Passager by Jane Yolen

Author:Jane Yolen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10. THE BATED BOY

WHEN HE WOKE AGAIN THE ROOM WAS DARKER and the light through the windows shaded. There was a new loaf and a bowl of milk by the door.

The boy clutched the covers and listened, but he could hear no sound of dogs beyond the door. So he went over, warily, to the tray of food and cautiously looked at it sideways, through slotted eyes.

In a fit of sudden anger, an anger that smelled a good deal like fear, he kicked the bowl of milk over and screamed.

There was no answering scream beyond the door.

He went back to the bed, curled up in the coverings as if he were in a nest, and willed himself back to sleep.

A few hours later he stood and urinated all around the bed, marking it for his own. Then, hungry, he went back to the door where the loaf waited on the tray. He ate it savagely, stuffing huge hunks into his mouth, and growling with each bite. When he was done, he sniffed around the place where the milk had spilled onto the floor, but it had all soaked in.

Bored and angry, he paced back and forth between the darkened windows and the door, faster and faster, until he broke into a trot. Finally he ran around the room, until he was dizzy and out of breath.

Then, standing in the very center of the room, he threw back his head to howl once again, but this time the howl died away into a series of short gasps and moans. He went back to the bed and curled into the covers and wept, something he had not done in a year.

When the sounds of his weeping had stopped and he drifted into a half sleep, the door into the room opened slowly. Master Robin entered and exchanged the empty tray for another, one with trenchers full of meat stew and milky porridge. Then he went over and stared down at the boy in the bed.

“Who are you, boy?” he whispered. “And how come you to our wood?” Then he knelt down and sat on the bed, stroking the boy’s matted hair and brushing it from the wide forehead.

At last he murmured in that soothing, low voice, “It does not matter. First we’ll tame you, then we’ll name you.” He smiled. “And then you’ll claim your own.”

The voice, the words, the warmth entered into the boy’s dreams and, dreaming still, he smiled and wiped his finger along his cheek. Then the finger found its way into his mouth and he slept that way until dawn.

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