Edain’s grin turned genuine. He’d been surprised to find he had two new siblings when he came home, apparently conceived not long after he left with Rudi and the others, and it had probably startled his parents too, being fifteen years after their next youngest. The pregnancy had been hard on his mother, who hadn’t been expecting it in her fiftieth year, but though the marks were still visible he thought she considered it worthwhile. It was enough to make him wistful for some of his own, too, though that would have to wait a while yet.
“Nola,” Sam Aylward said, warning in his tone. “Are you going to share that with your brother?”
“No, Da!” she said, backing away a little further. “No!”
Edain had noticed she was already well familiar with that one word, and used it often. Her brother Nigel didn’t say a thing, but there was a dangerous gleam in his wide blue eyes as he advanced on her.
She also cast a wary look on Edain, holding the jam-filled pastry behind her lest he treacherously steal some of it; they hadn’t had time to really get used to him yet.
“The roit answer, moi gurl, is yes Oi will share it with ’im, Dad,” his father said.
The gnarled hand moved with surprising deftness and twitched it out of her chubby paw. Before her lip had time to pout, he’d ripped it neatly in half, popped the piece with the bite in it back into the mouth she’d opened to give a wail of protest and then handed half to her brother.
“’ere you go, Nigel-moi-lad,” he said.
The dogs all rose and padded over to the children, taller at the shoulder than their tow heads, and carefully sniffed them head-to-foot with their gruesome muzzles, provoking squeals of laughter as the cold wet noses touched skin. One of the younger dogs showed an interest in the disappearing remnants of pastry, and Garbh nipped the offender on the ear to remind him of his manners. Then faces were licked, and children and dogs collapsed into a mingled sprawl not far from the stove.
“Garbh, stay,” Edain said. Her head came up. “Guard.”
She laid it down again on her paws but cocked an eye at him in response as if to say: They’re the pack’s puppies, of course I’ll guard them!
Then they sat in companionable silence for a fair time as the light faded, listening to the feather-tick of wet snowflakes against the windows and the occasional deep sigh from one of the dogs; the children had fallen asleep with the abrupt suddenness of their age, eyes shut and mouths open. It was full dark outside now, and nothing showed but the occasional yellow glimmer from someone else’s lanterns and candles and once the clop of someone leading a horse pulling a light cart down the village street. The smell of cooking came stronger.
“Time to go in, Da,” Edain said, feeling obscurely better.
The elder Aylward levered himself up with a grunt and they walked down a hallway past rooms currently full of knocked-together bunk-beds into a big open space that held a score of people of all ages and wasn’t impossibly crowded.
Mackenzies didn’t make as much of rank as many other peoples; a few specialists in Dun Juniper and Sutterdown aside, everyone worked on the land and at their crafts, and even the Chief had a loom in her bedroom over the Hall and took her turn doing dishes in the kitchens there. At need everyone who could fought, and nobody went hungry in a Dun unless everyone did, which was rare.
Such rank as there was, though, the Aylwards had. This was a big farmhouse, a two-story frame structure that had been old but well-kept before the Change and had served as the initial nucleus for Dun Fairfax-the name came from the former owners. They had been elderly and very diabetic, but their supplies and stock and tools had helped the nascent Clan survive, and the folk of the Dun and passers-by still made small offerings on their grave out by the gate.
One of the changes made over the years since had been to open out most of the first floor, joining the kitchen and the dining and living rooms into one space big enough for the cooking, preserving, pickling and other endless indoor work that kept the household provided for. There was a long table and chairs and trestle-benches that could be moved around to suit, and walls hung with everything from polished pots and pans near the stoves to sickles, scythes and shearing-shears. Just now several sets of bedding and futons were rolled up and strapped to tie-pegs as well, for their share of the folk from enemy-occupied lands they were sheltering.
A stairway and a trap door led down to the cellars, with their bins and barrels and racks of glass jars. Net sacks of onions, strings of garlic, bags of drying herbs and burlap-wrapped hams and flitches of bacon hung in convenient spots from the ceiling beams up here; there was a big icebox for fresh produce. Sinks and counters showed that Dun Fairfax had running water from an internal spring, and two big iron stoves with copper boilers attached for hot water shed heat as his mother and several of the refugee women worked on dinner. Rag rugs covered much of the plank floor, and a wooden border colored and carved with the symbols of the Quarters ran around beneath the eaves. Stained and painted knotwork and twining vines covered the rest of the broad band, and whimsical faces from story and legend peeked out from carved leaves.
Edain made a reverence to the images of the Lord and Lady standing on either side of the hearth’s crackling fire-blue-mantled Brigit with her flame and wheat-sheaf, and stag-antlered Cernunnos. His father did the same, and then lowered himself into his special chair by the fire with a sigh.
“Pull me one too,” he called to Edain. “A point o’ the Special from the Boar’s ’ead barrel, in ’onor of you comin’ ’ome safe.”
The room was brightly lit by alcohol lanterns behind glass mantles, and they gave off a slightly fruity scent that mixed with the smells of burning fir, cooking and-rather faintly-dog. Edain ambled over to a small barrel that rested in an X of plank frame on one counter near the door to the outside vestibule; that kept the draughts at bay and left a place for boots and overshoes and outer gear to hang and drip in the wet weather with which the dùthchas was abundantly supplied in the Black Months. The household’s weapons were racked on the wall next to it, brigandines and helms, sword belts and bucklers, war-bows and hunting bows and quivers and a brace of seven-foot long-bladed battle spears, all high enough to keep them out of easy reach of children too young to know better.
His mother Melissa, came in through the vestibule with a draft of cold wet air and a jug in her hand; she’d just poured the evening dish of milk for the house-hob, one of a householder’s duties. She gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“And one for me, too, love. Since you’re by the barrel,” she said.
His elder half sister Tamar was sitting at the table nursing her latest, while instructing her other boy and girl as they plaited mats out of barley straw; her man Eochu was beside them, his hands busy with awl and waxed thread on a piece of harness whose seam had come loose, and Edain’s younger brother Dick was helping him when he wasn’t trying to use a stick to scratch inside the plaster cast that marked where a war-horse had trod on his right shin. Symbols stood on it, from healing spells to a bawdy promise from his latest girlfriend as to what they’d do when it came off.
Their sister Fand was sitting cross-legged on the rug before the fire, cracking walnuts from a big plastic bowl with the pommel of a dirk and using the stone of the hearth as an anvil. She dropped the nut-meats into a glass jar, the ones she didn’t absently eat, and ignored the younger children nearby reading aloud from a big modern leather-bound and lavishly illustrated version of the Táin Bó Cúailnge. That from the lofty height of her fifteen years and experience as an Eoghan-helper on the latest campaign, which was, Edain thought, doubtless why she was wearing her rust-red hair warrior-style in a queue down her back bound with a bowstring. Though strictly speaking she shouldn’t, not until and unless she took valor and could stand in the First Levy’s bowline.