, then shut it quietly. “I know I’ve said a few strange
things the last year, but trust me on this one: stay away from
Thorne. At least until you’re older.
Much
older. You’ll be
sixteen in a couple of weeks and considered an adult according to
some laws, but that’s still too young.”

“
Don’t worry, Father.” She
tiptoed to kiss him on the cheek. “No man could tear me away from
you. Especially Thorne. He’s so . . .” Not able to think of the
right description, she shuddered instead.

Perrin grinned. “Just the reaction I was
hoping to see. I don’t want to visit my grandchildren in
Idumea.”

“
Eww! Neither do
I.”

He kissed her on the head and spanked her
playfully. “I’ll see you tonight before bed. I’ll bring home the
dinner bucket.”

Jaytsy ran down the stairs, grinning. The sun
had just set, but she could still make it home before it grew too
dark and cold. As she left the building she decided she had to tell
her mother about gardening that night, after Father came home. That
revelation would bring down a barrier Jaytsy feared had grown
between them, and would be the first thing she wanted to weed
away—

“
Miss Jaytsy, come with
me!” a hiss said in her ear, and a hand gripped her upper
arm.

Frightened, she glanced to see who had
captured her and was startled by the angry face of Lemuel Thorne.
“Why? What do you want?”

He didn’t answer her but marched her through
the darkening compound and out the northeast gates.

Jaytsy tried to catch the eyes of any other
soldiers, hoping they’d see that something wasn’t right, but no one
would look at Thorne, as if they were used to avoiding him.

He steered her to the right, over to the feed
barns on the side of the fort. Jaytsy’s insides squirm in fear and
she tried to pull away, but Thorne twisted her arm into an awkward
position.

“
Don’t do that, and stop
drawing attention to yourself,” he insisted. “I will snap this bone
in two. Don’t think that I won’t.”

He kicked open the feed barn door and pushed
her in. She fell on top of some of the large bales, and spun to
face him, trying to catch her breath.

He slammed shut the doors and lit a lantern
posted nearby. After placing it on the hook, he analyzed her
severely. “I want an explanation from you, Jaytsy!” he said
bitterly as he unbuttoned his jacket.

“
About what?” she demanded,
trying not to sound as startled as she felt.

He wrenched off his jacket and threw it on
the ground. He stepped up to her, just inches from her face, his
blue eyes steely and his broad chest heaving again, covered only by
the thin white undershirt.

She couldn’t back away from him without
falling over the bales behind her.

“
About you and your lies.
I’ve watched you. I know you’ve seen me,” he snarled. “Not ready
for ‘walking and talking’?” He paced like an impatient mountain
lion. “Yet I’ve seen you making eyes at every soldier in this
fort!”

“
Making eyes?” Jaytsy
cried. “I’ve done nothing but smile. There’s nothing wrong with
that!”

He lunged at her, forcing her to sit on the
bale behind her.

“
Nothing but smile? What
was that on the stairs back there? With a
corporal!
” he
spat. “How many other men have you flirted with? My future wife
shouldn’t be looking at anyone.”

As terrified Jaytsy was, she was suddenly
more angry. She pulled her legs up on the bale and stood up. “I’m
NOT your future wife! I don’t want anything to do with you, Lemuel.
Find some other animal to be the mother of the next general!” She
climbed to the next higher bale, looking for a way out.

He jumped on top of the bales to face her,
and she scrambled back down them again. She knew she was going
further away from the door, but hoped there was a way out the back.
She searched either side for an escape but discovered only solid
walls of hay. When she twisted back around she saw Thorne smiling,
and realized that smiles could be ugly.

“
Oh, you’ll be mine.
There’s no one else but you.” He jumped to a lower bale. “I’ve been
patient.” His voice was strangely calm and measured as he dropped
to the dirt in front of her. “But as my father has said, sometimes
girls don’t know they want something until they have
it.”

Jaytsy’s mouth went dry, and her arms and
legs felt floppy. She took a few steps back and found herself
hitting another wall of hay behind her.

She was trapped.

Thorne took another step closer and undid the
buckle of his sheathed sword. “You
are
ready, and you are
mine.”

---

Shem rode through the northeast gates and
felt immediately that something was wrong. He looked up at the
command tower where the light was still on in Colonel Shin’s
office, but that didn’t seem to be the problem. He reined his horse
to a stop and scanned the compound. Nothing appeared out of the
ordinary as he slid off his horse.

Feed barns. Now!

The thought was undeniable. Leaving his
mount, Shem jogged out of the gates and looked to the barns, but
there was no smoke or flames. Confused, he turned to walk back
through the gates.

Feed barns. Now!

Shem spun without further delay and sprinted.
One of the barns had light shining through the cracks, and from it
he heard a female shriek, “I said
no!
”

Shem kicked open the door and saw no one
immediately, but heard a commotion behind a few fallen bales. He
hurdled over them and scrambled to the top of the next pile. What
he saw in the dim light wrenched his gut.

Captain Thorne was on all fours, looking as
if he was about to vomit. His hair and trousers were disheveled and
his undershirt was partially torn.

The young woman crawling away from him
frantically adjusted her tunic and skirt to cover her, and looked
up at Shem.

Shem groaned as he recognized her face in the
weak light. Something clicked inside him as a dormant instinct
sprang to life, filling him with rage and energy.

“
NO!” Shem leaped onto
Thorne, flattening him to the ground. In a flash Shem flipped him
onto his back, pressed his long knife against his throat, and
crushed Thorne’s chest with his full weight. “Jaytsy,
OUT!”

Jaytsy yelped and scrambled over the bales,
still trying to fix her tunic as she ran out of the barn.

“
Oh, what are
you
going to do, Zenos?” Thorne, clearly nauseated, still did his best
to sound patronizing. “You certainly can’t kill me, or even cut me.
You know that all I need to do is send one message to my father and
he’ll have you transferred all the way back to Flax.”

Shem firmed his grip on the knife and pressed
the flat edge of the blade hard against Thorne’s throat. “Oh, I’d
be perfectly justified in killing you right now, you sniveling
piece of—” He couldn’t say the word. Someone as debased as Thorne
wouldn’t
make him say the word. “Don’t you ever touch that
girl again. Do you hear me!?”

Despite Shem’s knife pressing down on his
throat, Thorne still managed a ragged chuckle. “Let’s get something
straight here, Zenos: she’s too young for you—”

“
And you!” Shem bellowed,
filled with a desire to turn that blade just a little . . . that’s
all it would take, just a fraction of an inch and a tiny thrust
would end the repulsive captain’s life.

He’d killed before, and each time it left him
sickened. But at that moment the thought of stabbing Thorne’s
windpipe filled him with a hunger that it should have terrified
him, but it didn’t until much later that night.

Instead, he shouted, “She’s too young for you
or any man!” Clinging to his self-control with a shaky grip, he let
the knife’s angle shift slightly so that the tip repeatedly
punctured Thorne’s throat as Shem’s arm shook.

The captain winced each time it jabbed
him.

“
She’s like a daughter to
me!” Shem spat. “You should be thankful it was me who found you and
not the colonel! You’d be dead right now! In fact, I have half a
mind to drag you to him now—”

Remarkably—or maybe stupidly—Thorne attempted
another gasping chuckle. “Shin won’t care. He knows this is how it
is—”

“
Shin would care, he does
care!” Shem insisted.

Thorne scoffed, and his belly dry heaved, but
still he muttered, “Shin can’t get mad for something he used to do
all the time. Ever heard the phrase, ‘Out to the barn for a roll in
the hay’? Who do you think came up with it?”

“
Shut up!” Shem
yelled.

“
He has a reputation, you
know. All the Command School men know it, but no one has been able
to match it—”

“
Shut up!”

“
Oh yes—Shin took many a
young woman to the barns, when he was even younger than me. At
least I plan to marry the girl, so it doesn’t matter when I take
her—”

“
Shut up! Shut
up!”

“
You should hear the women
in Idumea talk, Sergeant. When my mother got around her friends,
who had also been officers’ daughters—well, let’s just say they
weren’t too discreet—”

It took Shem a moment to realize it really
had been
his
fist that punched Thorne in the jaw, and that
was why he stopped talking, and why his mouth was bleeding, and why
Shem’s hand was throbbing.

Perhaps he wasn’t allowed to kill Thorne, but
the cosmos did approve of hitting him.

Slowly Shem growled, “Thorne, leave Jaytsy
alone, and don’t you
ever
speak that way about your
commander again.”

Thorne spat out a mouth of blood. “Zenos,
you’ll pay for that—” He gagged on his own blood and nausea.

“
Oh, I
will
pay
,” Shem assured him as he repositioned the blade against
his throat. “I
will pay
extra careful attention to make sure
you stay far, far away from her. You’ll learn just how annoying and
persistent I can be. Every day and every night I’ll be watching
you.”

The desire to stab Thorne was so intense that
Shem’s hand nearly burned. But some influence from inside calmed
the knife in his hands, and through a force not quite his own
pulled it gently back.

And then he heard the words, clearly in his
mind:
Not now. Not yet. Another day.