Free The Returning by Christine Hinwood Page B

something is waiting, just around the corner.”
    â€œWhat, something ? You do mean what?”
    â€œDon’t know.” Completeness? But that still wasn’t it, didn’t explain what he felt.
    The hunger pushed him to the stable that dark evening, to saddle the gray, ready to ride away from them all. The going was a tearing inside, but the to , that was a lightness.

    WHEN CAM WAS small, long before the war had fought its way down from the Uplands in the north, the Smiling Women came. Cam and Roan and all of the boys were filching peaches from Da Farmer’s orchard.
    â€œIt’s the Smiling Women,” said Gillert Smithson. He was sat up on Da Farmer’s orchard wall, looking out for him or his sons. “On the road.”
    â€œSmiling?” said Cam.
    â€œAye, they’ve a chair and all.”
    So the rest climbed up to see a train of women in white, their walking stirring up the dust enough to hide their feet, so that they looked as if they glided, with a big man ahorse to the fore of them, and four more men, bigger yet, carrying the chair among them. The chair was white, like the women’s dresses.
    â€œLet’s go to Castle Cross.”
    They jumped from the wall and were off across the paths the earthwalls made, zigzagging toward the crossroads. Cam was last, partly because he was youngest, partly because of Geyard. He hesitated before leaping from the wall, for the ground was really quite far down, and jumping so often became falling, and horses could hurt themselves with a jump like that.
    â€œLeave that old stick,” said Roan. “Or do I take it home for firewood?”
    So Cam jumped, and it was none so bad. Then he ran, clicking his tongue to make galloping sounds, the stick that was Geyard joggling between his legs and tripping him.
    â€œNot a stick,” he said, panting. “A horse.”
    Castle Cross was where the East Road laid itself east–west over the Highway—the castle road that went north to Dorn-Lannet and south . . . well, who knew where it went south. Cam did not.
    The Lady came, the women. Their white dresses shone lights under the sun, all stitched with little spits and chips of crystal. Even their sandals glinted. As they walked they sang, and as they sang they smiled. The Lady held the curtains of the chair aside and looked out, gold at her throat and thick on her wrists, and it was gold that glittered on her dress.
    â€œLook . . .” Gillert stuck his elbow into Cam’s side. A handful of girls, stripped down to their shifts, walked in the midst of the women, singing, their faces all with the same blind, dazed expression.
    Raene Gost came up at a run. “I heard them . . .”
    Something in how she looked at the Smiling Women lifted the skin on Cam’s back, and he shivered. Raene took off her pinny and all the boys tittered. When she took off her dress they goggled and laughed behind their hands. But she didn’t seem to hear them, standing there at the roadside in her white shift. At first she had her arms folded over her chest, but suddenly she lifted them—white from elbow to shoulder, forearms brown—lifted them high and with them her voice, and stepped onto the road, walked beside them, the women smiling, and they took her hand and sang.
    The Lady leaned from the chair, held out a white hand, fingers gold-banded, and threw a shower of sparks. The others were down in the dust on the roadside, scrapping for the coins, but Cam just wanted to look at the Smiling Women, and he did, running after them, eyes full of their light.
    Then Mam rushed up and bent and grabbed him, held him and Geyard all tangled up in her arms, and shooed the others off. “You do leave that money. Leave it and get back home. Go on, get!” She was angry, she was crying. So was Cam. He remembered kicking and screaming—“I want to go, I do want to”—all the way back home, struggling to see them, but