Two

Summer nearly passed before I spoke to him. I heard his name, now and then, on a wayward breeze. He had hired several villagers, including the indolent Crispin, to help him pull the fallen roof and the weeds out of the shell of the old hall. Crispin, I thought, worked out of curiosity about the man cursed to murder and be murdered. As the foundations began to appear, he hired other villagers to mortar stone walls back together, and to begin to clear the overgrown fields. Sometimes I drifted through the trees in the deep wood behind the hall. I caught a glimpse of him high on the stone walls, guiding a roof beam dangling from ropes, or in a room with three walls, studying a fireplace that stood attached to nothing. I never saw him closely. The loose angles of his body, the rolled sleeves and open neck of his shirt, the way he wiped carelessly at the sweat on his face and shouted for water, did not suggest either a man under a curse or something that had made itself in the summer wood and walked into the human world.

But I had seen him before he had a face.

The curse, among those whose memories had outlived their teeth, became the subject of long and rambling argument on hot afternoons. Each variation, born in blood and fraught with danger, riveted our interest on the man putting his house back together, as if the inevitable hung over his head while he bent to his work, and we could only guess if he would be struck by lightning before he fell off his roof, or before Crispin dropped a hammer on his head.

"My mother met Shave Turl's old aunt outside the weaver's today," Perrin said, at the end of a breathless day when the air seemed so heavy and full of molten light, everyone sweated drops of gold instead of brine. Perrin had been harvesting his fields; he had straw in his hair and stubble on his chin. We sat outside, watching the twilight birds wheel in the trembling air, watching for lightning. Laurel, as usual those evenings, worked at something dainty, sewing lace on a pillow slip, or embroidering a handkerchief with Perrin's initials.

She raised her eyes at Perrin's voice. Our father grunted and drew on his pipe. "He's even got Shave working," he commented. "Shave hasn't worked three days in the year. His bones are too delicate. Some days they can't even lift him out of bed."

"His aunt said that Crispin's grandfather remembers the curse all wrong, and his head is full of sheep shearings."

My father grunted again, this time with more interest. "What does she remember, then? I suppose she was there in Lynn Hall, rocking beside the great hearth while the boy killed his father."

Perrin shrugged. "Who knows?" "Everyone seems to."      

"Go on," I said impatiently, my arms tightening around my knees. I sat on the grass with my skirt trailing over my knees, my bare feet. I could smell the sweet crushed grass around me. "What curse does she remember?"

"She says Nial Lynn said to his son with his dying breath, `Sorrow and trouble and bitterness will hound you and yours and the children of yours until Lynn falls and rises again.' "

My father raised a brow. "He said all that in one breath?"

"What did he mean?" Laurel asked curiously. "Lynn falls and rises again. The house? The family?"

"Shave's aunt couldn't be precise about that."

"It's a convenient curse, with the house beginning to rise already." My father tapped his pipe against stone. I looked out over the darkening wood, and wished I were something wild that prowled at night. I would run through moonlight until I reached the hall, where the wild roses grew among the tame in the old rose garden. And then, from some secret place, I would see what he became when moonlight touched him.

I shifted restlessly. Laurel dropped a hand on my shoulder, said gently, "Can you find me lavender, or roses-something sweet to scent my wedding cloth until

I work on it?" She had sensed my impulses; I had already brought her so much lavender to dry that the whole house smelled of it.

I nodded wordlessly. Perrin sniffed at the air. "No rain, yet." He fretted to be done with the harvest. Then the world could drown around him. Such stillness seemed charged, dangerous: There should be snakes' tongues flickering dryly above the trees at least, and the low, distant mutterings of thunder.

Laurel leaned back. "It's too hot to sew. My needle sticks in my fingers, and I can't remember what I'm doing. I can barely remember your name, Pernel. Or is it Perekin?"

"Don't," Perrin breathed, his face averted in the dark. She laughed and put her hand on his arm. They were both growing odd, prone to uncertainties and superstitions about their love. I supposed they would be unbearable by the time they married. And then they would forget their doubts as easily as you forget rain that falls at midnight.

She took her hand away again, her laughter fading. "It's too hot . . ." Her voice sounded unfamiliar; if I were an animal, I would have pricked an ear. I couldn't see her; all our faces had grown dark. If I had been her flute, I would have played a minor tune. If I had been her, I would have made a restless movement in the hot, sweet night; I would have wanted to touch and not touch; I would have misplaced my name.

The next week unburied another curse.

Perrin had got his grain into the barn; he helped our father finish his hay-making before the rains came. Each evening the clouds on the horizon turned the color of bruises, or overripe plums; the air seemed to listen, as we did, for rain. But the rains did not come. Work in the fields, work at Lynn Hall, continued.

Laurel, who had not yet seen Corbet Lynn, brought home the next curse. She had gone into the village to buy dyed thread and bone buttons and more linen, of which she seemed to require extraordinary quantities. She came to supper laden with gossip.

"Leta Gett broke another bone and is bedridden again. I asked Beda to make her some soup." She passed me cold beef and salad; it was still too hot to eat hot food. Perrin and our father, drinking ale, both looked as if they had, some time that day, dunked their heads in it. Their eyes were red with weariness; their hair stuck up stiffly; they wore threadbare beards, which they rasped absently and often but would not shave off until the hay was in. We ate outside again, fat candles smoking around us to drive away the insects. "I thought you or I could take it to her tomorrow, Rois. You could bring her some wildflowers." I made a noncommittal noise, my mouth full of radish. Laurel touched my arm, and lowered her voice, which caught the men's attention. "And here's a bit of scandal -Crispin must get married."

I swallowed what felt like a whole radish. "Who?" "Aleria Turl."

I sucked in breath, just like an old gossip. "Aleria, she's a child! And plain as a summer squash."

Perrin grinned. "She's not that young, and she's had her eye on Crispin since she was seven. Maybe that's why he's working so hard suddenly."

"He'll take the money and run," our father grunted. Perrin shook his head.

"I'll wager not. He's still here. If he were going to run, he'd have done it the moment she told him. And he can't argue it's not his-everyone knows Crispin was all she ever wanted. And everyone knows her. He'll stay." "He'll run," my father said briefly. "He's too lazy to run."

"He'll not make his own wedding."

"He will," Perrin insisted. "He won't leave the place he knows."

Laurel looked at me; I shook my head. I knew both of them and neither of them at all, it seemed. That Crispin would father a child with a girl with eyes like gooseberries and a mouth like a paper cut seemed inconceivable to me; that she might possess secrets and mysteries that caused him to veer wildly off his chosen course of doing as little as possible was something no one would have bet on. But there it was.

"A keg of your apple brandy to a cask of my beer," said Perrin, who grew hops, "that he'll stay to marry her." "When?" I asked Laurel. She was smiling a little, ruefully, at the bet, or at Aleria.

"Summer's end," she said. "How long can she wait? And that's not all - I found another curse."

"They're growing," our father said, slapping himself, as thick as gnats."

"What is it?" Perrin asked, chewing celery noisily. 1 leaned my face on my hands, staring at Laurel, wondering at all the imminent, invisible dooms hurtling across generations at someone who had not even been born before he was cursed, if he had ever been born at all.

"Leta remembered it," Laurel said. "She had drunk some port for the pain in her hip, and she cleaned out her attic, as Caryl Gett put it."

Perrin chuckled. "Go on. What did she find up there?"

"That Nial Lynn had cursed his son with his dying breath saying, `You are the last of us and you will die the last: As many as you have, your children will never be your own.' "

We were silent; it seemed, oddly, more terrible than the other curses. Perrin broke the silence.

"If that's true, then who is in the wood rebuilding Lynn Hall?"

I turned to stare at him. But it was an idle question; he did not wait for an answer. He pushed himself up, sighing, and went to kiss Laurel.

"Thank you," he said. "I must be up at dawn." "I know."

"Will you miss me?" "Will you?"

I got up at that point, and wandered across the grass. I heard our father call Beda to come and clear the cloth. I stood looking across the half-mown fields to where, I knew, Lynn Hall would be bathed in moonlight, broken and not yet healed, still open to light and rain and anything that moved.

"Rois," Laurel called, and I turned reluctantly. A stray raindrop hit my mouth as I went in. A few more pattered on the steps, vanishing instantly on the warm stone. I looked up, but it was only a passing cloud, a reminder of what was to come.

I took the soup to Leta Gett the next day, wanting to hear more of what she remembered of the curse and Nial Lynn. Who told you? I wanted to ask. Were you there? Who was there, that saw the murder and told of the curse? What did Nial Lynn do to his son that drove his son to murder? And that made Nial so hated that everyone looked the other way while the murderer fled? And if everyone was looking the other way, who was there to see what happened and to hear the curse?

But Leta Gett was sound asleep. Her daughter, Caryl, took the soup and the wild lilies I brought for her. When I asked about the curse, she only shook her head and sighed.

"It was a long winter, and too many people had too little to do besides spin tales. Nial Lynn was murdered, his son vanished, but no one was there to hear Nial's final opinion, if he said anything at all about the matter." Then she smiled. "It's all we're doing again: tale-spinning. Rois, will you make my mother a tea against the pain? She can't keep drinking port."

I promised I would. It gave me a reason to go back into the wood, to look for camomile and lady's-slipper. I would bring back water from the secret well, I told myself, knowing that I would go there, not for Leta Gett's sake, but for the sake of memory. I would drink the sweet water and watch the light....

I crossed the green and heard the flock outside the apothecary's door: ancient men and women sunning themselves on his benches while they waited for his potions. In the light their hair looked silver and white-gold, their skin softly flowing like velvet, or melting beeswax. The gnarled bones in their hands resembled the roots of trees. They sat close to one another, arguing intensely in their bird voices, not listening, just wanting to remember. They paused briefly, their eyes, smoky with age, putting a name to me, a place. And then, as I entered the apothecary's open door, they began to speak again. I stopped in the shadows to listen.

"  ... will die at the year, the hour and the moment I die, and so will all your heirs."

"  ... will hate as I have hated, and die as I have died, and your sons, and their sons . . .  "     .

“ ... never speak your own name again, and no one will know you when you die, and even your gravestone will stand silent. . .  "

"'None of your name will raise this house again, nor ill the fields grow for any of your name, for I bequeath all to the wood and that is my final will.'"

I felt hollow suddenly, as if I heard the dying man's voice among their voices. The apothecary, filling a cobalt jar, said lightly, "They've been like this for days; it's just something to do. Telling stories of the dead, to remind them that they are still alive. Did you want something, Rois? "

I shook my head, swallowing. "Just to hear them. Just an answer."

He paused, then corked his cobalt. "It's my guess Nial Lynn broke his neck falling down drunk, and his son was never even there. Will that do?"

I bequeath all to the wood ...

He has his grandfather's face ...

I straightened, pushing myself away from the wall. ^"It will do," I said, "until the next.^"

He smiled, though I could not. "Send Mat Gris in here, will you? And I could use more mandrake, if you spot it."

"Yes," I said, remembering. "I know where it grows." And that's where he found me early next morning: beside the wild raspberries and beneath the silver elm, digging up mandrake root in the shadow of Lynn Hall.