wasting straits try us, while he won’t speak, there’s no helping him.’
Kerelie sniffed, caught aback by the hiccup muffled into his sleeve. ‘I’d rather you whacked him outright with a fence-post for acting the brainless fool!’
‘Chin up,’ Tarens chided. ‘I’d prefer to keep the pasture intact and just break his head with my knuckles.’
Clinging to each other in harrowed dread, sister and brother stifled the thought that Efflin might easily die of the rancour sealed beneath his stark silence. Life, meantime, would not pause for his obstinacy, nor would Kelsing’s mayor forgo the debt set against their name on the town tax-rolls.
Kerelie’s exhausted weeping ran dry. While thin sun bleached the frost-burned grass in the yard, and the gusts scattered raced leaves between the straggled stakes in the fallow garden-patch, Tarens sighed and circuitously broached the idea that nagged at his uneasy mind.
‘Survivors don’t quit without reason,’ he said.
Somehow Kerelie sensed the root of the tension that upset his natural complacence. ‘Don’t even say what you’re thinking!’ she snapped.
When Tarens returned no argument, she pushed him off, angry, her raw cheeks flamed pink and her swollen eyes bright as north sky. ‘You daren’t tell me I’ve driven away the one person who might have changed Efflin’s condition!’
Tarens set his strong jaw. Prepared in his way to smooth her nettled anguish, he pointed out, ‘You have eyes. Tell me you haven’t seen the same evidence? Or haven’t you noticed that the scrawny hen we dragged back from the market is now eating her silly head off? She’d bring double the price now, restored to good flesh.’
‘Doesn’t mean the useless fowl will ever lay, or hatch a new brood come the spring.’ Kerelie belatedly dabbed her wet lashes on the inside of her cuff.
‘Well, the sheen on the bird’s feathers belies that.’ Tarens dug into his breeches pocket and offered his crumpled handkerchief. ‘Here. Don’t mess up your blouse. You’ll bleed the dye out of your pretty embroidery, and if not that, we’ve all heard in steamed language how much you love ironing wrinkled linen.’
‘You’re dead right. I hate laundry, never more than while Efflin’s flat on his back and quite busy wrecking what’s left of our sorry lives!’ Kerelie honked noisily, huffed, and shoved a frizzled wisp of hair behind an ear the chill had buffed scarlet. Then she pinned her critical gaze on her brother. ‘How could we have hidden that vagabond, anyhow? Did you honestly think he was innocent? By the rude way we were questioned, the high temple’s examiner sent that diviner to ferret the poor creature out. If we chanced to harbour a heretic, wherever he is, you have to agree he’s better off gone and, safest of all, well forgotten!’
Tarens looked away.
Kerelie’s eyes narrowed. Fists set on her hips, she stared at her brother until his blunt silence piqued her suspicion. ‘You know where that man is!’
‘No.’ Tarens blinked through his unkempt forelock. ‘I swear on the graves of our dead, I do not.’
‘Then what aren’t you telling me?’ Kerelie crushed up his soggy linen and hurled it down like a duelist’s thrown gauntlet.
‘I’ve not seen the fellow, hide nor hair!’ Tarens protested. ‘Not since the evening we aired our crass fears bare-faced in his living presence.’ Stung, he poised for a wary retreat: his sister in a high fettle was wont to clout back with the first handy object within reach. The soup-bowl was broken. Left nothing else, she would pitch the available cutlery at him before the innocuous napkin.
Yet Efflin’s wasting illness had sapped the spunk from Kerelie’s spirit. ‘Tarens!’ she pleaded, wrung beyond fight, ‘at least grace me with a civil answer.’
She would give him no peace. Warned by raw experience, Tarens sat down on the step and laced his big hands over his patched knees. ‘I don’t know where the little man went. But you’re right. He has not gone, exactly.’ The admission emerged in careful words: of fences repaired in the dark of the night; of water drawn to fill troughs for the livestock and small repairs done in the barn; of the fruit trees and vines pruned with expert skill where the untended tangle of last season’s growth threatened to choke the next harvest.
More, Tarens acknowledged the signs of a talent beyond anything known to farm husbandry. ‘If you saw the mends in the hedge by the wood, you’d see he’s got yew twining into itself with a purpose that’s frankly uncanny. That’s not done without use of the secret lore kept by the charm makers.’
‘Few dare that practice, far less in the open.’ Kerelie shoved the sick tray aside with her foot. Frowning, she gathered her splattered skirts and settled next to her brother. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Tarens regarded her with wide-lashed candor. ‘What would you have done, Kerie? Driven him out? Or could you lie to a temple examiner if one returns with more suspicious questions? Worse, could I lay us open to blackmail, that any unscrupulous suitor might pressure us for your hand in marriage? I couldn’t abide the chance that might happen! But without Efflin’s help, in flat honesty, I can’t work the croft by myself!’
Kerelie stood. Tight with hurt, she spun and picked up the tray. The clean spoon beside the untouched cloth napkin sharpened her to accusation. ‘You were risking our landed heritage, Tarens.’
‘Set against Efflin’s life? Does our titled right to till these miserable acres even signify?’
‘More than our brother’s health may be at stake,’ Kerelie pointed out, tart. ‘Or does the fact each of us was declared for the Light since our birth have no meaning?’
There, even her brother’s mild nature lost patience. ‘Your prim faith in the True Sect’s canon serves naught. The temple preaches a loveless morality that cares not one jot for the plight of our livelihood. The priests are fat parasites, theosophizing on their rumps while folk like us break our backs, milked dry by their tithes and their rote obligations. Where does their doctrine show the least concern for our chance to enjoy the fruits of our happiness?’
Kerelie banged down the tray and confronted her brother, her work-worn hands as chapped as his own, and her eyes just as smudged with relentless fatigue. ‘Do you honestly believe that mad vagabond has the gift, or the knowledge to enact a deep healing? Even the Light’s priesthood don’t flaunt such arrogance! They warn against undue interference. Could you take the risk that an invasive power of Darkness might ensnare a man’s defenseless soul? Or that a madman with a rogue talent could invasively damage a wounded spirit?’
‘That fellow is not crazy!’ Blushed under her censure, Tarens amended in heart-felt conviction. ‘No, I don’t know everything. The Light’s policies confuse me. But if Efflin dies, our family holding is lost to us anyhow. Should we act on our unseen fears before the virtue of human kindness? Who’s given us more, the Light’s faith or that stranger? And if you choose to reject generosity, then what standing do we have left in this world, or in the hereafter, for that matter?’
Kerelie turned her back. Palms pressed to her face, her hunched shoulders quivering, she lashed out and kicked the tin tray. The spoon flashed air-borne and tumbled into the garden, while the napkin, wind-chased, fluttered across the sere ground and caught like a forlorn flag of truce in the rose trellis. A moment, she stood, her vulnerable fragility fit to shatter at the next breath. Until the surfeit of grief overset her distress, and she broke into snuffles of laughter.
