“You haven’t been there?” she demanded suddenly, pushing him to arm’s length and gripping his shoulders. “He’d know you—”
“No, no, I haven’t been there yet. But this is a sorry place to find you, sister!”
She looked around as if she did not know what place he meant. “You’re back,” she said. “You’re here. You kept the promise! Oh, I have longed for you, longed for you!” And she leaned away from him a little again to look at him with pride and amazement. “A man grown,” she said, exulting, and held him and kissed him again. Then taking his hand she led him into the house.
Hovy followed them to the doorway, where he stopped and waited. Clover, a stocky, round-faced girl, stood at the corner of the house. She stared at Hovy with patient curiosity, and he endured her stare with patient indifference.
Inside the house, Weed took her brother’s hands again, still radiant with the joy of seeing him and touching him, but speaking urgently. “Hovy must go away,” she said. “People will know you through him. You, they’d never know. Only he’d know you. How you’ve changed! Oh, what a little boy you were! A little squirrel! Remember I called you Squirrel? And you called me Mountain, because I used to sit on you when we played?”
He smiled, shaking his head.
“And look at you now. As tall as Father—and you have his shoulders—Oh, Clay! The last time I was happy was the day I saw the ship sail in! All these years—there’s never been a day I didn’t think of him and you, of you and him. Never an hour. But now you’re here, my ship, my sword, my brother! You kept the promise! Now we can make it right! I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it alone. With you I can do what we must. And you came for that. I know you came for that. To set it right.”
“I did,” he said. “And I can do it.”
They were alike as they stood face to face in the dark, low-beamed room. She was not as tall as he, but as strongly built. He was handsome, with arched eyebrows and bright dark eyes. Her face was heavy, her brows drawn straight across, and the flash of her eyes was somber. But in mouth and nose and turn of the head they were alike. As he held her hands in his he looked at them and laughed again—“Which are yours and which are mine?”
“Mine are the hard rough ones,” she said, and stroked his hands, and then turned her palms up to show the calluses. “See? That’s the sickle, the churn, the plow, the washtub. My life.”
“You’ve lived here all this time?”
“I’m Bay’s wife.”
“His wife?”
“How else could I stay here? Where was I to go?”
“It can’t be. I thought—It’s wrong. You are the daughter of Odren!”
“That I am. Wherever I live.”
“And I’m his son. I never forgot. Never a day I didn’t say the words you said to me.” Her eyes flashed brighter at that. “I know what to do, Lily. I can do it. I have the gift, Lily, do you understand? I took the jewels you gave me and went to O-Tokne where there was a Roke wizard, a grey-cloak. Four years I spent with him, learning what I need to know. And I know it. I can set Father free.”
“The gift?”
He nodded.
She stared at him, as disbelieving as he had been of her marriage. “Wizardry?”
“I have the gift and I have the skill. I earned it, Lily! I cared nothing for all the teaching but what led to what I must do. I know what I must know. And I can do it.”
She stood, her hands still in his hands. She said slowly, “If you did . . . if could you set him free . . . what then?”
“He’d know his enemy. As he didn’t when he came home.”
She gazed at him as if trying to see her way. “And—?”
“And he would destroy her,” the young man said with fierce certainty.
Her bewildered look did not change.
“Her?”
“The witch who destroyed him.” He drew in his breath. “His wife. Our mother.” He spoke the word with all the strength of hate.
She took this in. “And . . . the man . . . Ash?”
“Ash is nothing. A sorcerer who fell into the power of a witch. Without her he has no power.”
“But I—”
“The wizard of O-tokne saw it all clearly. It was she who betrayed Father, she who destroyed him. She used Ash to do it. But facing Father and me, now we know what she is, Ash will be powerless.”
She stood gazing at him, her face almost blank.
At last she said, “I only thought of killing him.”
“You couldn’t see it clear. He’s nothing without her.”
She drew her hands from his and looked away. “I saw him make the spell, Clay. It was Ash who made it. I saw him.”
“He did as she made him do. I remember all you told us. He does her bidding. He does her will.”
“I thought she did his will,” Weed said, not in denial or argument, but stating it as a fact.
“No,” the young man said. He put his arm protectively around her shoulders. “She’s besotted with him because he’s her creature. He was nothing till she took him up. A common sorcerer, a boat-builder, a dog. It wasn’t in Ash that the power lay, but in him—in Father. My gift is from him, no doubt of it. She could take Father’s power from him and use it against him because he trusted her. But now he knows her! And when I free him from the spell his power will be his own again, and we’ll destroy her. And her dog with her. This is how it will be, Lily. It was at a high cost I learned what I needed to know.”
She listened with her heavy, pondering look. After a while she said only, “That’s her name. Not mine.”
He did not understand.
“I’m Weed,” she said.
“Weed, then,” he said, soothing and gentling her, cradling her against him. “Whatever you like! My sister, my only friend.”
They clung together. So they were standing when there were voices at the door, and the farmer entered his house.
He stopped and stood, the short, gnarled, bent-shouldered man. He ducked his head to the young man, muttering, “Master Garnet.”
The young man nodded.
“Hovy’s there outside,” the farmer said in a quiet, dull voice, speaking to the space between the brother and the sister.
His wife went to the door. “Come in, Hovy. Forgive my discourtesy. I was mad with joy to see my brother, and never spoke to you who kept him all these years and brought him back safe to me. Come in!”
And after seating the men at the table she called in her stepdaughter, and with her set out supper for them alclass="underline" thick chunks of stale bread soaked in milk with green onion chopped in it, and a bowl of little, late, sour plums.
The young man did not sit down with them. “Meet me outside, sister,” he said, and stepped out, restless. The dogs barked, and Bay spoke to quiet them.
They ate quickly and in silence.
Brother and sister met in the house yard by the kitchen garden.
“I want to tell you what I’m going to do. Tell no one.”
“You can trust Bay.”
“I trust no one. Come with me if you want, but no one else. And say nothing.”
“I’ve said nothing for a long time.”
“Tonight, at dusk, I’ll unmake the spell that holds Father in the stone. Then he and I will go to the house together and take them unawares. He’ll come on suddenly in all his strength. If Ash tries to lay any spell on Father, I can counter it. They’ll be helpless. Father can do with them as he will. The judgment is his. And he was always a just man.”
He spoke with exaltation and passionate sureness.
“Father was never a wizard,” she said.
“Strength isn’t in spells only.”
“But there’s great strength in spells,” she said.
“And I have that strength.”
“Greater than Ash’s?”
“You mistrust me, do you? Come with me then and see. I know what to do and how to do it.”
“Let me tell you what I think, brother.”