‘Then maybe we should just go,’ he said, standing up. ‘If you haven’t got the strength to protect your relatives from the truth, then,’ he shook his head, ‘just go. It’s kinder.’
Flora started to cry and Jimmy rolled his eyes: now he was the villain. He looked down at her. Well, maybe I am the villain. The young thief sat down and put his arm around Flora’s quaking shoulders. And if you do the gods-cursed sensible thing and lie like a sailor, I get to stay in this pleasant room and eat Cleora’s wonderful food.
Maybe confessing everything right at the beginning was the best, most noble, most honest thing to do. But in his heart, Jimmy was convinced it was also the best way to get them kicked out of the house and out of the life that Flora so obviously was meant for. And it would break her aunt’s heart. He shook his head. I’m being totally selfish and totally helpful at the same time. Damn, there’s no doubt about it. I was born for greatness.
‘Sometimes, Flora, the right thing isn’t always the best thing to do. I see a lot more heartache and loss coming out of an honest confession of the hard facts than out of your very plausible fib. My advice is to sleep on it: things may be clearer in the morning. All I ask is that you tell me first if you’re going to tell her about being a Mocker. All right?’
She sniffed and looked at him solemnly, then gave him a brief hug and rose. ‘You’re right,’ she said and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘And I will think it over. I’ll tell you my decision tomorrow, I promise.’ Leaning down, she kissed him lightly on the cheek and then, in a swirl of skirts, she was gone.
Jimmy’s mouth twisted wryly. Suddenly all that good cooking was sitting in his stomach like a lead weight. Why couldn’t women think things through? It was always the emotional side of things with them, never the logical. He gave an exasperated sigh. He’d never sleep with his belly in this kind of torment; perhaps a nice evening stroll was in order.
NINE - Encounter
A lone figure trudged down the road.
Bram had left the merchant caravan—if that wasn’t too grand a name for two wagons and two pack mules, where the road branched off toward the village of Relling—just before sunset the night before.
There was a good inn in Relling; they had a first-rate shepherd’s pie, and they brewed a noble ale. Not as good as his mother’s cooking or his father’s home-brew, though. The young man had squared his shoulders, swung his pack over his shoulder on the tip of his bowstave, and set off down the road once he’d made his goodbyes.
By avoiding the loop in the King’s Highway where the road headed off to Relling, and by walking most of the night—he usually slept for four hours—he would see his home just before sunrise, just in time for his mother’s breakfast. There was little danger along the trail he hiked, few animals that would trouble a grown man, and no robber was likely to be lurking along such a byway in the dead of night.
Every hill that challenged his legs was a step nearer to home.
He recognized trees he’d climbed as a lad, fields he’d worked in or tended stock through, jumped over a creek that crossed the roadway and grinned at the memory of the first time he’d been able to do that dry-shod. He was already man-tall in his seventeenth year, with a little soft yellow fuzz on his cheeks and a shock of rough-cropped gold hair, broad-shouldered and long-legged, his open blue eyes friendly. A lifetime’s hard work had put muscle on his shoulders and arms, but it was stalking deer that had given him grace, and made his soft boots fall lightly on the dirt of the road.
And thinking of which, he thought, his head coming up. Something fairly large crashed off through the roadside brush. Pig? he wondered, then stooped. The false dawn gave him light enough for tracking. No, deer, right enough. The cloven print was a little too big and a little too splayed for swine.
Bram chuckled. ‘Run off and get chased by a nobleman,’ he said.
Nobles hunted deer on horseback, with dogs; which was rather like killing chickens with a battle axe to his way of thinking—easily done and not much sport in it—but there was no accounting for tastes. The joy was in tracking and stalking, not the kill. After the kill came the hard part, dressing out the carcass and lugging it back home. But then nobles had servants to do the hard work, he conceded.
He took a deep breath of the musty-cool air and continued down the roadway, whistling. A brisk four-mile walk had brought him almost to his own door and he paused with a smile on his face to look at the old place.
The lane to the farmhouse looked so welcoming in the early morning that the sight of it lifted his heart. There were lanterns on the fence posts on the way up to the house and one beside the door, while the downstairs windows of the house were aglow with candlelight, the flame blurred to a warm yellow through the scraped sheep-gut or thin-sliced horn that made the panes. There was a lantern by the barn door as well, he saw.