So he said nothing. It was desperately necessary that the peace of the supper table not be disturbed. His mother's careful preparations, her cleanliness and little touches such as the chrysanthemums in the center of the spread, were talismans, protective as was his father's way of hovering about all problems without alighting his attention on any, and smoothing all troubled waters with belittling wit.
His father had said something more. "Hmm? What?" He blinked around the table.
"Where's your head?" His father's smile was puzzled, traced with a little sadness as it often was. "Have more potatoes, they're good for you," he said, but he looked like he wanted to say something else.
What he did add was, "I met a man today, a courier for the Ravenon forces named Chan. You know about the war they're having with the Seneschals?" Emmy nodded dutifully. Jordan sat up straight, his food forgotten.
"This fellow said there was a battle yesterday. On the border."
"Is the war coming here?" Emmy asked.
"No. I don't know if the war is going to continue. It seems the Winds intervened in the battle. Stopped it.
"The Winds are mighty," said their father. "That's the lesson; though truth to tell, this fellow Chan seemed more amused by the tale than anything." He shook his head. "Some people..."
He turned his attention to Emmy. "Your brother did well today, didn't he?" he asked.
"He did okay," she said in a monotone.
"Okay? Well, aren't you proud?" She said nothing. "Well, how about you?" he asked. "Did you get to see our master's guests? Did you meet Turcaret?"
Emmy glanced up; her eyes met Jordan's. He looked down, squirmed in his chair. "Yes," said Emmy.
"He's pretty grand, isn't he? I hear his house is twice the size of Castor's. Mind, that would be twice the work, I expect."
"II don't like Turcaret," blurted Emmy.
Their father reared back, raising his eyebrows. "What? That's a pretty definite opinion to have for somebody you've barely met, especially one of your superiors. What brought that on?"
Emmy didn't answer immediately, hunkering down over her meal. Finally she said, "He got Castor to make me wear my old dress tomorrow."
"What dress?" asked their mother.
"The canary one."
"But you've outgrown that dress, dear."
"I told them that."
There was a brief silence. Jordan felt a familiar tension, and the clamoring need to defuse it. He cast about for something
funny to say, but his father was faster. "You still have it? I thought you gave it to Jordan as a hand-me-down!"
Everybody laughed except Emmy. She looked a bit sick, actually, and Jordan's own laugh died in embarrassed silence.
"Well, after dinner we can try to let it out a bit," said mother.
Emmy looked at her aghast. Then she pushed away from the table and ran for the stairs.
"Emmy!" thundered their father, then more weakly, "come back."
They sat in silence for a few moments, then mother got up. "I'll talk to her," she said quietly, and padded up the stairs after Emmy.
Jordan and his father completed their meal in silence.
This village was his home, always and forever. Jordan enjoyed hearing tales of the outside world, and often dreamed of a life as an traveller. But outside the village waited the forest.
The forest appeared in the fading daylight as a ragged swath of green-black across the eastern horizon, exhaling its hostility across the reach of fields and air to Jordan. The forest was a domain of the Winds, and of the morphs that served them. Unlike the
morphs, the true Winds had no form, but only a monstrous passion sufficient to animate dead moss and clay. They drove the wall of trees forward like a tidal wave, slowed to imperceptibility by some low cunning, but just as unstoppable. The previous summer, Jacob Walker had gone to the back of his fields to cull some of the young birch trees that had invaded his fields. His son had seen the morphs take him, and the way Jordan heard it, the trees themselves had moved at the morphs' command. Walker's farm was abandoned now, saplings spiking up here and there in the field, the crops turned to woodsage and fireweed, poison ivy and thistle. The Walker family now lived in another village, and did odd jobs.
Some things could not be avoided, or confronted. There must have been a time, Jordan felt, when he was unaware of the pressure of the sky on him, of the eyes of conscious nature watching from the underbrush. He vaguely remembered running carelessly through the woods when he was very young. But he was swiftly educated out of that. Once, too, he had run and laughed in the corridors of the manor, but he knew now that however familiar Castor might be, he was something different than Jordan and his people, hence in his own way a force of nature like the Winds. To be obeyed, his anger sidestepped if possible, else accommodated. Jordan could not become that.
Better not to think about it. His pace had increased as his thoughts drifted back to the manor, and the visiting Lord. Jordan slowed his pace, consciously unclenched his fists. From here, at the edge of the village, he could see the roof of his parents' house over those of the neighbors. Everything looked peaceful in the goldening glow of evening. He had come to a fence, past which a row of haystacks squatted, surfaces alive with attendant grasshoppers, wise blinking birds sitting on their peaks. He sat down on the stile, and propped his chin on his hands.