And the one who’d lay claim.”
The brothers exchanged glances, recalling the last time this had happened. They’d been patching the roof on Tàm Lynn’s house when he’d collapsed on the ladder below them. Janet had never told them the meaning of that riddle, if she’d ever figured it out; Filib had copied it.
Thomas lay unconscious in the grass now as they wrestled with this one.
“Sounds like us, he’s speaking of,” Kester said. “We’ll rain death on ’em. The elves—those are the betrayers, innit?”
Filib thought this over. “But what about ‘the one who’d lay claim’?”
“Claim to what? Our houses, our land?”
“I dunno, maybe all of it, everything. When he comes to, we’ll tell him what ’e’s said.”
“Think he’ll understand?” Kester asked.
“No idea.”
“Someone’s going to betray us.” Grimly, they sat down then and waited.
XXXIII. Forbes
Inside the seizure, the words he spoke reverberated as if off the walls of a cavern. The lancing, violent streaks of light slowly subsided like a storm moving off, and then his words were gone, and it was the voice of Waldroup echoing in his head, Waldroup looming in the settling dark of the aftermath: “Hey, little brother. So you’re not done with riddles and you’re not done with me. I think maybe we’re both part of this, what happens to you. But you need to wake up now. Time is short. Get on!”
He opened his eyes to find himself inside the tiny shieling hut. The brothers must have stuffed him in there, which meant he hadn’t awakened any too quickly. He crawled out again to find that a mist had set in on the heights and dusk had arrived. The punctured target had been laid up like a piece of roof thatch against the shieling. No sign of Filib or Kester.
He’d foolishly thought the fits were done with him. The Queen had somehow silenced them. But now, outside her influence, they were back, along with Waldroup. It seemed too unlikely to be coincidence.
What had this one been about? He recalled only the voice of Waldroup telling him time was short. He would have to ask the Lusks, but tomorrow. Right now he needed to go home. He worried that Waldroup’s ghost knew something that remained opaque to him, and Janet would be growing fearful that the Yvags had found him already.
In fact, Janet wasn’t thinking of elves at all. She was detaining Forbes the miller, who had come to hear her answer regarding his hand in marriage. With Thomas’s return and the complications attending it, she’d forgotten Forbes’s promise to pay a call for her answer tonight. She wanted only to let him down as gently as possible, but let him down she must.
Forbes had carried a torch for her from the very first time he had come to do business with her father, who delighted in the idea of a miller for a son-in-law. Janet herself had always been the obstacle to that union. Redheaded Forbes would pay his quarterly banalities and then find some excuse to remain after. Sometimes he was invited to share a meal in their company, where he and her father both talked around the edges of a union, ignoring that Janet already had a suitor in foolish Kenny, who thought he would win great honor or a title in battle but instead only won a grave somewhere far from home. She had not given Forbes a reason to think she shared her father’s enthusiasm for their union. He pursued it on his own, smitten, although too shy and uncertain to confess what was in his heart, fearing—rightly—that she would say no. When the lad failed to return, Forbes did not press his suit right away, else things might have been different. He might have attracted her affections. Instead, he let her grieve and waited to see what she would do. That was when Thomas showed up, and despite (or perhaps because of) the danger of him, she joined her fate to his.
Then Thomas was taken, and she absented herself and her child. She supposed to Forbes it was as if she’d been kidnapped, too. She did not return until her ailing father wrote her to come home. Knowing nothing of the true circumstances of Thomas’s disappearance, Cardden had tried to convince her to give up waiting for her lost husband. “These men of the world,” he told her, “they often cannot be persuaded to settle down for long, daughter. You mustn’t blame yourself. Sometimes the quiet, reliable man is the better choice in life.” There was nothing she could say in response except that she wasn’t ready.
After Cardden’s death, Forbes remained steadfast, assisting and advising her on the business of running his demesne. He knew she’d sent Morven away, and that the child was still alive, but never inquired any further.
Thomas was gone, and so finally Forbes asked for her hand. She rejected his suit, which he seemed to expect. Then a month before Thomas returned, he asked again. And she, aware of something wrong inside her, had been ready to say yes, to stop fighting the inevitable and live however many months or years she had left in someone’s loving company. He didn’t know that—or did he? Had he sussed her capitulation? Her acceptance that Thomas was dead? He must have done. Unfortunately, life was not simple and followed no straight path; she’d asked for a little time to think about it and he’d granted her that. Now here she was, receiving and fending off poor Forbes while her resurrected husband failed to appear in order to establish, at the very least, that he had actually returned and she wasn’t fabricating an excuse just to delay or put the poor man off again.
“I know you met,” she told him. “Long ago it was.”
He nodded. “At a Christes Maesse event here. In this very hall. Surely twenty years if it’s been a day.” He tried to look bright, happy for her, but the smile collapsed in on itself. “Where did he go? All this time?”
She tried to fashion an excuse. None had been necessary when everyone thought him dead. Now that she needed a story, an explanation, she could find nothing to put forward. She touched the flagon on the table. “Would you care for more of this Spanish wine?”
“No, thank you.” He seemed incensed by the offer. “I would care for an answer. You owe me that.”
She could find nothing, no alternative to the truth.
So she told him.
“He was taken by elves, twenty years ago.”
His stare seemed to pass through her as if he was looking into the night itself. “He’s escaped from elves.” Disbelief dripped from the word.
“They do take people.” Even to herself she sounded absurd, insane as some demented auntie.
Forbes brushed the feathery red locks on his forehead. “There are stories, I know. I remember a family in Carterhaugh. Their daughter—”
“Yes. Her name was also Janet.”
He blinked a few times, then nodded slightly. “How do you recall that?”
“He saw them take her, my Tàm did.”
“You know, you shouldn’t put that about. It might make certain people suspicious of his having a hand in her disappearance.” He raised his own hand. “I don’t mean that I’m one of them, you understand. That is . . .” He sat, hands on his thighs, and seemed to search his own thoughts and memories. “And so, because he saw them do this, they came for him?”
“No,” said a voice from doorway. “They came because they had taken my brother years ago and in return I killed some of theirs, and they do not forgive or forget.”
Janet and Forbes both turned. Thomas stood there, glamoured to look as if he had aged alongside them.
The miller looked from him to Janet and back. “My God, really return you did.”
“No thanks to Magistrate Baggi or the widow Mac an Fleisdeir.”
Forbes stared at him a moment longer, then laughed. “Oh, Christ, I haven’t forgotten her.”
