III. Change

      Efflin’s recovery did not progress despite the efficacy of the remedies that broke his runaway fever. Constant dosing with cailcallow infusions, and the use of strong wintergreen poultices eased his wet cough for a time, even helped soothe his laboured breathing. Yet each hard-fought improvement failed to take hold. Days of diligent care did not lift his spirits or unseat the entrenched grip of his lethargy. Night after night, his reddened eyes dulled, until the once-vibrant spark in them faded to absence.

      Since Tarens could not win this fight with his fists, he vented his helpless rage in the field, where hard labour behind the ploughshare granted his fury a harmless outlet. When the ox balked in the traces past sundown, he returned to the cottage, sore and snappishly tired.

      Kerelie shouldered the burden of nursing, as well as the tiresome task of heating the gruel and bread sops for the listless invalid. Mostly, the trays returned to the kitchen with their picked-over contents untouched. Desperation led her to swap a precious crock of summer jam for a marrowbone from a neighbour. She soaked barley meal in the enriched broth in a hopeful effort to perk Efflin’s flat appetite.

      The beef in the soup became equally spurned. Driven fuming out of the kitchen, Kerelie smashed the clay bowl against the back step in a fit of exasperation.

      ‘He’s not trying!’ she ranted to Tarens, drawn by her noise at a breathless sprint, with a stick snatched up as a cudgel to beat off a hostile assault.

      But the only rescue his sister required was respite from an onslaught of tears.

      ‘Unlike you and me, Efflin’s not fighting!’ Swept headlong into her brother’s embrace, she pounded his arm in despair. ‘Why, Tarens? Why? He knows our family inheritance cannot be salvaged without him!’

      Tarens held her close. Heedless of the barley mush strewn down her skirt, he pressed her marred cheek against a worn jerkin that smelled of sweat, harness leather, and turned earth. ‘I don’t know, Kerie.’ He let her sob, quite aware of the clean spoon and napkin that told over the source of her grief. Painfully wretched himself, he had little comfort to offer. ‘Efflin’s not been right for quite some time. Not since the misfortune came on us. But whatever afflicts him isn’t your fault, Kerie. He’s a grown man. Maddening as his behaviour can be, as hurtfully as his wasting straits try us, while he won’t speak, there’s no helping him.’

      Kerelie sniffed, caught aback by the hiccup muffled into his sleeve. ‘I’d rather you whacked him outright with a fence-post for acting the brainless fool!’

      ‘Chin up,’ Tarens chided. ‘I’d prefer to keep the pasture intact and just break his head with my knuckles.’

      Clinging to each other in harrowed dread, sister and brother stifled the thought that Efflin might easily die of the rancour sealed beneath his stark silence. Life, meantime, would not pause for his obstinacy, nor would Kelsing’s mayor forgo the debt set against their name on the town tax-rolls.

      Kerelie’s exhausted weeping ran dry. While thin sun bleached the frost-burned grass in the yard, and the gusts scattered raced leaves between the straggled stakes in the fallow garden-patch, Tarens sighed and circuitously broached the idea that nagged at his uneasy mind.

      ‘Survivors don’t quit without reason,’ he said.

      Somehow Kerelie sensed the root of the tension that upset his natural complacence. ‘Don’t even say what you’re thinking!’ she snapped.

      When Tarens returned no argument, she pushed him off, angry, her raw cheeks flamed pink and her swollen eyes bright as north sky. ‘You daren’t tell me I’ve driven away the one person who might have changed Efflin’s condition!’

      Tarens set his strong jaw. Prepared in his way to smooth her nettled anguish, he pointed out, ‘You have eyes. Tell me you haven’t seen the same evidence? Or haven’t you noticed that the scrawny hen we dragged back from the market is now eating her silly head off? She’d bring double the price now, restored to good flesh.’

      ‘Doesn’t mean the useless fowl will ever lay, or hatch a new brood come the spring.’ Kerelie belatedly dabbed her wet lashes on the inside of her cuff.

      ‘Well, the sheen on the bird’s feathers belies that.’ Tarens dug into his breeches pocket and offered his crumpled handkerchief. ‘Here. Don’t mess up your blouse. You’ll bleed the dye out of your pretty embroidery, and if not that, we’ve all heard in steamed language how much you love ironing wrinkled linen.’

      ‘You’re dead right. I hate laundry, never more than while Efflin’s flat on his back and quite busy wrecking what’s left of our sorry lives!’ Kerelie honked noisily, huffed, and shoved a frizzled wisp of hair behind an ear the chill had buffed scarlet. Then she pinned her critical gaze on her brother. ‘How could we have hidden that vagabond, anyhow? Did you honestly think he was innocent? By the rude way we were questioned, the high temple’s examiner sent that diviner to ferret the poor creature out. If we chanced to harbour a heretic, wherever he is, you have to agree he’s better off gone and, safest of all, well forgotten!’

      Tarens looked away.

      Kerelie’s eyes narrowed. Fists set on her hips, she stared at her brother until his blunt silence piqued her suspicion. ‘You know where that man is!’

      ‘No.’ Tarens blinked through his unkempt forelock. ‘I swear on the graves of our dead, I do not.’

      ‘Then what aren’t you telling me?’ Kerelie crushed up his soggy linen and hurled it down like a duelist’s thrown gauntlet.

      ‘I’ve not seen the fellow, hide nor hair!’ Tarens protested. ‘Not since the evening we aired our crass fears bare-faced in his living presence.’ Stung, he poised for a wary retreat: his sister in a high fettle was wont to clout back with the first handy object within reach. The soup-bowl was broken. Left nothing else, she would pitch the available cutlery at him before the innocuous napkin.

      Yet Efflin’s wasting illness had sapped the spunk from Kerelie’s spirit. ‘Tarens!’ she pleaded, wrung beyond fight, ‘at least grace me with a civil answer.’

      She would give him no peace. Warned by raw experience, Tarens sat down on the step and laced his big hands over his patched knees. ‘I don’t know where the little man went. But you’re right. He has not gone, exactly.’ The admission emerged in careful words: of fences repaired in the dark of the night; of water drawn to fill troughs for the livestock and small repairs done in the barn; of the fruit trees and vines pruned with expert skill where the untended tangle of last season’s growth threatened to choke the next harvest.

      More,