42. Owed
Owed
Days later, the morning light found him and he opened his eyes.
He’d been home since the morning after Maggarie’s. One night under her roof had been all he could give her, though she’d told him in plain words he ought to give her a week.
He’d ridden home behind Jeremiah with the leg wrapped tight and the arm strapped, and he’d been here since.
He sat up. Slow.
Everything ached at the line of the wrap, and the leg burned at the join of the stitches, and the shoulder was a slow steady heat under the sling. His ribs had their own argument.
He set his good foot on the floor, then the other, and stood.
Ghost came up from the doorway and watched him.
The wolf had taken to lying across that threshold every night since he came back.
The talon-cut along the flank was a long red line under the fur where Maggarie had cleaned and stitched it the morning after she’d finished with him.
The wolf had spent the first days at the threshold not moving except to drink.
It was on its feet now. It was mending faster than he was.
He nodded to it. It rose, stretched, and padded out toward the kitchen.
He could dress himself. Barely.
The tunic went on one-handed, then he sat down on the edge of the bed to get the breeches on, working slow around the stitches.
Out the window the farmyard was already in motion. Jeremiah was leading Roan from the stable, the gelding clean-coated and well-groomed in a way Kain himself hadn’t managed in weeks before the hunt. Carol came in at the gate with a basket on her arm.
“Morning,” she called out.
“Morning,” Jeremiah called back. “Roan’s hooves are picked. I’ll get the stall mucked before I head off.”
“I’ll see to his water,” Carol said.
It went on like that. Two people working out the morning between them without consulting him.
He sat with the heel of his good hand pressed against his eyes a moment. Then he got the second boot on and made his way out to the kitchen.
The basket on the table was the one Oren had brought down before dawn, set there with the cloth folded back the way Sasha folded a cloth, neat and squared.
Bread. Hard-boiled eggs. A few pastries.
He picked one up and ate it slow, sitting at the table because crossing the kitchen had taken what he had.
The coffee went on the stove. He sat down again to wait for it.
Carol came in through the front without knocking. She knew the door was unlatched. She set her own basket on the table and dusted off her hands.
“Morning, Kain. How are you this morning.”
“Like I just got beaten up by a gryphon.” His ribs caught on the words and he stopped. “That hurt.”
“Sounds about right.” She didn’t smile, but it was close. “What needs done today. Garden?”
She was out the back door before he had an answer for her. He finished the pastry, poured the coffee one-handed, and made his way out to the chair she’d set in the sun two days before, between the kitchen door and the garden gate.
He sat down in it carefully and breathed easier once he was off his feet again.
Carol moved down the rows talking to the plants more than to him.
“Tomatoes look fine. Couple of worms on the second row, nothing to fuss over. Pumpkins are showing themselves.” She straightened, dusting her hands again. “You’re going to have a heavy crop this year, and you’re going to spend all of fall arguing with Sam about price.”
“I look forward to it.”
She finished her round of the rows, rinsed her hands at the pump, and looked over at him.
“I’ll be in the barn.”
When he was ready, he got up and went out to the barn.
Carol had Roan out of the pen and tied loose to the rail, and she was working him over with a soft brush, talking to him the way she talked to a horse and not the way she talked to a man.
He stood at the door and watched her a moment, the slow steady going-over she was giving the gelding’s neck and shoulders, the way Roan stood for it because she had been the one to raise him.
She moved on to the mane and worked through it with her fingers, then with the comb. She fed him an apple wedge from her pocket. She checked his teeth without asking the horse’s permission, the way she did, and Roan let her.
When she was done with him she turned him out into the pasture and came back to the barn with her hand on the gate behind her.
“You’re a hero in town, you know,” she said. She set about stacking buckets in the order they were supposed to be in, the order they hadn’t been in since before the hunt. “Sam is getting up a speech.”
“He shouldn’t.”
“He will.” She set the last bucket down. “There’s a bounty besides. The town pooled it. Coming up on thirty silver. Sam is looking forward to handing it to you with the speech.”
“He would.”
“And my father has been talking about bringing the debt down some.”
Kain looked at her.
Carol turned one of the boards along the wall upright and stepped back to see if it would stand on its own.
It would. “He said the bounty plus what comes off the gryphon makes the whole thing more than square, and he isn’t going to be the man holding paper on a fellow who put himself in front of a B-rank thing for the village. His words. The tone too.”
“What’s coming off the gryphon.”
She paused. She’d known the question was coming.
“More than the silver. A good deal more.”
“How much more.”
“I don’t have the count. Sam’s the one for that.
He sent men up to the kill-ground the morning after you came in, before the rain had finished off the slope, and they brought it down piece by piece.
” She lifted a finger as she went. “Feathers are going for five silver each. He had a few hundred of them. Then the claws. The beak. Maggarie wanted the bones. Someone took the gizzard, on account of what was in it. The hide besides.”
He sat with that.
The number was getting close to a sum he had never had in his life all at once, for a single piece of work.
“Where’s it sitting,” he said.
“Sam’s holding it. He’s got it in the strongbox at the store, sorted out by who took what off the body and what they paid for it. He figured the bulk was yours. He wasn’t going to spend a man’s silver without the man saying so.”
“That’s right.”
“I figured you’d say so.”
He turned the bad leg straight to ease the burn at the stitches and looked out at the yard.
The gate. The pen. Roan grazing easy.
“The Martinson debt is a fair thing to take off the bounty,” he said.
“He’ll say no. He likes saying no to that one.”
“He can say no. The bounty’ll cover most of what’s owed. Take it off the same way you’d take it off any other piece of work I did for the town. Don’t let him make it a gift.”
“I’ll tell him you said that. In those words.” She was watching him sideways. There was something behind it that wasn’t yet a smile.
“The rest isn’t for me.”
She set the bucket down she’d been holding.
“What’s that mean.”
“Sarah had a mother. She keeps a house up in the village they were both from, for the kids who would otherwise drift into the life that killed her daughter. I sent her the extra after the cave. She made it go a long way. She’s still at it.”
Carol had taken her hand off the bucket.
“I can’t ride to her right now. The leg won’t let me, the shoulder won’t either. So I’m going to ask Sam to write it up the right way. Set it so the silver keeps going to her, not just the one drop.”
“A trust,” Carol said.
“Something like.”
She was quiet a moment.
“I’ll go see Sam this afternoon.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to. He’ll need to know it’s coming, and he’ll need to start putting the pieces together. By the time you’re fit to ride out to that village, he’ll have the whole of it laid out for you.”
He looked at her. There was something in the way she had said it.
“My thanks.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m going to tell my father what you said about the debt, and he’s going to argue. Then I’ll come back here and tell you what he said, and we’ll argue too. It’s going to be a long ride home.”
“Then ride slow.”
She laughed, the short half-laugh that ran a beat and stopped. “I’ll ride slow.”
She put a lunch together at the table when the sun got high. Roasted meat between two slabs of bread, with butter, and a small jar of pickled onions she’d brought up in her own basket.
They ate on the front porch in the cool air. She rinsed the plates at the pump when they were done, dried her hands on her apron, and came up onto the porch.
“See you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
He watched her down the road until she was a small thing under the trees.
Then Oren came up the same road, high-stepping, with a basket nearly as big as he was.
“Delivery,” Oren called, before he was even close, “for Kain the Gryphon-Slayer.”
Kain set his jaw and got himself up off the porch. “Inside, Oren.”
Oren came in behind him and set the basket on the table with the care of a man delivering an item of state.
Bread. A sealed crock of stew. Hard-boiled eggs for the next morning. A handful of pastries beside, the same kind Sasha had been sending down before dawn for weeks.
Oren took the empty basket from the night before and gave Kain a short formal bow that he made every time, no matter how often Kain told him he didn’t need to.
“Tell Sasha my thanks. Tell her the eggs were good.”
“I will, Mister Asheld.”
“Kain.”
“Mister Kain.”
The boy went out, chest up, and marched back down the road.
He spent the afternoon in the chair by the fire with a book from town across his knees. The leg burned less if he kept it straight. The shoulder hurt no matter what he did with it.
Ghost lay at his feet most of the time. The wolf had been going out the back door for a stretch each day for some days now and coming back without a kill in its mouth. Working back to the work.
The sun was easing west when Jeremiah came back through the gate to see to evening chores. Kain heard the squeak of the barn door and the sound of Roan being brought back in, and got up out of the chair and made his way down.
By the time he reached the barn, Jeremiah had the gelding back in the stall and was latching the gate.
“Hey, oh.” Jeremiah looked over. “You’re still up.”
“I’m up. My thanks for all of this.”
“You killed a gryphon for us.” Jeremiah set the latch and turned.
“We aren’t even up to a down payment on what’s owed for that.
That thing could’ve put you in the ground, and what’s more, you had no call to go after it.
You came here a year back. You don’t run sheep or goats.
Gryphons don’t kill tomatoes, unless they’re trying to kill the man who’s standing in them. ”
“It needed doing.”
“It did. And the man who did it is taking visitors in a chair by the fire and being brought food in baskets, which is the right shape of it. So sit in the chair.”
“I’d sooner be doing the work.”
“I know you would. I’ll leave you alone the day you can saddle a horse with one hand.” Jeremiah raised an eyebrow.
“Which hand.”
“The one that didn’t almost get pulled off you.” Jeremiah crossed his arms. “Go on. Inside. Eat the stew. Go to bed early. We’ll be out of your hair the moment you can stand all day. Until then, humor us.”
Kain nodded once and made his way back up to the house. The night air had gone cool, and it pulled at the wrap on his ribs in a way that wasn’t pleasant.
He sat down at the kitchen table and ate the stew slow.
He’d told other men, over the years, that the way back from a bad one was rest. Lay down for a few days, and you’d be up again twice as fast as if you’d tried to push it.
He understood that man’s impatience now, sitting where he was, in a chair he hadn’t built, eating food he hadn’t cooked, while other people walked his property doing the work that was his to do.
It wasn’t a thing he was used to.
Other people caring about whether he stood up tomorrow. Other people doing his chores so he could heal. He sat with it.
He ate the rest of the stew.
The back door thunked open and Ghost came in empty-jawed. The wolf walked slow. Its head was lower than it had been a week back.
It lay down by the hearth and put its chin on its paws.
Kain looked at the wolf. The wolf looked at the fire.
“Tomorrow,” Kain said.
The wolf seemed to take that.
He went to bed when the light was gone. Ghost rose from the hearth and came behind him and lay down across the bedroom doorway the way it had every night since he came home.
The blanket came up one-handed, and he lay back and closed his eyes.
It wouldn’t be his routine for long.
In the meantime, it was a kind of treatment a man wasn’t often handed on the road, and he knew it was kinder than anything he had ever known on the road, and he let himself take it because there was no other thing to do.
Tomorrow would be Sasha’s breakfast and Carol’s morning, and Jeremiah out at the stall, and Oren at the door before the sun was down, and a wolf watching his bedroom doorway from across the threshold.
The work he should have been doing would still get done. Just not by him.
He slept.