Free Ambergate by Patricia Elliott Page B

of hope stirred inside me. Then I said, “But it’s men who make laws. And I’ve broken the law,
     and so I must be punished. That’s why the soldiers came for me.”
    “There are no soldiers here,” said Erland.
    “Does anyone ever come?”
    “Sometimes we find the drowned bodies of vagrants in the marshes. Bands of them sometimes group near the river in summer.
     But the Lawman keeps the only chart of the Wasteland and the ground is always changing. You are safe.”
    Later, when Erland took me back to the shelter and left me there to rest, I heated water and washed my hair with the soap,
     its lather still richly creamy and soft. Then I combed my clean hair free of tangles.
    It took a long while, but when it was done I sat in the afternoon sun until my hair was dry. The evening clouds were darkening
     overhead when I went back inside to stoke up the fire for supper. Canvas sail bags were lying against the wall. One had rolled
     too close to the fire for safety, so I picked it up to put with the others.
    It was strangely soft. Curious, I looked inside the neck of the bag. At once I flung it away from me and clutched my amber.
     I had to sit in Gadd’s chair until I grew calm. Feathers.
    But they were beautiful, not threatening, those silver-white feathers, like the single feather in Erland’s grandmother’s box.
     I knew the sail bag contained the swanskin I remembered seeing in their cottage long ago. Erland cared nothing for blasphemy;
     he had kept the swanskin in memory of her. All he’d said to me was true.
    Erland returned before Gadd, as I was setting bowls on the table. I had recovered, was in control of myself, the bag safely
     with the others.
    He stared at me. “You look different.”
    I’d forgotten my new-washed hair. I felt awkward under his gaze and bent my head so my hair swung around my face. “Do I?”
    He came across to me and gently, tentatively, took a strand from my face. “It shines in the firelight,” he said, as if he
     held a treasure between his fingers.
    I looked up at him, at his solemn, old-young face, theslight frown between his brows that I was beginning to know so well. I looked into his eyes and saw the surprise and wonder
     in them as he looked back at me.
    Something altered in the air between us.
    “I shan’t call you Scuff anymore, but Silky,” he whispered.
    A footfall made us turn. Gadd was standing silently in the doorway, watching us.
12
    From then on I went with Erland into the Wasteland each day.
    He taught me to fish in the creeks, to cast and ply the line. He took me deep into the spring reed beds, a shifting, secretive
     sea of tawny green, broken by willow and alder. The seed heads were higher than my head; I could hear nothing but the wind
     sighing through them.
    Sometimes we saw swans drifting on the hidden pools.
Such mystical creatures belong here
, I thought as I watched their lazy, almost sensuous motion through the water.
    “Don’t they mind us coming?” I asked Erland.
    “They’ll be building their nests soon,” he whispered. “They might attack a stranger if one went too near. But they’re used
     to me.” He gazed at them under his heavy brows, his face softening. “The cob and pen court again each spring, you know.”
    “Then it’s right that swans should signify True Love,” I whispered back, standing close to him.
    Something curled into my mind, a dream or memory, faint as smoke. A flash of white, then a feeling, nothing more, ofwings beneath me, lifting…. For a second it was with me, then it had blown away.
    When the strength had come back into my legs, Erland took me to the river, along the causeway road that was only a line of
     flat stones, so overgrown it was almost hidden. The river stretched all the way to the sky. Low yellow-green banks, nibbled
     by narrow inlets, bordered a muddy shore. Drifts of birds flew low over my head, startling me; the air was full of their eerie
     wailing and piping. There was a smell of salt on