Chapter 33: The Greenhouse Again

Max read the letter to the end, standing in the dry cold of the vault, with three men silent behind him.

I put everything in your name, his father had written.

It was the only thing I could think of that Mary could not take from your hands.

I did not have the courage to cross her.

I did not know how brave you had been until that morning, and I will not forgive myself for it.

You pulled three boys from a river.

One day one of them will come to the house.

Do not let them pay you in thanks. Thanks is cheap. Make them pay you in something better.

Max folded it along its old creases.

He did not cry this time.

He turned around and held it out.

James took it and read it.

He began to laugh and cry at the same moment.

"Well," James said, wiping his face. "That's us told."

By evening the three packs had signed.

It took four hours in the Meeting Hall, with quills and wax and a great deal of shouting about water rights.

When it was done there was one pact where there had been three old quarrels.

Helix, Tyros and Rydes were bound to Greywater and to each other.

The border feuds of two hundred years were over.

The Tyros elder signed it with his white beard trembling.

Then he took Max's hand in both of his, and said nothing at all, and let it go.

The feast in Hollowbrook ran till midnight.

Max stayed for the first hour.

Then he slipped out through the kitchen, through the garden, past the cat asleep on the wall.

He opened the door to the greenhouse and stepped into the damp warm dark.

The glass above him was black.

The long potting bench still stood at the back, scarred and pale with old soil.

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