A faint trail of dust rises in the distance, a wavering, wandering thing only loosely moored to the clouded expanse of the Greenway. Over fallow fields, it twists and drifts, ensnared by the stillness of late summer’s breath.
In the lee of a rough shed–little more than a woven mat of dried grasses laid across four ash stakes–a girl with hair the colour of a daisy’s heart turns towards the sun.
“A rider,” she says, glancing up at her brother.
Cuphir squints across the fields. He pulls the waterskin from its sling at his hip and wets his parched throat. Squares his shoulders. Touches his hand to the long knife strapped to his waist.
“Stay here,” he says.
“No,” Elan replies. She sets her flail upon her shoulder. The swipple swings easily behind her, and cracked husks tumble silently to the ground.
“Elan–” Cuphir begins, striving for stern and failing. His voice cracks, and he winces.
Elan smiles, thin and tight-lipped.
“Bandits don’t travel alone,” she says sensibly, tugging a large, patched oilskin down over the wheat that remains to be threshed and weighting two corners with large stones. Cuphir looks over her shoulder to the little house that sits beyond. “Halga has sense enough to keep them out of sight,” Elan continues, catching the line of his distraction.
Cuphir shoulders his flail. Across the fields, the rider approaches.
“When I say run, you run,” he says.
“I’m faster than you, anyhow,” she replies, striding away.
“That’s only because you’re a cheat,” he mutters, ducking under the mat overhead and following her into the sun.
“You only wish you were as clever as I am,” she replies. Her trousers–his trousers, last season–sit low upon her hips, held up by rough braces fashioned from bits and scraps of Jessamy’s old bridle. Her hand, small, brown and freckled, clutches her flail tightly, and he knows it is hard and rough and calloused. Two knuckles are scabbed from a scrap she’d had with several of the village boys when she had gone yesterday to retrieve Jessamy from the mill.
“Mule girl, mule girl!” they’d called her, trailing her through the village square, “Come to fetch your mother home?”
It makes him so angry that she refuses to complain about the village boys, or about her trousers, or about her hands that are hard and rough and calloused. Instead, she complains about the miserable excuse for stubble sprouting on his chin, or Halga’s snoring, or Pick tearing squealing out the door on bath day.
“Cuphir, I’m sure it’s nothing,” Elan says suddenly, and he becomes aware that he’s frowning fiercely. She looks up him with eyes like their mother’s in a face like their father’s. “Likely it’s only a rider from town bound for Trestlebridge.”
“When I say run,” Cuphir says.
She touches her shoulder to his arm, and he is angry again.
Instead of shouting, he looks across the field, earth warm and soft between his toes. The rider approaches on a tall, grey horse. Cuphir stops short.
Elan continues on for a few paces, then looks back at him, strong brows raised. Cuphir lifts a hand to shade his eyes, straining. The dust rises, billows, scudding clouds on a cloudless day, but–there, yes, there! Sunlight glints off a white bow, off hair fair as flax and brighter still.
“It’s Aeralhil,” he says in disbelief.
Elan turns so quickly the swipple of her flail thumps into his stomach. “Aeralhil?” she yelps as he doubles over, wheezing. She is on her toes, clutching him tightly as she squints into the dust, “We weren’t expecting him until Yuletide!”
Through watering eyes, Cuphir looks up and sees the rider raise a hand. Elan shrieks, drops her flail, and bolts from his side, raising another cloud of dust in her wake. Cuphir winces, shields his face and spits to the side.
By the time he manages to straighten, gingerly massaging the bruise he’s sure is forming across his belly, Elan has nearly crossed the field, and he watches as Aeralhil dismounts just beyond the verge, braces himself, and catches Elan as she flings herself bodily at him, laughing so loudly it feels as though the fallow fields, too, must shout for joy.
Tears prick his eyes, and he bends and retrieves Elan’s flail. It is small, so much smaller than his, and worn smooth with care and use. He hears Aeralhil’s laughter join Elan’s, warm and low and familiar, and the ache in his chest becomes something hard and sharp. He’s crying in earnest by the time he reaches the two of them on the verge between field and road, and Elan quiets as he stands before them both, head bowed, shoulders heaving.
“I’ll run ahead and tell the others,” she says. She smoothes a hand down his back, gentle and firm, and then she is away, tearing back across the fields like a seaward wind.
Aeralhil smells of dust and willow bark, and Cuphir sniffles wretchedly, scrubbing both hands across his face.
“I–” he says to his feet, toes curled in the dried grass, “–I–I–”
A large hand settles on his shoulder, and the flails clatter to the ground as he tips forward, hiding his face in a worn leather pauldron that readily endures the onslaught of his tears. Though he is much too old for such things, Cuphir clutches Aeralhil tightly, clinging to a reassurance returned.
There is anger, still, but it is a sad sort of thing now, soft and aching as he pushes himself away, mumbling apologies. Aeralhil draws back slowly and sighs, a terribly weary, familiar sound.
“I would have come sooner, had I known,” he says earnestly, “Forgive me, Cuphir. This has been much to bear alone.”
“We buried her not two weeks ago,” Cuphir replies hollowly, willing his breath to stop hitching, “Either Flindol has grown wings, or you must already have come north.”
“I had only just arrived in Bree when your message found me at the Pony,” Aeralhil says, “It was a fortuitous turn, for such tidings.” With a quiet jingle of mail, he bends and takes up the flails. In his hand, they are both small, and he gathers both swipples and tucks them neatly under his arm.
At last, Cuphir manages to venture a look up at him. While hardly ever the picture of health, Aeralhil is pale beneath the warm light of the sun, eyes dark and shadowed.
“You’ve been ill again,” Cuphir says, fear creeping into his voice.
Aeralhil winces and calls over his shoulder for Flindol, who had wandered away to nose curiously at a small cairn upon the roadside. Carefully, for he is always careful with them, he nudges Cuphir back across the fields. “I am on the mend,” he replies, honest if evasive. He shortens his strides that Cuphir might remain abreast. Flindol trails behind, split reins looped loosely over the pommel of his saddle.
Cuphir trots along at Aeralhil’s side, eyes dry and itchy now, mouth fuzzy.
“What were you doing in Bree?” he asks to ward off the silence.
Aeralhil tugs a hand back through his hair. The tie comes loose, and he smiles ruefully. “There was a friend of mine I wished to see,” he replies.
“A friend?” Cuphir says, confused, “You?”
“Is that so great a surprise?” Aeralhil says, dry and somewhat wounded.
“Aye,” Cuphir replies with a firm nod.
Aeralhil laughs quietly. When Cuphir had been small–waist-height, not shoulder-height–Aeralhil would have ruffled his hair, and he would have moaned and groaned even as he’d leaned into the touch. But he is older now, nearly a man, and only boys long for a father’s touch.
Aeralhil is older too, and gentler, and sadder than the man he had been when he’d ridden up to their gate and told them their father wouldn’t be returning home across the Snowbourn. Pick had hardly been weaned then, and even Cuphir still in short pants, but he well remembered his mother’s grief.
His throat tightens as he sees Halga and Pick burst out of the house in the distance, childish voices high and excited. He glances up at Aeralhil, whose pale eyes glisten fiercely in a weary face.
“How long will you be staying?” Cuphir asks, voice hard, pleading.
Aeralhil watches Halga and Pick race towards them with something so akin to grief that Cuphir bites his tongue.
“Through the harvest season, at the least, though I know I am lately come,” Aeralhil replies, voice thick, “But I would like to see you through the winter, if I am granted leave, and–” he adds hastily, “--if you would have me.”
Cuphir squints up at him, puzzled. “You think we would not want you here?” he says.
In the near distance, Pick howls. At six, Aeralhil is the only father he has known.
“I would not presume–” Aeralhil begins, but Pick howls again, the feral little thing, and Aeralhil permits himself to be bowled over as first Halga, quiet and studious, and then Pick, screeching, throw themselves upon him.
Cuphir thinks that, of the two, perhaps Halga understands that it is their mother who has died, but he also likes to think that had kept them both from seeing the worst of the wasting illness that had taken her mind first and left her a shriveled husk upon the threshing room floor. He watches Aeralhil sprawl on his side, carefully keeping his weight from the large bow slung across his back.
“Aeralhil!” Pick chirps, clawing his way up Aeralhil’s leg to bounce astride upon his chest, “Aeralhil!”
Aeralhil blanches even as he wheezes a laugh, and Cuphir snatches his youngest brother up in his arms before greater damage might be done. Halga, predictably, has welded himself to the scarred leather of Aeralhil’s gambeson, little arms wrapped tightly around the bowman’s neck.
Pick howls and kicks Cuphir in the arm.
“Herþan,” Cuphir swears, and Aeralhil arches a brow as he gathers Halga into his arms and presses a kiss to his dark head.
Cuphir makes a face as Aeralhil clambers to his feet and gestures to Flindol, who heaves the equine equivalent of a sigh but deigns to have Cuphir, a shrieking Pick in his arms, clamber onto his back. Immediately, he sets off for the house at a brisk trot, and Pick’s shrieks become shouts of delight.
Aeralhil bends with a grunt, retrieves the flails, and sets off at a far more leisurely pace, Halga burrowed deep into the crook of his neck.
“I cannot have been gone so long,” he muses, somewhat out of breath, “What is this frightful neekerbreeker I’ve found here in Bree-land?” Halga tightens his arms, and Aeralhil winces. “When last I rode south upon the Greenway, ‘twas but a little cricket I left behind.”
“We missed you,” Halga mumbles imperiously.
Aeralhil pauses at the foot of the trampled path leading up to the house. Flindol waits patiently by the stoop, tail switching. The door stands open, and from within, Elan’s voice sounds, sharp and exasperated, and Cuphir’s responds, young and defiant. Pick gurgles with laughter.
“I’ve missed you all as well,” Aeralhil murmurs, “So very dearly.
