The Falcon in the Barn (Book 4 Forest at the Edge series) (50 page)

Cambozola Briter smiled at her as he finished
adjusting a strap on one of the horses. “That’s what I keep telling
her, Miss Jaytsy. Maybe she’ll believe you.”

“
I’ll take care of the farm
while you’re gone,” Jaytsy promised.

“
Oh, you sweet girl.” Sewzi
shook her head. “But it’s impossible for you to do alone. If you
could just keep the fields irrigated—it’s been so dry lately. And
thin out the carrots, and maybe harvest the beans and peas, then .
. . the rest can just wait until we return.” She looked over at the
massive farm and cringed, realizing how overgrown it could become
in just a week.

“
Don’t you worry,” Jaytsy
assured her. “I’ll get some help from the fort—they eat this food,
they better help take care of it. And I’ll even draw pictures to
make sure they pull the right things. What about the cattle?” She
hoped they wouldn’t ask if her father could assist.

“
Spoke to a rancher west of
here this morning,” Cambozola told her. “He has some laborers that
will tend to them and the chickens.”

Jaytsy nodded. “Then go take care of your
son. I’ll take care here.”

“
I believe you will!” Sewzi
said, and rushed back into the house to get their traveling
bag.

Cambozola sidled over to Jaytsy, as if
nervous to be near a young woman. “Miss Jaytsy, Sewzi would trust
her gardens only to someone whom she feels truly has ‘brown
fingers.’ I’ve never seen her put so much faith into someone so
young. Thank you. She’d normally never leave her plants in Weeding
Season, but after losing my mother last year, and our home in
Moorland—” He paused to clear his throat. “We just can’t bear to
next lose our only boy,” he whispered. “Too much loss . . .”

Surprised by his soberness, Jaytsy squeezed
his arm. “Thank you for your confidence. I promise you’ll both come
back to find everything well. And I hope your son will be well,
too.”

Cambozola quickly wiped his face and patted
Jaytsy awkwardly on her shoulder. “Such a good girl,” he
mumbled.

His wife came bounding out the back door, bag
in hand, and tears streaking down her face. Jaytsy gave Sewzi one
last hug and a brave smile.

“
You’ll be back in no time,
and he’ll be fine as soon as he sees you again!”

---

Knock-knock . . . knock-knock-knock.

A trap door. Right below his desk. Perrin
could open it, slip down, fall to the ground thirty feet below, but
it would be worth a broken leg to avoid saying the words—

“
Come in.”

The door opened.

Even with his pocked face Thorne had a way of
looking dashing, polished, and completely un-soldier-like.
Soldiers, when not on some ridiculous parade, should have a little
dirt smudged on their faces, a bit of sweat on their brow, and a
scent like horses and work.

But Thorne always had a strangely faint odor
of something purple, like an older woman’s hair. Just another thing
that was so wrong about the boy.

“
Colonel Shin!”

“
You’re up, I see,” Perrin
tried to say airily, but it came out as light as an
anvil.

Thorne didn’t notice. “Yes, sir! My mother
says it was touch and go for a while, but here I am. Cheated death,
twice in one year.”

Perrin’s shoulders tensed. Thorne was never
in any real danger, but that’s not how Versula Thorne chose to see
it.

Although things
were
touch and go.
Versula always had a way of finding and touching Perrin, and he
found ways of quickly going.

And as for cheating death? Death just
couldn’t bear taking him yet. The Creator didn’t have any room for
someone like him in Paradise, and the Refuser likely wanted the
sniveling boy to torment Perrin for a few more years.

“
What can I do for you,
Captain?”

“
Sir, it’s what I can do
for you,” Thorne leaned on the desk, cautiously. “I
overheard—”

It was remarkable how many things he
“overheard.” He must have had several pairs of ears around the
compound.

“—
that your daughter is
requesting assistance in a nearby field? Some passing soldiers
brought in the message that the owners left and the fields need
tending to.”

Perrin must have been steaming for as quickly
as he felt his blood boil and rise.

“
I hereby volunteer to help
her plant plants! Or whatever.”

“
Weed,” Perrin corrected
him.

Thorne squinted. “They plant weeds? Why?”

At any other moment that would have struck
him as humorous. But he never felt like smiling when the captain
was around.

“
They
pull out
the
weeds, Captain. They just call it ‘weeding’ to be brief. Obviously
you’ve never done the job before.”

“
But I can learn, Colonel.
Surely you can see that,” he said with his thin smile rooted in
place.

“
This isn’t a time to
learn, Captain. We need experienced men who can find and quickly
remove the most pernicious weeds, and we can afford to send only
two for a couple of hours each day. Besides,” Perrin was grateful
for the sudden recollection, “the surgeon said that those
recovering from the pox should limit their time outdoors. The
intense heat and sun would further dehydrate you. Now, we wouldn’t
want that to happen, would we?” He put on his own tight
smile.

Thorne nodded, disappointed. “I forgot. Sir,
would you please tell Miss Jaytsy that I volunteered? That I wanted
to assist her?”

Perrin exhaled. “Oh, I’ll tell her, all
right.”

---

When Jaytsy went home for midday meal, she
told her mother what happened with the Briters.

“
Those poor people,”
Mahrree sighed. “I’ll help you with irrigation,” she said, although
she wasn’t sure how she could since dealing with the small mob that
came to empty her mother’s house that morning had left her needing
a nap.

“
I’m not sure you should,
Mother. You’re rather pale again.”

“
Thank you for
noticing.”

The door to the washing room opened and Peto
came out, his hands rubbed red. “Well I did some chicken coop work
this morning after all. It doesn’t seem they could do such
foul
things, but really—don’t let them fool you. They’re
much more than just ‘cluck.’” He inspected his finger nails and
shuddered. “Please tell me we’re not having scrambled eggs or cold
chicken today.”

“
Fresh greens, Peto, and
barley bread with goat cheese,” Mahrree assured him.

Peto sat down at the table. “I guess I’ll
tell you the atrocities of goats
after
we’ve finished
eating.”

“
So let me guess,” Mahrree
sat at the table with him, “added to the list of things you don’t
want to be when you grow up, under ‘soldier’ is
‘farmer’?”

“
Goat herder, chicken
rancher—or whatever they call it—sheep catcher—”

“
Shepherd!” Jaytsy
giggled.

“
Yeah, that,” Peto said,
taking a massive bite of bread. “Pig gatherer, cattle chaser, dog
grower, horse teacher—”

“
I’m seeing a pattern,”
Mahrree said.

“
I’ll eat it, but I won’t
take care of it,” Peto decided.

“
Eat dogs and horses,
Peto?” Jaytsy cringed.

“
I won’t eat them, but I
certainly don’t enjoy touching them. I’ll just find me a nice job
doing . . .” He scratched his head.

“
His handwriting is
atrocious,” Mahrree said to her daughter, “so he can’t do anything
with scribing or writing. That rules out quite a few
careers.”

“
And even though he’s
nearly as tall as me now, he’s still as skinny as green bean,”
Jaytsy pointed out. “So that rules out anything requiring muscle,
like blacksmithing.”

“
Carpentry,” Mahrree
added.

“
Piping—” Jaytsy
continued.

“
Hey!” Peto exclaimed.
“Father said I’m developing muscle!”

“—
basket
weaving.”

“
Oh, ha-ha,
Jayts.”

“
You could be a teacher,
like me and my father,” Mahrree suggested.

“
You mean, ‘my father and
me,’” said Peto smugly.

“
See?” Mahrree beamed. “You
love correcting and ridiculing people. You’d be perfect as a
teacher of teenage boys.”

Peto and Jaytsy laughed, and Mahrree thought
nothing ever sounded so wonderful.

“
What’s going on in here?”
they heard a deep voice boom from the kitchen. A moment later
Perrin came through the door. “Eating? Laughing? Did I authorize
this?”

No
, Mahrree thought;
Now
everything’s wonderful. “What are you doing home?” she asked him as
he dropped his cap on the table.

“
Just came by for a moment.
Jayts, I got your message from the soldiers you stopped. So the
Briters actually left?”

Jaytsy nodded. “They were very concerned
about their son. I’ve never seen them so upset.”

Perrin sighed and sat down at the table,
taking the bread out of Peto’s hands and ignoring his protests.
“They’ve experienced a lot of loss this past year. I can understand
their fear.”

“
So can you spare a few
soldiers to help with the farm?”

“
I can give you only two,
for a few hours each afternoon,” he said apologetically. “We have
so many men down, others are helping with the village . . . thank
the Creator we have no Guarders to contend with right
now.”

“
Indeed,” Mahrree sighed.
“I do every day.”

“
It should be enough,”
Jaytsy said, just a little worried. “I was hoping to keep the weeds
from taking over too much. The soldiers can get the larger ones, I
suppose.”

“
There was a
third
volunteer,” Perrin said, reluctantly. “He overheard
somehow.”

Jaytsy swallowed. “Who?”

“
Captain
Thorne.”

Peto grimaced. “Ew. That’s not what a garden
needs—thorns!” He looked at his family, wondering why they weren’t
laughing.

His sister and father were studying each
other, and Mahrree watched Jaytsy, trying to read her response.

“
I agree,” said Perrin. “I
don’t think he’s ever set foot on a farm before in his life. Nor
will he, if I can help it.”

---

That evening Mahrree put away a book that had
been sitting in Perrin’s study and paused as she looked at the
bookshelf. She glanced around, then pulled out her recently
inherited, “Embellishments of the Ages,” from her mother. It was
one of the few books Hycymum owned, and it was filled with drawings
of how to add unnecessary extras to pillows, blankets, clothing,
ceilings, walls . . .

Mahrree opened the book and it naturally fell
open to parchments she recently secreted there.

The family lines.

Mahrree licked her lips, glanced around
again, and sat down in the chair behind Perrin’s work desk.

There were two copies of family lines. One
was her mother’s, which had been first written by her
great-great-grandmother Kanthi. It was her and her husband Viddrow
Eno’s family lines, all the way back to the first families.

Mahrree had made a copy of it herself, back
when Peto was a baby, and sighed in delight at the fading original
which was now hers to keep secret and safe. Her chest bubbled with
heat when she read again the names of Kanthi’s husband Viddrow Eno,
and his older brother Barnos Eno who never married. Their parents
were Huldah and Boskos Eno. In 200, when the Great War ended and
the Guarders made their presence known, the brothers were 25 and 26
years old; Kanthi, a new bride, was 24 when she made the illegal
copy of family lines and secured them away on this expensive piece
of parchment her husband had brought her.

Mahrree pored over the lines of names and
dates which eventually converged again three more generations
back—they had been distant cousins—to see that both Kanthi and
Viddrow’s first parents were . . . not Guide Hierum and his
wife.

Oh, it was vain to wish they were, Mahrree
knew, to hope she had a trickle of the Great Guide’s blood in her.
But maybe one of the other family lines, which records she didn’t
have, might trace back to them. Still she smiled when she saw the
names of Cato and Gaia, one of the first five hundred couples.
There were no last names at the beginning, and she wasn’t even
entirely sure which name was male or female. Yet being able to run
her finger lightly over the fading ink of their names—people who
knew the Creator personally—filled her with such energy and joy
that she didn’t dare do it too often.

Below Kanthi’s hand was the sloppy but still
legible writing of Livia Eno, recording her and her husband Kew’s
names. Mahrree was intrigued that Livia—Kanthi’s
daughter-in-law—continued the tradition, and Mahrree wondered if
Kew knew about the record his mother and wife were secretly
keeping.

Then the handwriting changed again to the
flowing loopy style of their daughter, Sakal, Mahrree’s
grandmother. Maybe her husband Nool Uchben didn’t know of this
parchment either.

Then, added below, were the names of Hycymum,
Cephas, and their daughter Mahrree. She was fairly certain her
father knew of the family lines. He would have been most delighted
to see it.

Mahrree opened the other copy, recorded in
her hand and secreted away in her own recipes shortly after Peto
was born. She had moved it to sit next to her mother’s after Jaytsy
brought her the recipes from Hycymum’s house. The lines needed to
be together.