5. Giving Ground
Giving Ground
The weather turned warmer after that, and the snow gave up the ground a little more each day. There still wasn't grass enough to chance putting anything in, and Kain had no interest in watching a crop die the day he planted it, but there was plenty he could do to get ready.
Once the snow was off the beds he went out into the garden and set to pulling last year's dead growth, the dried turnip tops and the woody stems and the vines gone to fiber over the winter, all of it raked into piles along the edge of the beds to burn once he had the time.
He'd been at it most of the morning when a sound from the barn brought his head up, and it came again, a voice from inside the walls. His hand went to his hip before he caught himself, his fingers closing on nothing, the sword long since left behind and him glad enough to be shut of it.
That left the question of who had gotten into his barn, and why.
He straightened, took up the rake he'd been clearing with, and started for the barn with it gripped close. Halfway across the yard he caught sight of a bay mare tied at the post by the road, and he eased off.
He set the rake against the wall and looked in through the doors.
Carol was inside with Roan, brushing down his neck with a hand flat on his shoulder. She looked over when Kain's shadow fell across the doorway, and he gave her a nod. "Carol."
"Kain. Came to look in on my horse." She kept brushing. "Remind me what you settled on calling him. Roan, was it?"
"Roan."
"Roan." She shook her head at the horse like the two of them shared an opinion of it. "Waste of a good animal, that name. You could've called him near anything and you went with the color. Your choice, even when it's a poor one."
Kain leaned a shoulder against the door frame and watched her work. She led Roan out into the middle of the barn and went over him.
She talked the whole time, half to the horse and half to Kain, and Kain caught himself paying more attention than the job called for.
She stopped at the chest and looked back at him. "You've been brushing him against the grain right here. Watch." She ran the brush down. "Follow the lay of the coat. He's not tender there, he just doesn't care to be rubbed backward. Nobody does."
"Noted," Kain said.
"I'll bet." She said it half to him and half to the horse, in the same warm voice either way. "Back in the stall with you, then."
She dug a few apple wedges out of her coat and held them out flat, and Roan took them one at a time, chewing slow.
"Wedges," Kain said.
"Whole apple, the core can hang up in his throat and choke him. Cut them down." She wiped her hand on her trousers. "He'll eat near anything you hand him, and most of what you don't, so whatever goes in his mouth is on you." She latched the stall door. "Now. Is your coffee hot?"
"It can be," Kain said.
"Then let's. I'm half frozen, and it's a long ride out this way."
Ghost was on the front porch when they came out, stretched across the top step where the morning sun hit the boards. Carol stopped a few feet short of it, and the wolf raised its head and looked at her with its one good eye, and for a breath neither of them moved.
"You know that's not a dog, right?"
"Dog enough," Kain said.
Carol looked at the wolf a moment longer, then at Kain, and decided the pair of them were going to be exactly this way about it. "Well. Hello, dog."
Ghost's ear turned toward her voice, but it didn't move otherwise, and after a moment Carol stepped over its tail and went inside with the careful dignity of a person pretending she hadn't just stepped over a wolf.
Kain put the water on to boil and set out two mugs. Carol took the chair at the kitchen table and looked the room over with the same eye she'd used on the horse, missing nothing and saying so about most of it.
The counter held a drift of receipts from Sam's store, Mark's planting guide and the almanac sat together on the shelf, the cupboards hung open, and the chisel and hammer he'd used on the stone were still set down by the stove.
"Your planting guide and your almanac are the only two things in this kitchen that know where they belong." She nodded at the shelf. "The rest of it's chaos."
"Works fine," Kain said.
"I didn't say it didn't work. I said it was chaos."
"You want anything with it? Scones?" Kain set the second mug down on the table. "A cream cake, maybe."
"Don't mock me. I'd not turn down a sweet bun if you had one, which you don't." Carol leaned back. "Scones go with tea, anyhow. I couldn't tell you what a cream cake goes with."
"Neither could I." Kain sat down across from her. "It sounded fancy."
"And I sound bossy."
"Something like that," Kain said.
That got a laugh out of both of them, brief and easy, and Carol reached for her coffee to cover the end of hers.
The water came to a boil. Kain poured it through the grounds in the filter and the smell of coffee filled the kitchen, and he set the first cup in front of Carol and kept the second for himself.
"So what are you most set on planting? What's the big crop that's going to make you rich this year?" Carol blew across the top of her cup.
"Potatoes first." Kain sat back. "Mark always said to put potatoes in ahead of everything else. Easy to grow, hard to kill, fills you up when the rest runs out."
"He talked about potatoes, did he?"
"Until the rest of us wanted to throw them at him." Kain almost smiled at it. "Picked it all up from a farmer outside Greyhaven, then said it again for the next hundred miles of road."
Kain told her the rest of it then, the way they'd buried potatoes in the coals of a campfire on the road, how the skins charred past eating but the inside came out soft enough to keep a man walking another day.
A potato wouldn't turn on you the way meat could, either, and that counted for something when you were a few days out from anywhere.
"I never thought of a potato as something that kept you alive.
" Carol turned her cup. "My father took me into the city when I was small, and there was a place there that cut potatoes into little sticks and fried them in oil.
Best thing I ever ate, and I've never once managed to make them come out the same. "
"Good enough," Kain said. "Bad for you. But good."
"Terrible for me, I'm sure. Doesn't change that it was good." She set the cup down. "All right. Potatoes. What else? Onions?"
"That's the plan."
"Parsnips?"
"Don't think I know it," Kain said.
"Root vegetable. Like a carrot that's gone pale, and it sweetens up once a frost gets to it. Roasts well, and it'll carry a stew." She waved it off. "There's a whole list of things worth growing for the flavor. Plenty of herbs, too, if that's what you're after."
"I meant to try herbs this year."
"Then I'll point you at the ones worth the trouble. Let me know."
They talked on while the coffee cooled, Kain going over what he'd done to the place across his first year and what he meant to do with it next, and when he came to the notion of putting in fruit trees, Carol set her cup down and leaned in.
"Now that's worth doing. Three of them, and three different kinds. Apple, peach, and pear."
"Why those three?"
"Because they're my favorites, and I'll be coming out here to see to Roan for the rest of his life, and I'd like something good to eat while I'm at it.
" She said it flat, straight-faced, until the corner of her mouth gave it away.
"Sam can order the saplings off his Greyhaven man.
Start with the one you can afford and add the others as you go. And don't plant cherries."
"Why not cherries?"
"Because I don't care for cherries, and I already told you who the orchard's really for."
Carol laughed at that, a short burst she hid behind her cup, and Kain let the smile come.
She talked about fruit trees the way Mark had talked about potatoes, with the kind of plain enthusiasm that made a man want to go and do the thing, and it came to Kain that she was the first person in Tillamore who talked about growing things the way his brother had.
"How much for a sapling?"
"Two silver for a good grafted one. Cheaper bare-root, but they take longer and die more often. Spend on the grafted and it pays you back sooner." She drank off the last of her coffee. "I'll bring the catalog from Sam's next time. He keeps the special orders in a ledger nobody thinks to ask about."
"It'll come down to what I can spare. I still owe your father fifty silver on Roan."
"And you'll pay it. He's not worried, whatever he lets on." Carol stood and stretched. "I should get back before my father decides I've got better reason to keep riding out here than the horse does."
She started for the front door, remembered the wolf on the step, and turned for the back instead. Kain walked her out, and she swung up onto the bay mare like she'd been doing it since before she could walk.
She brought the horse around, then paused and looked back over the place.
"It looks good out here, Kain. You've put real work into it." She nodded a few times. "I'll be back to look in on Roan."
"Anytime," Kain said.
She rode off up the road and was gone around the bend. Kain stood in the yard a moment, then went back to the dead growth in the garden, and his mind worked on the trees while his hands worked the vines.
Apple, peach, pear. Three years before the first fruit, Carol had said, five before they gave a real harvest, and the guide had called them a forty-year payoff.
He had the forty years, near enough, and Carol meant to ride out across them to look in on a horse that wouldn't see the half of them.
He didn't mind the thought of her coming back. If she kept an eye on Roan, he'd be less likely to miss something that mattered to the horse, and that was the practical part of it.