The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 39 of 40

Chapter 39: Harvest

I took the wicker cage from her.

The linnet hopped along its perch and looked at me with one black eye, then the other.

"You fed it," I said.

"Every morning. Seeds from the kitchen garden." The queen mother folded her empty hands. "The cook thinks I've gone soft in the head."

I opened the little wicker door.

The linnet didn't fly.

It hopped to the doorway and sat there in the cold air, looking out at the moon on the river.

Then it hopped back in and began to clean its wing.

The queen mother made that small sound again, the one that might have been a laugh.

"It knows where the seed is," she said.

"Everybody does, in the end."

We stood at the wall together for a while.

She didn't say she was sorry. I didn't say I forgave her.

But she stood next to me, and I let her.

In the morning the gilded cage was back in my old window in the east tower.

Somebody had carried it down from the altar stone in the night and hung it on its hook.

Its gold door was open.

The linnet was inside, singing.

I left it exactly like that.

We went home for the rye.

That was how it was going to be, we'd decided on the road.

Highcrown for the Council and the winter. Frostgate for the harvest, and whenever we could get away.

Agnes said she'd go to Highcrown when they made her, and not before.

They never made her.

The rye came ready in the second week of October that year, late after the wet summer.

The whole valley went into the fields again.

Soldiers, farmers, widows, children. The midwife and her brother, who had taken the house third from the bridge for good.

Agnes in the straw hat.

The physician on a stool at the end of the field with a jug of cider, supervising.

The king of the Greywold cut rye in his shirtsleeves from dawn till dark.

He was terrible at it, and nobody told him so to his face.

The queen sat by the millrace with a ledger and a basket.

The twins were in the basket.

They were nearly four months old, and they had opinions.

My son wanted to be held up to see the wheel turn, and screamed if anybody put him down.

My daughter lay on her back and watched the sacks go past, one by one, and her lips moved.

"She's counting," Davy said, leaning over the basket. "Look. She's counting."

"She's blowing bubbles."

"She's counting with bubbles."

Davy Millward ran the hopper that year.

He was taller by two inches since spring, and his shoes were in a saddlebag where they belonged.

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