The Simbul's Gift Read Free Page A

for. Be a good time for you to make yourself useful to Gudnor. I give you leave.”
    Bro ignored him; his future most emphatically did not include Gudnor’s sisters, regardless of their dowries. The silence grew thick, until Dent cut it again.
    â€œI’ve never seen that color before, all fog and twilight. Old Erom’s stud-horse throws blacks and bays, regular as rain, but in all my days, Bro, I’ve never seen a twilight horse.”
    There was a challenge in Dent’s words, for all they were soft-spoken. Unafraid, Bro met his stepfather’s eyes. “I took her—” he admitted, an admission he’d made before and that had resulted in his one beating at Dent’s hands. “I rode her to the Yuirwood and back again. We met no one, man or beast. If Erom’s stud-horse didn’t sire her foal, I don’t know what did.”
    The words weren’t lies, but they weren’t true, either, and Dent was wise enough to ken the subtle differences.
    â€œYou’re a man now, Bro. No good comes from the lies a man tells or the secrets he keeps from his kin.”
    You’re not my kin!
Those were the words battling for Bro’s tongue. In the beginning, when Shali first came to Sulalk to keep house for another man, Bro had thought Adentir was a lack-wit. He knew better now: Dent was a simple man, simple in the way that good, honest men were often simple, simple in a way no son of Rizcarn GoldenMoss could imitate or defeat.
    With the sounds of the mare and foal behind him, Bro saw his stepfather as his mother saw him: as different from Rizcarn as night was from day.
    Probably, Dent would understand. Probably, Dent would light his pipe and listen to anything Bro might say about his father. For all their disdain, villagers were insatiably curious about the Yuirwood and the Cha’Tel’Quessir. Possibly, with a pinch of effort, Bro could have reconciled himself to his mother’s second husband, to Sulalk and farming, to the pure humanity that lay generations deep in his heritage.
    But because reconciliation might have been possible, Bro maintained an arrogance that masked, however inadequately, both loneliness and fear. He strode away from the shed, from his stepfather and the twilight colt.
    â€œWill you be back?” Dent called after him. “What do I tell your mother?”
    Bro hunched his shoulders and kept walking. He’d be back; for two more years he’d be back, training his colt. Then he’d be in the Yuirwood where, if he were lucky, he’d never see the naked sky again.
    He’d been back just once, when he stole the mare. Driven by a persistent dream in which he’d seen the trees and heard his father’s voice, Bro had ridden her to the forest edge, just as he’d confessed. He’d arrived at twilight, beneath a full moon. A deep-wood wind blew from the trees. A sign, he’d thought: an invitation to put farms and human farmers behind him. He pointed the mare into the Yuirwood, felt the dappled moonlight on his skin—or imagined he could. Come morning, though, he was back in the meadow beside a flock of sheep.
    The Yuirwood had rejected him.
    With no one to watch or care, Bro had crumpled into thedewy grass. He’d wept himself sick: his dream had been mere delusion or, worse, deliberate deception; he could hear his father’s laughter in the morning breeze.
    Bro had ridden the mare back to Sulalk. Where else could he go if the forest wouldn’t have him? He’d admitted his folly and taken his punishment: four strokes for thievery, another three for deceit. He’d tried to hate the man wielding the short whip, but there were tears in Dent’s eyes.
    Winter had been cold and dreamless but lately, as the birthing season approached, Bro had begun to dream again. He’d seen the mare’s foal, a twilight colt of the Yuirwood.
    When the birthing shed and Dent’s hurt-puzzled face were behind him,