A few moments later it opened up to reveal a small, middle-age man blinking sleep out of his narrow black eyes. They popped open when he saw who stood there.
“Come in, come in!” he said quickly, pulling Dormin into his small kitchen. “Are you safe? Have you been seen?”
Dormin smiled at the man who seemed genuinely happy to see him. “I’m fine and safe, Rector Yung. No one recognized me.”
Rector Yung looked up at the ceiling. “Thank you!” he called as if the Creator lived in the attic.
“Who is it, dear?” a woman’s voice came from behind a partially closed door.
“Our wandering lamb, my love!”
“Dormin’s back? Is he all right?” She sounded just as Dormin always thought a mother should: pleasantly worried.
“I am, Mrs. Yung,” he called back. “I’m sorrow to bother you so early.”
“Not at all!” said a cheerful voice. “Let me start breakfast. I’ll be right out.”
“Come in, son. Tell me everything!” Rector Yung led Dormin out of the kitchen and to a small sofa in the gathering room.
Dormin sat down. “I saw him, but Rector, I failed. He wouldn’t even take it.” He pulled his pack off his back and retrieved the copy of The Writings the rector had given him almost a season before.
“Ah, well. We had to try, didn’t we?” The rector took back the book as he sat next to Dormin. He ran his fingers through his black hair speckled with white, as if remembering he hadn’t yet combed it that morning. “I suspected it was a long shot, but like feeding an abandoned puppy, sometimes we have to try again and again until it finally accepts the milk that will sustain it.”
“Well, the puppy hates me,” Dormin exhaled. “Always has. And I didn’t do much to win him over, either. He’s always been so arrogant, so annoying . . .”
Rector Yung patted him kindly on the back. “Siblings have a way of recognizing our most sensitive points, then stabbing at them, don’t they?”
“Yes!” Dormin groused. “I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have let him control me like that, and for a while I did all right. It’s just that . . . I failed. I lost my temper, but I did tell him what you said to tell him.”
“And how did he respond?”
“By showing me the door,” Dormin groaned. “You said it would make me feel better. I must have said the words wrong, because it didn’t work.”
“The words ‘I love you’ do indeed have power, but not the kind I think you’re expecting. Trust me, Dormin—someday you will be glad you said them. At least you’ll know that he heard them once from you.”
“Whatever you say, Rector,” Dormin said wearily. “You’ve been right about most everything else.”
Yung chuckled. “Well, thank you for that enormous display of faith, son.”
“Sorry. So now what do I do?”
Rector Yung looked at him in the muted light of the dawn, the sky beginning to lighten and tinting everything a pale orange, matching the dozens of pumpkins growing around the rector’s small home. “Now, you will eat some breakfast, then take a very long nap in our guest room—”
“I mean, with my life!” Dormin slumped against the sofa. “Rector, I took work as a rubbish collector! Me, the son of King Oren, the descendent of all the kings, removing rubbish!”
“And that was the noblest work anyone in your family line has done in six generations, Dormin,” Rector Yung declared.
“Ha!” Dormin scoffed. “Whatever. I have no skills, Rector. The tutors I had as a boy—I realize now they never told me anything true. Merely more rubbish. Maybe that’s why I was good at removing it. My supervisor even said I had a knack,” he shuddered. “Said in maybe five or six years, with ‘consistent performance’ and ‘continued perseverance’ I could become a head remover,” he said dismally.
Yung swallowed. “Head what?”
“Removing trash, Rector. Not heads. No, I haven’t joined my great grandparents’ killing squads, although who knows—maybe that would have been the only other thing I could be successful at.”
Rector Yung patted him on the arm. “Dormin, you have remarkable skills. You’ve been gone for nearly a season getting by on your wits, finding yourself work, keeping yourself from being discovered, and . . . where was it that you finally found your brother?”
“In the dormitory. Command School,” Dormin said dully. “Stopped by my aunt’s and there was a message for me about him.”
Yung blinked in surprise. “Did you get in to the dorms?”