The Fireoak farmers and herdsmen knew perfectly well the two were outlanders, but they knew Diamod and had heard of Gird.
They sauntered down the lane, dusty and brown as the farmers with them, and no one spoke to them. Slow, traditional talk rolled by: harvest chances, taxes, a remedy for stiff ankles followed by a joke about the cause, comments on cows and weather and the uncommon number of rabbits that summer—a joke directed at Gird, which he well understood and knew better than to answer.
“Pop up and down everywhere, they do,” someone said a second time, to see if he would rise to the bait. “Got so common, we might think they’s people.”
Then the village, with its familiar cottages, the wattle fences between smallgardens, the walls of bartons rising behind. It was at once strange and the same: so like his own village, and yet not his village—and his village was not his village. Gird sniffed: bread, cheese, the vegetables they had not yet planted for the camps, ale somewhere—his mouth watered. Children wandered about, too thin but not yet starving, noticing the strangers but warned away from saying anything by quick gestures from their elders.
He would have passed Mali’s brother’s cottage, if Diamod had not jabbed him in the ribs. It looked different by daylight, from the front. He remembered Rahi’s harsh feverish breathing in the barton out back, the gray light of dawn when he’d eased out the gate into the field beyond. Now he saw a low fence enclosing a ragged smallgarden, the beaten path to the front door. And in the door, a thin girl, yellowhaired, who held one crooked arm as if it pained her. Her face whitened, and she ducked inside. Gird turned to see Diamod wink before he walked on.
Gird came to the door, stepped out of his boots, and said “Girnis?”
Mali’s brother’s wife, a face he barely remembered from that one night, said “You’re Gird? Gods above, what do you mean—come in, don’t stand there!” Gird picked up his boots and ducked beneath the low lintel. It was dark inside, and would have been cool if not for the fire on the hearth. By that flickering light, Gird could see Girnis standing flat against the wall between a loom and a wheel.
“Is—is Rahi—?”
“She’s alive, and well, and stubborn as ever.” Gird looked at the wife, whose lips were folded together. What had he walked into? He had not asked Rahi all that had happened here, but perhaps he should have.
“I thought—” the woman began, then closed her mouth, and twisted her hands, and finally said again “I thought you were leaving Girnis with us. To be ours.”
“I did,” said Gird, surprised. “I said so; I was grateful.”
She looked at him hard, then her mouth relaxed a little. “You didn’t come to take her?”
“Of course not! Why would you think—”
“Raheli left. When she didn’t come back, we thought she was with you, or dead—we didn’t hear of anyone being killed. And then we thought, if you wanted her, you might want Girnis, but she’s—”
“She’s not Rahi.” She was the child of Mali’s illness, the twin that lived, but never as vigorous as a singleton. “I wouldn’t take her. Girnis, let me see you.”
Girnis came to him, shyly but now unalarmed. Her arm had healed a little crooked—not so bad, when she held it out. But she stood with it up, as if it were still in its bindings, and it was thinner than the other.
“Does it still hurt you?” he asked. She nodded.
“Mother Fera—” she glanced toward the woman, “—says I should move it more, but the joint hurts, Da, when I try.”
“Let me feel.” Gird took her arm, conscious of its thinness, and the faint tremor—nervousness? pain?—that met his touch. He bent and straightened it slowly, stopping when he met resistance and heard her indrawn breath. He could feel nothing wrong but stiffness, but he was not a healer. “I’m sure your aunt has tried heat,” he said, “and herb poultices. I think myself it would be good to move it more. Sometimes things hurt when they’re healing. A few times a day, anyway—I think you could do that.” She nodded, solemnly. She was quiet; she had always been quiet, the quietest of his children, but not slow. Just quiet, in a house full of noisy ones.
The woman had moved nearer; she looked less alarmed. “We’ve had an offer for her,” she said. “She has a mixed parrion, she says?”
Gird nodded. “Yes. She has Mali’s parrion of herbcraft, and Issa’s—my brother’s wife’s—parrion of embroidery. Issa was a weaver, as well, but died before Girnis learned enough.”
“I am a weaver,” the woman said. “I can teach her, if her arm strengthens. But—will you let us arrange the marriage?”
“Of course. I told you—if you in your kindness will have her, she is your daughter, and yours is the right to speak for or against.”
He heard boots in the barton, and stiffened, but the woman called through the house: “Gird’s here. It’s all right.”
After that awkwardness, he was surprised to find that Mali’s brother was enthusiastic about the possibility of training within the village.
“Of course, the bartons,” he said. “You’re right, Gird, and I don’t know why we hadn’t thought of it before. Had no one to teach us, I suppose. I know—let me think—I know two hands of men who would join here, at once. What about weapons?”
“Drill first, then weapons,” said Gird. He and Barin were sitting on the cool stones of the barton, drinking ale to celebrate. He could feel a delicate haze leaching the tiredness from his bones.
“What about women?” asked Barin.
“Mmm?”
“You’ve got Rahi now. I’m Mali’s brother, after all; I remember what she was like and how relieved the family was when you offered for her. Will you take women like that in?”
Gird shrugged. “I would myself, but I can’t force another group to do it. What about you?”
“I don’t like the thought of seeing my wife—but after all, she could be cut down for no reason, as Rahi was. Most of them won’t want to anyway, but for a few—why not?”
The following night, five other men visited Barin’s, presumably to finish an open barrel of ale before the beginning of harvest, when it was bad luck to have one. They talked village gossip until the stars were thick and white, then Gird spoke his piece. Less open than Barin, they still agreed it was a good idea. The longer they talked it over, the more they liked it—except that only two of them thought women should be allowed to join.
“They talk too much,” said one of the men. “Let them find out, and it’d be all over the village by dawn.”
Barin laughed. “And who was it let out the secret of Kinvit’s lover, last winter?”
The others burst into laughs; the man who had complained of women talking too much said “But it wasn’t my fault!” Gird chuckled. It was always the same; the loosest mouths complained that others gossiped. Their tales were always true, and if the wrong story got out, it was never their fault. Finally the man came around, laughing at himself. “All right,” he said. “I got drunk; I opened my mouth, and out fell Kinvit and Lia, doing what Kinvit and Lia had been doing since harvest. No nosy old granny could have done worse.” But he was still opposed to having women training in the village. Gird did not push him, letting Barin do most of the talking. They would all know, by now, about Raheli; they would all assume that Gird had a special reason for allowing women to fight. And that was perfectly true.
In the end, the men voted to organize a barton meeting, and gradually recruit new members. Gird promised to send someone—“It may not be me,” he pointed out—to train them. “Consider him a sergeant,” he said at first, but even in starlight he could see the dislike they had for that name, associated as it was with the lords’ tyranny. “What would you call him, then?”
They talked back and forth, suggesting and arguing, until one of them said “We’re like a bunch of cattle milling in a pen, waiting for the herdsmarshal to set us on our way.”