made a point of stopping into all the villages regularly, a different one each Saturday.
Sarkan hadn’t come back. I didn’t know if he’d ever come back. I heard fourth- or fifth-hand that he was still in the capital, setting things right, but he hadn’t written. Well, we’d never needed a lord to settle quarrels for us, the headmen and -women could do that, and the Wood wasn’t the same kind of danger as before, but there were some things a village needed a wizard for, if they could get one. So I went around to all of them, and put a spell on the beacon-fires, and now if they lit them, a matching candle in my cottage lit up to tell me where I was wanted.
But today I wasn’t here to work. I waved to Anton and tramped on into the village. The heaped harvest tables were out on the green, dressed in white cloth, with the square in the middle for dancing. My mother was there with Wensa’s two oldest daughters, putting out trays full of stewed mushrooms; I ran and kissed her, and she put her hands on my cheeks and smoothed my tangled hair back, smiling with her whole face. “Look at you,” she said, picking a long silver twig out of my hair, and some dried brown leaves. “And you might as well be wearing boots. I should tell you to go wash up and sit quietly in the corner.” My bare legs were thick with dust to my knees. But she was laughing, joyful, and my father was driving the wagon-cart in with a load for the evening bonfire.
“I’ll clean up before it’s time to eat,” I said, stealing a mushroom, and went to go sit with Wensa in the front room of her house. She was better, but still spent most of her time sitting in a chair by the window, only sewing a little. Kasia had written to her, too, but a stiff, stilted letter: I had read it to her, and softened it a little where I could. Wensa listened to it in silence. I think there was a secret guilt in her to match Kasia’s secret resentment: a mother who had resigned herself to an unnecessary fate. That would be a long time healing, too, if it ever did. She did let me persuade her to come to the green with me, and I saw her settled at the tables with her daughters.
There wasn’t a pavilion this year: it was only our own small village festival. The big festival was in Olshanka, as it was in every year without a choosing: as it would be every year from now on. We were all too hot eating in the sun, an odd sensation for harvest-time, until it finally sank low. I didn’t care. I ate a big bowl of sour zhurek with slices of boiled eggs floating, and a plateful of stewed cabbage and sausage, and then four blini full of sour cherries. Then we all sat around in the sun groaning how good the food had been and how we’d all eaten too much, while the small children ran around wildly in the green until little by little they lay down under the trees and fell asleep. Ludek brought out his suka and put it across his knees and began playing, quietly at first; as more of the children drowsed off, more instruments came out and began joining in, people clapping and singing as the mood took them, and we opened the beer-casks and passed around the cold jug of vodka brought up from Danka’s cellar.
I danced with Kasia’s brothers and mine, and after that with a handful of other boys I knew a little. I think they were off to one side daring one another to ask me, but I didn’t care. They were a little nervous that I might lob fire at their heads, but in the same way I had been nervous to go creeping across old Hanka’s yard at twilight to steal the big sweet red apples from her tree, the best ones for eating. We were all happy, all together, and I could recognize the song of the river running through the ground beneath our feet, the song we really danced to.
I sat down in a breathless heap in front of my mother’s chair, my hair tumbled loose around my shoulders again, and she gave a sigh and put it in her lap to braid it