Tale of Gwyn (16 page)

“Aye, I have. But my thoughts are my own business.”

She should not speak that way to a Lord, however young, and she knew it.

He did not seem to notice her stiffness. “What if you don't, what if there's nobody you want to, you could come be my servant. I'd like that. I would, wouldn't you? We'd have to cut off your hair and pretend you were a man, or a boy because you wouldn't need to shave a beard, but what if we did? If we did, when I marry then you could serve my wife.” He watched her face eagerly. Gwyn didn't know whether to laugh at his tumble of ideas or pity the loneliness that made him dream up such things. “I mean it, Gwyn. We could do that. Would you like it?”

She hesitated.

“No, you wouldn't. Neither would I, if I were you,” he said. “I wouldn't mind if we didn't go back for a long time. Would you?”

“No, my Lord, I wouldn't,” Gwyn told him honestly. She liked this boy, this Lordling. “Except that I have so little to do,” she admitted. “I'm used to having my days busy.”

“We could carve wooden swords and I could show you how.”

That wasn't a bad idea. “And we can continue breaking a path,” Gwyn said. It was only the evening that stretched so long and empty. “I would make a terrible servant.” She laughed. “I have a temper and a sharp tongue and I don't like being lazy.”

“I know,” he answered, not looking at her, watching his own hands where they moved on the paper. “I know you'd hate it. You'd get all sour, like green apples.”

“And everybody knows how bad green apples are for you.” She was enjoying his idea of her.

He laughed with her and closed the book. With the charcoal, he made marks on the wood of the table. Gwyn watched him. He was making letters, four of them, but not in a cross the way the maps made them. He wrote them in a straight line. Two she recognized.

“That's your name,” he told her. She stood behind him to look at the letters. GWYN. She studied them in silence, while he wrote something else underneath. Just as she opened her mouth to see if he would name the two letters she didn't know and wondered if she dared ask him to give her a piece of charcoal to copy the shapes herself—if she would be going too far to ask that—he pointed to the long line of letters underneath her name.

“That's my name,” he told her.

Gwyn could think of nothing to say. She did not look at the Lordling. Her eyes were caught like a hooked fish on the long line of letters. The first and last were the same as in her name, she noticed.

“My name's Gaderian,” he said. He turned his face to look into her eyes.

Gwyn didn't know what she should say. She didn't know if she ought to say anything, or if this was something she ought to begin forgetting right away.

Oddly enough, it was the Lordling who reassured her. “You won't tell.”

Gwyn shook her head. No, she never would. “Hello, Gaderian,” she said.

That struck him funny. “Hello, Gwyn.” He giggled.

Then she dared to ask him the name of the first letter, the round one with the tail. Then, when he answered that, the name of the middle one, the one that looked like a forked twig. He answered both questions, so she knew the names of all the letters in her name. She asked him about the letters in his own name, the tall mountain peak letter first, then the big-bellied one.

“You'd better learn the alphabet,” he told her. “Sit down here,” he told her. She pulled her stool over beside him. He put a piece of charcoal into her hand.

“But you have to promise, on your honor—” he said.

“On my honor,” Gwyn promised.

“And I give you my word too, on my honor,” Gaderian said to her.

They got to work.

T
HE NEXT THREE DAYS PASSED
quickly, with too much to do in them. Gwyn and Gaderian broke more of a path each morning. The weather held clear and cold. Under each day's sunlight, the snow sank, until it was no higher than Gwyn's knees. It was heavier to push through then, but even so they could make better progress. Often Gaderian could move right along the surface, because his weight was not enough to break through the thickened snow. Then he would suddenly fall through at a soft spot and emerge with his head and cloak coated. Usually he worked patiently behind Gwyn, trampling down the path she had broken. Sometimes, she would hear his voice and turn to find herself alone: When he hid like that she would track backward until she could see where he had gone off the rough path, then her eye would search out the marks on the snow's surface until she saw a mound suspiciously higher than the rest. Sometimes, if she had not marked carefully the direction of his voice, she could not find him. He was getting better at concealing his tracks. In the mornings, they trekked across Da's vineyard and down that hillside to the dell, where the snow was piled up deep and heavy, and up the next rise. On the third morning, Gwyn heard the distant song of a bird from among the trees ahead. They were just past halfway to the village and she told Gaderian, “I think tomorrow we can go home.”

“It's not my home.”

They stood side by side, with the sun high overhead. She could see distant lines of smoke rising up into the clear sky. She put her arm around his shoulder for a minute and told him, “I too will be sorry to come to the end of these days.”

“Anyway we're running out of food,” he consoled them both.

During the afternoons they had mock battles with the staffs and with rough wooden swords they had made out of thin slats of wood. Gaderian tried to explain to Gwyn that it was entirely different with steel at the end of your arm. The wood, he said, was too light to really give you the feel of it; steel could bend and spring, slice and jab. But Gwyn could learn to keep her free hand behind her, and how to move with the parry-thrust of the one-handed weapon. When they fought, with staff or sword, they took care not to strike one another around the face or head, but went freely for other parts of the body. Most often, they both picked up a few bruises. As they played out their matches, Gwyn learned some of Gaderian's quickness of foot, as if it were a dance, not a match. He, in turn, became more aggressive, bearing down upon her steadily when he had an advantage, as if it were a march, not a match.

When the sun slid down the sky, they went inside. They ate as little as possible and added water to the stew to make it a soup, so that it would last longer. It might always snow again. In the evenings, they worked over the letters. Gwyn learned them quickly. Although her hand formed them clumsily on the wooden tabletop, her memory could hold their shapes and their names. She learned how the letters stood together to make words. “What I'll do with this knowledge, I don't know,” she often said.

“The same thing I'll do with my knowledge of how to use a staff,” he answered her. “I could send you a book, if you'd like that.”

“And have the Bailiff after me?” she asked, laughing. “No, thank you very much, I've no wish to go to prison.”

“Nobody goes to prison for something like that, Gwyn. You don't really think they do, do you? Besides, I bet I could do it secretly.”

“I hope you won't even try.”

“Not even maps?”

“Oh,” and Gwyn hesitated. She never tired of looking at the Lord's maps, at the design the lines made; she liked understanding the bird's view of the Kingdom, and where places were in relation to one another.

“Does your father mean to map the lands beyond the Kingdom?” she asked Gaderian. It seemed to her that his father must be the King's mapmaker, and that he must be training Gaderian to his art.

“We may not leave the Kingdom,” Gaderian answered her idle question. By that time, Gwyn knew better than to ask him why. He kept his secrets, and she knew no more about his own home or his proper title than she had known the first time she had heard of him.

Gwyn had no time to get back to the secret cupboard in those few days. The thought of the clothes hidden there was often in her mind, but she didn't dare risk looking at them with Gaderian so often at her shoulder. He was both curious and quick-witted, and Gwyn thought that until she was sure she knew exactly what it was she was hiding, she would give him nothing to question.

She had told him tales of Jackaroo in the same spirit that he had told her stories of knights who fought dragons and rescued princesses from dark towers. “I don't believe in dragons,” she told him. “Nothing made of flesh could have fire inside it to spit out, and they must be flesh or they couldn't be slain.”

“This Jackaroo is nothing but a thief, a vagabond,” Gaderian had told her. “No Bailiff would be as stupid as that, you know. If he was that stupid, he couldn't be a bailiff. The people would always be tricking him, the Lord's revenues would fall off and he'd get rid of that Bailiff and put in someone who could do the job.”

“And Ladies would never wander the countryside alone, even asking for someone to save their fathers.”

“No more than a King long dead would dress up like that and ride around trying to atone for his wicked life.”

“But they are good stories,” Gwyn said.

“I like stories,” he agreed.

“You wouldn't expect to be sent off to fight a dragon, would you?” Gwyn asked Gaderian.

“No more than you would sit back and wait for Jackaroo to come rescue you from trouble,” he answered her, laughing.

Gwyn almost asked him what he would make of the clothing hidden away behind the cupboard. For all that he was so much younger than she was, he had a much broader knowledge of the world. She had already opened her mouth to tell him, and show him, and ask him, when she realized how foolish that would be. Until she knew whose they were and how they had gotten there, she shouldn't put knowledge of them into the Lord's hands. Not even into Gaderian's hands.

THE LAST DAYS IN OLD
Megg's hut were good days, for all that they ate sparingly and were never far from hunger. Gaderian no longer dreamed and Gwyn had put aside the question of her own future. The last days went slowly and peacefully by them.

They were both in high spirits as they closed and latched the door behind them. Gwyn carried the Lord's saddlebag over her shoulder. The long book and pieces of charcoal were safe inside it. They had tidied the house, covered the last log with ashes so that it would burn out safely, and piled fresh-cut wood beside the fireplace, should another have need of it. There was a little meat left and the last part of the cheese. The saddle and bridle were safely hidden in the loft, and Gwyn had folded the blankets from the bed to add to those that filled the secret cupboard, to preserve its secret more safely. They set off together on the white path they had made for themselves, Gaderian chattering about the surprise their arrival would be as they climbed the hillside and crossed the vineyard.

By the time they had reached the crest overlooking the village, the sun shone high overhead. Although the first part of the journey had been easy, once they were breaking fresh paths it grew arduous. On the crest, Gwyn hesitated, looking down at the cluster of houses. Everybody was inside. Smoke rose from chimneys, but not from the forge. Paths had been shoveled between the houses and the well.

When Gaderian spoke, she realized with a start how long it had been since he had ceased his chattering. “I think you're right; I think my father must have made his way to safety, don't you think, Gwyn?”

“I think,” she said.

“We could be wrong.”

“Yes, my Lord, we could.”

“Then I could stay with you,” he explained to her. He had obviously been considering this. “Because if my father—didn't arrive safely, then neither did Burl, so there would be work and I could disguise myself. Don't you see?”

“Like a story, my Lord?” she asked him.

He didn't answer. After a while, he smiled reluctantly at her.

“I suppose some stories might be true,” she teased him.

“Give me a head start and I'll bet you can't find me. I remember the way from here, I do. I can see the smoke from the Inn. Will you, Gwyn?”

“Innkeeper's daughter, my Lord,” she reminded him.

His face grew solemn, but he refused to be entirely quelled. “Then I order you to do it, Innkeeper's daughter. You must count to fifty—you can count, can't you?”

“Aye, I can count, to fifty.”

“And turn your back.”

Gwyn turned her back. She stood dreaming over the village, seeing how the hills undulated in the background, falling down to form the little valley where the houses nestled together around the well, and how the roof that covered the well echoed the shapes of the hills. The sky above was covered by the dusting of filmy clouds. She stood, for more than the count of fifty, and then she moved on.

She followed his footprints into the trees. There, the snow lay less deep, under thicker crust. His footprints no longer showed.

Gwyn kept her eyes open and her wits clear as she followed the way home. Nowhere could she see tracks. Nowhere could she see any movement. Nowhere did any shape look like a boy hiding himself under the snow or within a snow-shrouded bush. She half expected him to call out to her at any moment, but there was no sound in the woods but her own steps.

When she emerged on the hillside behind the Inn, Gwyn forgot all about Gaderian. Smoke rose out of all three chimneys, and her heart rose with it. There was someone in the guest quarters. It could not be the Messenger, because he would have left the Inn before the blizzard came down. The chances were, then, that it was the Lord who burned the fire that gave out smoke from the guest wing. Which meant that there was a chance that Burl was either in his own little room or caring for the animals or sitting at the kitchen table playing a melody on his pipe.

Gwyn looked down on the familiar scene. The windows were shuttered against cold. The garden lay under a blanket of snow, but the chicken coop was dark with life and paths led there, as well as out to the privy. She turned around to call behind her. “I'm here. I didn't find you. You've won, my Lord.”