Lisbeth snatched the scroll back. With trembling fingers, she fastened the gold flower to the bodice of her plain brown dress.
“Dirk was a hero,” she said, her voice shaking. “He died like his father, doing what he thought was right. If you wish to sneer, Sholto, please sneer where I cannot hear you!”
Sholto turned away, his face expressionless. He began walking to the back of the house, where his supplies of skimmer repellent were kept.
“We had better begin locking up,” he said to Rye over his shoulder. “I will fetch the rags.”
Rye knelt by his mother’s chair and put his hand on her arm. A terrible ache was swelling in his throat and chest, but he made himself speak.
“Mother, Dirk may come back to us yet, whatever the Warden says,” he whispered, trying to make himself believe it. “He has been away a long time, but there is no proof that — that he is lost.”
Lisbeth covered his hand with one of hers. Her fingers were very cold. With the other hand, she fingered the delicate brooch pinned to her dress.
“And — and Sholto was not sneering at Dirk, Mother,” Rye rushed on. “He was just … trying to shut out the pain.”
He had not planned what he was going to say, but as the words left his mouth, he knew that they were true.
“Yes,” Lisbeth murmured through dry lips. “I should not have spoken to poor Sholto so. But … oh, Dirk, my tall, laughing Dirk! My firstborn! How can I bear it?”
She began to weep bitterly. Rye stayed crouched beside her for a while, but at last, he crept away to help Sholto seal the shutters. By the time they had finished, Lisbeth had gone to her room.
As the sun went down, Sholto and Rye ate in silence.
No one sprinkled the salt before we sealed the house, Rye thought. No one chanted the spells of protection.
But he said nothing aloud. He knew that Sholto would scoff at the idea that magic did anything that the skimmer repellent did not do a hundred times better.
That night, Rye lay awake for many hours. He thought that Sholto did, too, though there was no sound at all from Sholto’s bed.
He was just drifting into an uneasy doze when he was jolted awake. Distant crashes and screams were mingling with the muffled beats of the skimmers’ wings. He gasped and sat up, his heart pounding.
“Be still, Rye!” he heard Sholto hiss in the darkness. “They are not attacking us. But it is somewhere very near.”
Rye sat rigidly, blinking in the dark, trying to resist the ghastly images of what must be happening just a few streets away.
After a few long minutes, the awful screams abruptly ceased. But the dry rasping of the skimmers’ wings went on and on and on….
In the morning, when Rye and Sholto went out together to hear the news, they found the streets of Southwall seething with a tale of horror. The mother, father, sister, and grandmother of Dirk’s friend Joliffe were all dead.
A back window of the family’s home had been found yawning open, each of its shutters ferociously clawed and dangling from one twisted hinge. Five dead skimmers lay among the ravaged bones in the main bedroom, showing how valiantly Joliffe’s parents had fought for their lives, and the lives of the others in the house.
The neighbors had heard it all and were numb with shock. They were also plainly filled with shame because they had not tried to save the doomed family, though no one blamed them for a moment. Everyone knew that to open one’s doors when skimmers were overhead meant certain death.
The neighbors said that on the day of the tragedy Joliffe’s parents had received a letter from the Warden. The letter, enclosing a gold badge in the shape of a flower, had declared that Joliffe was now officially believed to be dead.
Joliffe’s parents had never lost hope until that moment. Who could wonder that the family, distracted by grief, had failed to seal the shutters properly, so that the hunting skimmers found a gap through which to attack?
We would have suffered the same fate if it had not been for Sholto, Rye thought, glancing at his stony-faced brother. It was Sholto who thought to seal our doors and windows last night. It was Sholto who put aside his grief to do what had to be done. It is because of him that he, Mother, and I are alive today.
But he knew better than to try to thank or praise Sholto for what he had done.
Sholto was filled with rage. Rye could feel it. Not a muscle of Sholto’s face moved, but Rye knew that his mind was burning with thoughts of Dirk, his lost brother; of Joliffe, though Joliffe had never liked him; of Joliffe’s family, horribly dead.
“This must stop,” Sholto muttered as he and Rye turned for home. “There must be a way.”
Rye knew that he required no answer. He was speaking not to Rye, but to himself.
So Rye was grieved but not wholly surprised when, the next morning, he woke to find Sholto’s bed empty and a letter for Lisbeth lying on the table in the living room.
Rye stared at the note — at one line in particular.
As you will remember, I turned eighteen two weeks ago.
Sholto had turned eighteen! But there had been no party, with all the neighbors invited in to feast and celebrate, as there had been for Dirk when he came of age. In the fear for Dirk’s fate, and at the height of skimmer season, Sholto’s eighteenth birthday had passed almost unnoticed.
Except by Sholto himself, Rye thought.
The note seemed so cold. It said nothing of love, or regret at parting. For a moment, Rye was tempted to tear it up and throw the scraps into the cooking fire.
But of course he could not do that. The note was for Lisbeth, and Lisbeth had to read it.
He heard a sound behind him, and turned. His mother was standing in the doorway of her room, a shawl thrown over her nightgown, a long braid hanging down her back. Her tired eyes searched Rye’s face, then fell to the note in his hand.
“Sholto …” Rye managed to say.
He went to his mother and awkwardly held out the paper, but Lisbeth made no attempt to take it.
“He has gone, then,” she said dully.
Stunned, Rye nodded.
“I knew it would be so,” said Lisbeth. “But I had hoped it would not be so soon. Ah, Sholto …”
“They may not let him go, Mother,” Rye burst out, desperate to comfort her. “Sholto can fight in his way, but he is not very strong. They may send him home again, like Crell.”
To his surprise, the corners of Lisbeth’s mouth curved in a wry half smile. “Sholto is not Crell,” she said. “Sholto wants to go. And he will get what he wants, by trickery if he has to. It has always been the same, from the time he was a tiny child.”
She sighed. Her eyes were far away. “So quiet, he was, my dark, determined little Sholto. But in his way, he was more of a handful than Dirk. At least I always knew where Dirk was. He made noise enough for two children and could not keep still for a moment. But Sholto …”
The smile faded, and for the first time, her lips trembled.
“Sholto will get what he wants,” she repeated. “By fair means or foul, he will go beyond the Wall.”
It was strange, Rye thought, that the house seemed so silent without Sholto. Sholto had said so little. Yet somehow, now he had gone, the very walls seemed to echo, as if they missed his calm, watchful presence.
At night, Rye now dreamed of Sholto as well as Dirk. The faces of both his brothers loomed at him out of the darkness, first one and then the other. Sometimes their mouths moved, but he could not hear their voices because of a rhythmic, pounding sound that echoed through every dream like a gigantic drum.
The bell tree marked the changing of the seasons, and Sholto did not return. At school, Rye’s friends no longer bothered to ask him to join their games. They knew he would refuse.