Both, he said, frowning. She needs you and loves you.
The trees hissed and sighed. One whispered, Elia, and another, Saints of earth, but before Ban could find it, find that tree who said her name, the echo had vanished and all the forest sang together joyfully.
The Hartfare path appeared as if in a dream, at the edge of a narrow clearing and marked with several tatters of blue wool, as if strips of some dark sky had become caught in the reaching branches. Hardly more than a hunter’s lane, but enough for the horse to recognize. The way to Hartfare, once found, lasted only a mile or so before spilling both horse and soldier into the village.
Ban slid off the horse and stood, amazed at how it had grown.
There were perhaps forty cottages, ten more than when he’d last been here. Some little huts for livestock, rows of gardens, and the public house, and his mother’s herbary. It smelled and sounded as he remembered—splatter of mud, clang of metal, and his father’s laughter and his mother’s quiet singing; Brona smearing blood off his palm from a shallow gouge and saying a charm, something Ban could not quite remember, but it made him feel glad. The memories were as distant as dreams, but surely they were real because dreams would not smell like crushed flowers and shit.
His horse stomped her foot and shook her head so the tack rang against her neck. Ban patted her, murmured soothing nothings, and unlooped the reins. He brushed floating moon moths out of his way as he hobbled the horse, and while some eyes on his back prickled his awareness, he lifted off the saddle and blanket to rub her down quickly and let her loose to graze.
Turning, Ban spied two young women peering at him from the nearest cottage window, and an older man kneeling in a patch of long peas, studying him, too.
The road through the village was thick with mud, and a pack of hounds ran out, barking and braying, with a boy calling frantically behind. Ban put his hand on his sword and stomped at them, splattering mud. He did his best to smile at the boy, and let the nearest hounds sniff and lap at his gloved fingers, shove their long noses in his crotch, nearly knock him over. They smelled filthy and wet and terrible. But he liked rough, loud dogs.
The moths did not, and wafted high into the air.
The boy stared at Ban, or rather at Ban’s sword, eyes brown like walnut shells and skin swarthy, marking him one of the clan from far south in Ispania, and so related distantly to Ban and his mother. Ban wondered if the boy was a bastard, too, and if his only hope was to join service as a retainer. He said, “After I speak with Brona, I’ll show you to use the sword if you like,” and the boy grinned gap-toothed and nearly tumbled over one of the dogs.
There were people everywhere. Ban strode faster, before there were more interruptions, before he lost his nerve.
The herbary where his mother lived and worked was built of wood and mud bricks, with fresh thatch from which some small tufts of pink flowers grew, despite the late season. The door was closed, but the square, squat windows were open, and Ban heard his mother’s voice singing in the side garden.
It shook him to his boots, for she sounded so much the same he nearly forgot his own age.
“Mama,” he said, not loud enough to be heard; more for himself, a reminder, a grounding. And when he spoke, some relief blossomed in his chest. With a growing smile, he strode around the corner and found her shooing some chickens out of her sweet pea vines.
At his step, Brona spun, black hair loose, skirts twisting at her bare calves. She held two small dark plums, waxy and ripe. They’d been his favorite as a boy.
“Welcome home,” his mother said, offering the fruit.
Ban took one, but the moment his finger brushed hers, he dropped the plum, frozen.
She was as imposingly lovely as he remembered.
Brona wore her waves of black hair loose and only a thin sleeveless shift hanging off one tan shoulder as if she’d just been awakened, though it was very late in the morning. Her skirts clenched at a waist caught like a bridge between heavy breasts and heavy hips. Red flushed her cheeks and her mouth; her eyes were dark and wet as the mossy forest outside. Horn and amber beads hugged her wrists and bare ankles. The tops of her feet were mud-speckled, and her toes vanished into the grass. She was exactly as Ban remembered, unbound and free, made of the very earth; the memory was a visceral wave of delight followed by the hot awareness that he could see her now the way his father must have. When he left he’d only been a boy and had only a son’s eyes. Now he was a soldier, and understood the hunger of men.
“Ban,” Brona breathed in a thick sigh.
“Mama,” he said, just as full.
She closed the distance, and her hands found his rough cheeks. Brona slid thumbs along his jaw, toyed with the thick, uneven strands of his hair, tugged at the leather jacket he wore. She put her palms to his chest, and there were tears washing her eyes. “What a man you look.”
Swallowing, Ban touched his mother’s waist, wanting to pull her close and hug her until he forgot everything of the past month, or the past ten years, everything but whatever herby soap she put in her hair and the always-sharp smell of her, as if the dry flowers hanging from her ceiling and the herbs she grew and harvested, boiled, waxed, crushed, and turned to tinctures had permeated her skin and blood. Pretend she had kept him, chosen him. But instead he said, “I don’t
