The Nethergrim Page 27

  Edmund proposed they set a watch, just as he imagined the Ten had always done. He volunteered to be first, and sat up to tend the fire wrapped in Indigo’s saddle blanket. He thought for a while that everyone else had fallen asleep, but then John Marshal got to his feet and strode off to sit on a boulder.

  “Master Marshal?” Edmund got the feeling he was wanted. He shrugged off the blanket and approached.

  John turned half around and nodded. “Sit awhile.”

  Edmund sat beside him. “Aren’t you tired?”

  The lines crinkled in around John’s eyes. “When you reach my age, you may find sleep a less-than-constant friend.”

  Edmund waited. John watched the mountain. Seasons came and went on his face. At last he spoke: “You are only fourteen.”

  “Fifteen next summer, Master Marshal.”

  John looked back at his sleeping daughter. “Will you guard her? Will you swear to watch over her?”

  Edmund found himself expecting it. “You’re not coming home with us.”

  “You know as well as I do this has only just begun,” said John. “Vithric’s spell seemed to feed the Nethergrim, somehow, to give it strength and form. I don’t know how it works, but I do know that I cannot allow it to happen again.”

  The mountain of the Nethergrim sat silent across the valley. It would have been a blessing to drift awhile in triumph. It would have been a blessing to imagine the world restored.

  Edmund tried to make some sense of all that he had learned. “Vithric must have already done the spell once before. He should be over sixty by now, but he didn’t look nearly that old.”

  “I was told Vithric died of a wasting disease.” John shifted, then winced, and bound the bandage tight around his injured hand. “He must have faked his death years ago, the first time he started to fall ill. The spell bought him a decade or two of life, and then the sickness started to consume him afresh. As I’m sure it will again, once he has lived through the years of youth he stole from Tilly and the other boy.”

  Edmund felt despair eating away at his victory. “Why is the world like this?” He shivered. “Why does it feel so cold, so hard?”

  A smile flickered on John’s face, one that was neither happy nor sad. “What would be the worth of goodness, in a world that always rewarded it?”

  Edmund turned John’s words over and over in his mind. He wondered for a moment if he would still feel so utterly grown up when he got back home.

  “Know what I ask before you agree,” said John. “I charge you to protect my daughter, to stand her friend whether or not she ever returns what you feel. Do not swear unless you understand.”

  “I swear it.” Edmund held out his hand. John gripped it in his.

  Edmund glanced back at Katherine. “When will you tell her?”

  “I’ll let things go as long as I can, let her feel some ease for a while. I’ll try to keep it secret until I have you all down safe in Elverain.”

  Edmund could not help but smile. “With respect, Master Marshal, you don’t know your own daughter. She’ll work out what you’re thinking long before that.”

  He proved right, though for the next four days John Marshal would not answer Katherine’s ever more worried looks. A fall of sleet came just as they reached the tunnel in the valley beyond, and frightening as the place still was, they felt tempted to stay in its shelter for a while. Tom would not allow it, though—he stepped out to test the wind and returned looking far too grim to be challenged on the subject. The sleet turned to snow by the time they reached the second arch, then to freezing rain on the long descent. They nibbled through the last of the salted meat before they came in view of Upenough, with two days’ march still to go. Tom scrounged some roots, but they tasted so bad that Edmund thought starving the lesser evil. They found John’s severed finger on the floor of the inn. No one knew what to do with it, so they buried it at the side of the road.

  The rain let up at the edge of Thicket. They were all wet through, footsore and bedraggled, but the children skipped into the air at the sight of curling smoke from the hearths of the hamlet ahead. There was no trace of food on the wind, but the smell of hay and home fire was enough to set Edmund’s stomach growling.

  “Look!” Sedmey fairly shrieked it. “There’s people!”

  Folk came out of their houses to stare. Others turned to look in from the pastures—some of them even waved. Edmund felt certain he had never known happiness so pure. The slowly falling fear and rising hope had not prepared him for the moment—field and pasture, hedgerows and cows—home.

  “Papa. Papa, don’t you dare.”

  Edmund turned to find John Marshal walking over at the verge—bent low, as though the wind blew before him, not behind. Half a furlong ahead a trail branched south just before the road reached the first of the fields.

  “Papa, you come home.” Katherine’s voice tore at Edmund. “Don’t you dare turn off this road!”

  John raised his head. “I am sorry. Child, I am.”

  The children stopped their march to stare at Katherine, then at John, though their first good meal in a week was a matter of yards away.

  Geoffrey looked to Edmund. “He’s not coming back?”

  “I have been asleep too long,” said John. “I have lived in that dream a man can have, where he thinks if he lives quiet and raises his children well, that the world owes him peace. Now that I better understand what the Nethergrim truly is, I must find the roots of its evil and pull them out while I can.”

  Katherine crossed her arms. “Then I go with you.”

  “I cannot allow it.”

  “Who says you can stop me? I’ve got the horse.”

  The children dropped their mouths wide in shock. Katherine and her father stared each other down, looking more alike than Edmund had ever seen them.

  John Marshal broke first. “I was wrong to leave you the way I did back in Elverain. If I tell you where I am bound this time, will you be content to wait for me?”

  “If you are marching off to some mountain somewhere, then no.”

  “I am not. I am going to Tristan. His lands are not so far, Katherine—king’s roads all the way. Do not worry for me.”

  Katherine bit her lip. She blinked fast and looked away.

  Her father wavered, then seemed to make an effort to master himself. “I will send word, I promise you.”

  Katherine scrabbled to the ground. “Then take Indigo.” She offered the reins. “Please, Papa.”

  “He is not mine to take.” John gripped her hand. “You are in Lord Aelfric’s care while I am gone. He will not forsake you, whatever happens—he owes me far too much. Look to him, and to your friends, and before you know it, I’ll be home again.”

  Katherine bowed her head. Her father embraced her, then turned to Tom. “Come. We have miles to go before we rest tonight.”

  Tom stepped out from the children and came to stand by John. Jumble followed at his heel. Edmund felt a moment of shock—then relief and gratitude.

  Katherine’s face showed none of those feelings. “You’re sending me home, but you’re taking Tom?”

  “You have a home to which you may return,” said her father. “Tom does not. If I let him go back to his master, I would be maiming him as surely as if I held the whip myself. I am taking him on to a new chance at life—I am bringing him to Tristan, in hopes he can find him a place among his household. Perhaps I should have done this long ago, but now is much better than never.”

  “Goodbye.” Tom looked more sad than eager at the prospect. “I will miss you.”

  “I’ll miss you, too.” Edmund clasped him by the arm. “Safe journey.”

  Katherine seized Tom around his bony shoulders. She tried to speak, to bless him for the road, but could not seem to find words, so she held him close once more and let him go.

  Tom followed John to the head of the trail. There they stood for one moment more, and then, as there was nothing left to say that would do more than prolong the ache
of parting, they turned and strode away.

  Geoffrey and the kids from Roughy ran onward to the houses, shouting that they needed dinner very badly and that their parents would surely pay for it. Edmund stayed with Katherine, watching her father and their friend diminish until they passed on over the farthest of the hills.

  They left Sedmey and Harbert to sleep at Thicket grange, promising to send word down to their parents in the morning. The shadows grew long by the bend of Wishing Hill, throwing a shroud over cottage and tree. Katherine walked Indigo a few lengths ahead, leaving the brothers to themselves.

  “Mum’ll need a lot of help, if—” Geoffrey could not finish. Edmund watched night come sweeping from the east. He hoped, hoped hard, and spent a while thinking on what hope really was. He wondered whether things were fated to be, or if it only sometimes seemed that way. He wondered it all the way home.

  The inn sat quiet—quiet enough that his heart misgave him. There was no one on the steps, no babble of talk through the shutters. Geoffrey crossed his arms on the road, looking very small. Katherine came down from the saddle and took his hand. Edmund drew in a breath and pushed back the door.

  He found the place quiet, but not empty. A few of his neighbors sat with ales by the fire. They all stood up, like he was Lord Aelfric himself come in for an evening ale. One look at their faces told him what he had been waiting and hoping to hear. Nicky Bird started to say something, but Martin Upfield clapped a hand over his mouth and pointed upstairs.

  Edmund climbed up to the bedrooms. He turned toward his parents’ room first, then spied the light coming from under his own door. He pushed it back to find it made into a sickroom, his father laid out, swaddled on his pallet, and his mother bending down to tuck him in.

  “If you want an ale, ask Martin—and if you want dinner, forget it.” Edmund’s mother had her back to him, so his father saw him first. Harman stared, one long look that said more than any words could say, then squeezed his wife’s hand.

  Edmund’s mother turned, and nearly kicked over the lantern. Edmund had to grab her so she did not faint and fall on top of his father.

  Edmund’s father reached out trembling from the bed. “Going to build some shelves in here. Been thinking about it, there’s some space over there. Any books you like, son. Any books.”

  “Mum—Mum, ow!” Edmund wriggled—her grip was almost as tight as Vithric’s. “My ribs. I hurt my ribs.”

  “Oh, oh, my son—oh, Katherine!” Sarra met her at the door and kissed her hands. “We thought—we were so afraid.”

  Edmund knelt at his father’s side. Harman looked pale and drawn—but whole, breathing even, the bandages wrapped around his middle clean of blood. The letter Edmund had written him lay on the pallet at his side.

  “Had time to think, think hard on things, what I meant to say if—when you came home.” Harman tried to prop himself up, then grimaced, and sank back. “Had time to think on it.”

  Edmund nodded to the door. “Tell us both.”

  Harman peered past him in confusion at Katherine. She stepped aside to let Geoffrey through.

  Chapter

  30

  Edmund set down the jug. “That’s two farthings for the table.”

  “Sure you won’t have a sit with us awhile?” Nicky Bird slapped his back—right on the healing cut on his shoulder. “Come on, Edmund, give us the story again!”

  “I told it last night—and the night before.” Edmund set out the mugs around the table.

  “We want to hear it good and proper, before the minstrels get wind of it and mangle it up.” Martin Upfield knelt to stoke the fire. Someone proposed a brave song, a glad song, and soon after, Horsa Blackcalf started up a jig on his fiddle.

  “Quit that noise, curse you!” Edmund’s mother shouted from the kitchen. “My husband is sleeping up there!”

  Edmund made his rounds, dodging more requests for a story or a song. He stepped out the door for a breath of air, and found his brother sitting alone on the step, staring up at Wishing Hill and past it to the Girth.

  He sat down. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Home, I guess.” Geoffrey looked around him. “Doesn’t seem so bad anymore.”

  Edmund leaned back to rest on the step. From the inn behind him came a rising roll of talk—he heard his own name spoken once and again.

  “You’re going to be a wizard,” said Geoffrey. “A real one.”

  “Of course I am.” Edmund looked across at him. “It’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  Geoffrey shook his head. “It’s not a question of what you want anymore. You’re going to be a wizard because that’s what we need of you.”

  Edmund snorted. “When did you get so grown up?” As soon as he said it, he felt sorry—but Geoffrey only smiled.

  Edmund breathed in the scent of home—turned fields and haystacks, wood and earth. “I used to wish and dream for something to happen, something to make me feel that my life was a grand adventure.”

  Geoffrey punched his arm. “Wish granted, you twit.”

  “I said it to Katherine and Tom, the night Vithric stole you and Tilly.” Edmund looked up to the Girth. “I told them I wanted to run away, to someplace with excitement and danger.” The mountains seemed to loom in, to menace and wait.

  “I’m going to make you study,” said Geoffrey. “You’ll wish you’d never learned to read before I’m done with you.”

  “And I’m going to make you practice with that bow,” said Edmund. “Next time, you’ve got to hit him in the heart.”

  Horsa prevailed upon their mother to at least play one, a quiet one—and it really was good, the sort of song that stirs sad with happy and seems to hint that they are halves of a whole. The moon rose over the last fine night of the year. The warm spell that had come to bless their return was about to end—autumn would soon make its first stumble with winter ever closer on its heels. Edmund closed his eyes. The wind rushed up the lanes of the village and through the tops of the trees all around, one note of joy, of gift, of hard things done. It would have been as near to perfect as anyone could ask, were it not for the whisper he heard beneath.