Thank you for purchasing this Scribner eBook.

“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why were you counting our money?”
“What little there is to count,” said she. “Covenant Man will be here once Reaptide’s gone—aye, while the embers of the bonfire are still hot, if I
know his ways—and what then? He’ll want six silver knuckles this year, p’raps as many as eight, for taxes have gone up, so they do say, probably
another of their stupid wars somewhere far from here, soldiers with their banners flying, aye, very fine.”
“How much do we have?”
“Four and a scrap of a fifth. We have no livestock to sell, nor a single round of ironwood since your father died. What shall we do?” She began to
cry again. “What shall we do?”
Tim was as frightened as she was, but since there was no man to comfort her, he held his own tears back and put his arms around her and
soothed her as best he could.
“If we had his ax and his coin, I’d sell them to Destry,” she said at last.
Tim was horrified even though the ax and lucky coin were gone, burned in the same fiery blast that had taken their cheerful, goodhearted owner.
“You never would!”
“Aye. To keep his plot and his place, I would. Those were the things he truly cared about, and thee, and me. Could he speak he’d say ‘Do it, Nell,
and welcome,’ for Destry has hard coin.” She sighed. “But then would come old Barony Covenant Man next year . . . and the year after that . . .” She
put her hands over her face. “Oh, Tim, we shall be turned out on the land, and there’s not one thing I can think to change it. Can you?”
Tim would have given everything he owned (which was very little) to be able to give her an answer, but he could not. He could only ask how long it
would be before the Covenant Man would appear in Tree on his tall black horse, sitting astride a saddle worth more than Big Ross had made in
twenty-five years of risking his life on that narrow track known as the Ironwood Trail.
She held up four fingers. “This many weeks if the weather is fair.” She held up four more. “This many if it’s foul, and he’s held up in the farming
villages of the Middles. Eight is the most we can hope for, I think. And then . . .”
“Something will happen before he comes,” Tim said. “Da’ always said that the forest gives to them that love it.”
“All I’ve ever seen it do is take,” said Nell, and covered her face again. When he tried to put an arm around her, she shook her head.
Tim trudged out to get his slate. He had never felt so sad and frightened. Something will happen to change it, he thought. Please let something
happen to change it.
The worst thing about wishes is that sometimes they come true.
That was a rich Full Earth in Tree; even Nell knew it, although the ripe land was bitter in her eye. The following year she and Tim might be
following the crops with burlap rucksacks on their backs, farther and farther from the Endless Forest, and that made summer’s beauty hard to look
at. The forest was a terrible place, and it had taken her man, but it was the only place she had ever known. At night, when the wind blew from the
north, it stole to her bed through her open window like a lover, bringing its own special smell, one both bitter and sweet, like blood and strawberries.
Sometimes when she slept, she dreamed of its deep tilts and secret corridors, and of sunshine so diffuse that it glowed like old green brass.
The smell of the forest when the wind’s out of the north brings visions, the old folken said. Nell didn’t know if this was true or just chimneycorner
blather, but she knew the smell of the Endless Forest was the smell of life as well as death. And she knew that Tim loved it as his father had. As she
herself had (although often against her will).
She had secretly feared the day when the boy would grow tall enough and strong enough to go down that dangerous trail with his da’, but now she
found herself sorry that day would never come. Sai Smack and her mathmatica were all very well, but Nell knew what her son truly wanted, and she
hated the dragon that had stolen it from him. Probably it had been a she-dragon, and only protecting her egg, but Nell hated it just the same. She
hoped the plated yellow-eyed bitch would swallow her own fire, as the old stories said they sometimes did, and explode.
One day not so many after Tim had arrived home early and found her in tears, Big Kells came calling on Nell. Tim had gotten two weeks’ work
helping farmer Destry with the hay-cutting, so she was by her onesome in her garden, weeding on her knees. When she saw her late husband’s
friend and partner, she got to her feet and wiped her dirty hands on the burlap apron she called her weddiken.
A single look at his clean hands and carefully trimmed beard was enough to tell her why he’d come. Once upon a bye, Nell Robertson, Jack
Ross, and Bern Kells had been children together, and great pals. Littermates from different litters, people of the village sometimes said when they
saw the three together; in those days they were inseparable.
When they grew to young manhood, both boys fancied her. And while she loved them both, it was Big Ross she burned for, Big Ross she’d wed
and taken to bed (although whether that was the order of it no one knew, nor really cared). Big Kells had taken it as well as any man can. He stood
beside Ross at the wedding, and slipped the silk around them for their walk back down the aisle when the preacher was done. When Kells took it
off them at the door (although it never really comes off, so they do say), he kissed them both and wished them a lifetime of long days and pleasant
nights.
Although the afternoon Kells came to her in the garden was hot, he was wearing a broadcloth jacket. From the pocket he took a loosely knotted
length of silk rope, as she knew he would. A woman knows. Even if she’s long married, a woman knows, and Kells’s heart had never changed.
“Will’ee?” he asked. “If’ee will, I’ll sell my place to Old Destry—he wants it, for it sits next to his east field—and keep this’un. Covenant Man’s
coming, Nellie, and he’ll have his hand out. With no man, how’ll’ee fill it?”
“I cannot, as thee knows,” said she.
“Then tell me—shall we slip the rope?”
She wiped her hands nervously on her weddiken, although they were already as clean as they’d be without water from the creek. “I . . . I need to
think about it.”
“What’s to think about?” He took his bandanna—neatly folded in his pocket instead of tied loosely, woodsman-style, around his neck—and
mopped his forehead with it. “Either’ee do and we go on in Tree as we always have—I’ll find the boy something to work at that’ll bring in a little,
although he’s far too wee for the woods—or ye and he’ll go on the land. I can share, but I can’t give, much as I might like to. I have only one place to
sell, kennit.”
She thought, He’s trying to buy me to fill the empty side of the bed that Millicent left behind. But that seemed an unworthy thought for a man
she’d known long before he was a man, and one who had worked for years by her beloved husband’s side in the dark and dangerous trees near the
end of the Ironwood Trail. One to watch and one to work, the oldtimers said. Pull together and never apart. Now that Jack Ross was gone, Bern
Kells was asking her to pull with him. It was natural.
Yet she hesitated.
“Come tomorrow at this same time, if you still have a mind,” Nell told him. “I’ll give thee an answer then.”