Mistress of Birds by Celia Lake

Author:Celia Lake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celia Lake

Chapter 20

FRIDAY

Adam had returned the book to Mistress Dutton, and been gifted with several scones still warm from the oven. It was a kindly gesture, and he was not at all sure what to do with that kindness. It had been a long time since anyone had been that apparently uncomplicated around him.

It made no sense. He knew Mrs Whitmore must have said something about him. Something accurate and kind enough, but the sort of comment that would provoke pity and distance. And surely Mistress Dutton had heard the gossip in town now, from the librarian, from everyone else who had a hint of an opinion. It wasn’t that Adam was the centre of anyone’s world; he knew he wasn’t. But he also knew how gossip worked in a small community. As far as he could tell, he was the only new thing this month, besides the woman up the hill.

Two women now, they seemed to be multiplying. He’d seen them yesterday. Walking north across the fields, hundreds of feet away. Thalia had her hands in her pockets, the other woman had an arm through hers, and they were deep in conversation.

He supposed people had friends like that. Still. He hadn’t, not for a decade. Oh, certainly people he could nod to, who didn’t know about him, the few times he made it to the Veterans in Trellech. But he didn’t fit there, nor at The Arthur. He technically qualified for membership at The Arthur. But that didn’t mean they needed to make him feel comfortable, among all the officers who had been born and bred to it.

It made him wistful, at any rate, that Thalia had a friend. Taller, dark-haired, striking, what he could see at a distance. But not nearly as comfortable on a hillside. Thalia hadn’t seemed rugged or outdoorsy, but she had a comfortable ground-covering walk, a certainty about where she put her feet. While he was at it, Adam envied that too.

They had disappeared, and today he’d kept an eye out for them, but he hadn’t seen any sign of them. No sign of birds, either, at least nothing close enough for him to get a good look. That worried him. It was autumn, certainly, and well past time for a number of birds to migrate.

He wondered, suddenly, how far that went. If there was something odd, could you use the birds to locate where the problem was? Quite possibly, they avoided whatever it was. The difficulty was that birds moved rather faster than he could, and it was impossible to tell without a great deal of work. Tracking charms, and all that, he knew the theory of it, but he’d only ever used it on sheep. Sheep, on the whole, were less prone to vast, swooping journeys.

Today, he was trying to focus on an actual task, figuring out how close the bulk of the apples were to ripening. He thought the earlier varieties might be just about ready in a few days. A week, perhaps.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.