Chapter 4: Moon Dog

Duncan put his hand out for it, and then stopped with his hand still out, because the moon had moved.

It had been over Alder Mountain since supper, up above the third pine on the ridge, small and white and going nowhere at all. He had stood at the corner of the house with a stalk of timothy going soft in the side of his mouth and watched it long enough to be sure of that.

Now it was down in the yard.

It did not fall and it did not drift. It came down slow, without any hurry in it, and it gathered — he watched it gather — into a ring in the air over the glass in his father’s hand. Not on the glass. Above it, a finger’s width above it, thin as a thread, and holding still.

He rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. It stayed.

He had seen a thousand moons and never once seen one do anything. This one had come down off the mountain and stood in the air over a thing his father had just called a piece of junk out of the river, and it was the finest moonlight he had seen in thirteen years.

“Pa,” he said. He said it quietly, because it looked like something a loud voice would break.

His father’s eyes came off the ring fast, like a hand jerked back from a hot stove, and went somewhere else. Both his hands were shaking. He turned the glass over and pressed it flat into Duncan’s chest with both palms, hard enough to move Duncan back a step, and then bent down with his mouth next to Duncan’s ear.

“Go inside. Put that where nobody sees it. Tell your brothers to bring the blades out to the door.” His voice was not loud. There was nothing in it at all. “And not a word in the house. Not to your mother, not to the little one.”

“Blades to the door,” Duncan said. “And put it—“

His father looked at him.

“Go.”

Duncan had never seen that face on him before. He had seen his father shout, and he had seen him go quiet, which was worse, but he had never seen his eyes go narrow and stay narrow. His father’s head turned an inch toward the dark past the wall and stopped there and did not move again — the way a hawk on a rail goes still, because it has already picked the thing it means to have.

Duncan’s legs would not do what he told them. He got the glass down inside his shirt, flat against his ribs, and went. He could not remember afterward when he had chewed the timothy stalk through.

Gareth lay on the bed with his boots on, which nobody in the house had bothered to argue about for years, and Corwin was up against the headboard with his hands behind his head and had been quiet long enough that there was something on the way.

Then the door opened and Duncan came in sideways and shut it behind him with both hands, softly, and that by itself was wrong: Duncan had never shut a door quietly in his life.

“Corwin. Gareth.” That much came out. “Pa says come out to the door. With the—“

Then his voice went, and he stood there with his hand still on the latch, and he was going to cry, and everybody in the room could see it coming.

Corwin was off the bed before the sentence was finished. He took Duncan by both shoulders and held him, and he was gentle about it, which only made it worse.

“Is he hurt? Did he say anything else? Duncan. Did he say what it is?”

Gareth sat up and pulled the box out from under the bed. Two blades in it, dry and oiled, wrapped in a length of old blanket. He took the coat down off its peg and the staff from the corner behind the door. He laid the staff on the boards where his hand would find it, and put the long blade and the coat into Corwin’s arms.

“Somebody’s come,” he said.

He did not say it like a question, and he did not look at either of them while he said it. He looked at the window, where there was nothing in it but the yard.

Corwin held the coat a moment without putting it on. “Who?”

“He didn’t say who. He said blades.”

“That doesn’t mean—“

“You’ve got the door,” Gareth said.

Corwin looked at him a while longer. Then he gave it up, and put the coat on, and did it up to the throat, and took the long blade and carried it flat against his leg. He looked at Duncan once on his way out — Gareth could not tell what it was meant to be — and then he went.

Gareth picked the staff up off the boards. “You take Mother and the little one to the back room. Both of them, and shut the door. Don’t come out for the door, and don’t come out for anything else.”

“Are you—“

“Go on.”

Duncan went. Gareth pinched the wick out between his fingers, which left the room with nothing in it but dark and the smell of lamp, and pulled the door to behind him.

Gareth’s father stood at the edge of the yard with his back to the house and looked into the melon field. He did not turn around when the two of them came up behind him.

Under the cart the big yellow dog lay with its chin on its paws. Gareth passed close enough to touch it, and it raised its eyes and put its head back down. It had not made a sound since supper. He could not think of a night it had not found something to bark at.

His father put a hand out sideways and did not look around, and Corwin laid the long blade across it without a word.

“Around the house,” he said. “Both ways. All the way to the wall and back again. I want to know there’s nobody standing in my yard but us.”

Corwin said, “I’ll take the front.”

“Take it, then.”

Gareth went the back way, fast, the staff low in his hand and the grass cold through his boots. The pond was black. The wall stood where the wall stood, and the orchard fence stood, and the back door was shut and the little window over it was dark, and there was nobody in the grass and nobody down along the fence line, and he went the whole way around it without hurrying over the part he did not want to look at, because the man who had taught him anything worth knowing would have known if he had hurried.

Then he came back around the front of the house and stopped at the corner with his hand on the boards.

Corwin was at the door where he had been put. Beyond him the wall stood empty and the front of the house stood empty, and there was nobody in the yard but the two of them.

His father was in the melon field.

He had walked in off the yard without hurrying, down the second row, the same walk he took into that field every morning, and the leaves had closed behind him and gone over his knees. Then he stopped. He bent at the waist and put both hands down into the vines, and came up out of them holding a man.