The Falcon in the Barn (Book 4 Forest at the Edge series) (14 page)

Peto stood at the door again, a damp cloth in
his hands and an anxious expression on his face.

“
It’s all right, Peto,”
Mahrree told him from somewhere in her husband’s body. “Come on
in.”

“
What did I almost do?”
Perrin continued. “What did—What is this, blood?
Mahrree?”

He released her to see the red spot expanding
on her bed dress.

Peto gingerly handed his mother the cloth,
then stepped back to the relative safety of the doorway.

Mahrree patted Perrin’s hand and sat up out
of his grip. Putting the cloth on her shoulder, she said, “Just a
nick.”

He stared at her shoulder in growing horror.
“Hide it. My long knife. Where I can’t find it.”

“
Already have,” she said as
brightly as possible.

“
Let me help you,” he said
as he made to take the damp cloth off of her shoulder.

Not too sure of how gentle he was at the
moment, she said, “Really, Perrin, it’s fine—”

“
Please
let me do
this,” he said with such yearning that Mahrree let her hand drop
and allowed him to remove the damp cloth. He grimaced when he saw
the perfect puncture point. Tenderly, he wiped the remaining blood
off with the damp cloth while Mahrree tensed in worry.

“
No, it’s not too bad,” he
agreed. “But it’s still horrible.”

“
It’s fine,” she assured
him again.

To her surprise, he bent and kissed her wound
as if she were three years old.

Peto, in the doorway, turned away.

Mahrree noticed. “Thank you, son. Go back to
bed now.”

He nodded before trotting down the
stairs.

Perrin gingerly put the damp cloth on her
shoulder again. “Bleeding’s already slowing.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes,
Mahrree too exhausted to think anything else but a prayer of
gratitude that nothing worse transpired. What Perrin thought as he
repeatedly pressed the cloth on her shoulder, she could only
imagine.

Eventually he said, “It’s never got this far
before, has it?”

“
Besides you and Shem
bloodying each other’s noses, no,” she said softly. “And it was
just an accident.”

“
What if you hadn’t been
stopping me, though?”

She shrugged, and regretted it as her
shoulder twinged.

Again her husband kissed it, as if somehow
that would make the wound vanish.

“
Nothing
did
happen,
Perrin.”

“
I can’t go on like this
anymore,” he said so softly she almost didn’t hear him.

Sickened by what he may have meant by that,
she hugged him fiercely. “Well, I can!” she told him. “For as long
as you need to.”

He hugged her back, but something felt
different about him, some terrible notion of . . . giving up.

---

That morning Peto left for school earlier
than normal so he could run first to the rectory and pound on the
door.

Rector Yung flung it open. “Peto? Come in,
come in.”

“
Last night,” he said,
gulping in the warm air of Yung’s small fire. “It was bad. Shem’s
been sick, so he wasn’t there, but this time . . . this time there
was bloodshed.”

Yung’s eyebrows flew upwards. “Whose? Are you
all right?”

Peto nodded. “Yes, everyone’s fine. Not that
bad, but . . . it was my mother. Father was holding his long knife
above her, sure that she had killed herself or something. I brought
up a candle and he saw the light and dropped the knife on Mother,”
he said in a rush. “Just a nick, but,” he paused to collect
himself, “it worried me.”

Rector Yung pulled him into a gentle hug. “Of
course. And your sister?”

“
She doesn’t know. Slept
through it. Father was really upset. But the bracelet thing? It
helped wake him up, or something.”

Yung nodded. “Good, but now this is going too
far. We need to confront this bear.”

“
I don’t know how that will
help,” Peto said in resignation.

“
On Holy Day, I’ll talk to
him,” Rector Yung promised.

---

Perrin didn’t go to the fort that
morning.

By the time dawn had arrived, he was still so
out of sorts that he’d put his uniform on before shaving. Halfway
through his breakfast he remembered, and went to the washroom. It
was while he was slicing off the stubble from his throat with the
single-edge blade that he caught his reflection in the mirror. Or
rather, he caught the reflection of the army patch, the one with
the sword imposed on top of a pine tree. The sword tip seemed to be
aimed right at his head, and—

The army will kill you.

Abruptly he dropped his razor into the
washing basin and darted out of the washing room. He didn’t know
where those words came from—his imagination or somewhere else—but
they terrified him nonetheless.

Panting, he jerked open the back door and ran
on to the back porch, breathing in the cool morning air. Unable to
control the trembling of his hands, he shoved them in his
pockets.

Two soldiers coming off of patrols for the
night passed along the back alley, and Perrin whistled to them.

“
Tell Thorne I’ll be in for
the afternoon shift. Got some . . . got some things to do around
here.”

The soldiers nodded to him uncertainly, then
saluted—forcing Perrin to remove his jittery right hand from his
pocket to salute back—and jogged off to the fort.

Perrin sighed and, feeling something itchy on
his throat, rubbed it. His hand came away with a mixture of gray
soap and red blood. He’d cut himself, likely when he dropped his
razor. No wonder his soldiers regarded him with such
trepidation.

Back in the washing room he smiled dismally
at himself in the mirror. He was a bit of a mess, he thought as he
reluctantly picked up the razor again.

But he couldn’t finish the shaving job. He
couldn’t bear to hold another blade again. Not just yet.

Instead he took a rag and wiped his face,
partly shaved, partly stubble, and dabbed at the nick. Right next
to that blood vessel, the one they teach the soldiers about.

Want to hit your enemy right there, to make
him bleed to death.

Want to make sure you never get hit there,
or—

If only he’d been just a finger width’s
closer, then—

He shuffled to the gathering room and plopped
on the sofa. Mahrree tilted her head at him as she readied her bag
for school.

“
Going to work later
today?” she asked, far too cheerily.

He only nodded.

“
Want me to stay with you
until then?”

He heard the hint of hesitancy in her tone.
While half of him wanted to say yes, the other half didn’t want to
be reminded of what he nearly did to her. “No, go ahead. I’m just
going to . . . rest.”

She kissed him on the forehead. “All right,
then!” She produced a smile so exceptionally merry that Perrin
wouldn’t have been in the least bit surprised that if, once she
reached the back garden, songbirds flocked to her and butterflies
accompanied her to the school.

Alone in the house, he headed to his study
and slumped into a chair. In his dream he was only moments away
from plunging his knife into the neck of a Guarder.

Into the neck of her.

Last week he had slept better, and it was
after he wrote a few responses to letters. With growing anxiety, he
snatched the rest of the letters waiting on the shelf and started
answering them. Hogal used to say that the best way to get over
feeling sorry for yourself was to forget yourself and do something
for someone else.

It was a feeble effort, but he needed to
begin to absolve himself of nearly committing an unforgiveable
crime, although it was like draining the river with a mug.

Half an hour later he realized, as he started
into the fourth letter, that it was providing him with a sense of
completion, of tying up loose ends. Of finishing a nagging
task.

Of ending.

---

Two days later on Holy Day Mahrree hugged her
mother outside the rectory.

“
I can stay to help,”
Hycymum offered again, but the tone of her voice suggested she’d
rather go start dinner for them all instead.

Mahrree shook her head. “It’s all right. I’m
not sure what you could do, anyway.”

Hycymum sighed sadly. “Is your shoulder
feeling better?”

“
Scabbed over nicely, yes.
Just go home, Mother. We’ll be by later to eat.”

Hycymum squeezed her daughter’s arm and
looked over at Shem who stood nearby.

“
I’ll bring them over
myself early, in case he gets worse,” Shem promised.

“
I’ll make fresh rolls,”
she promised back. With a kiss on her daughter’s cheek, and a wave
to her grandchildren, Hycymum picked her way through the snow after
the congregation meeting.

“
Why do they call it the
Raining Season?” Mahrree grumbled as she kicked a clump of slush
with her boot. “It’s always snowing here.”

Shem, standing next to her in the frigid air,
tried to chuckle, but it turned into a fit of hacking. Mahrree
patted his back uselessly until he stopped coughing. “This Raining
Season is brought to you by the same minds in Idumea that declared
the sky to be blue.” Shem looked up into the gray washed expanse of
it.

Mahrree scoffed. “I don’t even know why I
bother checking its color anymore.”

They stood outside the congregation hall near
a tree, waiting for Perrin. Jaytsy and Peto were a little ways away
making snowballs and halfheartedly taking aim at a nearby
trunk.

“
Shem,” Mahrree whispered,
“look at Jaytsy and Peto, alone. There are no more teenagers here
on Holy Day. They’re either at the dances or entertainments or the
games. They’ve got no one.”

“
So what do you want them
to do?” Shem said softly back. “Let them go after midday meal? Send
them off dancing or to the amphitheater?”

Mahrree twisted to look at him. “Of course
not! Why would I allow it today when I don’t allow it during the
week? Besides, Holy Day is
all
day, not just until the
service is over.”

Calmly he said, “Then what other option is
there? Mahrree, sometimes doing the right thing means a life of
solitude.”

That’s when she noticed the depth of gloom in
his eyes. Since he was twenty she’d been taken in by his big, happy
blue eyes. But she didn’t realize until then how his eyes had
changed. They were duller, sadder. There was still a faint twinkle
when he looked at her, but his eyes were colder and definitely
older. And lonely.

“
Oh, Shem,” she whispered,
touching his arm. “Here I am complaining, and there you are still
single. I’m just not thinking.”

He smiled at her, a tiny bit of a twinkle
trying to rise up in expanse of heavy blue. “Nothing to apologize
for, Mahrree. I’m just stating a fact. But you’re right—look
around. Which of these women could I marry? The only single ones
left are widows with children my age.”

Mahrree chuckled sadly. “Message received.
And I’ll stop nagging you about finding a wife. And I also won’t
bring up that Sareen was asking after you again. I finally broke
down and visited her little book shop, thinking I might find
something diverting in there.”

“
And?”

“
Oh, I was diverted, all
right. Don’t you
ever
go in there! Not that I’m one to
advocate more laws, but the books she’s selling? There ought to be
several laws against those.”

Shem smiled grimly. “I assumed as much. She’s
not what I’d consider marriageable either.”

“
Agreed. I’m so sorry that
being devoted to us for so many years has meant that . . . you have
only
us.”

“
It’s all right, Mahrree.
Truly,” he said. “I’ve made peace with that idea that I may never
be married. It’s better than being with someone who may persuade me
away from my belief in the Creator, and it’s far better than
behaving in a less-than-honorable manner. The next fifty, sixty
years will seem
temporary
compared to the one thousand
years’ reward to live with the Creator. Each year slips by so
quickly, so it really doesn’t matter.”

He never ceased to amaze her. “I wished I had
your insight, Shem. You should have been a rector, you know
that?”

Again his sad smile appeared. “Not the first
time I’ve heard that, but this is my calling. I’m sure of it.” He
followed that up with a pathetic chuckle which dissolved into
coughing.

It used to be that he and Perrin would laugh
every time they got together. Mahrree noticed years ago that their
laughs had both changed to mimic each other. They had the same
pitch, rhythm, and length, as if the two men were truly brothers.
She couldn’t remember the last time she heard either of them
laugh.

Shem and Mahrree watched the front door.
Rector Yung was saying goodbye to his attendees, which didn’t take
long since there were less than fifty who still went on Holy
Day.

Holiday
to the rest of the world.

The Briters came out of the hall, waved at
Mahrree and Shem, then headed for Jaytsy. She rushed over to give
Mrs. Briter a hug.

“
See Mahrree? Jaytsy’s got
a friend,” Shem elbowed her. “So what if she’s nearly the same age
as her mother? That’s a woman you can trust, right?”

Mahrree chuckled miserably. “Yes. Jaytsy
could do far worse. Mrs. Briter is a very lovely, but
odd,
woman. Anyone who willingly plunges their hands into dirt is
odd.”