Free The Returning by Christine Hinwood Page A

at the trees with a stick, swipes like sword cuts, whap!
    â€œWhat do they want me to tell them, that they keep asking? I killed them all and sold my sword to the Uplanders? That is what they want.” Whap!
    â€œIt’s you coming back alone, of all of them who went.” Should he tell him of Ardow and his warnings? Ban hesitated, held his tongue. Keeping his eyes from Cam’s, he mimicked the sword swings. “You said you were a bowman . . . ?”
    That halted Cam’s pacing and slashing. “Ban, I cannot tell you any more. I cannot. I do just want that you all let—me—be.”
    The knot was back inside Ban, pulling every which way at once.
    â€œDid you steal him? Geyard?”
    Silence.
    â€œYou did say he was given you, by our new Lord, our old enemy.”
    Cam hurled the stick at a tree bole so hard that it splintered. “Don’t you turn, don’t you start looking twice at all I say! You’re as bad as the village. Choose which one you like best.” He turned his back.
    Ban watched the shift of Cam’s shoulders beneath the cloth of his shirt.
    â€œBan?”
    And the way the tail of his hair hung against his spine.
    â€œBan?” Cam twisted to face him.
    It wasn’t that his face had changed, it was that Ban was seeing it differently. He stepped back, and fell. Cam leaped to help him.
    Ban hit at him. “Leave out of it, Cam.”
    Cam simply stood there holding out his one hand, looking not like the grown man he was, but like a boy, awkward and unsure. “Ban?”
    â€œI do think Ardow was right.”
    â€œI . . .” Cam rocked back a step. “I’ll see you back to—”
    â€œThink I need your help to get back?”
    Cam’s face closed. “Right about what?” He spun on his heel, and walked away as fast as the forest would let him.
    Ban curled on the leaf mold and wished himself dead.
    Â 
    BAN WAITED BY the water hole day after day, for as long as he could stand the cold. He walked the pine forest, but there were no hoof prints around the ruin of the witch’s hut. He crept through the game wood, empty but for Fenister’s gamekeeper. Cam was not coming. He was not coming, and it must be Ban who went to him.
    Walking into the tavern, Ban felt himself going red, white, red again.
    â€œFace long as a wet week.”
    â€œBroke with your sweetheart, did you?”
    Break you, is what I will do . But he didn’t say that until he was out of the inn and standing alone on the street.
    They none of them had seen Cam.
    Next morning he skited off to Attling’s holding, the knot in his gut drawing tight. Mam Attling just jerked her head at the terraces. Da Attling was there, the little maid, Cam’s young sister, sitting on the earthwall watching him. Ban looked away, away from her black eyes the same as Cam’s, the way they looked into him, the same.
    â€œHe’s gone.” Da Attling leaned on his fork and shouted it up to Ban, where he stood on the levee. “Did take off, and where or when or what-all, he didn’t say.” He spat. At Ban? At Cam? Ban did not know.
    The little maid jumped down from the wall and ran weeping to her da. There was nothing for Ban to do but walk back home.
    He went to the water hole. He tried to see himself—on the road to Dorn-Lannet, going there to seek Cam out. But how? That would finish things at home. And why, for what, when Cam would not think of him once, not like that, not him, Ban Coverlast.

Cock Horse

    C AM HAD A hunger in him. He didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t know how to assuage it. It was an always-hunger, but worse now, in this after-the-war stillness.
    â€œMoving does help,” he had told Ban. “You know, moving on.”
    Ban had asked, like everyone asked, “Where? Moving where?”
    Cam shrugged. “Don’t know.” Over this hill, maybe. Across that valley, perhaps. “Perhaps