Full Circle (23 page)

“Our guests,” Thegan said to Sorn, “have informed the Lord Leof that they have Traveller blood, so I think they are best housed
in the barn with the others.”

He ignored the council completely. Vi didn’t react at all but Reed was furious, and the two younger ones showed a mixture
of relief and indignation. Sorn nodded, and with her agreement Thegan simply turned and walked out.

Leof exchanged a quick glance with Sorn, and followed him, trying not to laugh. Punctured expectations were so often funny,
even in people he quite liked.

Thegan turned and found him chuckling and smiled, the real smile. He couldn’t help but return it. “They have no idea they
have given us a weapon that we can use against this enchanter.”

“My lord?”

“Not only Travellers as hostages, now, but Lake People.” His tone was full of satisfaction. “After this is over, they will
not be going home unless they tell me the secrets of the Lake.”

There he was again, planning for the future. Leof found it both reassuring and irritating. He wanted to say, “How can you
be so sure it will be over?” but knew it was possible that Thegan was
not
sure, and was just putting on a good face for his officers. Leof didn’t want to find out that was true.

He left Thegan and went to check on the mason’s gang strengthening the wall under Oak’s direction. No time to rest just yet.

Sorn and her maid, Faina, crossed the yard, headed for the dairy. Oak’s eyes followed them, and Leof stiffened. He would brook
no indignity from a Traveller towards Sorn. But Sorn disappeared inside the dairy and left Faina outside, talking to Alston.
Their bodies inclined towards one another. Oak’s mouth tightened and he turned away suddenly, his trowel striking hard against
the high stone block that was wrapped with ropes ready to be lifted, the note ringing out across the yard. Faina, not Sorn,
then. Leof relaxed, filled with sympathy. No wonder the poor fellow looked unhappy.

“Keep up the good work, mason,” he said. Oak looked surprised, as though Leof’s words had contradicted something he had been
thinking. Not feeling valued, maybe? Leof hadn’t been an officer all his adult life without knowing how to deal with that.
“Without you, mason, and your colleagues, we would be in a dangerous situation. Our lives are in your hands.”

Leof looked around at the small gang preparing to use pulleys and rope to haul the heavy stones up into place, and clapped
Oak on the shoulder. He expected the man to puff up a little with importance, or nod with understanding, but Oak stopped still,
as though he had never thought of his role in this way. Finally, he nodded and turned away, trowel still in hand, to give
an order to the lad he’d been assigned, a young man with light brown hair and soft hands, who’d clearly never done a hand’s
turn of work in his life. He looked familiar, and then Leof placed him — the one who had pretended not to be a Traveller,
on the road to Baluchston.

“Flax!” Oak ordered. “We need to raise these blocks. Give us a work song to keep us in time.”

The lad nodded. “Sea shanties are best for that,” he said in a light voice, and waited until all hands had grasped the rope,
then he gave out a note so strong and full that Leof almost jumped.

Lady Death will ring her bell

Heave away

Haul away

Call us all to the deep cold hell

Raise the mains’l maties

The men hauled on the ropes in time and the stone block slowly rose. Oak steadied it so it wouldn’t swing.

There waves are taller than the sky

Heave away

Haul away

They’ll crush your ribs and blind your eyes

Raise the mains’l maties

Oak called, “Hold it there,” and then Leof heard the solid thunk of the stone settling into place.

Although he’d spent the day in the saddle, he felt the sudden need to get out of the fort, to prepare himself for dinner,
the first meal he’d had in both Thegan and Sorn’s company since he’d found himself loving her. He needed surcease. He checked
that Thegan did not need him.

“Arrow will need exercising,” he said. “If you’ll excuse me, sir.”

“You and your horses!” Thegan replied, waving Leof away.

Arrow did need exercising. She was spritely and affectionate and danced her way down the long road from the fort, shying at
everything — wind blown leaves, a boy trundling a cart full of stone up to the walls, her own shadow. Leof found her innocent
antics a great relief; and they kept his mind off everything else.

He rode down to the pool where he had seen the old man, half hoping to find him there again, but there was nothing except
the cool, spreading water and moss-covered stones, which seemed to promise continuity, a sense of time far beyond a human
lifespan. He dismounted and stayed there for a while, until Arrow grew bored and nudged him in the back. He reluctantly turned
to go back, then paused and walked towards the water, Arrow’s reins looped over his arm.

He stood with his toes just in the pool, feeling the cool wetness seep slowly into his boots. “Lady,” he said, feeling absurd,
“What should I do?” He didn’t expect a reply. Part of him hoped fervently that there wouldn’t be one.

But a voice sounded in his head, as though she were speaking from another room. “You are not one of mine,” it said, which
was curiously hurtful, because it was said in his mother’s voice.

“I am in need of guidance,” he said.

“No,” the voice said. “You know what is right, which is all the guidance you need. If you will not go home to your mother,
you must take the consequences.” The voice was curiously soft and sorrowful, as his mother’s voice had never been in his memory,
and yet he knew that his mother could sound like this, as though she had crooned over him in this tone when he was too young
to remember.

“But I will give you a gift,” the voice said, “because you believe in me. Because you have tried your best to protect my people.”

Something nudged his toe. He looked down and saw a little circle floating on the water. He picked it up. It was woven reeds,
a simple ring as large as a woman’s bracelet.

“For luck,” the Lake said, her voice warm with laughter. “Just a token, to help you think of me. Keep it with you.”

The water stilled, the ripples from where he had picked up the ring disappeared, smoothed away, and he knew she was gone.

He tucked the ring in his left pocket and felt a little flushed, as he had at sixteen when Dorsi’s daughter, Gret, had chosen
him for the Springtree dance: embarrassed and happy, with an undercurrent of fear.

A
S ALWAYS
when Travellers came together, the barn that night was full of music, a complex lively music of drum and flute and oud, bells
and rhythmic clapping, horn and gong. Rowan, Swallow and Flax were at the centre of it, of course, and Flax found it comforting.

“Give us a song, lad,” Reed, one of the councillors from Baluchston, said to him, and he muttered to Rowan, “What will I sing?”

Rowan smiled at him and played the first notes of “The Distant Hills.”

From the high hills of Hawksted, my lover calls to me

The breeze is her voice, the wind becomes her breath

From the high hills of Hawksted, above the settled plain

My lover sings so sweetly, sings the song of death

The last time Flax had sung this song was in the Deep, asking for acceptance from a group of demons. This audience was much
easier.

By the time he finished, there were more than a few wet eyes. Even Oak looked teary, which he hadn’t expected.

“Singing’s all very well, my dearies,” Vi said, “but that Lord Thegan’s a cold-hearted boy and he’ll sacrifice us all, sooner
or later.”

“Aye, that’s so.” It was Reed’s voice, grave. “He’ll not keep feeding us, not for long.”

“We’re not prisoners,” Oak objected.

“I’d rather be here than back home,” a woman said. “They slaughtered my cousins — and we’ve been Settled three generations!”

Disquiet circled the barn like a swarm of bees.

“It’s bad out there,” Vi agreed, “and we’re better off here for the meanwhile. But let’s not think he’s doing it out of the
goodness of his heart. We may not be prisoners, but we’re hostages, sure as eggs is eggs.”

“What would you know? You’re not a Traveller.” It was a man’s voice, deep and authoritative. Flax looked around but didn’t
recognise the old man. There were people here from all over Central Domain.

“I’ve got the old blood in me, same as everyone in Baluchston,” Vi replied. “I may not have been on the Road, but as far as
Thegan is concerned, I’m tainted and he can do what he likes with me.”

That silenced them.

Flax hesitated, but the memory of Ash confronting wind wraiths came back to him. Surely he could face a few questioning eyes?
“We have to be ready,” he said. “Sooner or later they’ll turn on us, and we have to be ready. Have our escape routes planned,
hide some weapons, figure out who stands with whom, and where.”

Some in the crowd looked at each other, judging reactions, and Vi nodded.

“Aye,” she said. “But quietly. Sing again now, in case they wonder why we’ve stopped.”

Rowan’s flute started and Swallow began to sing; it was beautiful and spare and delicate, in a language Flax didn’t know.
From the Wind Cities? No, something else. The melody sounded strange, too, with an unusual choice of notes. With a shock,
Flax realised that she was singing in the old language, the tongue used by the people Acton had invaded. He’d had no idea
that it survived. His parents had certainly never taught him any.

Then the words changed into his own tongue, as though Swallow were translating:

Water, fire, earth and air

Spirits live and spirits die

Flame upon the mountain

Wind across the sky

Water dark and dreamless

Earth in which we lie

Water, fire, earth and air

Blood is everlasting

“We’re better off where we are,” the old man said, when Swallow had sung the last note.

“But we have to be ready,” Flax objected, “for when we’re not better off.”

“Young man’s talk,” the man said. Flax could see clearly now; he was a very old man, half bent over with rheumatism. “Young
man’s talk, young man’s death.”

A Traveller saying, and true enough. There were a few scattered chuckles.

“Old heads on young shoulders, sometimes,” Reed said, and Flax laughed.

A child began to cry, and then another as the first cry woke the sleeping ones.

A woman groaned and got up to settle her child, and the assembly began to break into family groups. Some headed out to the
privies.

Flax joined Oak and Vi and Reed in a corner of the room to plan.

I
CAN MAKE
a wall will stand for a thousand years. I’ve seen ’em. Fences built in Acton’s time, still there, snaking across the country
like a stream. You can’t build a straight wall that’ll last, though. Have to follow the lay of the land, get the feel of the
earth roundabout and put the wall where it lies lightest on the ground. Try to build a straight wall and it’ll tumble over
come spring, when the groundwater shifts with the snowmelt; it’ll bulge when the tree roots feel their way through the cracks
in the bedrock to get to the rivers beneath; it’ll shake itself to death, slowly, with the heat and cold and heat of summer
and winter and summer, over and over, making the rocks snap and crack apart, like as not — and then the wall has to bind those
rocks together so that, even snapped apart, the wall still holds. Can’t do that with a straight wall.

Build a straight wall, and you’re having to repair it, year after year. That’s most of my business, repairing straight walls.
Guess I shouldn’t complain about ’em then.

I know where I am with rock. Know my granite and my schist, sandstone and bluestone, basalt and limestone. Harder the better.
Nothing beats a granite wall. Nothing.

But people… I have no idea about people. Never have had. Like my father, Mam said. Just like him. That’s all right with
me. My Da was a good worker. I’ve never seen a man make a wall with less wastage of stone. He could find the right chink even
for a bit of rubbish — tufa, or even scoria, rocks that hardly deserve the name of stone. He taught me. Never said much. Didn’t
need to. Piece by piece is how you build a wall, and there’s not much to say about it that you aren’t better off showing.

He taught me masonry, too, working with mortar, even bricks. Some places just got no stone. I can build anything, near enough,
thanks to Da.

So I never minded being no good with people. My da found himself my mam, and I guessed one day I’d meet myself a girl who
didn’t want a chatterer, and it’d be sweet.

And maybe I would have, and maybe I could have, if I hadn’t met Faina first.

Course I always thought I’d meet a Traveller girl. Who else? I’m no fool, ready to get beaten up or worse for looking above
myself. And when did I meet other girls anyway? Walling, you deal with the man of the farm, or the house, not the woman. But
my mam liked to visit the local gods wherever we went, and I came with her, though I don’t feel them the way she did. So there
we were a few years ago near Sendat, in a little village, and we went to the black stone altar early for the dawn greeting,
just like a hundred times before, in a hundred little villages all over the Domains. And there she was. Fair-headed, blue
eyed. Praying like she meant it.

My mam says my da made up his mind about her the first time he laid eyes on her. Takes some men like that. Guess I’m like
my da that way, too.

Like I said, I’m not a fool. Didn’t even think about it. Didn’t even imagine…

But I knew there wouldn’t be anyone else for me.