The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 18 of 40

Chapter 18: The Pass Fair

"Read me the rest," Corvin said.

I read it out loud.

The reeve called it smuggling grain from a royal mill. The fine was forty silver crowns.

If it wasn't paid by market day, my father would go south in chains to the cells under Highcrown.

"Market day's in four days," I said.

"Greyford's two days with a cart."

"We don't have forty crowns. We don't have four crowns. The whole keep runs on flour and favors."

I got up.

I walked to the window and back.

I did it again.

Corvin sat down in his chair and watched me do it six times.

"We ride tonight," he said. "Take twenty men. Open the lockup."

"And then he's a runaway, and the reeve burns his mill, and every farmer on the lane pays for it." I shook my head. "No. If he comes out, he comes out with the fine paid, in front of everyone."

"With what?"

I stopped at the window.

Down the valley, the wheel turned in the dark. White water. Lamplight in the mill door.

"With flour," I said.

I sat up most of the night at his table with charcoal and the back of the smith's wife's letter.

Sacks. Carts. Prices in Greyford before the Writ, and prices in Greyford now.

Corvin didn't go to bed either.

He sat in the chair by the window, whittling.

Every time I said a number out loud he said "Mm," like it made sense to him.

Some time after midnight I put my head down on my arms to rest my eyes.

I woke at dawn in his bed with my boots off and the blanket tucked around me.

He was asleep in the chair with the whittling knife still in his hand.

The free packs came down the Wolfpass at noon.

I'd sent word over the pass with a shepherd in September.

Flour, if they wanted it, at the first full moon of the winter.

I hadn't known if anyone would come.

They came in a long line out of the snow on the high road.

Thirty wolves who swore to no king, in sheepskins and bright wool, leading pack ponies and a flock of fat brown sheep.

The ponies carried blocks of gray salt wrapped in straw, and bars of raw iron from the mountain forges.

The village came out to stare.

Nobody on this side of the pass had traded with them in eight years. Frostgate had had nothing to sell.

We set up in the square in the snow.

Flour on one side, from the mill, in new sacks with a russet wolf painted on them because Davy insisted.

Salt and iron and sheep on the other.

The free packs' headwoman was a tall gray woman with a bone ring through one ear.

She put her hand in a sack, rubbed the flour between her fingers and smelled it.

"Rye," she said. "Ground fine. Not stolen?"

"Grown here. Ground here. Nobody's half."

She looked at me for a long time.

"Two blocks of salt a sack," she said.

"Four."

"Three. And a sheep for every ten."

"Three, and a sheep for every eight, and you eat with us tonight."

She laughed out loud.

"Done."

It went on all afternoon.

Agnes haggled a pony driver down so hard he had to sit on a barrel.

Davy traded three of his second-best buttons for a horn whistle and blew it until the sergeant took it away.

The sergeant gave it back an hour later and blew it himself.

By dark there were fires in the square and two sheep turning on spits.

The smell of roasting meat went down the whole valley.

Some of these children had never tasted mutton.

I watched a little girl in a too-big coat take her first bite of it.

She stopped chewing and looked up at her mother.

Her mother was crying.

So was the farmer from the first flour. He cried at everything now. Nobody teased him about it.

Somebody brought the fiddle.

The free packs had drums.

Corvin came and found me at the edge of the firelight with a cup of hot cider.

"You're thinking about Greyford," he said.

"I'm always thinking about Greyford."

"Think about it tomorrow." He held out his hand. "Dance with me."

"You can't dance."

"Neither can anyone else here. Look."

I looked.

The sergeant was dancing with Agnes.

I took Corvin's hand.

He couldn't dance.

He stepped on my foot twice and said sorry both times, very seriously, and the third time I stepped on his on purpose.

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