Marool followed his departure with her eyes, casting only a single infuriated glance upwards as she said to her steward, “Separate them, Nephew. And see they’re tended to. I may get enough use I out of one not to mind paying damages for the one he’s ruined, but damned if I’ll pay for more than that.”
And she was gone.
“I was reared a farm boy,” called Ornery in a level tone. “If you need gardening done.”
“ … e, too,” said Mouche.
The steward exchanged looks with the Haggers, who shrugged, one of them commenting: “The gardener says the two you gave him are useless, they don’t know roots from sprouts, and they’ve planted three rows of fennet upside down.”
“We’ll bring them back here, then,” said the steward, in a glum voice.
Mouche and Ornery were beckoned down from their perch. They were then taken down through the paddocks to the lane, and up the lane to the stone house of the head gardener, and there traded for the two other pressed men who shambled sourly down the lane to | the stables. Behind the gardener’s house were several daub-and-wattle houses, brightly painted, where the gardener’s invisible help had lived, and the contents of Mouche’s pack were soon laid out there, together with a few clothes for Ornery, who had only what he’d carried on the boat upriver.
Thus it came that Mouche and Ornery, their wounds washed and medicated, sat over a late lunch beside a Timarese hearth, drinking broth from Timarese bowls, spied on, though they did not know it, by a good many Timmys in the walls, including Flowing Green who was in as near to a frenzy as the Timmys ever got. Mouchidi had been wounded, and badly. Mankinds could die from such wounds. Tim had seen it happen!
When Ornery had gulped all and Mouche spooned down half what they had been given, enough that they were no longer famished, Ornery set down her bowl and leaned confidentially toward Mouche.
“That was rotten of him, saying you were bad luck. It isn’t true, you know. It’s just the inscrutable Hagions, making mock of good sense.”
“I … udden … ind so … uch,” muttered Mouche, “if aw had jus tol … ee.”
“I told you why. Your pa didn’t want to hurt you.”
“He could haw ‘ought me ‘ack!”
Ornery gave him a long, level look. “He couldn’t buy you back. Not from a Consort House.”
Mouche flushed. Of course he couldn’t have been bought back. He knew that. Someone could have tried, though.
“I … ove’ ‘at farn,” he muttered resentfully.
“I loved my family’s farm, too,” said Ornery. “It was beautiful there. We had a vineyard … “
“So di’ ooee.”
“And we had sheep and chickens and a garden and orchard. But the mountain blew, and the ashes came on a terrible wind, and when I got home they were all dead, Mama and Papa, brother, all gone. There was no sense to that, either. Maybe when they felt the hot wind coming, they hated me because I escaped and they didn’t. Maybe they didn’t even think of me. Life’s hard enough, so my captain says, that most times we should do very little thinking about what other people think or do or say, just enough to get by. Otherwise we just jangle ourselves for nothing. So he says.”
“I renen’er how uh hayhield snelled,” said Mouche, stubbornly, determined to make his loss the greater.
“And the smell of strawberries, new-picked,” said Ornery. “And the flowers in Mama’s garden, outside the kitchen door.”
Mouche heaved a huge sigh and gave up the effort at grief supremacy. “You’re righ’,” he announced. “Likely he didn’ wan oo hur ny ‘eelings … “
“And you’re nobody’s bad luck,” insisted Ornery.
Mouche nodded and forgot himself enough to try to smile, more because of Ornery’s good intentions than at his interpretation of the facts. If good fortune had come to his family, it had happened only after he, Mouche, was gone away. If that wasn’t bad luck, what was it? Almost as though he hadn’t belonged there. And if not, where did he belong? Was it possible he had been brought here, well, at least to House Genevois, for a purpose? By fate? Now there was a large thought.