“I won’t have him near me,” she whined. “Take him away.”
I have had to hide the Young One in my bed upstairs. If I even speak of him, Robin begins to cry. And yet she clings to the One so that even I hardly get a glimpse of him. The King came in that evening—as he comes every evening—to inquire after his “golden gentleman.” Robin would not let our King look at the One at all.
“I wish the King would leave us alone,” she said.
Then Sweetheart put a mouse on her bed, and you would have thought it was a poisonous snake. Then Jay came in. Jay made a lot of noise and merriment. He says laughter cures. But the reason he came, I saw of a sudden, is that he is courting Robin. I was shocked. It does not seem right when Robin is ill. Jay is quite old and has loved many women. He boasts of it. That shocked me, too. But I like Jay all the same. My head was in a muddle about it.
“Do you like Jay enough to marry him?” I asked Robin when Jay had gone.
Robin shuddered. “No! I can’t bear the way the stump of his arm wags about!”
It is true. Jay’s stump of arm seems to have a life of its own. I do not like to look at it either. “Don’t you like him at all?” I said. “He likes you.”
“Don’t talk about it! I don’t want him! I shan’t ever marry!” Robin said frantically. I could have kicked myself. It was gone midnight before she was calm enough to go to sleep.
When she did, I opened the door to the River and sat thinking. It seemed to be all my fault, this, because I had twice wronged the One. As I sat, I thought I saw a light in the River. I knelt in the doorway and stared, terrified, down into the green-gold depths of the water. There was a huge shadow there, like a man with a long nose and a bent head. If it had not been that I had only just got Robin to sleep, I would have screamed. I was sure it was Kankredin.
“That one-armed jokeman says my Robin is poorly,” Uncle Kestrel said. He was rowing toward the door with a tiny light in his boat. Where my shadow came from, I do not know.
It did me good to see him. “It’s no good going for mussels,” I said. “The King’s camp is by the millpond.”
“I know that, my love,” he said. “I came to see how you all did.”
I knelt on the doorstep, crying a little, and told him about our travels, our King and the One. But I did not tell him about Gull. He thinks Gull died on the way.
“Kings and Undying are like that,” said Uncle Kes
trel. “They take no account of the trouble they cause. You make sure to keep Robin here until she’s well. That’s what matters. Is there any little thing I can get you from your house?”
“You’re the only person in Shelling I love!” I said. “Did they break my loom as well as the roof?”
“Now don’t get so fierce,” he said. “They did not. They only took their feelings out on the walls and roof.” Then he said something that has made me angry ever since. “I’m not excusing them,” he said, “but you gave them provocation, you know, even Robin. You all knew you were different, and you acted as if you were better. It made for hard feelings.” I was too angry to speak. “You want your loom brought?” he said, and I had to forgive him.
“And my bobbins and my shuttles and my needles and my spinning wheel,” I said. “And don’t forget my yarn.”
“You’re trying to sink my boat!” he said. “Sometimes you sound just like your aunt.” But he brought them, every one, and my spindles, which I had forgotten to ask for. I have never seen a boat so packed with wool. The loom was perched on top. I had to wake Duck to help me drag it indoors. He could not think what I was so excited about, but I think Uncle Kestrel understood.
Since then I have been weaving, unless Robin finds the noise too disturbing. The King is amazed at my industry. Indeed, I am often very tired, though it gets easier and easier. But I am afraid Robin will die, and I weave to take my mind off it. I pretended to myself that when the coat was finished, Robin would be well, but she is not. Then as soon as it was finished, I dreamed once more that my mother was telling me to think. And I found I had it all to do again.
The morning I started this second coat, Duck lost patience with me. Lately, because he is so bored, he has been spinning for me, and he was at work outside by the millwheel, which has clumps of forget-me-nots growing all over it. “Of all the boring, stupid, gloomy people!” Duck said. He flung the spindle down and waved his arm at the sun-scattered brightness over all the green growing things.
“Look at it! Look at you! You’re even worse than Hern!”
I burst into tears and said I hated the King.
“Who cares?” said Duck. “He’s keeping Gull safe, and us safe from Zwitt. What more do you want?”
“It’s all my fault,” I sobbed. “I betrayed the One to him. And I made you leave the One in his fire when we should have taken him to Kankredin. If we’d had the One then, everything would have been different.”
“You’re just letting yourself be taken in by what the King thinks,” Duck said. He took up the spindle and poked moodily in the ground with it.
“I know I didn’t obey the One,” I said.
“Yes, you did! Don’t be a fool,” Duck said, stabbing with the spindle. “The One arranged it that way! He wasn’t strong enough to meet Kankredin. If we’d waited for him, he probably wouldn’t have come out of the fire at all. The One alone knows what would have happened if Hern had poured water on it!”
“Stop ruining my spindle,” I said. “Are you calling the One a coward?”
Duck looked sideways at me through his hair. He ties it back with a band, but it always falls round his face in white tendrils. “No,” he said, and he squatted there, using my spindle to draw patterns round a clump of grass. He reminded me of someone. “The One is deep,” he said, “like the River. Tanamil knows. He’s the one we should have asked.”