The Usurper's Crown (21 page)

“Yes.” Then, she paused, an odd thought striking her. “I don’t … I … what should I call you?”

He appeared to consider her question gravely, but she saw the merry light in his blue eyes. “In front of others, I think perhaps you should call me Avan, as that’s how they know me. When we are alone, you may call me Avanasy, if you choose.”

“I’d like that. You’ll have to teach me to pronounce the rest later.”

“Gladly. Come now.” He shouldered his scythe easily. “Your berries are spoiling in the sun, and your little sister is beginning to despair of your reputation.”

“Ha!” laughed Ingrid sharply. “Despair is not what Grace is beginning to do, I’ll wager you.”

But he was right otherwise, and Ingrid let him begin to walk her back. They made their way through the scrub and thickets silently, side by side, content for the moment just to be together. There would be time enough for everything else later.

When Grace saw them, she just grinned impishly and raised her brows. Ingrid made a show of cuffing her sister across the head, but Avan, Avanasy, did not even smile. He just gave them both a strange, formal bow, with one leg extended and both hands crossed over his breast. Then, he reclaimed his scythe and strolled easily away into the woods.

Ingrid stared after him, unable to take her eyes off the smooth motion of his body.

“Has something happened, Ingrid?” inquired Grace mildly.

“Not something,” answered Ingrid. “Everything.”

“Ingrid!” Grace shrieked, and leapt forward, hugging Ingrid so hard they both toppled over into the underbrush, barely missing the baskets of blackberries.

“Get off me, you idiot!” cried Ingrid, shoving her sister backward and making a great show of reordering her clothes and hair. “A little dignity would only improve your character, miss.”

Grace just laughed at her and plucked a leaf from her hair. “I knew he would ask you. I knew it. When’s it to be?”

“Would you keep your voice down!” snapped Ingrid, looking around. But little Thad and their sisters seemed to be out of earshot, and none of the neighbors had moved in. “No one knows yet. He’s got to talk to Papa. He’ll come by tonight.”

“Perfect,” declared Grace. For the look of the thing she began to pluck berries from the nearest bush, tossing them down into the basket without concern for whether they were crushed or not. “You can be married in the fall, and then we can all move to Bayfield for the winter and …”

“ ‘We?’ ” Now it was Ingrid’s turn to arch her brows.

“Of course,” said Grace blithely, popping a couple of berries into her mouth. “You can’t set up housekeeping all on your own, you know. You’re going to need my help.”

Ingrid turned her attention to the blackberry canes, carefully moving aside thorny green branches to hide her surprise, and her irritation. “Mama is going to need help as well, you know.”

“And I know you won’t leave me in that house,” said Grace with the blithe assurance that was so much a part of her. “With Papa and Leo breathing down my neck all the time, and no Ingrid to stand up for me? It’s unthinkable.”

Ingrid pulled a last few warm, sticky berries from the bush she worked and dropped them into the basket. The warm delight that had come to her when she accepted Avan’s proposal had fled, replaced by an unfamiliar frustration with her younger sister. Did Grace only see Ingrid’s happiness in terms of how it would help her?

“We’ll talk about this later,” said Ingrid, hefting her basket so she could move further into the thicket.

“Oh, Ingrid …” began Grace, but she did not finish her sentence, for at that moment, a man’s horrible scream cut through the forest.

At once, Ingrid dropped her basket and hiked up her skirts to run for the trail and the direction from which the sound had come.

“Thad!” she shouted as she sprinted past her little brother. “Get the girls home! Now!”

“Yes, Ingrid!” he called behind her, but she did not look to see that he obeyed. Ahead in the woods, the man cried out again and sobbed in his pain.

On the edge of the true woods, a cluster of people had gathered, their backs bent, their voices raised into an incomprehensible gabble. As Ingrid came crashing forward to join the crowd, crabbed Vale Anderson turned and saw her, and pulled his wife aside, opening a small lane for Ingrid. Others turned and saw her, and they also drew away.

Her heart in her mouth, and her blood suddenly singing in her ears, Ingrid moved forward through the crowd of faces that she had known since birth but suddenly could not see.

In front of her, Leo lay on the ground, his face gone ashen and knotted and straining in pain. Papa squatted by Leo’s outstretched leg, his hands red with blood. A scythe lay on the ground nearby. More blood stained its blade.

Ingrid took in all this in a single heartbeat. In the next, she was on her knees by Leo, cradling his head in her apron and putting a stick between his teeth for him to bite down on. Papa had a knife out and was cutting through Leo’s boot and trousers. Each movement brought a fresh cry of pain from her brother’s throat.

“What on earth …” Grace’s voice, then Grace herself pushed through the crowd. Ingrid looked up at her mutely, and then followed her gaze down to their brother’s injured leg.

It was bad. The gash was just above his ankle, and went clear to the gray-white bone. Blood poured out like it could never be stopped.

“Mary Mother of God!” cried Grace, and she went whiter even than Leo. She stuffed her fist in her mouth to stifle what might have been a scream or a sob, and, to Ingrid’s shock, turned and fled.

Leo groaned again and his head pressed hard against her apron. Ingrid grabbed his shoulders to hold him steady. Papa did not look up. He used the cloth cut from the trousers to tie off Leo’s leg below the knee. The red flood slowed a little and Leo moaned against the biting stick.

Ingrid glanced around at her anxious neighbors, but the only face she could see clearly now was Avan’s. She looked at him, a silent plea in her eyes. He understood at once, but only shook his head. There was nothing he could do.

No. There was something. “Avan!” she cried. “Get to Bayfield. Fetch the doctor!”

“At once,” said Avan, and he vanished from her sight.

Papa glanced at her sharply, but did not contradict, or even glower. “I need a hand here,” was all he said. “We need to get him home.”

Four men surged forward to help lift her brother between them. One of them was Everett Lederle. Of course it was. In her shock and confusion, Ingrid found time to think,
Oh, Everett, I am sorry …

The men tried to be gentle, but they had to hurry and they all knew it. The bleeding had slowed, but it had to be stopped, and soon. Each jolt of their footsteps ripped a fresh cry from Leo. Ingrid was selfishly glad to be able to run ahead fast enough that she outpaced the sound of her brother’s screams, up the track to their house.

She half-expected Grace to have preceded her, but Mama was alone in the kitchen wielding a huge ladle and presiding over the steaming kettles on the stove when Ingrid burst in.

“Jesus and Mary, what’s happened?” she cried as she saw Ingrid.

Ingrid, gasping for breath and pressing the heel of her hand against her side, told Mama. Mama shrieked and threw up her hands. The ladle fell to the floor with a clang and a clatter. Mama just ran from the room to throw open the front door.

“Ingrid! Get a basin of hot water, and we’ll need all the clean sheets!”

“Yes, Mama!”

Ingrid moved as swiftly as she was able through the clouds of blackberry steam, but she suddenly felt unbelievably clumsy. Her hands shook as she poured boiling water from one of the iron kettles into an ancient and chipped shaving basin. Thad appeared in the kitchen, peering around the door.

“Take this up to Mama,” said Ingrid, shoving the basin into her little brother’s hands.
Where’s Grace?
she wondered desperately at the same time. Her two littlest sisters peeked around the door. “Girls, you stay in the yard, understand me?”

They vanished. Thad trotted out into the hallway, splashing little puddles of water as he moved. Ingrid ignored that. Instead, she hurried into the front room and threw open the cedar chest, one of the family’s truly fine possessions. She scooped out an armful of fragrant, snow-white sheets, just as the men bearing Leo between them poured through the door.

“Upstairs,” directed Ingrid. And there was too much jostling and too many cries of “Careful, there!” before they were able to maneuver him up the narrow stairway. Leo himself made no sound. He must have fainted, for which Ingrid was grateful.

Mama waited beside the bed in the bare room Leo shared with Thad. Her face was white as the sheets Ingrid carried, but she stayed steady as the men laid Leo on the bed. She shooed them all back and bent over her son, mopping away the blood and examining the gash. The men shuffled out of the room, murmuring their good wishes to Ingrid and Papa as they left. Everett brushed her arm in passing, and Ingrid, to her shame, found she could not look into his eyes.

“I need those sheets, Ingrid!” snapped Mama.

Then it was all blood and heat, and hot water and white sheets, and Mama stitching Leo’s wound closed and Ingrid cradling his head, and hoping Thad would keep the little girls out of the way. They did not need to see this. Leo alternated between straining to hold still despite the pain and swooning from the same pain and loss of blood.

Then it was over and Leo was again in a faint and there was nothing to do but gather up the bloody sheets and the empty, rust-stained basin and lug the whole, stinking bundle down the stairs to the back kitchen.

The room was filled with the smell of burned blackberries. Ingrid nearly choked as she dumped the sheets into the tin washtub and hurried to throw open the stove to bank down the fire. Papa, seemingly oblivious to the stench, sat at the table, hunched over a cup that, from the smell, had probably held strong coffee not too long before.

“How’s your brother?” he asked gruffly.

“I don’t know,” admitted Ingrid, surveying the disaster on the stove. A kettle of syrup and another of preserves had boiled down into identical thick, black, utterly inedible messes. A whole day’s work gone. “He’s lost a lot of blood. The doctor will be able to say more.”

“You should not have involved that man Avan,” Papa grunted to his empty mug. “It’s none of his business.”

Ingrid strangled a sigh, telling herself that was a reflexive remark from Papa and meant nothing. It needed no reply. She took the still-hot coffeepot off the stove and poured what was left of its contents into Papa’s mug.

“I’ll get supper started,” she said, returning to the stove. She tried to give herself over to thoughts of the chore at hand. She’d set the kettles to soak and get at them with the wire brush after supper. There was still some stew from yesterday. A little water and it would stretch out just fine, with dumplings, and some of the fresh blackberries and what was left of the cream …

She wrapped a rag around the first kettle of burned blackberry essence and made ready to haul it out the back door.

“Your sister should have been here to tend to that,” announced Papa, gulping some coffee. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Ingrid set the kettle outside the door. “Thad!” she called to her younger brother. “Get this filled with water, won’t you? Be careful, it’s still hot. I’ll have another out shortly.”

She returned to the kitchen, only to find Papa glowering at her from under his heavy brows.

“Your sister’s gone again and all you can say is you don’t know where,” he snarled. “Your brother can’t keep his mind on his work and will probably have to have his foot off. By God, is there not one of my children who will do as they should?”

Ingrid set her jaw and concentrated on wrapping the dish-rag tightly around the handle on the old Dutch oven.

“You’ll pay attention when I speak to you, girl!” The exclamation was followed fast by the crash of Papa’s hand coming down hard on the tabletop.

Slowly, Ingrid turned. Her hands flexed, as if they wanted to curl into fists.

“You may be sure, Papa, I have heard every word you said.”

Papa rose slowly and fear stiffened Ingrid’s spine. He stalked forward until he was a bare six inches from her and Ingrid knew he meant to hit her. His heavy hand itched to lash out at something, and she was nearest. At the same time, in his eyes, she saw fear and disappointment, fear for Leo, disappointment at his life and his lot, and his children. Oh, most especially his children, and all that had become of them lately.

“You’ll mind your place, Ingrid Loftfield,” he said heavily. His breath was sour with coffee and worry. “And you’ll not speak to me again in that tone.”

Ingrid held her ground and her peace. There was nothing else she could do.

Papa’s eyes searched hers for a long moment. What he found in her face, she could not tell. She could only see his anger growing cold and heavy, like a millstone around his neck. It seemed to be the only feeling he had left in him.

“Get about your work,” he grunted at last. “It’s time one of you did.”

With those words he pushed past her. She heard the front door open and close, and she let out the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding.
Let it pass
, she counseled herself.
Let it pass. It does no one any good, and it will soon be over. Soon
.

Soon she would be married to Avan, and in a house of her own. She lugged the Dutch oven out to set beside the back door. Soon, she would be well out of this, and Mama might cry and Papa might carp and Leo might glower, and it would be nothing at all to her, because she would have her own home, and she would love and be loved.

And how will Grace manage?
Ingrid returned to the stove and squatted down in front of it. How will it be for her when there’s no one to stand between her and Papa? She used the poker to uncover the embers and began laying tinder over them, watching the orange flames spring to life.

Grace will manage as she has managed everything else
. Ingrid laid some larger sticks in the fire, and closed the stove door, letting them get on with the business of burning down to hot coals.
With a smile and wink. She’ll be fine
. But even as she thought that, she glanced toward the back door.
But where
is
she?