The Returning

Table of Contents

 

 

 

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First published in the United States 2011 by Dial Books
Published in Australia 2009 as
Bloodflower
by Allen & Unwin

Text copyright © 2009 by Christine Hinwood Maps by Jeffery C. Mathison

 

All rights reserved
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any
responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

S.A.

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hinwood, Christine.
[Bloodflower]
The returning / by Christine Hinwood.
p. cm.

Summary: When the six-year war between the Uplanders and Downlanders is over and Cam returns home to his village, questions dog him, from how he lost an arm to why he was the only one of his fellow soldiers to survive, such that he must leave until his own suspicions are resolved.

eISBN : 978-1-101-47643-7

[1. War—Fiction. 2. Villages—Fiction. 3. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H59766Af 2011
[Fic]—dc22 2010008398

P
IN AND CAM were grinding wheat for flour when Da came in, his arms full of lettuces.

“Eh-oh.” Da straightened his arms and the lettuces tumbled onto the table. “Do you look at this.”

Pin looked—“Euuw!”—and moved back. The outer leaves were full of holes. When Da peeled them back, inside were tiny baby snails, smaller than Pin's little fingernail. “Look at the mess they've made.”

The lettuces, thought Pin, looked like tattered green lace.

“You ought to see it out there. It's a plague of them. Aye, even the thrushes cannot keep up. No one minds a bit of meat to their greens, but we'll have no greens left for market soon, and then how will we pay the new Lord's taxes?”

“Well,” said Mam. “I have a crock of beer put by that'll do. And there've always been taxes, new Lord or old.”

Da picked the snails off the lettuces and threw them out the door for the birds. “Torches, we'll need, as there's no moon. Who'll help me?”

The twins pushed up to Da's side.

“Can I?” said Edord.

Hughar jostled him. “Can we!”

“Aye, if you do as you're told.” In the doorway, Da stopped and tweaked Pin's bare toes. “Make certain you're wearing your pattens after tea.”

Pin looked at her feet. Pattens were for mud and snow, to keep your shoes dry. Not for mid-spring. “Why, Da?”

Da put his finger alongside his nose and closed one eye.

“Mam? Why have I to wear my pattens tonight?”

“You'll see,” said Mam.

Pin sat on the doorstep, where the sun nosed into the cottage, and thought of a dress of green lettuce-lace; of what it might be like to have your house on your back.

“Stop sulking,” said Mam, after a time.

“I wasn't.”

“Sitting there with a face on you to turn the milk!”

“She's not sulking, she's thinking,” said Cam. Pin wondered how he knew.

Cam had gone to war when Pin was very small, and it was as if she'd never met him; not until after the war had ended and he'd come riding in with the warm spring winds, on his fine tall horse, with his sword and his spear and his stories of the North.

He picked Pin up and flung her in the air, caught her between his arm and his side. “Oof! You are getting heavy. Thin as a pin, my backside! Plump as a pin.”

Pin screeched with laughter. When Cam sat down, she climbed onto his lap.

“Well,” said Mam. “How's that! She never likes to be held.”

Cam jogged her up and down. “Does she not?” He tipped his head sideways and down and looked into her face, his own all funny and upside-down. “The new Lord of Dorn-Lannet, he does have a snail keep, little Pin-sister.”

Pin felt her skin lift up in goose bumps.

“On an island. It's in a lake, this island (and the lake in the garden, and the garden in the castle, so fine), so as the snails cannot escape. And he does feed them on milk and grain and grape juice, until they grow too fat to get back into their shells.”

Pin's stomach felt funny. Spiders were fine, and beetles, but snails and slugs and all those wet worming things, they gave Pin shivers down her back.

“Then you know what he does? No? His cooks do fry them up and serve them to the Lord.”

“Leave be,” said Mam. “Do you want her sick all over you?”

“Sick!” said her stranger-brother, his laughter rocking Pin forward and back. “The Lord, he does think them a great delicacy.”

“Well, they've their own ways, those Uplanders.”

“Aye, Mam, they do.”

“Eh then,” said Mam. “Do you think to be all afternoon milling a bit of grain?”

Cam winked at Pin, hefted the millstone in his hand. “You feed, I'll grind.”

Pin trickled grain through the bottom of her fist, and Cam worked the stone in circles.