I was certain that we had seen the last of him, that—until the day I died—I would never lay eyes on my father again. So I felt a wrenching sadness for my mother, who would take a dream so hopeless and present it to the one person she thought might make it come true. And I wondered how many other desperate dreams might be flung at Melinda’s feet, how many other impossible desires people carried around in their hearts, despairing of a chance to ever speak them aloud. How many other people would crowd through the doors at the Parmer Arms, laden with unattainable wants, how many would be crushed by disappointment as the weeks passed and nothing in their lives materially altered? Was it better or worse to have the chance to say those dreams aloud, and then be forced to acknowledge that they would never come true? Was it better to live without dreams at all?
Surely not. Surely having the dream in the first place was what mattered most. The desire to do better, achieve more, consider the contours and colors of happiness. Surely that was better than to turn away entirely from hope.
I searched for Gryffin for an hour. For two. I searched for Gryffin long after I knew Ayler had loaded Melinda back into his little cart and turned the horse’s head toward the eastern road. I returned to the schoolhouse, I returned to the tavern, I circled the entire town. He was nowhere.
Dark came early, swept in by a summer storm. I was back at my house, for I absolutely had to help my mother serve the dinner (a cold one of leftovers), clean up after the guests (a family of three, including a very cranky baby), and sort the linens for the morning (laundry day). Besides, it was by now raining so hard that I would not have been able to see Gryffin unless he walked right up to me and tapped me on the shoulder. I could not help fretting about him, wondering where he might possibly have gone and hoping he had found shelter from the weather. It had occurred to me that his uncle might have taken him somewhere—for instance, to one of the nearby farms where Frederick bought produce—and that Gryffin’s absence might be mysterious, but hardly sinister. And yet I felt such great uneasiness that it completely overshadowed the disappointment I had felt at not being able to introduce my friend to the woman I was sure could change his life.
It was late, and I had just made up my usual pallet on the kitchen floor, when I heard a sound at the back door. I did not immediately pay attention, because the thunder had been so loud just then that for a moment I thought it had merely caused the wood to rattle against the frame. But then the sound came again—a faint knocking from a point very near the floor, as if a raccoon or a badger had made a fist and attempted a rather ineffectual pounding on the wood.
When I opened the door, a sheet of rain sluiced in, and Gryffin crawled in right behind it.
I cried out and pulled him deeper into the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. He was soaked through and his skin was icy to the touch. And his legs…He was using his arms to propel himself forward, dragging his legs behind him. It was clear by the ripped and filthy condition of his clothes that he had used this method to travel some distance, from wherever he had been all the way to my mother’s house. It was not that he had somehow mislaid his canes. His legs were completely useless, not just twisted in their normal fashion, but broken, jagged, bleeding.
“Gryffin,” I whispered, my throat so constricted that I could barely speak. “What happened to you?”
He dragged himself all the way across the floor till he collapsed in front of the stove, lying so close to it that it was clear he was trying to absorb any of its remaining heat. Behind him was a trail of water and dirt and blood. “My uncle,” he gasped. “I made him angry. He told me to leave.” He paused a moment to catch his breath. “I told him I wouldn’t. He—he went and got his cart. He threw me in the back. He took me to the edge of town, and farther. I don’t know how far. Then he—then he—”
It was clear what his uncle had done then. Beaten a helpless boy and left him broken, miles from shelter. I was full of such fury that I thought my bones would literally explode from my body. I was full of such grief that I thought my heart would stop. I was full of such fear that it was as if my blood had turned to prickling brine. Gryffin was so cold and so hurt and so desperate that I thought he might not survive.
“Let me see, let me see, let me see,” I murmured, bending over him and, with shaking hands, trying to gauge the extent of his injuries. I knew nothing about medicine and had never even learned to set a bone. There was no official doctor in Thrush Hollow, but there were two women who served as midwives, and I had seen Mr. Shelby fix a boy’s shoulder once when it got dislocated at school. “Gryffin, I want you to lie here very still—don’t move a muscle—and I will go find someone to help you.”
“No one can help me,” he said, and he was sobbing. “Oh, Kellen, I think I’m going to die!”
At that point, if Melinda had been standing right in front of me, I would have sacrificed every wish I had ever held in my heart. I would have given up any hope of my father’s return, my mother’s love, my life eventually running some kind of normal course. I would have said to her instead, “Please save him. There is nothing else I want.”
I heard a sound at the door leading to the interior hallway, and I looked up. Standing there was the father of the irritable infant, the man who was sharing the guest room with his wife and child. He was staring down at us, his face stupid with sleep, his hair rumpled from contact with his pillow.
“The baby’s crying,” he said in a dazed voice. “I came to get some milk. But—but—what’s wrong with him?”
I came to my feet, feeling dizzy. “He got hurt,” I said brusquely. “Broke his legs. There’s milk in the ice chest in the pantry.”
But the man dropped to his knees beside Gryffin and very gently touched the worst of the open wounds, where the edge of a bone protruded. “I work with horses at my father’s farm,” he said. “I can set a bone. These are bad, but if you help me, I can help him.”
So perhaps Melinda had granted my wish after all.
Chapter Eleven
We labored over Gryffin for an hour, the young groom and I. His name was Del, and he seemed to have forgotten all about his temperamental baby. He had me fetch a bottle of whiskey—something we kept in the house so rarely it was another miracle that one was on hand—to pour over the bleeding skin to combat infection. He had me boil water, mix a poultice to his instructions, tear up clean linens, prepare two sets of splints. I cannot imagine how Gryffin bore the pain of our ministrations without howling aloud, but he remained conscious and generally silent as Del and I set and bandaged his bones. His face was gray, though, as we finally laid him back on the pallet, and his mouth was red where he had bitten his lips to keep from crying out.
“This is bad,” Del said when we were finally done and washing our hands. “I can see his legs were in poor shape to begin with, but now—”
“Will he die?” I demanded. It was all I could think about.
“Shouldn’t,” Del said. “Unless fever comes, and it might, what with his exposure to the rain on top of everything else. Shouldn’t die, but, Kellen, I don’t know that he’ll ever walk again.”
“I don’t care about that,” I said, though Gryffin almost certainly did. “I just want him to live.”
In the morning, my mother found me sleeping beside Gryffin on the kitchen floor. After her initial gasp of outrage turned to a muffled exclamation of horror, she was relatively helpful. She assisted me in moving Gryffin to the parlor (where the sofa was currently unoccupied by a paying guest) and getting him cleaned up. She even found some of my father’s old clothes—much too big, of course—and helped Gryffin change into them so he could get out of the bloody tatters he had slept in the night before.
Del came straightaway to check on us and seemed to think Gryffin’s legs looked good. “How do you feel?” he asked.
Gryffin’s face was strained and white. He shook his head. “I hurt a lot.”
Del nodded. “I imagine you do. I don’t have anything to give you for the pain, but there migh
t be someone in town who sells something like that.”
I stood up. “I’ll go see.”
“First you’ll help me get breakfast on the table,” my mother said. “You can see to Gryffin later.”
“I’d like some tea, if you’re making any,” Gryffin said. I think he could tell how furious I was at my mother’s unsympathetic response, and this was his way of encouraging me to make the meal as she’d asked. I nodded tightly and returned to the kitchen. My mother went to set the dining-room table, and Del stayed to talk with Gryffin.
In a few minutes, my mother joined me. “How are you going to get him back to his uncle’s?” she asked. “He can’t walk. Will Frederick come for him?”
“He’s not going back to Frederick’s,” I said. “Frederick beat him and left him on the road to die.”
Her face showed shock and disbelief. “Nobody would do something like that,” she said.
I looked at her a moment. “People do terrible things to other people all the time.”
She shook her head. “Then I—what’s going to become of him?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked alarmed. “He can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” I said, my voice tired. “You’ve always wanted a boy.”
Now her face was such a mixture of emotions I couldn’t sort them all out—anger, grief, guilt, confusion. I rushed on before she could think of something to say. “I’ll find somewhere else for him to go,” I said. “But he’ll have to stay here a little while. He can’t walk. He can hardly move. You can’t put him out on the street.”
Her hands were shaking as she turned to the stove, and the pans rattled in her grasp. “No,” she said over her shoulder. “I won’t put him out. But he’ll have to go. There’s no place for him here.”
It was three days before our lives settled back into anything like normal. Del and his family stayed one more night, Del expressing a desire to do what he could for Gryffin, and I was deeply grateful for his aid. One of the midwives, an older, imperturbable woman, also was most helpful. Not only did she supply a range of powdered herbs that succeeded in easing Gryffin’s pain, but she proved to have a wide knowledge of infection and how to prevent it, and she dropped by several times to check on Gryffin’s progress. Mr. Shelby came to the house once with an armload of books and a great deal of sympathy, and stayed for dinner.
To Ian Shelby I told the entire story, but I could tell that he, like my mother, did not entirely believe me. Frederick was not particularly well liked, but he was well known; he was a long-standing member of the community. No one could believe that he would commit an act so atrocious—could believe it, would believe it.
“Well, now, surely there’s been a misunderstanding,” Mr. Shelby said. “Surely there’s more to the story than we know.”
But I knew there was no misunderstanding. I knew that Frederick had tried to murder his nephew.
And he knew I knew.
The evening of that first day, after the guests were fed and the dishes were done and Gryffin was reclining as comfortably as possible on the sofa, dosed with the midwife’s drugs, I silently left the house. I trudged the mile to the tavern, entered the back door without a challenge, and rummaged through Gryffin’s room to find such items of clothing as I thought he might be able to use. There wasn’t much. I had brought a small bag with me to carry his clothes home, and I did not entirely fill it.
Then I headed back downstairs and stopped in the kitchen, to find Dora and some servant girl feverishly making meals.
“I need to talk to Frederick,” I said.
Dora gave me one quick, harassed glance. “He’s busy.”
“I need to talk to him tonight. Tell him I’ll wait out on the bench in back for a while. After that, I’ll come look for him in the tavern.” I paused. “I think he’d rather talk to me in private.”
Now the look on Dora’s face was pinched and worried. I could see her mouth open, her lips pursed as if she had a question to ask. Where’s Gryffin? you’d think she might want to know. Or, Have you seen Gryffin? Is he all right? But she didn’t ask either question. She didn’t say anything. She merely nodded and went back to her cooking.
I went outside and sat on the stone bench, my bag between my feet. Last night’s storm had cooled the air remarkably; the world felt clean and eager, full of possibilities. I was exhausted, though. I had been awake half the night and working hard since I’d woken up. I let my shoulders sag against the back wall of the house, and waited without impatience.
Twenty minutes after I sat down, Frederick came out of the tavern. His face was drawn into a scowl, and he was drying his big hands on the front of his shirt. “What do you want?” he said in an unfriendly voice.
I came to my feet. “You didn’t kill him, you know,” I said quietly.
He stood very still and just looked at me.
“You tried to kill him, but he’s alive. He’s at my house.”
Frederick grunted. “Maybe I’ll have another go at him, then.”
I stepped closer, which I could tell surprised him. He eyed me uncertainly. My voice was even softer when I spoke once more. “If you ever touch him again, I will call every Truth-Teller in the kingdom to this town,” I said. “I will have them stand on every street corner and inform everyone that you tried to kill your nephew. They will describe how you beat him, because he was too weak to run away from you. They will tell everyone how you turned your tavern into a brothel, sending couples up to Gryffin’s room for a little fun.”
Now his face was red and angry. “I didn’t do any of that!”
I raised my voice. “What else will Truth-Tellers repeat if they come here to talk of you, Frederick? Did you rob your customers? Did you beat your wife? How many times have you lied and cheated? The Truth-Tellers know everything—and they will tell everyone.”
“You brat,” he hissed and swung a hand to strike me.
I dodged the blow and punched him hard in the stomach. I heard his breath whuff out, and his face grew stupid with surprise. No one ever expected me to be as strong as I was. He staggered back and put a hand up against the wall to steady himself.
“If you touch him,” I said. “If you speak to him. If you look at him. Everyone will know what you have done.”
“Call a Truth-Teller to do your bidding, and he’ll talk about you as well,” Frederick wheezed. “Everybody knows that.”
I laughed. “Why would I mind if anybody talked about me? I’m a lost girl who dresses as a boy who nobody in the world cares about. I don’t have anything to hide.”
Frederick had pretty well recovered by now from my earlier blow. Now he straightened and took another menacing step toward me. Ayler had taught me where to kick a man to do the most damage, and I was strung with tension, ready to do just that, but he didn’t come near enough to offer me an opportunity. “Everybody hides something sometime,” he said. “You better be careful.”
I wanted to kick him anyway, just to see him suffer, just because he was loathsome and cruel and deserved so much more pain than I could ever inflict. But I didn’t. I stepped away. “You’ve already hurt me so much by hurting Gryffin,” I said softly. “There is nothing more you can ever do to cause me pain.”
On the evening of the third day, I told Gryffin about Melinda. He was feeling well enough to sit up, and his appetite was good, and the aching in his legs was not as severe. He still required a great deal of care, and my mother was still disgruntled that he was taking up what might otherwise have been a paying bed, but he was improving, and that was good enough for me. He had slept much of the day and was wide awake now at what was close to midnight. Everyone else in the house—my mother and an elderly couple who had rented the room for four nights—was asleep. I had just crept in from the kitchen to do one final check on Gryffin and found him propped up and staring moodily at one of Mr. Shelby’s books. He wasn’t even pretending to read, just sitting there with the volume open on his lap.
“Are you in
pain?” I asked with some concern.
He looked over at me and attempted a smile. “No. Well, not much, anyway. I just find that my mind can’t settle.”
I came to sit beside him on the sofa, as I had every couple of hours for the past few days. I checked his forehead for fever, but his skin was cool. I checked his bandages for fresh blood, but they were clean. The mug beside his bed was still full of water. There didn’t seem to be much I could do for him except distract him.
“I was looking for you, you know,” I said, leaning back against the cushions. Gryffin relaxed beside me, and our shoulders touched. I could feel his thin hipbone resting against my own. “That day when you went missing.”
“That’s what you said,” he replied. “But you never said why.”
I gave a little laugh. “That’s right, I didn’t! How is that possible? Because I had very exciting news. I suppose I’ve been too busy to remember.”
“So tell me now.”
“Melinda was in town. The Dream-Maker. Ayler brought her.”
I felt Gryffin stir beside me. “She was? Did you talk to her? What was she like?”
“She looked old and sad, I thought. Ayler said she was in mourning. And she looked—I wouldn’t have said I thought she seemed like a kind person, but she looked interesting. As if, if you asked her about her life, she would have no end of fascinating stories to tell.”
“Did you ask her to make any of your dreams come true?”
I shook my head, so the ends of my hair brushed against the top of Gryffin’s shoulder. “I wanted you to meet her. I wanted her to grant your wishes. I should have asked her on your behalf before I ever left the Parmer Arms.”