the care-free family of those days had gone. Truth brooded amid their sullen silence: that the bull’s sale might buy a month’s time but not turn the tide of bad fortune. Rigid tradition still ruled in the westlands: a married man always left home to increase the prosperity of his wife’s family. This moment’s immoderate pain was a pittance against straits that could force them to sacrifice their remaining measure of happiness.
The wagon rolled into the morning’s choked mist and turned north on the rutted trade-road that wound through the wood. Already, the maples had shed their foliage cloaks of bright russet and flame. The crabbed oaks wore drab brown, shorn of acorns. The spoked wheels turned, sucking, through the ice-glazed puddles, and grated where frost crusted the verges. Only the mourning doves’ doleful calls fluted through the overcast gloom.
Determinedly buoyant in his muddy clothes, Tarens started to whistle, while Efflin clutched at sore ribs and withdrew, his scowl ingrained as chipped wood. The patience that had been his virtuous mainstay had disappeared with their burned dead. Soon enough, his tense brooding would drop a wet blanket back over his brother’s vivacious spirit.
Like Kerelie, Tarens refused to dwell on the problem, that the croft demanded more coin than they owned. Half of the harvest rotted in the field for the lack of strong hands to wield the scythe and hay-rake. The milch-cow in the barn was too aged to breed, which a healthy bull’s service to a neighbour’s dairy herd might have done something to remedy.
‘The pair of you ought to be facing the butcher’s knife, and not that savage wretch of a beeve, who should’ve been culled as a yearling!’ The puckered scar on her cheek shadowed under the rim of her pert straw bonnet, Kerelie wrung out the dish-cloth and gave up her effort to dab the stains off her holiday finery. The spatters of meat juice already set, without lye soap and a pail of hot water.
Her grumbled oath made the jaunty tune pause.
‘Forget that we never asked for a nurse-maid,’ her cheerful brother pointed out, reasonable. ‘Are you going to geld me to settle the score?’ Tarens liked his risks spicy, though usually not by acting as shield for star-crossed, recalcitrant livestock.
Efflin risked a baleful glance sidewards. ‘More of somebody’s bloodshed never did gag a woman hell-bent on a scolding.’
‘I ought to whack someone’s bravado, straight off!’ Kerelie shoved a strayed wisp of wheat hair underneath the delicate row of blue flowers stitched into her headscarf. Flushed pink, she gazed fondly at her brothers’ broad backs, alike in size and yet so different in demeanour.
Of course, the belligerent idiots behaved as though neither had just hammered the other to pulped flesh and cracked ribs. Tarens returned a wolf’s grin, brazen calm flaunting his innocence, while Efflin goaded the plodding ox with his felt-cap jammed down to his ears. The odd little goat-bell some past affectation had tied onto the band gave sweet tongue, belying his sour expression. The tucked feather, sported for the courtship that, somehow, he never found time for, defied the low cloud that threatened a drizzle.
Kerelie attacked, moved by fierce affection. ‘A good thing you bumble-butts have no children to hobble the next generation.’
Where Tarens’s gleeful insouciance failed, Kerelie’s nagging at last lifted Efflin’s grim mood: the brothers exchanged pointed glances from equally guileless blue eyes. Having made rueful peace, in sore need of distraction from their hitched groans of discomfort, they vied to see which one would bait their sister’s flaying tongue first.
‘Stubborn? Me?’ Efflin snorted. His flicked finger jingled the ridiculous bell, mocking her fire-brand common sense. ‘I can’t take that prize, sweet. Not since the time you kissed the neighbour’s mule on the muzzle in an attempt to make friends when it bit you.’
‘Once!’ Kerelie howled. ‘I was three years of age!’ Would anyone ever mature enough to overlook that blighted mistake?
As Tarens’s broad smile renewed the embarrassment, Kerelie slapped his wrist, then masked her rioting blush, bent in half, as a squabble among the crated hens drew her repressive notice. More than one stabbing beak sought to rip the rush baskets and peck holes in the harvested apples. Through a shriek meant to shock thieving poultry out of their natural appetite, she buried the branding humiliation: that her face was grotesquely spoiled, no matter how neatly the village healer had stitched her ripped cheek. She cringed to count the grasping suitors lately chased from the door with thrown pots. None of them had trampled the garden-path muddy before Uncle’s death left an inheritance.
She would be forced to marry. If her brothers remained too kindly to speak, they must broach the sore subject, and soon. A croft in dire straits for the lack of grown field-hands could not stall for long while she pined for a love match.
‘Folly lights up no candles, dear girl,’ Efflin soothed, wisely quick to dismiss the mishap that marred her porcelain complexion. ‘And Tarens won’t sow anyone’s moronic by-blow, today. The strumpets will snatch coin for his kisses, up front. Unless, with that toad’s mug, he plans to hide his licks at the butcher’s?’
‘Why would he?’ Kerelie shot up straight in offence. ‘Most women turn into simpering idiots shown a damned fool with an injury!’
‘And you never dote on the lame ducks, yourself? Then I don’t smell cinnamon bread in that basket, and we all never noticed how much you loathe baking.’ Tarens’s snorted laughter transformed to a cough, as her toe poked into his banged ribs. Sobered, not chastised, he ploughed ahead, ‘A bashed eye from a bull is no hero’s fare.’
‘The damaged tomcat better make himself scarce!’ Kerelie turned her unmarked cheek and warned, ‘Forbye, who said the basket was brought for your sake?’
Tarens laughed, boyish dimples and handsome features rugged with the sunburn peel on his hawk nose. ‘Never claimed, did I, that you had good taste.’ Sheepish, he ducked Efflin’s fraternal cuff and avoided being knocked off the wagon seat.
‘You randy louts!’ Kerelie shrieked. ‘Your manners alone will wreck my last hope of netting a decent husband!’
But Efflin wheezed because he was chuckling. The three of them never could stay at odds for long. ‘Doused in beef juice,’ he quipped, ‘your smell’s about right.’
‘To impress someone’s hog? Good thing, then, we need to,’ Tarens said, suddenly serious. As his sister glared back, fair brows pinched with outrage, he winked. ‘Lure ourselves a stud pig, that’s the issue, directly. Her highness at home’s stopped producing.’ Owlish, he added, ‘That’s been true since the night Efflin downed uncle’s stash of rye whiskey. Did you know he mistook the stall with the cow? I caught him shoved in with the farrow, his lewd mitts busy squeezing the sow’s udder.’
The chickens were left their free take of the fruit as Kerelie groaned, giggles muffled behind her chapped palms. She tried not to imagine what might have prompted that odd bout of maudlin drunkenness.
‘Oink,’ Tarens gasped, then dodged like a weasel, aware he had earned another black eye from his brother’s punitive fist.
But no trouncing rejoinder hammered him flat.
Efflin was too busy, hauling back on the reins to slow the yoked plod of the ox. Abused leather harness squeaked in complaint. The trundling wagon slewed in the ruts and jerked the bullock on its short tether. Through the bucketing creak as stout wood took the strain, the vehicle ground to a stop just in time to avoid the odd fellow whose aimless stance blocked the roadway.
‘Light’s grace!’ exclaimed Kerelie, above the distressed cackle of upended hens. ‘Is that someone’s lost child?’
But the drifting mist unveiled a grown man, mistaken by his slight stature. Back turned, unaware that his loitering obstructed traffic, he wore a laborer’s seedy clothes. The hard-worn cloth had been repeatedly mended, the original color lost beneath a tatterdemalion motley of patches. His stained knee breeches, napped hose, and holed shoes were dirt-caked, their style beyond recognition. Filthy hair nested with snapped twigs and leaves hung in snarled hanks to his shoulders.