Jackaroo Read online

  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.”

  She turned to go down the hillside and in her eagerness called down to the Inn, cupping her hands around her mouth to make her voice carry. “Halloo! Halloo the Inn! Halloo!”

  The kitchen door opened. She saw her mother stand there, hands under her apron. Gwyn waved her arms in the air and scurried down the hillside as fast as she could, more excited than she had known. One by one they came out to meet her, stopping by the door as she rushed toward them, her mother and father, Rose, and then Tad yelling wild greetings, which she couldn’t really hear. Even the Lord came out. He made his way through her family and crossed toward her as she hastened up to him. His eyes were on the hillside behind her and his hand on the hilt of his sword. He strode out long in leather boots.

  Gwyn had moved past him to the circle of her family—but where was Burl?—before she heard what he was saying. She halted, and turned.

  “Innkeeper’s daughter.”

  “Here is your bag, my Lord.” She dropped it at his feet since he did not reach a hand for it.

  “I asked you, where is my son?” The cold voice rang, like steel on steel.

  Gwyn looked back to the hillside, where the trees began, and opened her mouth to answer him. He had his sword at her throat before she could speak a word.

  “I left him in your care.” His cold eyes pinned her and his distant voice was icy. “We see what care you took of him. You should not have returned, Innkeeper’s daughter.”

  Fear was at Gwyn’s throat, too, as cold and sharp as steel. “No. I didn’t—”

  The sword pressed deeper. The swords with which she and Gaderian had played had been such toys, Gwyn thought. Fear sat stiff along her spine, like a blade. He would kill her here, without hesitation, she knew it.

  “My Lord, he—”

  But the sword pricked and his stony face showed her that nothing she could say would enter his mind.

  “He was tied on, and the mare came back, and now you have come back. See her, Innkeeper.” He spoke over her shoulder. Gwyn turned her head to see her parents standing close together. Shame was written on their faces, and their eyes would not meet hers.

  “I’ll have my son of you, Innkeeper’s daughter.”

  She wondered if he meant to slaughter her there and then, as they watched. And if he did, which was what he wanted to do, Gwyn imagined his surprise when Gaderian finally decided to come out of his hiding place. It would serve the Lord right, she thought bitterly, to kill her and then have to learn his mistake when nothing could undo it. It would be no comfort to her parents either, and they deserved none if they did not know she would not do such a thing. She raised her eyes to the icy blue ones and at her expression, the sword pricked again.

  “You ought to hear her speak, my Lord.” That was Burl’s voice, calm and unafraid. When Gwyn cautiously turned her head to see him, he was moving clumsily through the group by the kitchen door, a stick in his hand and one foot wrapped up.

  “You ask too much, lad,” the Lord answered, his voice cold metal.

  “I ask only that you hear her,” Burl said quietly. “I know her.”

  What the Lord would have said to this, they never found out, because just at that moment a high happy voice called down to them: “Father? Father!”

  The steel fell from Gwyn’s throat as he let the sword drop into the snow beside the saddlebag. Gwyn didn’t wait, not even when Gaderian’s voice summoned her back, then was muffled by snow as he tumbled and rolled down the hillside. He got quickly to his feet and ran to meet his father.

  Gwyn went past her family. She didn’t stop in the kitchen, but stormed right through and crossed the yard to the stables. She was shaking with fear and rage. Rage ran along her blood and licked like flames along her bones.

  They all of them had condemned her.

  She let herself into the mare’s stall and buried her face against the warm brown shoulder. “Good girl,” she said to the horse. She breathed in the warm, rich smell of horse hay. “You did it. Good girl.”

  She had never understood how alone she was. She had never understood anything.

  The chestnut turned her head to nuzzle at Gwyn’s shoulder. When she heard someone walk along the narrow passage she thought it must be Burl and he, at least, had known.

  But it was the Lord himself who stood at the open stall, in his tunic and leather boots, his sword sheathed at his side. “It was a mistake, Innkeeper’s daughter.”

  Gwyn faced him. “Aye, it was that, my Lord,” she agreed, angry.

  “I am sorry for it,” he said in his distant voice.

  He didn’t sound sorry. The mare moved, rustling the straw. “Are you now,” Gwyn answered him, not bothering to conceal her disbelief.

  “How was I to know—”

  “A
ye, the Lords know nothing of the people—”

  “—when you didn’t say—”

  “—and care little for what they know or do not know,” Gwyn finished.

  He warned her then: “You shall not speak to me so.”

  So Gwyn stopped speaking. She held his eyes and held her tongue. But the anger burned in her.

  Burl appeared behind the Lord, who stepped back to let him through. But Burl did not want to enter and leaned on his stick, looking from one to the other of them. Nobody spoke.

  At last the Lord broke their silence. “I would know how the Innkeeper got such a daughter, and such a servant,” he said. “The irony of it is that now you will never trust me, and now you can trust me for anything.” He left them.

  Gwyn’s anger choked her throat, and she could not say the words of thanks to Burl that she wanted to speak. Burl handed her the brush: “You might curry her. I’ve not been able to take proper care of them.”

  “What happened to your foot?”

  “Frostbite,” he answered. Gwyn ran the brush down the mare’s neck and the muscles underneath the skin rippled in pleasure. Even when Burl spoke that cold word, frostbite, his voice sounded warm. Not hot and angry, like hers, but warm and quiet, like the warm quiet of a plowed field. “I have nine toes left,” he told her.

  “But you were riding.”

  “Not always,” Burl answered. “The Lord became feverish in the night and—I walked beside him. It’s lucky he was too ill to protest the indignity of being carried like a sack of grain.”

  Gwyn grunted and moved on to brush the muscles of shoulder and leg with the rough strokes the mare enjoyed.

  “You cannot be angry at them, Gwyn,” Burl’s voice said behind her. “They thought of what they would have done in the same situation. Later, when they had thought more, they—”

  “Later would have been too late, wouldn’t it?” Gwyn asked, surprising herself by her calm. “The Lords don’t stand under the law.”

  “They are the law.”

  “It’s their own law.”

  “Aye. They will not want you to have seen,” he advised her.

  Gwyn knew which they he meant. She knew also how they must be feeling now, to know they had betrayed her so: sick at heart. She was the one betrayed and she felt a death in her heart. How would they feel, being the betrayers.

  “Well then,” she said, “I will not have seen.” What had been done could not be undone. What she had understood could not be forgotten. “It will be a small lie.”

  “That will not be the lie,” Burl corrected her.

  His rightness angered her. “I would finish this in peace,” she told him, hearing without any pleasure how like Gaderian she could sound, giving the order. Burl obeyed her, however, without question. Gwyn did not watch him go. She continued currying the mare. The lie would be pretending that everything had not changed.

  Part Two

  Jackaroo

  Chapter 13

  GWYN TOOK HER TIME CURRYING the mare. She spoke a few words of greeting to the stallion. Then she returned to the kitchen. She wore her face like a mask.

  They were waiting for her. Rose hemmed a chemise with delicate stitches. Her mother peeled potatoes while Da cut smooth the legs for a new bench in the barroom. Tad sat by the fireplace, doing nothing. They hadn’t changed, although they looked different to Gwyn. She had changed, she thought; everything had changed. She hung her cloak from the hook by the door.

  “Now that you’ve greeted your precious animals, you’ll come to greet us,” her mother said.

  “Oh, Mother,” Rose said. She smiled up at Gwyn, her fingers drawing thread through the fine cotton. “It’s good to have you back, and safely. After so long, we were afraid—”

  “You did well, daughter,” Da announced. “You’ll be hungry, I expect. And thirsty too. Tad, fetch your sister a mug of cider. And how would some of your mother’s apple pastry taste to you, with cheese beside it? Or would you rather start with a bowl of stew?”

  Gwyn wasn’t hungry at all. “No, thank you,” she said. She made herself sit down at the table, but she couldn’t make herself look into their eyes. They were pretending that nothing had happened.

  She could see why they wanted to pretend that. If they said anything at all about the scene in the garden, they thought they might betray to her what they assumed about her—which they hoped she had not noticed.

  Tad set the mug down so hard that it slopped over. He stood there, looking at the pool of brown. At last, his mother fetched him a cloth to wipe it up with.

  “Where were you all that time?” Rose asked. “Who found you?”

  “We were at Old Megg’s, so we were safe.”

  Tad slammed a pastry and the cheese down in front of Gwyn. The knife clattered onto the floor, but he had returned to his seat by the fire.

  “We had food enough,” Gwyn said. She took a breath. “When did Burl get back?”

  “That first morning,” her father answered, relieved to talk about this. “The Lord was sick for three days, and your mother had to nurse him.”

  “And that’s gold hard-earned,” her mother said. She gathered up the potatoes and carried them over to the pot, to drop them in one by one. “There’ll be gold for you, too, I don’t doubt.”

  Gwyn didn’t think she cared to have his gold.

  “It’ll make you a rich dowry,” her mother said. “The men’ll flock around, you’ll see.”

  “Gwyn has a dowry,” Da pointed out.

  “This’ll make it more,” his wife answered. She scraped the peelings into a bucket for the goats and moved a low stool over by the fire, where the butter waited to be churned.

  What Gwyn wanted to do was go back to the horses, to get out of the room and away from them. She made herself stay at the table and chew on a bite of pastry. She drank slowly from the mug of cider, not tasting it. She felt alone, even there in her own kitchen with the fire at her back. But it didn’t feel like her own kitchen, not anymore, and her family were strangers, who would have let the Lord condemn and execute her. They were wearing masks. It would hurt them if they knew she had noticed; and it wouldn’t do any good for her to be angry, it couldn’t change what had happened.

  Gwyn didn’t want to think about it, because it frightened her to realize how little she belonged here, in the one place where she belonged more than anyplace else. So she changed the subject. “Did the Messenger arrive?”

  “No sooner were you out of sight than they rode up,” her mother answered. “If I were a suspicious woman I could tell you what I’d think.”

  Gwyn had to smile at that. Her mother caught her eye and smiled back. “I’d be right, too, I’d wager on it.”

  “If we were ever likely to find out, I’d wager you were,” Da said. They had all relaxed, as at some danger now past.

  “I’m thirsty too,” Tad complained.

  “Then get yourself some cider,” their mother snapped at him. “You’re not helpless. No, you’ll spill again, I’ll get it for you.”

  “The Messenger rode to Earl Northgate from the King,” Da reported. “The soldiers said there is war in the south, and I know no reason to doubt their word.”

  “War among Earl Sutherland’s heirs?” Gwyn asked. Thinking of what Gaderian had told her, she suspected otherwise; from what Gaderian told her, the greatest danger came when the Lords rebelled against their Earl; but she was not supposed to know anything Gaderian had told her.

  “So I assume,” Da said. “I think we’ll hear soon that the Lords of the north are calling for soldiers. The King must settle this, I think. The Earl’s sons fight to their deaths among themselves, I hear, and the southern Lords will look for profit from that. The King must name the next Earl himself, I think.”

  “Which will mean higher taxes this year, and the next as well,” Gwyn’s mother predicted.

  “Aye,” Da agreed. “But we can pay them.”

  Many, Gwyn knew, would not be able to do that. He would profit
from this, and the Innkeeper’s family would be fatter for the ill luck of other men. For a minute, she saw her father as others probably saw him, as Cam saw him, feeding off of the misfortunes of others. Then she saw him again as she always had—a steady man, who poured fair measures, who husbanded his holdings well. She did not know which was the true, which the false Innkeeper.

  TWO DAYS LATER, THEIR GUESTS left them. The Innkeeper’s family stood in the courtyard, with Burl leaning on his stick behind them, to see the two off. Gwyn had not exchanged a word with Gaderian since they had returned, and she had seen him only once or twice, looking out the window, his expression hidden, as if their time together at Old Megg’s had never happened. She was not, she told herself, disappointed; she had not expected anything of him. He was, after all, a Lord.

  The morning he left, Gaderian sat the mare with no sign of life from the slight body beneath the cloak. If Gwyn felt his eyes had sought her out from under the folds of his hood, she thought she was mistaken about that. Before he mounted the stallion, the Lord gave into Burl’s hands a purse. Then he approached her with another. Gwyn took the soft leather into her palm, feeling its weight. To refuse it would be to raise questions.

  The Lord made a little speech then, in his distant voice, about his gratitude and how he was in debt to the family, more debt than gold could repay. They rode out of the yard, turning east to follow the King’s Way back where they had come from. The snow was still packed thick under the horses’ hooves, so their leaving was as swift and silent as their arrival.

  Back in the kitchen, they would not leave Gwyn alone until she had counted out what she had been given. Burl escaped to his own room, but Gwyn had no such luck. Rather than quarrel, she pulled at the drawstring and poured the coins out onto the table. Tad bounced beside her, wondering if the coins would be gold, wondering how many there would be, wishing he had been the one to travel with the Lords and get the reward. Gwyn had opened her mouth to tell him that if he had been the one, there would have been a funeral not a gift-giving, when she saw a folded piece of paper slide out among the gold pieces. Her hand moved quickly to hide it, but he had seen.