The Daughter of Odren by Ursula K. Le Guin

Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The dogs of Hill Farm barked. Bay’s wife, Weed, said from the scullery, “Is there someone at the gate?”

Her stepdaughter, Clover, a girl of fifteen or so, ran out to look and came back. “Two men,” she said.

Weed dried her hands on her apron and went out into the house yard, hushing the dogs. As she walked toward the men at the gate she looked at them with a direct gaze, her head up and her face expressionless. Her look changed.

“Hovy?” she said, her eyes on the older man.

Then she looked again at the younger man, and cried out in such a voice that the girl behind her stopped short in terror—“Clay! O Clay!” She tore the gate open and flung her arms round him, sobbing his name and saying, “Brother, brother!”

“Then it’s you, it’s you indeed, Lily,” the young man said, trying to hold her away a little, half laughing and half in tears himself.

“You haven’t been there?” she demanded suddenly, pushing him to arm’s length and gripping his shoulders. “He’d know you—”

“No, no, I haven’t been there yet. But this is a sorry place to find you, sister!”

She looked around as if she did not know what place he meant. “You’re back,” she said. “You’re here. You kept the promise! Oh, I have longed for you, longed for you!” And she leaned away from him a little again to look at him with pride and amazement. “A man grown,” she said, exulting, and held him and kissed him again. Then taking his hand she led him into the house.

Hovy followed them to the doorway, where he stopped and waited. Clover, a stocky, round-faced girl, stood at the corner of the house. She stared at Hovy with patient curiosity, and he endured her stare with patient indifference.

Inside the house, Weed took her brother’s hands again, still radiant with the joy of seeing him and touching him, but speaking urgently. “Hovy must go away,” she said. “People will know you through him. You, they’d never know. Only he’d know you. How you’ve changed! Oh, what a little boy you were! A little squirrel! Remember I called you Squirrel? And you called me Mountain, because I used to sit on you when we played?”

He smiled, shaking his head.

“And look at you now. As tall as Father—and you have his shoulders—Oh, Clay! The last time I was happy was the day I saw the ship sail in! All these years—there’s never been a day I didn’t think of him and you, of you and him. Never an hour. But now you’re here, my ship, my sword, my brother! You kept the promise! Now we can make it right! I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t do it alone. With you I can do what we must. And you came for that. I know you came for that. To set it right.”

“I did,” he said. “And I can do it.”

They were alike as they stood face to face in the dark, low-beamed room. She was not as tall as he, but as strongly built.

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