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

by Trish Mercer

  Mahrree kept her hand firmly over her mouth as she heard, “Oh, I see you all right. All of you. Please, do tell me,” Perrin said in his most condescending tone, “what mortal threat is there associated with lobbed tomatoes? What terror of vegetables is there that would cause each of these men to NOT pursue their responsibilities?”

  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 br
ight, 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?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Magistrate Wibble has been eager to do something in public ever since the memorial service in Planting Season. He wants to lead? Then he’s going to lead this village!”

  “Lead them the way you think they should be lead?” Mahrree guessed.

  “Well, of course. Tomorrow night no entertainments but a mandatory meeting. This ‘reallocation of goods’ ends now!”

  Chapter 22 ~ “You aren’t people, you’re vultures!”

  It was the 1st Day of Harvest 336 when Perrin sat on the platform again. It had been nearly five moons since he was there for the memorial service when it seemed the entire world chanted “General Shin.”

  But tonight there was a different feel in the amphitheater, much like the times he’d caught a thieving boy, forced him into a chair, and set in to yelling at him about his duty and responsibility to the world. It never worked. The boys would glare up at him with hardened eyes. Perrin had always been amazed that so few parents were upset with their children’s thieving, but now he understood why as he stared at Edge.

  The majority of Edge stared back at him, suspecting that he was about to ruin their fun and profit.

  It didn’t help matters much that Wibble was completely massacring the very carefully worded speech Perrin had prepared for him. How in the world did Wibble become magistrate anyway?

  In the most accommodating way possible Wibble was trying to suggest to Edgers that perhaps the residents should consider the feelings of the relatives that may still be around, and that maybe messages could be sent to all parts of the world looking for relatives, and then, if no one responded, then perhaps auctions could be held, or maybe even some of the properties donated to less fortunate families, or to some of the refugees from Moorland who still didn’t have places of their own . . .

  That’s when the crowd grew ugly. Perrin could feel the tension growing in the amphitheater and wished he’d had more than fifty soldiers stationed for security. Many in the audience rose to their feet, shouting.

  “Wibble, are you telling us we don’t deserve what we get?”

  “Why should I give up something I’ve worked for?”

  “Moorland survivors? Just how much longer are we supposed to tolerate them? Let them go somewhere else!”

  “This is unfair!”

  Colonel Shin had tried to stay squarely in his seat like an appropriate authority, but his shock at their reaction wouldn’t let him. He shifted in his chair, trying not to leap to his feet.

  His plan was perfectly reasonable. That Wibble presented it so ineptly certainly didn’t help the mood of the crowd, which was more ravenous than Perrin anticipated. The magistrate cowered under the weight of all the protests, se
nt a look of appeal to Colonel Shin, and Perrin was on his feet in an instant.

  If he worried about another General Shin rally erupting, he didn’t need to. While most of the villagers silenced and sat down at the sight of the colonel, several men continued to stand, their arms folded in challenge.

  Perrin waited ten long, agonizing seconds before speaking. “Almost a year and a half ago I saw this village pool together all their resources to save each others’ lives. Each of your homes, barns and shops were damaged. Each of your families faced food shortages. But each of you made sure no one suffered. We all lost weight last year, but as I look around I don’t see anyone starving today.”

  A few snickers rippled through the crowd as Colonel Shin’s eyes paused on rotund Mr. Trum. He was one of the few who continued to stand, his folded arms resting on his great belly. He likely had many plans that Colonel Shin just may see fit to destroy, and he wasn’t about to let that happen.

  “Just this morning I read a report about how much property had been ‘acquired’ during the past few nights. I’m sure those things weren’t taken by our precious sons, which leads me to believe that someone else is picking up where the boys and the Guarders have left off!”

  A few people squirmed in their seats, but not as many seemed to feel as guilty as the colonel had hoped.

  “I have also read a report about how many lands, houses, and shops have been snatched from the dead!” His voice boomed across the amphitheater.

  A couple of the standing men sat down. A few still remained, including Trum.

  Perrin took a few deep breaths to regain his composure. “I can’t help but wonder, why? Our crops will be excellent this year. We’ll have more than we expected to store. The herds have rebounded, trade’s come back, the shops are rebuilt, and people are buying goods. We have no more threat of attack from the Guarders, thievery is down, or it was—” an irritated edge entered to his tone. He shook his head in disappointment. “I’ve lived here for seventeen years now, and I’d predict that this will be one of our most prosperous years. Yet that’s not good enough for you.”