Wolfbreed (21 page)

He stared at it for a few moments, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t anger his father more than he’d been angered already. His father’s words still stung him, but probably not quite as much as Uldolf’s words had stung his father. He couldn’t question the faithfulness of his parents, and certainly couldn’t compare them to his first mother and father.

Both of them had proved themselves beyond any accident of birth. They had chosen him, crippled, half dead, and fevered …

“Father,” Uldolf said finally.

“What?” Gedim looked up from gathering stray branches from under the fallen tree.

“You’re right, I
am
a self-pitying brat. I’m sorry.”

“Forget it, son.”

No
, Uldolf thought,
I shouldn’t
. How many parents out there would just give up on half a child, even one that
was
their own flesh and blood?

I should have it carved on the back of the arm I still have: “Be grateful for what the gods have given you.”

“Ulfie!”

Uldolf looked up from his wood-chip-covered arm to see his mother with her arm around the shoulders of a briefly unfamiliar woman. The new person had long midnight-black hair that glistened in the fading afternoon light.

Then Uldolf saw the vivid green eyes, the cock of her head, and the smile. The confusion must have been visible on his face because she repeated, slower, “Ulfie?”

Uldolf looked at his mother. “What did you do?”

“I took some oak gall and prepared a dye. It seemed that blaze of red hair would attract attention.”

Lilly held up a full bucket of water toward Uldolf.

“And she’s gotten to the point where she’s well enough to get into trouble if we don’t give her something to do. You men looked thirsty.”

Gedim came around the tree, shaking his head. “Thank you, my lady.” He gave Lilly a small bow before pulling the ladle out of the bucket.

Uldolf frowned. “Her shoulder. Should she be carrying that?”

“Don’t worry,” Burthe said. “She’s stronger than she looks. And I took out the last stitches this morning.”

When Gedim was done, Lilly walked over to Uldolf, still holding out the bucket. “You can put that down if you want,” Uldolf told her.

“I’m going to leave her to watch over you two.” Burthe turned to go.

Uldolf took a step toward his mother, but he walked into a bucket that swung into his path at chest level. Water splashed his chest and ran down his arm.

His father laughed. “I do believe you should take a drink from the young woman.”

Lilly nodded at him. “Ulfie,” she said.

Uldolf sighed, grabbed the ladle, and took a drink.

illy stayed, watching them for the rest of the afternoon. She sat on the wall about three yards from where the trunk had crashed through. Every time Uldolf glanced in her direction, she would smile at him. Uldolf would respond by turning away and chopping harder.

It didn’t keep him from imagining her sitting there, rocking her legs back and forth.

He would have imagined that dyeing her hair such a dark color
would have made her less attractive. However, all the black hair did was make Uldolf realize how much her original fiery mane had distracted from the rest of her features. Even with the angry red gash above her right eye, her face was something that men more talented than he wrote lyric poems about.

And he shouldn’t be thinking that way about her. The more she recovered, the more he saw that there had to be a family somewhere, agonized about losing her. Such a beauty would almost certainly be betrothed to someone, if not married already. As delicate and unmarked as her skin was, Uldolf strongly doubted that that family, or her absent husband, worked the land like him.

Yesterday, after she had blurted out a complete sentence, he had tried to ask her about her family, but she had only responded by shaking her head and saying, “No,” or “Ulfie.” When he had asked her where she lived, she had said, “Here,” and smiled at him.

Uldolf still didn’t know if she didn’t understand his questions, couldn’t yet form an answer, or was having fun at his expense.

Still, she
was
starting to speak again. And eventually they’d be able to have her tell them where her people were.
Then I’ll take her home
, Uldolf told himself.

And if she was of noble birth, it was near certain that there would be a reward for the man who brought her safely home. That might give his family the resources to make it through another winter. He hoped that would make taking her home easier.

Besides, betrothed or not, a woman with such a generous, happy spirit deserved more than half a man.

y the time the sun reached the tops of the trees on the western edge of the field, the fallen oak was finally so much cordwood. Lilly surprised him, again, by announcing, “I help!”

She joined him and his father as they moved the segmented logs
off of the field. At first she would lift one and Uldolf would take it from her, but then she’d just smile and grab another, larger log. He worried about her shoulder; he could vividly remember her right hand shaking as she fastened his cloak around herself.

However, from all appearances, the wound no longer bothered her. And, whatever her family history might have been, she showed no aversion to working.

Once they had removed all the branches from the main trunk, they chopped the trunk itself into four segments. When Gedim came back with the horse and a harness, they had to push the large sections so the horse could drag them out of the divots the tree had dug in the soft earth.

Uldolf and Lilly rocked the sections as his father drove the horse forward. Lilly had placed herself shoulder to shoulder with Uldolf so that her arm touched his side. As the sweaty skin of her forearm slid against him, he could feel her muscles flex and tense.

Like his mother had said, she was stronger than she looked.

And not just physically
, Uldolf thought.

The tree was gone before the sun.

ow that she was well, Lilly’s words “I help” became a familiar phrase around the household. Initially, because of her communication difficulties, and her apparent lack of any practical knowledge of how to do anything, Uldolf’s parents met that phrase with some trepidation. But like her strength, she had reserves of intelligence that simply weren’t apparent on the surface. Just by watching Burthe prepare one meal, she was able to cook a passable stew on her own. And after a few minutes with Gedim, she was able to hitch up the plow as if she had been working the farm all her life.

It made Uldolf feel better about bringing her into the house. The more tasks she did, the more she made up for the extra food she ate. It was something that Lilly seemed to understand, and Uldolf suspected that it drove her statements of “I help.”

In a strange way, he was proud of her. Not just the intelligence and the strength, both of which he suspected she was born to and was just reclaiming as she healed. What most gratified him was her selflessness, her desire to help everyone.

But clearly her preference was to help Uldolf.

And right now, that meant sowing, scattering barley seed evenly across the new-turned earth.

The two of them worked down the furrows, Lilly ahead of him with a basket of barley, scattering the seed. Behind her, Uldolf harrowed the row by hand with a wooden rake. They had a horse-drawn harrow, but his father was still turning earth in some of the more reluctant parts of the field.

Hilde was watching them from on top of one of the stone walls closest to the cottage. While she spoke quietly to her dolly at the moment, she had her own job that would occupy her for much of the spring. She scattered the birds that would come to try and pick at the new-sown seed. Every once in a while, Uldolf heard her calling, “Shoo bird, shoo bird,” accompanied by the fluttering of wings.

It was good that Lilly was here. Even before their ox had died, the sowing often came late simply because they had too few people to work the farm. And sowing was a two-person job, at least. Because of the birds, they couldn’t leave a sown field unharrowed with the seed exposed for very long. With the crop uncovered, a flock of crows could strip an acre bare in an hour, and a farm this small didn’t have enough days or bushels of seed to undo that kind of damage.

Even with Lilly’s help, Uldolf mourned their ox. Dragging the heavy rake across the earth, breaking clods of dirt and covering the barley seed would be exhausting with two arms. The day was two-thirds over, and they should have an acre sown at least, but they had barely finished half an acre. It was frustrating, because Uldolf knew it was his work that was slowing them down. Even with the deliberately self-conscious way that Lilly was scattering the seed, she could have easily covered two acres by now if she hadn’t needed to wait for him to catch up every few minutes.

Worse, the sky was darkening with rolling clouds, and he felt a few cold drops hit the back of his neck.

They might not even get a full day’s work done.

Uldolf reached his arm out, bending and extending the rake to pull another foot or so of barley under a blanket of earth.