Prince, Cinderella Forsakes You novel · Chapter 28 of 32

Chapter 28: Snowbound

"No?" Dulcie said.

"No. You're seventeen. It's two days' ride. You don't know anyone."

"I know Clem's whole lane. I know the old foreman. The widow gave me her poker to hold."

"No."

Dulcie looked at me.

I kept my mouth shut. It was between the two of them.

She turned and walked off into the firs with her braid swinging, and she didn't come down to supper.

She didn't speak to her brother for a week.

Then the snow came, and there was no time to sulk.

By midwinter the Thornwood was white to the windowsills.

The Keep's east wing still had no roof, so the snow came straight in and drifted down the old corridors in long white tongues.

Dulcie skated on the ballroom floor.

We grafted in the big barn below the Keep, where the cows kept it warm.

The whole village came. Every day for three weeks.

The old man from the orchard wall dug up wild apple seedlings from the hedges for rootstock.

The women cut them clean and the children carried them in baskets.

I sat at the long bench by the barn door with my father's knife and the barrels of scions.

"Watch," I said.

I cut the rootstock on a long slant. Then the scion, the same.

A little tongue cut down into each, so they locked together.

Wrap it tight with waxed string. Seal it with wax.

"That's a whip and tongue," I said. "My father could do one with his eyes shut."

"Can you?" asked a girl of about eight.

I shut my eyes and did one.

When I opened them, she was clapping.

By the third week, half the children could do a better whip and tongue than their parents.

We set the grafts in sand barrels in the cool end of the barn, rows and rows of them.

Every one had a little wooden tag in Dulcie's handwriting.

She wouldn't let anyone else write them.

"It's accounts," she said.

Her brother came down to the barn every afternoon with firewood and cider.

His hands had healed pink and shiny. He could hold a knife again, carefully.

He sat at the far end of the bench from Dulcie and made the worst grafts in the barn, and she pretended not to watch him.

One afternoon I sat down between them.

"She's better at this than either of us," I said to him. "Look."

He looked.

Her grafts were neat and tight. Every tongue locked clean.

"She needs a real orchard," I said. "Not a barn. My father's has every kind of tree. The old foreman's forgotten more than I'll ever know."

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