The Returning Read Online Free

The Returning
Book: The Returning Read Online Free
Author: Christine Hinwood
Pages:
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didn’t fight, didn’t want to. They married their daughters to the Lords of other keeps, to put a stop to the fighting.” Father laughed. “Or to increase their holdings. It went on until there was only one Lord left.”
    â€œIn Dorn-Lannet.”
    â€œAye, in Dorn-Lannet—just as the Uplander Lord has done, he fought them all until there was only him left. Now, he didn’t want the other keeps making trouble for him, this Lord of old, so he had them pull down their walls and disband their men-at-arms.”
    Graceful thought of the men sent home after the war, men she had seen pass through Kayforl, heading south to their own villages. They had a look to them, the same look . . . Was it war that gave them that look, or was it being set adrift by their Lord to find their way home, having left it in the first place to fight for him?
    Graceful thought of Cam Attling, sent back not by the old Lord but by the new, they said, with a horse, as if that could make up for his arm. But he wasn’t adrift, was he? He had his family to come home to, their holding.
    â€œAnd so . . .” Father took her hand and helped her down the side of the hill. “So, the keeps became farms, the men-at-arms took up holdings, and all together they made up villages.”
    â€œI see,” said Graceful, and she did. But there was something else there for her to see, and she couldn’t quite.
    â€œThere, Daughter.” Father stopped, pointing to the edge of the forest, where the land was newly cleared. “What will you name it, this new field?” All the fields of Fenister Fort Farm had names.
    Graceful put the seedling down. It had grown heavy during the walk down the hill. “The woods look different.” It was not just because of the trees that had been felled around the base of Fenister Fort Hill. Farther into the woods, the knotted mess of saplings and shrubs and fallen branches had been cleared. Father had hired a woodsman. Now there was space among the trees that no longer looked to hide goblins or wolves, space she thought she might like to walk in.
    â€œI thought Wildwood.” Father walked to the edge of the cleared ground and stood looking into the forest, hands stuck in his belt under his belly.
    â€œWe should call it Merrydance, for Stepmother.”
    Merrydance had been Stepmother’s name, until she had married Father and become a Fenister.
    â€œMerrydance is a fine name.” Father set his spade at the soil.
    â€œIsla says plants grow better if you talk to them.”
    â€œGar.”
    â€œPlants grow or they do not, and talking has no part of it.” Graceful started. It was Father’s woodsman, who’d come silently from the trees to stand behind them. He was not a Kayforl man, but an outsider, from Apstead. (Apstead being a day’s ride away southward.) It wasn’t just his being an outsider that no one liked, Isla had said to Graceful—it was that he didn’t smile except at Father, and Graceful. When he saw them, he lifted his hat and put a friendly mask over his more usual surly one.
    â€œThem Coverlasts are seeing I don’t get to the trees about their cot, right. They set their traps and what-all and I near walk into them, right, and I break them up but they make more and set them again.”
    Father leaned on his spade. His face had a look on it that Graceful knew but saw only if she had been very naughty.
    â€œDon’t come to me with this; you should know what to do. They’ll want work, they always want work, that lot. Put them to it, clearing the land.”
    Graceful watched the woodsman trudge back in among the trees. Then, with Father helping, she set the seedling in the ground. “I name this field Merrydance,” she said, and Father threw his hat in the air.
    Â 
    AGERST THE DRAFT horse was trotting. “Come up. Come up, sir.” Father slapped the reins and Agerst sped up. His great hooves beat
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