27. Longway
Longway
"What do you mean, you're out?" Kain leaned on the counter of the general goods store. "I bought some here for Sasha not a few weeks back."
"Sorry, Kain. My last vial of it went out the door yesterday." Sam spread his hands. "I'll have more in a few days. Right now I haven't got it."
Kain drummed his fingers on the counter. "What about the fancy lumber Sasha wants for the bar?"
"That I never carried. It's a specialty wood. Redwood doesn't grow anywhere near here."
"So where am I supposed to go for it?" Kain pushed his hands into his pockets. "Sasha wants the work done soon."
"Not like you to come in this testy." Sam held up his hands. "Ride out to Lathemtown. Two hours east if you cut across the country, and they'll have all of it."
Kain crossed his arms, and the truth of it was that he wanted the linseed oil for his sword.
The blade had taken a thin skin of rust in the long while it had sat sheathed in the drawer, and that wasn't a thing he meant to let get around, not even to a man like Sam.
The lumber could keep; Sasha, in his experience, couldn't.
"How do I find it?" Kain asked.
"Best thing is to ask somebody who knows. Hold on a moment." Sam looked past him as Carol came through the door. "What can I do for you?"
"Fabric and thread," Carol said. "And orange dye, if you've got any."
"Out of dye as well. The shipment's held up." Sam spread his hands again. "Your best chance of it today is over in Lathemtown."
Sam's eyes had a twinkle in them, far too pleased with himself, and Kain decided not to give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
"Lathemtown. That's a long ride, and a dull one with nobody along." Carol made a face.
"I'm headed that way myself," Kain said.
Before long the two of them were riding out across the hills, angling east. They went south of the ridge where Kain figured the gryphon lay up, down a thin trail that might have been a road once, and came out of the forest into a stretch of rolling country, and Carol pointed ahead.
"We'll pick up the trade road past that rise. There used to be a bigger road from Tillamore out to it. You can see how much use it got."
"I can tell," Kain said.
Carol glanced over at him. "Outside of supply runs, I've barely been past Tillamore in my life. Grew up there, and I expect I'll die there."
"What's it like, growing up in the one place?" Kain asked. "Somewhere like this."
"It was a fine place to be a child." Her voice came up bright, though Kain could hear something underneath it.
"I was born in that farmhouse. My mother was the pretty one.
Never a hair out of place. My father was the practical one.
Both of them Tillamore born, married about as soon as they were let, and I came along not long after.
I learned a horse before I learned a stove, and I had both before I was six.
Mother taught me to sew and bake and mend.
Father taught me horses and how to set a fence. "
The bright went out of her a little. "They wanted more children.
My mother took sick not long after I came, bad sick, and after that there couldn't be any.
She came through it that time. The thing that finally took her was the same thing, my father says, come back stronger.
A growth of some kind, inside her. I never knew more than that. "
"Sorry to hear it," Kain said.
"It's life." Carol kept her eyes on the road ahead. "I miss her. I love my father, and I won't hold it against the world that I got the one and not the other. I had good years with her, and she spent them getting me ready for the life I've got."
"And what life is that?" Kain asked.
"Some days it feels like two of them." The corner of her mouth came up.
"I run the house in my mother's place. The baking, the cooking, the mending.
And I work the farm besides. Fix fence, muck stalls, all the rest of it.
I trade bread with the old women and I stand around the store arguing weather with the old men. "
"I know the shape of that," Kain said.
She went on telling him about the place as they rode, and in time they came up onto the trade road. A wagon was rolling along it from the south, and Kain put a hand against the sun and watched it come.
The driver was a heavy man with a beard, his hands easy on the reins, the bed behind him loaded under a tarp with a pair of folded crates lashed to the side. Kain knew the shape of him before he had the face.
"Tomas," he said.
The wagon came on at the pace of a man who knew the road and saw no reason to leave it. Tomas drew the team up where they met and pushed his hat back.
"Asheld. Look at you. Still here."
"Still here."
"Glad of it. I had a bet with myself on whether you'd stick. I'm out four copper to my own pocket."
"What direction."
"Triton this week, then back east. I'll be through Tillamore in a fortnight or three. I'll carry you something from Triton if you've a need."
"I'll think on it."
"Don't think too long. The wagon's full heading north and light coming home."
Carol had watched the whole of it with the quiet of someone who hadn't been introduced, and Tomas turned and touched his hat to her.
"Miss Martinson."
"Mister Tomas."
"Tell your father the cousin in Triton is still a liar. He'll know the one I mean."
"He'll know," Carol said.
Tomas flicked the reins, and the wagon rolled on toward Tillamore, and Carol watched it go.
"You know him."
"From last year. He came through Tillamore every couple of months. I hadn't seen him since the snow set in."
"He calls me Miss Martinson. My father will be unbearable for a week when I tell him."
"Don't tell him."
"I'm going to tell him."
They rode on, and Lathemtown showed first as a smudge on the distance and then as a town. It ran no bigger than Tillamore for size, but the general store was a far larger one, and there were specialty shops besides.
Carol went off to a place that dealt in yarn and thread and dye, and Kain went to the lumber yard and bought several lengths of a deep red wood for Sasha. Then he crossed to the general store for the linseed oil.
He was standing over the nail bins when Carol came up.
"Ready to head back whenever you are."
"A moment." Kain took a nail from one bin and a nail from another and held them up against each other, turning them end over end, weighing the heads and the lengths. Carol snorted.
"They're nails. They hold things together. Pick some."
"And bring Sasha's wrath down on me for grabbing the wrong ones?" Kain set the two back and reached for a third. "A moment."
Carol wandered off, and Kain made his choice and paid for it, and when he came out he found her waiting with both horses. The bags were packed, and she had a basket on her arm.
He stowed the nails and the oil in his saddlebags, and as he swung up she handed him a sandwich of ham and cheese.
"I ordered for you while I was at it. We can eat on the ride home."
"Works for me." Kain took it, and held the reins in one hand and the sandwich in the other, and Carol hung the basket off her saddle between them as they set out.
They rode a good while without talking before Carol looked over at him. "Tell me about your childhood."
"Not much to tell." Kain ate a corner of the sandwich. "A big city. One brother. Our parents died about the time the two of us were old enough to leave home, so there wasn't a great deal holding us to the place after."
"Then tell me about the Silver Hands."
Kain looked at her a moment. "You're sure."
"I'm sure. Not how it ended. Just the life of it."
"It was a good life, taken all around. We spent the most of it on the road, going job to job, picking up smaller work along the way."
"How many were you?"
"Four. My brother, Mark. Sarah was the tracker. Darien did the cooking."
He went on. "It always ran the same way.
We'd take a job, and there'd be a few days' travel to it.
Darien would gather up whatever the country grew along the road, the local spices, the recipes off anybody who'd part with them.
Sarah did the same with the animals, wanting to know every kind a place had.
Mark asked after the farms. We'd make camp of an evening, and most nights I was the only one who sat in it the first while.
The rest were off. Sarah would come back with something she'd shot, Darien would cook it, and Mark would come in talking soil and gardens. He'd watch."
He paused over it. "He saved us more than once that way.
One time I knew rain was on the way, so I set the tents under a big oak.
Mark came back and told me the water would run straight through the camp.
I grumbled about moving them in the dark, but that night a flash flood came down off the mountains and knocked the oak clean over. "
He let it sit, then went on. "It was good country to see, all of it.
We went north and south and most everywhere between.
If one of us got a notion to see some new part of the world, we packed up and went.
We were in this country here near a year at the end, on account of Mark.
He would not leave it. None of us rightly knew why. "
Carol rode and listened, taking it in the same way he once had, doing for him what he had done for her.
He told her about the food they cooked and the places they had been, the towns and the ways of people he'd never have crossed otherwise, and when Tillamore came up at last on the road ahead, the telling came to its end.
"Thanks." Carol gave him a quiet nod. "This was nice."
"It was." Kain nodded back.
Carol broke off and rode north toward her own place, and Kain went on for Tillamore with the lumber and the nails for the Kettle.
Sam would talk it up, he had no doubt of that, and he found he didn't much care. It had been a trip to Lathemtown, was all.