The Returning by Christine Hinwood Page B

nor the Uplander that called himself theirs now. Next in rank were the Fenisters. It was them that the Coverlasts held their land from.
    The moldering leaves were scuffed up, marking a run off the track. Cam followed it and Ban followed Cam, through low and scrubby trees, both of them walking with hands up before their faces at first, then walking side by side, through forest groomed and tidied.
    Cam led them to the edge of the newly cleared land, overlooked by Fenister’s terraces.
    â€œHalf of what we get off the land goes to Fenister.” Ban threw stones onto the naked soil. “And now he’s clearing it, land we’ve always used.”
    Cam looked at Ban. “Fenister is fat, and he’s fat because he’s greedy.”
    â€œDid you care so much for Miss Graceful then?”
    â€œAah!” Cam mimed a wound to the gut. “You hit hard, Ban.” Though he joked about it, though he walked beside Ban and laughed, something about Ban’s words had made a wall between them, though he had not meant them to.
    â€œThey’re a closed-fisted, money-scammering lot.”
    â€œThis does tip the balance a little more your way, then.” Cam laughed quietly, and the wall between him and Ban seemed gone again.
    They kept their distance from the big stone house that was Fenister Fort.
    â€œClose enough here, I do think.” Cam had them crouched behind a buttress root of a huge fig.
    At that moment, Ardow’s voice sounded in Ban’s head. He leads you astray, does Cam Attling. Ban realized he was afraid.
    â€œCam,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
    Cam wasn’t smiling, but Ban could see that laughter was close to the surface, narrowing Cam’s eyes. He butted Ban on the shoulder with his elbow.
    There were rabbits out in the fields. Cam had his bow, that he would never draw again. He held it out. Ban shook his head; there was death in the very feel of it. They argued it in silence, in gestures, then Cam took his knife from his belt and— thhhunk —a rabbit was pinned dead to the ground.
    Down the trail, there was a crackling of brush. Cam looked at Ban, eyes wide, and Ban at him. Then Cam darted out of shelter, caught up knife and kill. They ran, stopped when they’d put a distance between themselves and the field.
    Ardow said Cam was changed since he went to war. Ban had been eleven then and Cam twelve. There would be some change, Ban had argued, from eleven to seventeen, from twelve to eighteen.
    â€œAnd what did he see, do, all those years of fighting, to come back half Uplander?” Ardow was in very earnest. “Some say he fought for the Uplanders, not ours. Some say he killed all ours, else how did he come back so fine, horse and sword and all, Uplander in his ways?”
    â€œShame on them, and on you,” Ban had said.
    This Cam, his Cam, led him stealthily now, through Fenister’s new game wood. Once he stopped.
    â€œOne rabbit is not enough to feed thirteen.” And Cam worked them closer and closer to the big stone farmhouse to get another rabbit. Ban began to lag.
    â€œCome on!” Cam paused, waiting for him. “Do I have to carry you?”
    It wasn’t the walking that slowed Ban, it was being so close to Master Fenister. They crouched by the yard’s very walls, and then it happened. One of the hands came to piss over the yard wall and, catching sight of them, set up a hue and cry.
    They ran again, and this time Ban led, no longer trying to be quiet.
    They stopped to catch their breath.
    â€œLost them,” Cam whispered. “Have we not?”
    â€œNot, but we will. After me.”
    Their eyes met and they laughed. Ban felt fear turn to excitement.
    He lost Cam, where the forest was still given over to itself, undergrowth stringing cat’s cradles between the tree trunks and the trees themselves grown smaller, knottier. As soon as he realized, he stopped. The moon perched fat and low on the