The Moon Glass

Chapter 16: Eighty-One Strands

By the middle of the morning there were three of them at the yard table and no two of them at the same work.

Duncan had the Name-Book open in front of him, turning the pages over the way a man turns a stone he doesn't trust. The linen had gone soft and furred along the edges and the ink had crept down into the folds and spread there, so that a whole word had to be carried up into the light and guessed at before it could be read. Duncan's thumb had worn one fold down to a thread. He had been at it since breakfast.

Gareth sat across from him with a burin and a slip of ash wood, cutting letters into it. He didn't look up when he talked, and he didn't stop cutting when he did.

"You've had that page three times."

"It's rubbed out."

"It'll be on the wood here when I'm done with it."

"When will you be done with it?"

"When you take your elbow off the table."

Corwin sat at the end with the deed book open and the year's tally at his elbow, going back over their father's figures against his own, because no sum in that house was trusted until it had been worked twice. He let the other two go on for a while. Then he said, "He's been at it all morning."

"He has," Gareth said.

"He'll have it in half."

"That's what it's for."

Past them the house door stood open on the dark of the middle room, and past that the shut door of the little room where Corin had gone in before first light to sit at his training, the way he did every day and half the night. Nothing moved behind it. Out beyond the fence the fish pool lay flat and brown, one of last year's carp hanging under the stone lip and doing nothing about anything.

Their father came in through the gate and crossed the yard without hurrying, and none of the three of them stopped what they were doing, because that was what they did when he came in like that. He took the cup off the table on his way past — poured at breakfast, cold two hours — and sat down on the step with it, below the table and out of reach of anything on it.

Gareth cut another letter.

"I went up to Thane's," Elias said.

The chair went back and Duncan was up out of it, hands flat on the table, the Name-Book forgotten under them.

"What did they say?"

Elias drank and let the breath out through his nose.

"She was at the door with a pan of greens," he said. "I asked her whether she thought much of our Duncan." He turned the cup a quarter turn on his knee. "She went red to the ears and made a mess of her answer twice, and then she said, 'Him. I want him.'"

Duncan said, "Good. Good. That's — good," and couldn't get anything else out of himself, and that did it for the other two. Corwin laughed until he had to push the tally away from him, and Gareth laughed with the burin still in his hand, and for a little while there was nothing in the yard but the four of them.

"What did Dunstan say?" Duncan said.

"Nothing you'd want repeated." Elias drank again. "He hung the goose on the shed nail and stood there a while with his back to me. When he turned around he had his face back on."

Gareth blew a shaving off the slip. "You'd better go up there looking like something," he said. "Not like this."

"Like what?"

"Like that."

Duncan looked down at his own hands, still spread flat on the table, and put them behind his back, and the laughing started over.

Then Elias set the cup down on the stone beside him.

"Now hear me," he said.

The laughing went out of the yard one man at a time.

"The road is a wonder," Elias said, "and nobody knows what's sitting in it. This house is thin. Four sons, and the youngest of them still a child. If one of you goes down, who carries the name?"

He looked at them and none of them answered him.

"That Glass in the house is our luck and it's our ruin, and it's both at once. I've known that since the day I carried it in. I pushed Corwin's match through as fast as I did for a reason. I want a child in this house, and I want one soon, so that if the thing comes for us there's a line behind us yet."

"You're the same," he said to Duncan, and waited until Duncan nodded at him. "You'll be married inside the year, and you'll give this house what it's owed."

"And you," he said, and looked at Gareth.

Gareth cut the last leg of the letter, blew the shaving off the slip, and laid the burin down flat.

"You I can't move," Elias said. "I'm past the age where I can. You've no use for the girls in this village and I've stopped asking you about it. But a man leaves children behind him whether he wants to or not, and this house is going to need them."

Gareth turned the slip over and looked at what he had cut.

"I know what I'm about, Dad," he said.

"Then that's best," Elias said. The two of them looked at each other a while, and neither of them added anything to it.

Elias rubbed his thumb along the white at his temple, where it had come in first, and looked out past the fence at the fields. Past fifty, strong as an ox, and doing the sum anyway. Gareth watched him do it and said nothing about it. He had a piece of news of his own, and had had it most of the summer, and had not spent it. He was not going to lay it down on that step for his father to sort into the accounts.

The door of the little room came open and Corin came out of it at a run and stopped in the middle of the yard.

"Eighty-one," he said.

Gareth looked at him.

"All but the last one," Corin said. "I've got all but the last of the eighty-one strands, and then the first turning takes, and I'll have the Dusklights." He stood there with his chin up, waiting to hear how big it was.

Elias was up off the step. He took the boy under the arms and lifted him and held him up, and laughed, and Corin hung there with his feet off the ground and his face split open. Corwin got up too and reached in and took hold of his cheek and pinched it until Corin was yelling at him, and kept pinching until the yelling turned into a complaint, and then a complaint with words in it, and then let go.

Corin rubbed his face and grinned around at all of them, and went back inside, and shut his door, and could be heard in there a while, and then not.

Gareth hadn't got up. He looked at the shut door longer than the others had, and then he went back to what was in his hands.

The Asking was made at the sun-nodes and nowhere else. This house had gone into the last one thin, and Gareth had counted the days down to it and then counted them again from the far side. The next was midsummer. Midsummer was a few days out.

Corwin went back to the tally. Duncan sat down and picked the Name-Book up off the table and held it upright in both hands, like a man reading.

Gareth turned his slip over, found the head of the last letter he had cut, set the point of the burin in the wood above it, and cut. The shaving came up out of the groove in one curl.