“Dogtooth?” Pondwader whispered. “Dogtooth … ?”
The old man didn’t move a muscle. He appeared to be sound asleep.
When Dogtooth started snoring, Pondwader rose and walked out through the darkness, veering around black blurs of trees and piles of deadfall, to where Musselwhite waited. She had thrown out their bedding beneath the spreading limbs of a large pine. As he neared, she held the top blanket open and slid over, making him room. Seedpod lay a short distance away, snoring. Pondwader slipped off his sandals, crawled in beside Musselwhite, and hugged her fiercely. It comforted him to feel her body against his, to hear her steady breathing.
“Are you all right?” she asked softly, as if she sensed his fear.
Pondwader buried his face in the wealth of her hair. It smelled sweetly of pine needles. “So long as you are safe, I will be content. You are all that matters, my wife.”
But he couldn’t keep the quaver from his voice.
Musselwhite stroked his back long into the night, until he fell asleep in her arms.
Eighteen
Diamondback lay in his grandfather’s shelter, his back supported by a pile of blankets, playing cat’s cradle with Thorny Boy. The six-summers-old child sat cross-legged at Diamondback’s side, his face a mask of concentration as he studied the complicated lacing of strings that Diamondback held before him.
“I don’t know which ones to pull,” Thorny Boy said plaintively. “Tell me.” His brown headband did not keep the unruly tangle of black locks from falling over his eyes. With a quick swipe of the hand, he shoved them back.
Diamondback smiled. He extended the cradle and waggled his thumb. “First, you’ll want to grab this one. Then—”
Thorny Boy lunged for the crossed strings and Diamondback jerked the cradle away, which drew a frustrated whine from his little brother. Thorny Boy slammed his fists into the floor mat. “Why did you do that?”
“Because,” Diamondback said, “you make the same mistake every time we play this game. Now, listen!”
Thorny Boy’s mouth puckered into a pout. “Hurry.”
Diamondback smiled. “You have to pull both crosses out at the same time, then up and away. After that, you have to pull the crosses over the edge of the cradle and take them under the bottom, bringing your fingers up here … and here … or the whole weave will fall apart. Remember? That’s what you did wrong last time. That’s why we can’t get any further in the game. If you don’t go slow, Thorny Boy, you’ll never learn to finish this series of patterns and you’ll never be good enough to go on to the game of Precocious Cat’s Cradle—which is much harder. You’ll be stuck here, at the beginning, for the rest of your life.”
Thorny Boy groaned, “I know, I know. You tell me this every time!”
“I’m trying to get you to think.”
“I am thinking!” Thorny Boy sucked his bottom lip in and clamped his teeth down on it, while he attempted the feat. He pinched the two patches of string, pulled—stopped momentarily to frown—then pulled the crosses over the edge of the cradle and brought his fingers up through the bottom. Diamondback let him take the string, and as Thorny Boy pulled it out, the next beautiful pattern in the game emerged: four interlocking squares, filled by diamonds.
Thorny Boy shrieked in glee. “I did it! Look!”
Diamondback laughed. “I told you. You just had to think about what you were doing.”
“Mother is going to be so proud of me when she returns!”
“Yes,” Diamondback said as he playfully punched his brother in the shoulder. Thorny Boy fell backward, laughing, and had to take quick action to keep the string on his fingers. Diamondback added, “She will be proud of you, and so will her new husband—I hope.”
Thorny Boy grinned as he studied the pattern he’d created, and Diamondback let his gaze drift over the village, seeing all the familiar faces of his clan, hearing their warm voices as they spoke to each other, and wondered how a Lightning Boy would fit into this tightly woven group. The scent of cooking mussels and maypop rose on the evening breeze. Adults murmured and children giggled as they gathered around their evening fires. Windy Cove Clan possessed more knots and twisted strands than a game of Precocious Cat’s Cradle. Diamondback hoped the Lightning Boy would be happy here—though, Diamondback admitted, ever since his mother told him she might marry again, he himself had been undergoing fits of depression and anger … and then when the news came that his father still lived, those feelings had just grown worse.
He had begged Ashleaf to send a messenger to Heartwood Village so his mother could stop the marriage—but the elder had refused, saying they had too few people left as it was. They could spare no one. And, besides, they needed this alliance.