Cerryl swallowed. “Ser. . the blade. . something be-something is wrong with it.”
After a moment, Dylert frowned. “You be seeing that from without?”
“Hearing, ser,” Cerryl lied. “It. . sounded wrong. I know. . you are the millmaster. . but I had to tell you.”
“Hpphhmmm. Sounds he hears,” grumbled Viental.
Brental glared at the stocky laborer.
“Well. . we be shut down. Might be looking afore anything else.” Dylert frowned. “If there be a crack or flaw,” he shrugged, “then we stand lucky. If not,” he looked at Cerryl, “a lot of work you’ll have to do, young fellow. A darkness lot to make up for this.”
“Yes, ser.”
Dylert glanced at the other two. “Got to clear the blade anyway. Let’s be at it.”
Cerryl stepped back and watched as the three men wrestled the log off the blade. Sweat continued to ooze down his back.
“Now. . he has to hear it. .” mumbled Viental, with a look at the youth.
“Time enough to complain when we find he be wrong,” answered Dylert. “If he be wrong. Cerryl’s not a flighty chap, like some.”
A last shove by Viental, and the log slipped away from the blade. Brental looked at the drop gear and then at the water gates before taking a cloth and brushing away the sawdust that had swirled around the circular toothed blade.
The color drained from the redhead’s face. “There’s a crack here. . might not a held another pass.” His eyes went to Cerryl.
Then Dylert glanced at Cerryl, frowned, then grinned. “Guess you might yet make a mill man, boy. Anyone hear a blade off-true like that. .” He shook his head. “My da, he claimed he could. I never could. That be why. . I check the blade so often. Thought he was a-tellin’ tales.”
Cerryl looked down for a moment, his eyes on the sawdust-covered stones around the saw platform. “I wasn’t sure, not all the way, but. . I didn’t want anyone hurt, and you talked about how a broken blade. .”
“He listens, too,” said Brental. “Glad I am that he does.”
Viental shook his head ruefully. “Know why my mother said to wait afore talking.”
“Well. . good thing Henkar got the new blade forged and tempered. . This rate we’ll never survive. . two blades this season. Best we get to it,” Dylert said. “Can’t be cutting with a cracked blade.”
While the three men wrestled to replace the blade, Cerryl stepped back and slipped out of the mill, trying to keep from shaking as he did. Again, he’d barely managed to avoid revealing what he had really seen.
Outside, in the hot but slightly cooler shade by the now-silent millrace, he swallowed.
Finally, he lifted the heavy yoke and walked slowly uphill toward the stables.
XV
CERRYL LOOKED AT the handcart, upside down on the flooring stones just inside the mill door, then at the dark-stained and battered half bucket filled with grease.
With a slow and silent deep breath, Cerryl reached into the bucket and dipped out a globule of the dark substance with his right hand and methodically began to grease the cart wheels and axle, using a thin stripped fir branch, barely more than a twig, to push the grease where his fingers couldn’t reach.
Behind him, at the other side of the mill, Dylert directed Brental and Viental as the three continued cutting a half-dozen oak logs from the upper woods, logs that Dylert had marked and felled a season before. Cerryl’s eyes went to the saw platform, but his senses only saw the normal whitish red of the cutting, not the angry red of a stressed or cracked blade. He nodded and looked back down at the dark gray grease.
After another repressed sigh, he dipped out more grease.
“Some folk here to see you, Cerryl.” Erhana stood in the door to the mill, her voice barely audible over the whine of the big blade and the thump, thump of the wheels.
“Me?” Cerryl finished daubing grease on the top exposed part of the cart’s axle. “To see me?”
Erhana smiled, then added, “Your aunt and uncle, I think.”
Cerryl looked around for the grease rag, then saw it under the side of the upended left cart wheel, where he’d placed it to keep any extra grease from falling on the floor stones. He picked it up and wiped his hand as clean as he could, then straightened, and walked out the door into the sunlight.
Overhead, the summer sky was filled with white puffy clouds scudding westward, clouds that cast fast-moving shadows across the hills of western Lydiar and the forests to the north of the mill.
Cerryl glanced from Erhana to his aunt and uncle and then back to the brown-haired girl. “Thank you.”
Erhana nodded and slipped uphill toward the house where Dyella was carding wool in the shade of the porch.
“How are you?” Cerryl asked after a moment.
Syodor carried a small pack. Nall stood beside him, empty-handed. Both looked downcast, somehow smaller than Cerryl recalled them.
“You’ve grown.” Nall licked her lips nervously.
“My feet have, anyway.” Cerryl offered a smile.
Neither Syodor nor Nall returned the smile.
“What. . what is the matter?” Cerryl felt uncomfortable with the proper use of “is,” at least in speaking to his aunt and uncle, but he remained determined to speak properly. He looked steadily at his uncle.
“Things have been better, lad. Aye, they have been.” Syodor looked at the ground, not speaking for a time. “The duke. . my patent. . said no longer could grub the mines.”
“I’m sorry.” Cerryl nodded gravely, feeling that his words offered little comfort. “I really am. I wish I could do something.” Even as he spoke, sensing the discomfort of his aunt and uncle, he found himself wondering why Syodor’s words felt so wrong, even though his uncle had often worried about the patent.
“Best you can do, child,” said Nall, “be to take care of yourself.”
“You got a place, Cerryl. Better than we could give you now.” Syodor again looked down at the stones of the causeway. “Dylert be a good man.”
“I know, uncle. . but what about you? Where will you go?” Cerryl swallowed. He’d never expected Syodor or Nall to be anywhere but at the house by the ancient mines.
“Don’t you be worrying about us,” admonished Nall. “Not like as we got that much longer to worry, child. ’Sides, we got a place.”
Cerryl looked back at his uncle.
“Got a cousin in Vergren,” said Syodor, his voice flat. “Sheep country there. He’s got an extra cot. Small, and it needs some work. Even managed to borrow his mule cart. Take most of our things.”
“Isn’t there anything. . any place else?”
“What else we need, lad? The mines are over for me. Have been for a long time. Just didn’t want to admit it.”
Syodor’s voice was rough, Cerryl realized belatedly. “I’m sorry. Can you tell me where you’ll be?”
“Tomorrow we set out,” said Nall. “Like as dawn. Gerhar be Syodor’s cousin. His place be on the old north road, past the second hill. In Vergren, that be.”
“Tomorrow?”
“The Duke’s man gave us but four eight-days, and it was most of that finding Gerhar.” Syodor forced a wry smile, one that did not touch his remaining good eye. “Lucky we be that Gerhar has but one young daughter and can use the extra hands.”
Cerryl shook his head. “Perhaps I should come. .”
“No.” Syodor’s voice was as firm as Cerryl had ever heard it. “Better you remain here with Dylert. Leastwise you have a trade. If anyone asks, best you tell them you be an orphan, but that your folk come from Montgren, Vergren way.” He laughed once. “That be true enough, now.”
Cerryl moistened his lips.
“Brought you some things,” said Nall, after another moment of silence.
Syodor opened the pack. “Pack be yours, too, Cerryl. Sooner or later, like as you be needing it.” He took out something, something that glowed white beneath his hand with the light that was like that of the sun, and yet not. “This, it be your da’s,” the miner added gruffly, extending a small knife in a sheath. The knife and sheath were nearly toy-sized, small enough to fit within Cerryl’s palm. “This, too,” Syodor added, placing a silver-framed mirror-a screeing glass-beside the knife.