The Four Forges (12 page)

“LIKE A TWIG, she is. She’ll break in the wind,” grumbled Garner.

“Is not! She can do anything I can, and faster.” Nutmeg wrinkled up her nose, glaring at her brother, even as he reached out and pulled one of the fancily plaited braids that Rivergrace had woven into his sister’s hair. Grace wore the same crown of braids, hiding the points of her delicate ears, though nothing could hide the extreme slenderness of her body or the highlights of her brilliant eyes, colors of the most vivid blue-green with sparkles and streaks of golden sunlight through them.

“Not,” echoed Rivergrace, putting her chin up, even as she settled into a position behind Nutmeg, glancing up at him through a defiant fringe of bangs that would never allow themselves to be braided no matter how Nutmeg tried, instead framing her forehead with chestnut curls that caught the red and golds of every sunbeam. The last of Harvest Month sunlight brought freckles out on her fair skin, dusting her nose.

Garner crossed his arms and tried to parody his father’s sternness. “I can’t let just anyone do this job. It has to be done well, if it’s to be done at all.”

“We can do it!” vowed Nutmeg, hand over her heart. Grace hesitated a moment, then signed her fingers over her chest as well, although he could read a touch of bewilderment on her face. She understood much more than she had those many days ago when first truly awakening, and he gave her credit for that.

“Please let us. Please!”

He waited for Rivergrace to say something else, but she merely looked up at him with pleading eyes. Garner looked down at her. “Well, Grace?”

She didn’t say a word, but put her hand out and wrapped her fingers about the bail of the bucket he held, and gave him another long look with sorrowful eyes.

“She says please, too!” Nutmeg bounced impatiently.

“I haven’t heard her say it.”

Rivergrace pulled slightly on the bail. Nutmeg said accusingly to her brother, “You know she doesn’t like to talk.”

“I don’t know any such thing because you won’t let her get a word in edgewise. You do all the talking for everyone.”

“Do not.” Nutmeg huffed and stumbled for an insult, and gave up, crossing her arms across her chest and glaring at Garner.

Garner shook his head. “I can’t let you two do my chores anyway. Da told me especially to get this done. He wants it done right, and those baby goats can knock you over, eat too much, not let the others in. Takes strong arms and good eyes to feed them right.”

“We can do it, please,” begged Nutmeg, her retreat to insulted silence forgotten.

Rivergrace tugged gently on the bucket handle. “Please,” she said breathily, and then looked down as if she’d said too much. He let the bucket go into her hold. “All right,” Garner told them, and handed Nutmeg the other three buckets of feed. “Just make sure you do a good job of it!”

“We will!”

“Will,” Rivergrace echoed, and the two bounced off, buckets in hand, stopping only long enough to roll up the cuffs of their overalls, and nudge each other excitedly. Garner hid his grin till he went round the corner of the pens, and headed to the press where Hosmer stood, mopping his face, and taking a break from turning the great wheel of the machinery.

“Get the girls to feed the goats like Da wanted?”

“Of course,” Garner said, taking up a ladle of water and pouring it over his brother’s sweaty head. “Did you doubt I would?”

“You know Nutmeg and chores, and her stubborn streak.”

Garner let his grin out. “Hos, you just have to know how to handle women.” He dipped the ladle again and this time took a long drink as Tolby rounded the press with crates of new apples, putting them into the crushing bins. “I’ll be sure to tell your mother you’ve become an expert,” he said, as he passed by them. Garner sputtered the last of his drink out as Tolby’s chuckle trailed behind him.

He went in through the kitchen back door and slid his arm about his wife’s waist, hugging her roughly, as the breath rushed out of her and she fought for a laugh and to throw his arm off. He sat down at the table a moment. “Derro. What is it you’re doing there?”

She held the bracelet up. “I took my ribbons from the fair and braided this for Rivergrace. It’ll hide those awful scars for now, although I hope because she’s young and young skin heals well, in a few years they’ll hardly be noticeable.”

He flicked it with a fingertip. “But those are your fair ribbons!”

Lily tossed her head. “I have a beau,” she said, eyes sparkling, “who will buy me new ones next fair!”

“Do you now?” Tolby stole a kiss, and then sat back down. “I hope he has more money than I have!”

“No, but more hair!”

“Hey. Now, my love, that is not fair.” Tolby chuckled to himself, as he swiped the palm of his hand over his thinning gray hair. “The hat wears it off, I swear, and I would be a foolish man to work without a hat against sun, wind, and rain.”

“And you, my love, are anything but a foolish man.”

“Sometimes, I wonder.” Tolby pulled out his pipe and tapped it down, after examining the bowl and deciding half a smoke was better than none, and all he had time for anyway. The boys would be all right left alone for a while. “I thought I saw Bolger sign a few weeks ago, right after we found Grace, but the rains had come through and I couldn’t be sure. Looked like a hunting party, I found signs of a kill or two, but I’ve seen nothing since, and yet . . .” He paused to strike his flint and set the toback alight. “I feel guilty. It’s good to see nothing, but it doesn’t sit right that no one has come looking for her. Not family, not owner.”

“She’s only a child.”

“Less valuable, then? Perhaps.” He clamped his teeth about the pipe stem. “Remember when the Bolgers came through two years ago, in the spring of ’21?”

“How could I forget? They wanted every jug of hard cider you could unearth for them.”

He blew out an aromatic cloud of smoke. “But that wasn’t what they came for, Lily. They pulled all our hats off, and looked at our ears, before rummaging through the kitchen and larder and around the cider press, or had you forgotten?”

Lily dropped the ribbon bracelet onto the kitchen table, where it lay like a river of satiny colors, all bound together magically. She made a face. “Filthy Bolger hands tugging at my hair to see my ears. I made you all bathe twice after they left. Yet, it seems I did forget, neh? Unpleasant memories.” She tilted her face at Tolby. “They couldn’t have been looking for her, then. She couldn’t have survived two years on the river! Someone else would have found her long ago, and the journey . . . why, she’d have been to the great sea in weeks. Besides, they seemed to be looking for someone male.”

“Oh, no, no. It’s not Rivergrace I’m minded of. But Bolgers have come here before, looking for the elven, I’m thinking, and I don’t know from where they would have come. Do you remember when I was but a young buck, and still courting you in town, and there were Bolger raids, and a bunch of us joined the guard and came riding out?”

“That’s how you found these lands, wasn’t it?”

“Aye, my love, it was. No one knew what the Bolger hounds were looking for then either and that was . . . could it have been? Twenty-some years ago. Tales told said they looked for a ship or boat on the river, but liars that they are, most of us dismissed that.” Tolby sighed then, as if amazed at the passage of time. “We drove them back without a clue what it was that had set them off. The mountains are far away, and the other grovers out here, well, none of us use Bolger help. The critters have some intelligence, but they’re sly and sneakers, and I won’t use a whip or bully somethin’ to get it to work with me. So they come and go, without any of us knowin’ why or being any the wiser. At least they don’t seem to have found their quarry.” Tolby took two great puffs on his pipe after that bit of a speech. “I just wonder who they might have been looking for, and who would use such a band of creatures to hunt with.”

“Are you sorry we took her in?” Lily looked at him solemnly, folding her hands in her lap, watching his face as well as listening to him closely.

“Never. I’m not one to say that the Gods take away and give back, I’m not so grand as to have a God’s eye turned on me, you see, but if the Gods did take note, they’d not have found a better foster mother than you, my dear.” Tolby smiled softly at her, holding his pipe.

“Are you thinking of looking for her people?”

“No,” he answered flatly. “You and I both know, Lily, slave or parent, whoever had her took little care of her. If it had been the two of us, and our little ones, they’d have been cared for even if we had to open our veins to keep them fed. No one took care of the little one like that, no one, and they won’t be getting her back from me!”

Lily stood, came round the table, and slid onto her husband’s lap, looping her arms about his neck, and snuggled against him listening to the pulse pound fiercely in his indignation. “Thank you,” she whispered to his jaw.

“Had to be said,” Tolby muttered gruffly. “Remember the nights we’d find her sneaked back downstairs, feet in the larder cabinet, eating everything she could stuff into her mouth, half sick with it, and terrified when we caught her?”

Lily nodded against his chest. “How did you stop her?”

“I couldn’t have her thinking she was stealing it, could I? Keldan noticed it, smart lad. ‘Da,’ he told me. ‘She eats like a bird, a peck here and there. She’s got to be still hungry, but I think it scares her.’ So I watched, and he was right. She hardly ate at the meals, afraid of taking what she needed and wanted, so she’d steal back downstairs in the middle of the night and eat what she could lay her hands on. So I started waking in the middle of the night myself, quietly go upstairs, wake her, take her by the hand and lead her down, and fix her a small snack. I won’t have a child who thinks they have to steal to eat. Then she knew she wasn’t stealing, couldn’t be stealing, and she settled right down then. And your tucking small snacks away in a napkin and giving it to her when you sent the girls up to bed, that helped, too. She is still a mite skittish, like one of those hot-blooded northern horses, but she’s a smart lass. Just mistreated.” He puffed angrily. “Mistreated horribly.”

“No more,” Lily breathed against her neck.

“Not if we have anything to do about it.” He held her back. “She has a very long time before she needs t’ worry. We Farbranches are a stout lot, and we’ll be guarding her.”

SHE WOKE IN THE darkest of the night chasing dreams. For a moment, she lay in complete panic until she saw the thready gleam of moonlight filtering in through the window and knew she could breathe. Not rock and earth over her, but a roof, and a bed that cradled her. Rivergrace quieted, listening to the deep, soft sounds of Nutmeg next to her, and when her drumming heart had stilled a bit, she got up, carefully, quietly, easing out of the bed and down the creaky wooden stairs so as not to wake anyone. She had remembered the noisy spots and could get up and down them with the barest whisper of noise that even the sharp round ears of the others could not catch, although she trembled at each groan of the weathered wood. She could hear it, sharp as could be, the moaning of the wood, bent and carved into steps, lamenting its loss of life as a young, verdant tree.

Without lamp or candle, Rivergrace lifted the latch on the back door and went outside. The ground felt both damp and icy cold under her feet. Soon she would either not be able to make the trip at all or would have to find boots to wear. Grace hurried across the yard and into the grove, and down the lane to the river. The journey seemed both farther and nearer every time she made it. Definitely colder. She crouched on the bank, looking into the still, deep waters, drawing her gown about her like a tent as proof against the coming winter, hugging her arms about herself. She knew well now the difference between the sound of the wind in the trees and the Silverwing in its bed, both rushing on a journey through the valley.

The night frightened her. Not the darkness of it, but the unseen things that inhabited it. There were some she had seen, and many she could hear and smell, and she did not understand what they feared, but it seemed that all who walked the night were hunters of one sort or another. Did she hunt too? Maybe.

Rivergrace chafed her hands against her arms. Sometimes when she woke, she had no words. It was as if all of them fled her when she slept, running away, leaving her with no way to say or think anything. On such nights all she could do was to lie awake until they crept back slowly, one by one, with feelings and the ideas behind them. She didn’t know why they left or where they went or what she could do to make them come back quicker, but she hated the trapped feeling of being unable to speak or even put words together in her head, to be remembered for shouting aloud later. It was as if it took all she could do to just
be.

She stared into the river, watching the moonlight ripple across its current. Alert for the smell and sound of stinkers riding into the valley, she could stay a while but not too long, in case one of her family missed her.

Rivergrace stretched out her hand and leaned close to the water, and touched it. Icy cold thrilled through her fingertips. Something wiggled against it and swam off with a splash of a finned tail, into the dappled shadows of the reeds and deeper pools.

Can you help me
, she thought after the fish.
I’ve lost something here, but I . . . I don’t know what it is.
How impossible. How could she find the words to tell the fish what she’d lost if she’d never known them herself? But something. She knew she’d lost something on the river. Whenever she tried to ask Nutmeg about it, more and more haltingly as it escaped her grasp, Nutmeg would only hug her close and soothe her, on the edge of tears herself. She did not want to make Nutmeg cry anymore, so she stopped asking.

Whatever it was she’d lost, she was losing even the thought of it, the barest notion of it. The feeling of being on the raft, swirling downriver, was something she could only touch in dreams, and even those were becoming wispy and shredding away, like clouds on a windy Harvest day. Before that, beyond that lay something she could not describe. It was as though she had been cupped in great hands, the river flowing about her but not touching, time without meaning, herself breathing and living and growing as quietly as a stone on the ground ages, her thoughts as vast as the sky itself, and as slow as the mountains. She did not know what that meant, any more than she understood why she could barely sense her loss. In her nightmares, she remembered cold, and crashing dark, and screams and pain and then . . . nothing. Something had caught her up and saved her, and cocooned her from the river, then set her upon it once again, something to which a day meant nothing more than a breath, and to which years were only a sigh. So she would wander to the river and stand, knowing only an ache inside of her and with no idea why, her memories so thin she would lose them, too. She hugged her hands to her throat, feeling the sorrow well up in her unbearably.