Story: Fellyans (part thirteen)

Fellyans

(part thirteen)

Vincent looked at her, and she inched up a defiant chin until she’d met his eyes. He was sorry, she read. You stood idle while I made my bed, so now you have to let me lie on it, crossed her mind…

“When did you last hear from your parents?”

“Not since I came away. We wanted that, you know it.”

“Langham wouldn’t have thought of giving them a little cottage, on one of his hills?”

Coral returned Vincent a long silence. “They were loyal to their king in those days. And their king tended to ruffle his feathers over ‘taking charity’.”

He thrust a hand in his hair. The fat ring denoting his sovereignty snagged, and Coral watched the infatuation of her girlhood getting the worst of it, at battle with himself.

She left her chair to perform the extraction. “Quiet. Be still. There!”

“Coral. I don’t think you can have heard the news, if you haven’t been in touch. We’re gone, all of us.”

“Gone. What does that even mean?”

“The Queen’s soldiers. They’ve razed the huts. We were marched to the border, us who wouldn’t take the oath. They put us over and told us to fend for ourselves. Your parents, your cousin Callow and your cousin Gilp… And all the Scrubbs, the Mudders, the Twiggins, Half-nosed Eldo, Rusty the Rough Sleeper, Widow Shingles, Old Nanny Stodd. Who would have died from the trudge, but we happened on that sprite, Nightfeather…”

“Marshhawk?”

“Who found a spell to turn her into a holly.”

“Do you call that a good thing?”

The hand made for the hair. Coral in haste stayed it, and Vincent, deprived of expression, flailed a moment. “Why not? A holly, a fern, a toadstood… All of us, Coral! The ones we care about and the ones we don’t! Hutterers are only a people now, not a nation.”

“But you didn’t stay! To look after your people.”

“She says ‘your’,” Vincent muttered.

“Our. My parents. My cousins.” She paused, conceding: “I don’t much like Gilp.”

“My people gave me the boot. Does it please you? The third day, we’d got down to chewing odd bits of leather…those that had shoes… It was Breen Mudder stood up before the others and said, vote him out! We’ll have a government of our own! And I said, you can’t vote me out when you didn’t vote me in, in the first place. Which ended up not the point I’d hoped to make. They had me sit and stay, and were off trudging. Those stragglers we’d picked up, the laundrywoman and the sprite, are the only two to stick by me.”

“You’d endeared yourself, no doubt.”

14

Fellyans

Fellyans (conclusion)

(2021, Stephanie Foster)