“Enough!” said Aunt Bel. “I’ll not come walking into the village with the pair of you snarling like dogs fighting over a bone! For shame!”
“It’s a long way to walk,” said Artald. “From the border with Salia all the way up to here. Days and days walking, a month maybe. They must have been right desperate to leave their home.”
“They looked desperate to me,” said Stancy. “Poor creatures. Who knows how many they started with and how many lost along the way. It’s the fault of those Eika raiders.”
“Mayhap not,” said Henri, “for it seemed to me there was peace in Medemelacha, and order, too. I saw no beggars on those streets.”
“Driven out or murdered,” suggested Aunt Bel, “so as not to bother them who didn’t wish to share. Who stole all good things for themselves.”
“Perhaps,” said Henri, “but I saw Eika and human folk working side by side. None of them looked like they were starving. I don’t know. What do you think, Alain?”
Alain had been staring at the clouds, wondering if the light had changed, heralding a change in the dense layer and perhaps promising sunshine. The talk had flowed past him, although he heard it all. “War brings hunger in its wake. What is this now, these clouds, these sickly fields, this fear and these portents, if not echoes of an ancient war?”
“It’s God’s will if the sun don’t shine, or the rains don’t fall,” said Artald. “So Deacon teaches.”
“That storm last autumn was not made by God,” said Alain. “That was made by human hands, in ancient days.”
They looked at him, as they always did, as if they did not know if he were a madman or a prophet, and then looked at each other and away again, at the trees, at the clouds, at the startling appearance of a robin hopping along the ground under the skeletal branches of an oak.
“Look there!” cried Stancy. “Look at that!”
“Mayhap spring will come after all,” said Henri.
The others kept walking, but Alain halted and with a gesture commanded the hounds to move away down the road. Blanche hovered beside him as he moved slowly forward until he was close enough to kneel and stretch out his hand. He breathed, finding the rhythm of the wind in the weeds and the respiration of the tree. The bird hopped toward him, then onto his palm, turning its head to stare at him first with the right eye, then the left. That gaze was black and bright, touched with a shine.
“Come quietly and slowly, Blanche, and kneel beside me. No fast movements.”
Scarcely breathing, she crouched next to him and held out her hand. After a moment, the robin hopped onto her fingers, gave her that same piercing examination, and abruptly spread its wings and flew away.
She burst into tears. “How do you do that?”
“Just be patient, little one. If you find what is quiet within yourself, even the wild creatures will trust you.”
“No one trusts me.”
“That robin did.”
She sniffed, wiping eyes and nose.
“Best come now,” he said. “Let’s hope we see more birds this spring, for it’s an ill portent to have them all vanish like that.” He tilted his head back to look up into the bare trees. “For so it was then. An ill portent.”
“Here, lad, are you having another headache?” Henri had returned, leaving the others waiting up the road. “Let me help you up if you’re not feeling well. No need to go on today if you’ve a mind to go back home.”
“No, no, Father. I’m well enough. Just remembering a forest once where all the birds had fled. But there was a terrible black heart alive in that place. That was why they fled. They feared evil.”
Henri looked around nervously as Blanche whimpered. “Think you we’re haunted?”
“Here?” He patted Blanche tenderly on the head. “Nay, I think it was the wind blew the poor creatures so far that it’s taken them this long, those that survived, to find their way back home.”
“So it may be,” said Henri, still holding his arm and gazing at him. “So it may be. A poor creature may be blown a far way indeed before it turns its gaze toward home.”
They caught up to the others, who set on their way without question or comment. They smelled the tannery before they saw it, and marked the square steeple of the village church rising above trees. In the common ground and meadow in front of the church, an assembly had gathered by the chair and table where the count’s chatelaine held court to choose young folk to serve for a year at Lavas Holding and to receive the tithes and taxes the village paid to the count in exchange for his protection in times of war. Alain did not at first recognize the old woman who sat at the table. It was not until she looked up and saw him walking among his kinfolk, and turned her face away in shame, that he realized this woman was Chatelaine Dhuoda, but so aged with white hair and wrinkled face that anyone might be excused for mistaking her for a woman twenty years older.