By sunset a hill stood against the northwest sky, and on that hill a walled town, which was Henas’amef, and tallest of all in the town, the faint outlines of the keep, the Zeide. A tower stood atop all, scarcely discernible except at sunset, and in that tower his mother lived, and in that keep his lord, Crissand, ruled; and, right along the highroad he traveled, was Gran’s place. He kicked the horse and applied the end of the halter rope, making all possible haste before full dark could come down, and determinedly not looking toward that tower, which had watched over him all his life. He felt its presence now as he had felt it for years, familiar and uncomfortable, his mother’s eyes continually watching his back, finding out all his mischief and his doings.
But here were the fields he knew. There was the old, broken berry bush, stark against a snowy land; and there was the boundary stone that was older than anybody remembered, and nobody knew what it marked, except it had Sihhë signs on it, almost weathered away. There were a pair of trees, winter-bare, whose outlines he knew, the farthest ranges of his earliest childhood wanderings, and there was Farmer Ost’s old oak that stood by itself in a pig lot, with a rickety fence and the pig boy’s cottage just down the lane that left the highroad.
There, there in the last of the daylight, he saw Gran’s thatched roof, the wonderful twisted chimney, perfectly fine, with smoke rising out of it. It was a sight finer than Guelemara’s tall houses: smoke, and someone home, and the warmth of it going out into the gathering dark like a banner on the wind.
He leaned to open the gate and rode into the yard, past a fence of stones and old, weathered logs, on which snow lay in ridges. Goats peered out of the shed as he latched the gate back, from Tammis’s back. The geese scattered as he turned Tammis into the friendly warm dark of the goat shed.
A horse snorted and shifted inside, and Tammis gave a low grunt as Otter slid down off his sweaty back, right next to Feiny. The comparative warmth was wonderful, the familiar smell of their goat shed was about him, Feiny was here safely, which meant Paisi was, and aside from Feiny, it was as if he had never left. In a moment more he heard steps crunching through the snow, coming toward the shed door.
A shadow with a stick in hand demanded:
“Who goes there? Who’s in our shed?”
“Paisi!” he exclaimed.
The stick lowered. “Otter? Is it our Otter?” The shadow rushed forward bearlike to embrace him, thump him about the arms and back and smother him in an embrace. “Otter, me lad!”
“How’s Gran?”
“Oh, a little soup and she’s fine, she’s fine, lad, despite she complains. Come on, I’ll see ye in.”
“I have to rub your horse down.”
“The hell ye do. I’ll see to ’im. Just you go inside and ’splain to Gran why ye left a warm spot to come home.”
“I had a message,” he said. He wanted to tell all of it, the sanctuary, the bad dreams, the way the king his father had tried to advise him, then meant to send him off in the dark of night. “A priest dropped a pot and it scorched the floor and nothing was right after. Nothing was right before, for that matter.” Tears welled up, as if he were a child, and he had stopped being that. “I came home, Paisi. I just came home, was all. It was time.”
“Poor Otter.” Paisi hugged him tight, a warm, homey-smelling refuge against the dark and the cold and the confusion of priests and royalty. Paisi tousled his hair, faced him about, and slapped him on the rump. “Go in the front. I barred the shed door. All’s well. Gran’ll skin ye.”
He had to laugh, though his eyes still watered, half from the cold and the pungent dust of the shed. He found the door—Paisi had flanked him by coming around from the front, barring the shed-side door for Gran’s protection, and he trudged through the shin-deep snow in Paisi’s tracks, right around to the front door.
It opened before he got there, and Gran was on the other side of it, skinny Gran, in her ragged old robe and her layers of many-colored skirts, with her white braids done back in a tail as she wore them at night—she was set for bed, or had risen from it. She had her stick in hand and a worried frown on her face.
“Well, ye do smell different,” she said, hugging him and not minding his snowy feet on the floor. “Ye don’t smell like my Otter.”
“I’m so tired, Gran.”
She kissed him on the cheek and immediately began saying there was soup on—there was always soup on, and Gran added whatever came in, day by day, with more water. The smell of it mixed with the smells of old cloth, and moldy wood, and goats and horse. The drying herbs that hung from the dusty rafters over their heads sifted bits and fragments down onto the wooden floor, along with snowmelt.
She set him down on the bed he shared with Paisi, dipped up soup, wiped the rim of the bowl with a much-used cloth, and handed the bowl to him with a chunk of bread to sop in it.
“The young duke’s men came an’ ask’t after us,” she said. Lord Crissand was the only duke he’d ever known, but to Gran he was forever the young duke. “They give us a whole sack of flour an’ another of baked bread, besides sausages an’ cheese and several venison pies. An’ then they come back with grain. What’s this o’ bad dreams, lad? Ha’ ye done somethin’ silly?”
He had drunk a little broth from the rim of the bowl and had the warmth flowing down into him. Her question caught him with his mouth full, and he swallowed hard, burning himself. “We both dreamed, Gran.”
“Paisi said the same, the fool. Ain’t no trouble ’cept the old joints.”
“She’s lying,” came from the door, as Paisi opened it and stamped off snow on the mat. A cold gust came in with him and ceased as he shut the door behind him. Paisi’s hands were all over horsehair and mud, and he wiped them on a rag that hung with the cloaks, by the door, before he splashed up water from the little washing basin to finish the job.
“Ain’t,” Gran said meanwhile.
“Is,” Paisi said, toweling off. “I found ’er abed an’ fussin’.”
“Oh, well,” Otter said, “if she was fussing, then she was fine.”
“See?” Gran said.
“The duke’s men was here,” Paisi said. “Yesterday. Your da sent food an’ blankets by way of the duke, so we knew you was all right with him. And here ye come, saying all’s wrong. What happened?”
“I tried to see home. And spilled the water and oil, and got caught, and that was the start of it, but it only got worse.” He had the soup and the bread in hand and could not let it cool. He dipped the bread and ate, explaining as he went. “The king wasn’t angry, but it upset the priests. And the Quinaltine… the Lines… they were breaking.”
“Was they?” Gran settled on the other end of the bed, a slight weight. “Breakin’?”
“And the spot on the stones, and the priests upset.” He dipped another bite of bread and ate it, desperately, even if it tasted like ashes. “And I’d made trouble for everybody. And I kept dreaming. I kept on dreaming, and I didn’t know if Paisi had made it. And then I had a message.”
“A message, was it? The duke must ha’ sent, before ever he brung the food out. But that were fast travelin’, that message, boy.”
“It must have come from Lord Crissand,” he said. It seemed to him, too, that it had been fast traveling, and he had passed no courier coming back. But perhaps the duke had been beforehand with everything and already intended to help Gran.
Paisi said: “But ye can’t ride, Otter. Ye was mad to take out like that, wi’ no food, nor shelter, nor yet a saddle nor proper bridle, good gods! What if the horse had throwed ye?”
“Well, he did, a few times.” He’d landed, fortunately, in snow, and not on his head. “But I got back on.”