The Lost Years Read Online Free Page B

Apollo.”
    “No. Not now.”
    “I could make you a potion, then.”
    “No thanks.” I shook my head. “When you did that for the thatcher’s son, he slept for three and a half days.”
    A smile touched her lips. “He drank a week’s dose at once, poor fool.”
    “It’s almost dawn, anyway.”
    She gathered her rough wool blanket. “Well, if you don’t want to sleep, I do.”
    “Before you do, can’t you tell me more about that word? Gal—Oh, what was it?”
    Seeming not to hear me, she wrapped herself in her customary cloak of silence, even as she wrapped herself in the wool blanket and closed her eyes once more. In seconds, she seemed to be asleep again. Yet the peace I had seen in her face before had flown.
    “Can’t you tell me?”
    She did not stir.
    “Why don’t you ever help me?” I wailed. “I need your help!”
    Still she did not stir.
    Ruefully, I watched her for a while. Then I rolled off the pallet, stood, and splashed my face with water from the large wooden bowl by the door. Glancing again at Branwen, I felt a renewed surge of anger. Why wouldn’t she answer me? Why wouldn’t she help me? Yet even as I looked upon her, I felt a small prick of guilt that I had never been able to bring myself to call her Mother, although I knew how much it would please her. And yet . . . what kind of mother would refuse to help her son?
    I tugged against the rope handle of the door. With a scrape against the dirt, it opened, and I left the hut.

2: A N O WL IS C OMING
    The western sky had darkened, as the moon had nearly set. Streaks of silver, shading into gray, lined the thick clouds above the village of Caer Vedwyd. In the dim light, its humped roofs of thatch looked like a group of shadowed boulders. Somewhere nearby I heard lambs crying. And my friends, the geese, began to wake up. A cuckoo in the bracken called twice. Under the dripping oak and ash trees, the fresh scent of bluebells mingled with the smell of wet thatch.
    It was May, and in May even a dreary village before dawn could seem lovely. I pulled a burr from the sleeve of my tunic, listening to the quiet stirrings. This month excited me like no other. Flowers opened their faces to the sky, lambs birthed, leaves sprouted. And as the flowers blossomed, so did my dreams. Sometimes, in May, I swallowed my doubts and believed that one day I would find the truth. Who I really was, where I really came from. If not from Branwen, then from someone else.
    In May, anything seemed possible. If only I could learn to harness time itself. To make every month like May! Or, perhaps, to live backward in time, so that whenever the end of the month arrived, I could turn May right around and live it all over again.
    I chewed my lip. Whatever the month, this village would never be my favorite place. Nor my home. I knew this early hour would be the finest of the day, before the sun’s rays revealed its tattered huts and fearful faces. Like most villages in this rolling, thickly wooded country, Caer Vedwyd existed only because of an old Roman road. Ours ran along the north bank of the River Tywy, which flowed south all the way to the sea. Although the road had once carried streams of Roman soldiers, it now carried mainly vagabonds and wandering traders. It was a towpath for horses bringing barges of grain down the river, a route for those seeking the Church of Saint Peter in the city of Caer Myrddin to the south, and also, as I remembered well, a passage to the sea.
    A metal tool clanged in the smith’s shop under the great oak. I could hear a horse tramping somewhere up the towpath, its bridle jingling. In another hour, people would be gathering in the square under the tree, where the village’s three main paths converged. Soon the sounds of bartering, arguing, cajoling, and of course thieving, would fill the air.
    Five years in this place, and it still did not feel like home. Why? Perhaps because everything, from the local gods to the local names, was changing.