Tabula Rasa

Chapter 43

Aedic had eaten everything Petta had offered him for supper and the hunger had almost gone away for a while. Now she wanted the unbrother in bed and out from under her feet. For once, Aedic carried him behind the partition without arguing. He took the unbrother’s boots off and slid below the blankets with him. Petta wanted to know why Aedic didn’t do it like that every night. See? There was no need make a fuss about it, was there? Aedic, who was not the one making a fuss, took no notice. He cuddled the wriggly unbrother in the darkness, even though everything was mostly the unbrother’s fault for making too much noise and getting on Matto’s nerves and scaring away the fish so there was a fight.

In the end the wriggling stopped and the soft breathing told him the unbrother was asleep.

Aedic did not sleep. Instead he curled up tight and poked his fingers into his ears, trying to shut out the sound of the unbrother snuffling and the adults talking about the boy who had been kidnapped. But it was hard to keep his fingers rammed far enough into his ears all the time, and when the sounds drifted back he could hear his aunts still going on about how terrible it was. Who would do such a thing? And he thought, I know who would do it. I said he would come and get Branan, and he did. I made it happen.

It was not really the fault of the unbrother. Aedic himself was the one who had told them Branan’s name, even though he knew Matto would never keep it quiet. When the man found out that Branan knew nothing after all, he would cut Branan’s throat and bury him in the wall too, and then start hunting for the one who really had seen what happened.

Aedic.

He pulled up the blankets where the unbrother had thrown them off, and put a hand on one warm chubby leg. The unbrother was all right when he was asleep. Sometimes even when he was awake. When he laughed, it made you want to laugh too. He was all right when Aedic threw him up in the air and he shouted, “Again! Do it again!”

Aedic wished he was still two winters old like the unbrother. The unbrother didn’t have to know anything about dead bodies and keeping secrets and telling lies and getting other people into terrible trouble. He didn’t know about the man who would murder Branan and find Matto and then come after Aedic and bury him in the wall. All he had to do was run about and shout and try not to fall in the fire or break things.

If only Mam were here. He could have told her all about it, and she would have known what to do. He might as well tell the dog as tell Da. He could hear Da now, over by the hearth, saying the things everyone had heard a hundred times before. You couldn’t trust the Romans and you couldn’t trust your own people, either. One of the uncles told Da to give it a rest: This wasn’t about him, it was about a missing kid, and why didn’t he think of somebody else for a change? And Da said, “It’s all right for you! They didn’t steal your farm!”

Aedic stuffed his fingers tighter into his ears and put his head down under the blankets until he could hardly breathe.

By the time he came up for air, the argument had stopped. He could hear the scrape of the fire being banked up, and the musical trickle of wee into the night bucket. One of the aunts said something about an early start, and the uncle said they would be searching over by Broken Crags in the morning, and the aunt said again that it was a terrible thing, and how must that poor family be feeling, going to bed knowing their boy was out somewhere in the cold?

Aedic wished everybody would stop talking about it. It was as if they had heard about something exciting and they all wanted to be part of it.

It wasn’t exciting. It was a snake that writhed inside your stomach and hissed that something very, very bad had happened, it was going to get worse, and it was all your fault.