The Mate He Gave Away novel · Chapter 6 of 40

Chapter 6: The Inspection

The ox cart rolled north with my grandfather's stone roped down in the bed.

Corvin rode beside it, and I rode beside him.

On the second morning, while he was watering the horses, I tied the gray tag to his saddle horn with its own bit of twine.

He came back and saw it.

He stood very still.

Then the back of his neck went red, all the way up to his ears.

"It's seed," he said. "It's nothing."

"Four families on my father's lane ate their seed corn by February. Eleven sacks isn't nothing."

"I didn't do it for thanks."

"I know. That's why you're getting it anyway."

He untied the tag and put it inside his coat.

He didn't look at me the rest of the morning.

But twice I caught him smiling at the road.

Back at Frostgate the work started the next day.

The sergeant kept his word. Eight men turned up at the falls on their day off, then twelve, then twenty.

We cleared the burned beams.

We dug out the wheel pit.

Agnes sent down bread and onion soup in a cart, and Davy drove it and spilled half.

By the end of July the new frame stood over the race, raw yellow pine against the black.

That was the morning Ondine came.

I heard the horses first, then Davy yelling from the gate tower.

I came up from the falls with mud to my knees and sawdust in my braid.

Six riders in Adderley green stood in the yard, around a carriage with a gold serpent painted on the door.

Lady Ondine Adderley stepped down from it.

She wore green silk to her throat and a light summer cloak, and on her black hair sat a thin gold circlet with three garnets.

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