After a while the listener asked, “And they none of them ever came back?”
The innkeeper smiled a bit grimly. “The girl turned up just the next day. She’d run off with her brother across the fields. A farmer took them in overnight. Farmer Bay, it was, who’d lately lost his young wife in childbirth. His mother was there with the baby, so there were women in the house. Next day Bay sent word to the lady and she sent for the children, but the girl wouldn’t come nor let her brother go. She said she’d die before she entered her house until her father was there. The mother went to see her, but the girl would have kept her out of the farmer’s house if the farmer had dared forbid her, and she wouldn’t look at her or speak to her, and the little boy clung to his sister and wouldn’t go to his mother for all she coaxed. So at last, to keep the scandal down, the Lady Lily said that if her daughter and son chose to stay with Farmer Bay while the great house was all in grief and mourning, she would permit it. And she went back across the fields.
“There was a show of seeking for Lord Garnet and sending boats out to look for the ship, but that all died down before very long. It was as if his return had been a dream, all but for the men who’d sailed with him and were back home now, or had been killed in the battles, like our two villagers. And again there wasn’t much talk. The lady rules at Odren, and the sorcerer rules the lady, that’s how it is, people said, and they made the best of it.
“Well, after maybe a fortnight, the boy Clay, the son of Odren, goes missing from Hill Farm—gone, like his dad, no one knows where! But that wasn’t sorcery. The girl said to her mother, ‘I sent him away. I’ve saved him from the wicked man you live with. He’s safe with a good man. I don’t know where he has gone, and if I did I’d never tell you.’ The girl wasn’t moved by pleading or by threats. So the Lady Lily said to her in fury, ‘You’ve debased yourself, running away, living with a farmer. So you shall marry him.’ And the girl says, ‘I’d sooner marry Bay than ever see Ash again.’ And with that, the lady orders the farmer to marry the girl.
“So, if you came seeking the daughter of Odren, she’s Bay’s wife Weed, and stepmother of his daughter. As for the boy, and the gardener Hovy . . . Well. I have a good memory for faces. Still, I couldn’t think who your husband was till I was in the midst of my story. Weed sent her brother away with him. Is that it?”
The guest was silent. She sighed. “I’m Hovy’s sister, Linnet, not his wife,” she said, subdued but steady. “And I’m all the mother Clay’s had since he was ten.” She looked up at the innkeeper. “But I’ll tell you, mistress, I’m in fear for us now, me and my brother! I’m in fear. What are we doing here among these terrible people? It was the boy’s will. He would come back. Hovy’s always done his bidding.”
The innkeeper shook her head. “We all do the masters’ will. We’re swept up in it, along with them, like leaves in the wind. And what now? Where will the ill wind blow us now?”
They had long since finished shelling the beans. The innkeeper got up and went inside to draw them each a clay mug of thin beer, for the autumn day had grown quite warm. “Have this, now,” she said, sitting down companionably. “Have a swig of this, Missis Linnet, and tell me, how much of my story did you know before I told it?”
“Little but the names, missis. I know only the story Clay told, the story his sister told him. She told him he must remember it, every word of it, and he did. He’d say it over to me and to Hovy, again and again, over the years. So that it would be always in his mind, as his sister said it must be. So that he could come back when he was grown and set things right.”
She looked downcast at that prospect, but cheered up a little with a sip of beer. “Lovely brewing, missis.”
“It is that. Can you tell me this story?”
Linnet was reluctant, uneasy, and the innkeeper did not press her. They spoke of the weather, the harvest, the quality of malt. Then Linnet said in a kind of whispered outburst, “I know what happened. To their father. The girl, his daughter, she saw it.”
The innkeeper looked at her with round eyes, her dignity lost for a moment. “Weed? She saw it?”
“She never slept that night, the night her father came back. She watched. Deep in the night she saw the sorcerer go by. She followed him, hiding and creeping. She watched from the window.”
Linnet’s voice had fallen into singsong recitation; she was repeating words she had heard said a hundred times, the same words in the same order. The innkeeper listened unmoving.
“She saw him go down to the cliff above the bay. He made signs and spoke. The ship down in the bay moved from her mooring. Her sails shivered in the starlight. No wind blew but she moved forward out of the bay. Out to sea. She was gone.
“The sorcerer came back up into the house and passed by the girl where she hid. She followed him back to the door of the bedroom. The lady came out to meet him. They spoke in murmurs. The lady went back into the room and after a time came out with her husband. She was saying: ‘You must come and see the golden house. We must go secretly.’ She coaxed him and put his shoes on his feet. He did as she pleased. And they went outside and down the road. The sorcerer followed them, Ash.
“The girl followed far after him, hiding herself.
“There was only the first light in the east.
“They came to the standing stone, the Standing Man. The three stood there. The girl hid among the willows where the path comes into that valley. She heard them talk. The lady said that Ash had looked with a wizard’s eye at the Standing Man and saw that hidden within it was the door into a wonderful house of gold. The hinges of the door were of ruby and diamond. The lady said, ‘We did not open the door.’ She said, ‘We waited for you to come, since you are my lord and the Lord of Odren.’
“He said, ‘I see no door into the Stone.’
“She said, ‘You must put your hands upon it.’
“The sorcerer said, ‘Lean your forehead on it. When I speak the key word, then you will see the golden house.’
“And the lord laughed and did what they asked. He stood there with his hands and his forehead on the stone. The sorcerer raised up his arms quick and high and spoke a word. The air turned black. The girl could not move. There was no air to breathe. It was like death. When she could see again she saw her father and the standing stone and did not know what she saw. It was the man and it was the stone. She saw her mother crouched on the ground watching the sorcerer weave his spells.
“The girl crept away. She ran up to the house and woke her brother. They went to Hovy in his gardener’s hut. She said they must flee at once and find someone to take them in. Hovy took them to the house of a farmer he had come to know. Bay of Hill Farm took them in.
“And the rest you know.”
She looked at the innkeeper as if awaking from a trance.
“And what now?” she said. “What now?”
The dogs of Hill Farm barked. Bay’s wife, Weed, said from the scullery, “Is there someone at the gate?”
Her stepdaughter, Clover, a girl of fifteen or so, ran out to look and came back. “Two men,” she said.
Weed dried her hands on her apron and went out into the house yard, hushing the dogs. As she walked toward the men at the gate she looked at them with a direct gaze, her head up and her face expressionless. Her look changed.
“Hovy?” she said, her eyes on the older man.
Then she looked again at the younger man, and cried out in such a voice that the girl behind her stopped short in terror—“Clay! O Clay!” She tore the gate open and flung her arms round him, sobbing his name and saying, “Brother, brother!”
“Then it’s you, it’s you indeed, Lily,” the young man said, trying to hold her away a little, half laughing and half in tears himself.