The Falcon in the Barn (Book 4 Forest at the Edge series) (41 page)

“
Jayts, you have time!”
Mahrree exclaimed, but quietly so as to not disturb the soldiers
around them. “You’re only sixteen. There’s no need to rush, trust
me.”

“
Mother, I really don’t
want to wait another
twelve years
to find my husband like
you did,” Jaytsy exclaimed quietly back. “And I don’t want to get
married next week, either. I just wished I knew when, and
who.”

“
Don’t we all?” Mahrree
sighed. “The biggest decision one can make, and you don’t even know
when you get to make it. It’s not all up to you, I’m afraid. But
that’s also good,” she decided. “It’s got to be the Creator’s
timing. He knows when we’re ready to find a good match. I wouldn’t
have wanted to marry your father if I’d met him in Edge when we
were eighteen, and we weren’t ready for each other at twenty-seven,
either. It took us time to become the person the other would love.
You’re probably not ready for him yet. Or he’s not ready for you,
but both of you will be eventually.”

Jaytsy twisted to face her mother. Something
in her words had certainly pricked Jaytsy, but Mahrree didn’t
understand why her daughter wore an expression akin to pain.

“
Not
ready
yet,”
Jaytsy muttered. She sighed and faced forward again, gripping her
ponytail. “Mother, how did you know Father was the one for
you?”

Mahrree had been waiting for this question,
but she thought she had a few more years to prepare for it.

“
Your father wasn’t
the
one for me. I don’t believe in that. There were a couple
of men I’ve been attracted to over the years. Before and after
him,” she confessed. “But he was the one I chose to love. Not only
was I attracted to him, but I loved his mind, his spirit, his
personality—”

“
How?” Jaytsy turned to
her. “I mean, you hardly spent any time with him alone before you
were engaged, right? It was through the debates you fell in love
with him. So how did you know everything
else
about
him?”

She’s got me there
, Mahrree thought,
scrunching her lips. They really did have an unusual courtship; it
occurred
after
they decided to marry. She had often wondered
why she said yes to his proposal. As flimsy as it sounds, the idea
just felt right.

And then there was her own father . . .

“
I didn’t really know that
much about him—that’s true,” Mahrree conceded. “But I
felt
he was a good choice, and I never felt that way about any other
man. And there was something else—Jaytsy, my father liked
him.”

Jaytsy started to respond, until she thought
more on what her mother just said. “Umm . . . Grandfather Peto? I
hate to ask this, but wasn’t he already dead?”

Mahrree smiled. “Yes, he had already died.
But when I need his guidance about something that’s important, I
still feel him. And marrying the right man is
very
important. The first moment I saw Captain Shin, I felt my father
distinctly and I had the impression that he liked this man. He’s
told me that many times, even after we were married. And he’s also
told me that I should always trust my husband, which has been a
little hard to do this last year—”

Jaytsy nodded in agreement.

“—
but I should always have
faith in him, too. Trust
your
father, Jaytsy. I guess if
there’s any man that he likes, you have his blessing to love
him.”

Jaytsy sighed again. “Any man that Father
thinks is worthy of finding or saving?”

Mahrree hesitated. “Uh, all right,” she said,
trying to understand Jaytsy’s odd phrasing. “Perhaps.”

Jaytsy blew out heavily, as if she was having
a hard time catching her breath that afternoon. “I still have
time,” she said more to herself.

Mahrree massaged her hands, realizing that
she was missing something.

---

Shem returned from Moorland in the afternoon,
but it wasn’t until later that night that Perrin finally got him
alone. Perrin had been briefed by Fadh about the fire to destroy
the remaining structures, and received the final count of the dead,
but there was one more piece of information that only Shem could
supply.

“
I saw Jaytsy talking to
you before she left—what did Lemuel say to her when she was
changing his bandage?”

Shem started to twist his face into an odd
configuration.

“
No, no, no,” Perrin
stopped him before Shem rearranged all of his features. “She didn’t
say, ‘Not a word,’ did she?”

Shem searched his memory. “You’re right, she
didn’t. Good. I was having a hard time figuring out how to do this
one.”

“
So?”

Shem smirked. “Your
thorney little
friend
said to your daughter, ‘Your father thinks I’m worth
finding and saving. I hope you will think so too. Please save me,
Miss Jaytsy.’”

Perrin scowled. “Oh, that’s awful. That’s the
best he could do? Good.”

Shem pointed at Perrin’s expression. “Exactly
the same face she made when she told me! Granted, the boy
had
been under sedation most of the night, and likely didn’t
have a lot of time to prepare something less sappy. What was
Jaytsy’s reaction to him?”

“
She didn’t look impressed,
from what I could tell,” Perrin said. “But she nodded slightly.
Should I be worried about that?”

Shem shook his head. “I wouldn’t. She’s
starting to recognize his manipulation. She asked me if it would be
her fault if he wasn’t ‘saved,’ whatever he meant by that. I told
her only Lemuel was responsible for Lemuel’s successes and
failures—not her or anyone else. She seemed to accept that. And
then
,” he paused, “she said if you had known what he tried
to do to her in the barns, you probably would’ve left him to die on
the field.”

Perrin released a low whistle. “For a second,
I considered it.”

Shem folded his arms. “So why didn’t
you?”

Perrin couldn’t have been more surprised by
Shem’s response; he actually sounded disappointed
.

“
Why didn’t I? Because he’s
still my responsibility. Because I have a duty to protect
him.”

Then Perrin smiled partway.

“
Because then I was also
struck with the thought, ‘Not today. Some other
battle.’”

---

Deep in the forest east of Moorland, four men
dressed in mottled green and brown clothing picked up the body in
the blue uniform and brought it to wide crack in the ground. It was
the last to go into the bottomless crevice which had already
swallowed dozens of Guarders who died as the soldiers chased them
last night into the woods and into their waiting blades.

The dozens of other men in concealing
clothing watched silently as the four hefted the old man, swung him
over the chasm, and released his body, letting it tumble to depths
unknown for a burial not to be commemorated.

No words were said over the body of
Beneff.

No words
should
be said for a
traitor.

---

Late the next night, Perrin was thrashing in
bed again.

Mahrree next to him wasn’t worried or
disturbed, but was chuckling.

“
Do you realize—
really
realize
—what we’ve done?” he asked for the sixth
time.

“
I do, Perrin. You
destroyed the Guarders!”

It was only now that it hit him—now that
everyone was back safely to their forts, after the dead soldiers
were given a proper burial, after the injured were secured and
recovering, after the borrowed horses were returned, and the trees
remained exceptionally silent—now that he went to lay down in his
bed for the first time in a few nights, it finally hit him: over a
hundred years of terror might finally be over.

He sat up abruptly again, pulsating. “I mean,
true—we need to wait to see. Probably a year, I’m afraid, to make
sure there are no other attacks and that they are truly gone, but
then?”

In an effort to try to relax him enough to
sleep, Mahrree sat up to massage his shoulders. But even as broad
as they were, she had a hard time finding him because he fidgeted
so.

“
And then,” she answered
his question, “
then
the world can be declared a different
and better place. We may not even need forts or the army anymore.
Who’s there left to fight?”

“
Even more than that,
Mahrree,” he bounced in enthusiasm. “The world can be declared
open
!”

She stopped trying to rub his shoulders.
“Open? What do you mean?”

“
I’ve been thinking about
this for a while.” He turned eagerly to her and tried to search her
features in the dark. “Remember on our second wedding anniversary
when you came up with a ridiculous plan to go through the Guarder
land and find a new place to settle?”

She swallowed down a lump that appeared in
her throat. “Yes.”

“
Well, it wasn’t a
ridiculous plan, and I apologize now for ever thinking so. Remember
how my grandfather went over the wall to free the
servants—”

“
Oh, Perrin,” she whispered
in anticipation and anxiety, “I know where you’re going with this.
You want to find Terryp’s land!”

“
And more! Mahrree, if
there are no Guarders what’s to keep us confined here? Poison? The
entire world simply can’t
all
be poisoned.”

Mahrree hugged her legs, suddenly very
nervous. “Remember something else from that discussion we had on
our anniversary? That Guarder women have many children?”

“
I’ve thought about that,
too,” he said, now on his knees and ready to bounce through the
roof. “We got that information years ago from the delusional
Guarder that Shem was talking to. I never trusted him, and soon
after that he vanished. Consider this: the rumors have always been
that Guarder women and children are armed, but never in the entire
history of fighting Guarders have we ever seen women or children. I
had Fadh and Shem look specifically at the Guarder dead in
Moorland, and all they found were men, ages late teens up to
middle-aged.”

Mahrree swallowed again.

“
Here’s my theory,” he
plowed on. “Those who raid from us? They’re castoffs from their own
society that exists somewhere far, far away. Maybe even hundreds of
miles from us. They don’t even know about us, like we don’t know
about them. These men, though, are maybe thieves or murderers and
were booted out. They wandered and happened upon us during the
Great War, then assumed the role of Guarders. They’ve been using us
to survive ever since. That would explain their poor communication,
their lack of consistency, their changing strategies—they’re just a
bunch of criminals, and they recruit others to join them from among
us, like they did with Riplak, to make their jobs
easier.”

When Mahrree didn’t say anything, he gently
shook her shoulder. “What’s wrong? I thought you’d be all over
this? If the vast majority of them are gone, their power is
stripped! They’re finished! Even their local recruits will surely
be scared out of compliance with them.”

She couldn’t move. It was a fantastic theory
which, if true, would open possibilities no one had considered
before.

But she knew something that he didn’t.

There
were
Guarder women.

Well, at least one who chided Mahrree to
tears and out of the forest thirteen years ago.

But she couldn’t confess that to him, and
while she sat stewing a terrible thought came to her: what if that
woman’s sons had been killed in Moorland? Or her husband—

For absolutely no logical reason whatsoever,
thoughts of Rector Yung suddenly filled her mind.

She shook her head to dislodge him and to
focus back on her husband, who was now bobbing like a four-year-old
in search of convenient bush.

“
I am
all over
this
,” she assured him. “I’m just stunned,” which wasn’t
exactly a lie. “I just never thought of anything like this before,
and need to let it sink in a bit . . . Wait. If there are no
Guarder women, how are there Guarders now?”

“
More castoffs,” he said
easily. “Maybe this is how that other civilization deals with their
criminals, by throwing them out. They keep coming here generation
after generation. Isn’t that amazing!”

“
That they loot
us?!”

“
That we finally put an end
to all of this!”

She sighed wearily, wondering how that
Guarder woman fit into any of this. The words she said to Mahrree
that night long ago still didn’t make any sense: “All I do is save
lives.”

Whose lives? Where?

There were so many variables missing to this
equation that Perrin was trying to write, and it wasn’t as if math
was Mahrree’s best subject to begin with, but after midnight her
ability was even more diminished to figure out all of the parts,
especially ones he didn’t know were supposed to be in there.

“
Oh, Perrin, I just don’t
know,” she confessed, truly dismayed. “I mean, I wish—”

She was startled by him suddenly kissing her
on the lips.

“
I know, I know. There are
so many possibilities and we have to wait. It’s a mess in my mind,
too, so just think about it Mahrree? Help me get to the bottom of
this? And, maybe in a year or so, should there be no more Guarders
and no more need for defense, all kinds of marvelous things could
happen.” She could even hear him grinning in the dark; he
practically lit up the room.