Blood Ties (27 page)

If she stopped chasing, she finally admitted to herself one day, she might stop living, too, and go back to death in life. It was a spring morning and she looked up to watch the migrating birds pass over, snow geese and eider ducks and above, the tall cranes, heading north. She left the tack she was mending and took the roan for a ride in the forest. She couldn’t still the sense that she wasn’t quite where she was supposed to be. But in the end she stayed with Gorham, and relished the chases even more because of what she knew she was missing.

She took the midnight watches with the foaling mares while Gorham dined with the owners in town, and she was happy to take the yearlings and two-year-olds and gentle them, teach them, love them into willing cooperation with humans. The hard part was letting them go to who knew what kind of master; although, there was many a time when Gorham refused a sale because he didn’t like the riding hands of the buyer, or the way they dug in their heels unnecessarily. He wouldn’t even talk to one warlord’s buyer who wore spurs.

Pless was a free town and a fair distance from that particular warlord’s domain, so it was safe enough to refuse, but Bramble admired him nonetheless. Although he did begin to regularly sell horses to the warlord in Sendat, Thegan, despite Bramble’s objections.

“No matter how he treats his people, he treats his horses well,” Gorham said. “And he pays well, too.”

In the late autumn two years after she had come to the farm, Gorham arrived one morning with a peculiar look on his face, half happy, half worried. He was distracted all day. Bramble stared when he couldn’t find the mucking out fork for the third time in one hour, though it was standing there in full view.

“All right, what’s happened?” she asked, placing the fork in his hand.

He stood looking at the fork and laughed shamefacedly. “Zel and Flax are here, my kids.”

“Well, that’s good. Isn’t it?”

“Flax’s sick. With the marsh fever. In the past they’ve stayed a few days and then taken the Road again. But with Flax sick, it looks like they’ll be here all winter. And Osyth’s worried the town will find out about them. They’re singers and acrobats, you know, like Osyth used to be — the least respectable kind of Traveler.” For a moment his face brightened. “You should hear Flax’s voice — he sings like a meadowlark.”

She shrugged, not too interested in Osyth’s ambitions or Flax’s voice. “You’ll just have to keep them out of sight.”

Over the winter Gorham became more silent and more haggard. He buried his worries in hard work, and there was plenty of that. The winter was too bitter and the ground too hard to let the horses go out to exercise in the fields, which meant snow had to be shoveled from the main yard every morning, pine bark and sawdust scattered. And the horses exercised there on a lunging rein for all the hours that daylight lasted.

Gorham was absent more often than he cared to be, because the town council elections were coming up. Osyth was taking every opportunity to consolidate Gorham’s chances, giving parties, attending parties, “dropping in” on people to chat. She was probably bribing people, too, Bramble thought (if she could bring herself to hand over her silver). She shook her head at the idiocies most people were interested in, and concentrated on keeping the roan fit enough through winter so they could start training for the chases as soon as the weather broke.

Then one day Gorham came out to the farm gray-faced.

“Osyth’s dead,” he said. “Last night. I was with Maude. The catch broke on her window. She died of the cold in her sleep.”

He said each sentence separately, as though they didn’t follow on from each other. It seemed odd to Bramble: most people woke up when they got too cold.

Gorham noticed her reaction. “She took sleeping drafts sometimes,” he said. “When I went to Maude’s.”

He felt guilty, she could see, but she thought that guilt was stronger in him than grief, and that maybe the guilt was so strong because there was some relief mixed in with the grief.

He went home after an hour; he’d cleaned the same bridle three times. Bramble tried to show sympathy, but she wasn’t sure that sympathy was what he needed. Absolution, maybe.

She went to the funeral the next day, of course, and stood by Gorham at the mouth of the burial cave and heard the town clerk speak the farewell words.

“May you not linger on the roads. May you not linger in the fields. Time is, and time is gone,” he said.

“Time is, and time is gone,” the mourners responded.

“May you find friends. May you find those you loved. Time is, and time is gone.”

“Time is, and time is gone.”

“Under your tongue is rosemary: remember us. In your hands are evergreens: may our memories of you be evergreen. Time is, and time is gone.”

Then they placed her in the burial cave and rolled the stone back over the entrance.

Gorham’s children weren’t there.

“I told them they could come as far as I was concerned,” Gorham said. “It was Osyth who cared about me getting on the town council, so people might as well know we were Travelers now. But Flax’s still very sick and Zel won’t leave him.”

Maude was in the crowd but didn’t go back to the house afterward for the mourners’ honey and salt cakes. Flax and Zel didn’t come downstairs, although Bramble saw Gorham go up to them a couple of times.

Two weeks later Gorham was elected to the town council.

“I forgot to take out my nomination,” he said, a little dazed, at the election party in the town square.

Bramble smiled widely at him. “You got the sympathy vote, man,” she said. “Wouldn’t Osyth be pleased?” And that was somehow funny for both of them, that Osyth had got what she wanted, as though she was ordering his life even from the grave.

Bramble never did meet Gorham’s children, for they left town as soon as the weather warmed up, by the northwest road. Three months later he married Maude, and became markedly more carefree, despite his new responsibilities as councillor.

At about the same time, Gorham bought himself a Golden Valley stallion with a prize-winning pedigree, a broad-chested palomino with a wicked eye.

The day he arrived, Gorham was beside himself, more excited than Bramble had ever seen him. “This is it,” he said. “Now we stop training other people’s horses and start breeding our own.”

She smiled at him, for she was also pleased. They’d been gradually acquiring a brood-stock of mares, but they’d had to take them to other farms to be covered by a stallion. Bramble didn’t like leaving her pregnant mares in someone else’s hands, but since they had to be covered again within a month of dropping their foals, there was no alternative. Now the mares could stay home, and she’d have the fun of birthing the foals from the mares other people brought to their stallion.

Gorham had risked a lot on the purchase, but not as much as a Golden Valley stallion usually cost.

“They say he can’t be tamed,” Gorham said to Bramble as they watched the procession of horses make its way up the road, the blond mane waving in the middle of the pack and trying, again and again, to break to the front. There was energy there and to spare, Gorham noted with satisfaction, although the journey from Golden Valley through the mud and slush of early spring couldn’t have been easy.

“They say he’s never been ridden, that he’ll take a leading rope but not a bit.” Gorham snorted, confident, feeling excitement bubble up even more strongly inside him as the horses drew nearer. “As long as I can lead him within smelling distance of the mares, that’s all we’ll need. The foals we’ll gentle ourselves from the day they’re born — they’ll take the bit all right.” He danced from foot to foot. “He’s by Gelt out of White Blaze!” he repeated for the fiftieth time. “Gelt!”

Gelt had won every chase in the country for four years straight, until there was no one left who’d take a bet against him. His owners had retired him to stud for two years, then brought him back to racing, but some rival fed him hemlock with his oats, so there were only two years’ worth of his get. This three-year-old stallion was one of only four colts born, and his dam was herself a prizewinner.

“He looks well,” Bramble said.

He did look well, prancing through the gate at the end of a long day’s travel as though he’d just been for a stroll down to the river. He was a healthy, glossy, beautiful animal, with a mad sidestep and bared teeth for anyone who came near him, even his own groom.

Gorham nodded to Bramble and she moved in gently, silently, until she could breathe softly into his nostrils. He stood stock-still at the scent, then shook his head and moved backward, untrusting. Gorham and Bramble nodded to each other, satisfied. There was no malice in him, just mischief and a hatred of being confined and told what to do.

That Bramble understood. She felt his stubbornness — the will to never be mastered, never be compliant — as a kick in her own chest. If she hadn’t liked Gorham, she might at that moment have leaped upon the stallion’s back and let him race flat out until he was exhausted, using his desire to be free to release her from her own bondage . . . But she did like Gorham, and there was the roan to be considered, so she pushed down the urge to flight and showed the groom where the stallion should be stabled.

They passed a field where a mare and new foal were grazing, and the stallion broke free and jumped neatly across the fence as though it were only knee height.

“She’s not due to come into season for another four days,” Bramble said, surprised.

The groom shook his head. “Don’t matter. He likes mares. Collects them, you might say, even when they’re not in season.”

And indeed, when they looked across, the stallion wasn’t trying to mount the mare, just sidling around her, whickering, snuffling. He shook his head, the pale mane flying, and Bramble was abruptly reminded of Leof shaking the hair back out of his eyes as he smiled at her. She forced her attention back to the present. The mare was entranced, although she should have been warning this strange stallion away from her foal. They watched her sniffing in turn, smelling that unmistakable stallion musk, and as good as swooning. Bramble held on to the fence and laughed. Gorham stood there, legs apart, arms folded, beaming as though the stallion was his own son.

The stallion looked sideways at the mare, nickering softly, and she rubbed her head against his neck like a coquette. The onlookers shouted with laughter. The sound offended the stallion, who flung up his head to stare forbiddingly at them. That made them laugh more.

“The way he looked sideways at her!” Gorham chuckled, wiping his eyes.

“Like Acton, he is,” the groom said, chuckling too.

The legend held that Acton had been irresistible to women. He’d had, they said, a way of looking sideways so that women just melted into his arms. In his own tribe, before the landtaken, they said all a woman had to do to excuse her infidelity with Acton was say, “But he looked sideways at me!” And husbands who followed Acton into battle were mostly hoping that over the mountains he’d find fresh girls to look at. His heir, Thegan, was born of a woman who had no time for men, but had said that if she were going to try it with anyone, it might as well be Acton.

“Like Acton,” Gorham said thoughtfully. “So he is, and so we’ll name him. Acton it is.”

He and Bramble shared a grin, two Travelers making a joke about the old enemy of their people. Even the fair-haired groom smiled. “Aye,” he said, “that’s the name for him, rightabout.”

Then the stallion came up to the fence where Bramble was leaning. He didn’t get too close, but stood quietly next to her.

Gorham moved toward him but he flung up his head and moved back. Gorham paused, considering. “Talk him in, Bramble,” he said.

So Bramble spoke quietly to the stallion, reeling him in on her voice like a fish on a line. “Here then, Acton, come on, Acton, here we are, come to Bramble, come on, boy.”

The words were unimportant, it was all in the tone of voice. Gorham watched as Acton stepped carefully back to stand near Bramble’s shoulder and snort at her, and reluctantly let his plans for schooling and gentling the horse himself slip away.

“Looks like he’s taken to you, lass,” he said. “Best for you to have the handling of him.”

She was astonished and delighted, he could see. Never expected much for herself, Bramble, though she held her dignity so dear. Well, not dignity exactly, he thought. Freedom, maybe, or something like it. She’d never be beholden to anyone, not even for a scoop of oats for that roan gelding of hers. And how had a slip of a girl, as she had been then, got hold of a warhorse?

On the Road you didn’t ask those sorts of questions, and even though he’d settled now, Gorham still knew better than to poke and pry where it didn’t concern him. Bramble had been a gift from the local gods, as far as he was concerned. He considered himself to be the best horse trainer this side of the mountains, but Bramble, he knew, would outstrip him, or could, if only she could bring herself to truly master an animal instead of working out a compromise, where the beast was a partner rather than a servant.

Gorham loved horses, loved them with a rising of his blood whenever he was near them, loved training, grooming and, especially, riding them, as though their mere scent was his key to happiness. But they were only animals, after all, not people, and no matter how often you felt that wordless sense of accord, or found your horse responding as though it could think in tandem with you, they were still animals and bred to serve humans. Gorham knew Bramble didn’t see it that way.

It didn’t get in the way of day-to-day business, because a horse that has been bred right and trained right likes to be ridden, likes to have the partnership and even the hard work, so Bramble was happy to prepare them for their owners, or for eventual buyers, knowing Gorham didn’t sell to the cruel or the stupid. But it worried him, sometimes, in case they ever came to a parting of the ways over it. And it worried him, briefly, as he put the stallion into her care, but he soon dismissed it. He told Bramble that Acton would have the life all stallions dreamed of: no work and an endless procession of mares to cover.