The Falcon in the Barn (Book 4 Forest at the Edge series) (57 page)

Thorne’s mouth worked up and down lamely,
searching for a response. The soldiers looked at each other
sheepishly, realizing not one of them had chased the teenagers.

Mahrree could barely contain her
snorting.

“
We . . . we . . .” Thorne
stammered, “Look at our uniforms! They all need to be cleaned
now!”

Perrin rolled his eyes. “Oh, they’re
vegetables
, Captain! And you not only let the work force
escape but you also allowed them to destroy a few bushelfuls that
someday we may desperately need. Now, there should not be a single
one of you standing here, but you should all be RUNNING IN
PURSUIT!”

No one can stay standing when Colonel Shin
used that tone and volume. Captain Thorne actually jumped as he
took off in a mad dash in a direction he hoped some teenager had
run. Even Mahrree felt the need to hop up and help, but she stayed
as small as she could behind the shrub as the soldiers sprinted
away.

Perrin sat alone on his horse quietly
grumbling at the empty garden until he said, “You can come out now.
Mahrree?”

Stunned, Mahrree slipped out from behind the
shrub. “How did you know I was there?”

“
I can feel you in the
air,” he waved vaguely. “Well? How did your students
do?”

“
Quite well,” she said with
perfect sobriety. “One hit Thorne squarely in the face with a
tomato. Excellent aim.”

They both glanced around to make sure no one
was around, then they snorted in laughter.

“
We’re terrible!” Mahrree
exclaimed as she wiped away a tear. “We shouldn’t be
laughing.”

“
He deserved it, I’m sure!”
Perrin said. “If I were an artist, tonight I would draw his
expression complete with the tomato sliding into his
ear.”

“
Oh, stop it!” she
chuckled, although mentally she pictured the drawing of the
pathetic captain hanging in a prominent spot in Perrin’s office at
home where he could admire it. “Don’t you need to be finding some
lost boys?”

He shrugged. “I know where they hide in the
marshes—down the slope a ways from the canal—so I’ll just swing by
there in an hour with a fresh pack of soldiers who aren’t afraid of
tomatoes. In the meantime, do you want a ride back home?”

Mahrree eyed his horse for the day, a white
stallion who was clearly suffering from the heat. “I don’t think
that poor animal deserves any more weight. He’s already . . .
foamy.”

Perrin sighed. “Frothing. Yes. The sergeant
in charge of the stables thought he’d be a good match for me, but
he looks stronger than he is. Maybe it’s the weather.”

“
Maybe you should be giving
him
a ride back to the fort. I’m fine walking.”

“
You realize you’ve never
ridden with me?”

“
There’s a reason for
that!” she declared. “Why would I want to get up on an animal like
that? Well,
that
one doesn’t look too dangerous. More like a
melting snow bank right now. But in general, why?” She looked up at
him flirtatiously as she headed for home.

He swung his horse around to accompany her.
“Oh, come on. Every female dreams of being rescued by a dashing
officer on horseback. Doesn’t she?”

“
And what would you be
rescuing me from? And on that?”

“
Someday, though, you’ll
want to ride with me.”

“
That will be a very
unusual day, I promise!”

“
All right then. Guess I
getter go round up some ridiculous young men and see if they found
our lost boys yet.”

He’d tipped his cap formally to her and
kicked his heels into the weary animal. Mahrree grinned as she
watched him growing smaller in the distance, eventually sighing to
herself in delight.

---

A week later she thought about him again,
riding off on that dissolving horse, and sighed in pleasure.

Then again, it was so easy to get lost in an
afternoon daydream when she had a pile of papers to grade. School
had started again, and it was clear that her students were as
distracted in their writing as she was in her grading it.

But, tragically, there were fewer students
this year. Three boys had died due to the pox, along with their
families.

Indeed, the final tally of dead was
staggering. Over ten percent of the population throughout the
world—just like in Edge—and twenty percent in some villages, had
succumbed. And every fort needed to recruit more men to fill the
ranks of those who died.

Perrin confided to Mahrree last night that he
wasn’t entirely sure why, though. “There’s still no evidence of a
Guarder presence. We can at least
shrink
the size of the
army safely, and that would also reduce taxes and put more silver
back into the world’s pockets. That would be the humane thing to do
right now.”

“
But Perrin,” Mahrree said,
“since when are the Administrators interested in returning anything
back to the world?”

He grunted. “Of course. Why relinquish so
great a hold? Remember when they first put commanders in ultimate
control over the villages? It was supposed to be a temporary
measure.”

“
Well,” Mahrree began
philosophically, “that was about fourteen years ago now, and since
the world has been in existence for 336 years, I suppose fourteen
years
is
relatively temporary—”

He squinted at her. “With that kind of
reasoning, you could be an Administrator, you know that?”

Her mouth dropped open in feigned horror. “I
think that’s the most awful thing you’ve ever said to me!”

Mahrree chuckled again at that conversation
and looked down at the penmanship that appeared more like weevil
trails on the page.

“
Ugh,” she pulled a face.
“Even with an extra long Weeding Season break I still can’t bring
myself to correct this! Not as if any of those boys did their share
of the work.”

Well, a couple finally had. Instead of
Captain Thorne leading out the workers, it was Shem and Lieutenant
Offra who, while they both maintained a firm hand with the boys,
also knew enough to make the weeding into a competition.
Rehabilitation didn’t have to mean drudgery, after all. Another
week or so, the farms would all be taken care of and the boys would
have paid off their debt to society.

And, not coincidentally, most of the trouble
makers had been working so hard during the days that they were
simply too tired at night to make any more trouble.

She stared again at the scrawled pages before
her trying to rehabilitate the fragmented sentences, and was struck
by a thought.

“
Wait a minute—everything’s
back to normal!” she marveled out loud. “When did that
happen?”

Yes, everything was blessedly, boringly
normal for the first time in a year and a half.

“
I don’t believe it!” she
laughed.

The kitchen door slammed shut. “Don’t believe
what?” Perrin called as he came into the eating room and looked
down at her work. “Someone wrote a good paper? Well, obviously not
that one, Or . . . no, no that one, either. Did a muddy worm crawl
across that paper, or is that supposed to be someone’s
handwriting?”

Mahrree chuckled. “I was just realizing that
everything has gone back to normal, and I simply couldn’t believe
it.”

“
It’s
almost
normal,” he said with a familiar glint in his eye. He took off his
cap and bent down to kiss her—

But a sudden knocking at the front door
stopped their kiss.

Perrin groaned, kissed her quickly anyway,
and headed to the front door. When he opened it he faced the chief
of enforcement.

Mahrree still wondered how the young man,
barely thirty, earned that appointment. Physically, he wasn’t
anything intimidating. While of average height, his body was on the
floppy, rather jiggly side. Nor did he come across as anything
confident, as the vigorous massaging of his felt hat demonstrated.
It likely wouldn’t fit properly by the time he left. And he wasn’t
exceptionally bright, either. While not one of her past students,
Mahrree knew him in school and was struck by the fact that he
always seemed to be about two steps behind everyone else, in
comprehension, in awareness, even in walking. However, he performed
better than average on the Administrators’ tests, and somehow
getting the right numbers counteracted the logic that he wasn’t up
to the job.

He did know, nevertheless, how to find the
colonel so there were points in his favor.

“
Colonel, sorry to
interrupt you at home, but I saw that you were returning, so that
perhaps this would be a—”

“
Come on in, Barnie,”
Perrin said patiently.

Mahrree hid her smirk. The poor man dithered
even more than Beneff had. And he seemed to be the worst around
Colonel Shin.

Chief Barnie waved awkwardly over at Mahrree
as he came in to the gathering room.

“
Colonel, I need some
advice,” he said as he sat down on the edge of the sofa. He slapped
his hands together worriedly, crushing his hat. “The magistrate
said he couldn’t find anything in the record books, I have nothing
in our law guides, and I thought maybe there was some kind of army
precedent—”

“
For what, Chief?” Perrin
asked good-naturedly. He was used to the younger man dancing around
his main point until he felt confident enough to stomp on it.
During their first conversation—which took five minutes to get the
point, after different sidetracks about the weather, the latest
entertainment, and the issue of whether beef was tastier than
veal—Perrin had learned to cut off the chief as quickly as
possible. Direct questions usually forced the poor man to his point
sooner.

“
The farms,
Colonel!”

The
other
problem with Barnie was that
when he felt the penetrating stare of the colonel he often got to
his point
too
quickly, leaving Perrin trying to figure out
what conversational ground he had leaped over in his hurry.

Mahrree looked down at her papers to keep
from chuckling.

“
The farms, as in . . . ?”
Perrin tried to backtrack him a little.

“
People taking them
over!”

“
Who’s taking them
over?”

“
Those working them, of
course!”

From the corner of her eye Mahrree observed
her husband rubbing his chin as he always did when he was looking
for patience stored in his square jaw line. And to his credit, he
always found some. “Let’s narrow this down even more,
son
—”

Oh, it was really bad when Perrin had to
revert to calling Barnie “son” in that tone of voice.

“—
so you went to someone’s
house, right?”

Barnie nodded eagerly.

“
Who’s house?”

“
The Planatards. On the
east side? That was when—”

Perrin held up his hand. “The Planatards all
passed away?”

“
I know!” Barnie nearly
shouted.

Perrin held his hand a tad closer to Barnie’s
mouth. The chief stared at it and pressed his lips closed. “So
someone was working on their farm?”

“
The Meesemen. Had their
two daughters weeding the berries, but that’s not all.”

Perrin put down his hand and nodded to the
chief to continue.

“
They moved in!”

“
The Meesemens into the
Planatards’ house?”

“
Yes! Said it was bigger
than their house!”

Perrin brow furrowed. “Did you talk to them
about this?”

“
Of course! Said it’s not
right, them taking over the house and the field, but they said they
were working it, so why not—”

Perrin held up his hand again, but the chief
wasn’t looking at him as he gestured wildly with his hat in
hand.

“—
So I said, but it’s not
yours, and they said no one owns it now, so it’s ours, and I said
that they already had a farm, but they said not as big as this one,
so I said who will have your old farm, and they said they’d have
both! Well then I said, what if they have relatives that want to
come claim the farm, and they said, well maybe their entire family
died, and why would they want a farm in Edge anyway, and they
wanted it so they just took it! Just like that! I mean, Colonel,
what do we do now? It’s not exactly theft, but it’s not exactly
honest. Is it?”

“
No, Barnie,” Perrin patted
him on the back. “It’s not. Let me mull over the problem and I’ll
have a solution in the morning.”

After the chief left, Mahrree said, “I didn’t
have a chance to tell you yet, but when I went to the market this
afternoon I noticed the family that usually runs the bakery was
also manning the basket stand nearby.”

Perrin rubbed his forehead. “Shem told me
there were reports of goats and hens disappearing from the back
garden of someone’s house. Those reporting the loss were ones that
were about to claim those animals themselves.”

Mahrree sighed. “On my way home I saw a young
couple carrying furniture out of a house whose residents died.”

Perrin groaned. “Is everyone claiming the
dead’s possessions?”

“
Apparently. I guess the
thieving of the boys is as contagious as the pox. Maybe people
think it doesn’t matter if the immediately families aren’t around
to complain.”

“
This is getting out of
hand,” he fumed. “Yes, there are animals and goods available, but
it shouldn’t be for the swiftest hands! Where do people get the
idea that they can just take something?”