The White Order Read Online Free PDF Page B

Brental reclaimed his goad. “Ge-ahh!”
       The log cart creaked forward and into the mill, and Cerryl stepped back into the doorway to try to finish getting the sawdust out of the door tracks before Brental brought the cart back.
       Viental half-shrugged, half-flexed his broad shoulders, swinging his arms. “Heavy, that one.” He grinned at Cerryl, yellow teeth flared out of the ginger beard braided below. “Ever think you could lift that, mill boy?”
       Cerryl shook his head.
       “Best you know that. Not one in a score dozen be lifting as I do,”
       “Not one in score of scores as bald, either,” called the lumber wagon driver from where he stood beside the lead horse.
       “Rinfur ... I don't see you handling the logs.”
       “I don't see you handling the teams. You have to be smarter than the horses.”
       “Someday I be strangling you with that tongue.”
       The teamster grinned. “Not while I run faster and ride better.”
       Viental shrugged, then grinned. “And talk longer.”
       “Go see your sister,” suggested Rinfur amiably. “You do whenever you feel like it anyway.”
       “So? No one else lifts as I do.”
       Cerryl and Rinfur exchanged glances. Viental disappeared for days on end, always returning with the explanation that he had had to help his sister. Dylert refused to pay for the missing time but said nothing.
       “That right? Even the mill boy knows that. Right, Cerryl.”
       “No one lifts like you do,” Cerryl agreed.
       “See?”
       Rinfur continued checking the harnesses.
       Cerryl's eyes flicked up to the house and then to the trees beyond, gray-leaved, almost brooding under the hazy clouds and waiting for winter and the snows and cold rains. A gust of wind stirred the leaves that had fallen, lifting a handful, then dropping them.
       The mill boy frowned. Why did the trees drop but half their leaves every fall? No one had been able to tell him-just, “That be the way it is, boy. Always been so.”
       There was too much that had always been so.
       With a gust of wind, Cerryl shivered, not because of the chill but in anticipation of the cold rain he felt would fall before night. His eyes went uphill once more.
       Behind the house, Erhana dipped a bucket into the well. Cerryl smiled. Close up, after all the practice with the scraps of mirrors and the flat sheets of water, he could do without either and catch glimpses of people just beyond his sight.
       He watched, first with his senses, then with his eyes, as Erhana carried a bucket of water from the well up the steps and onto the porch, each step precise.
       “Better start sweeping,” said Viental. “Dylert be coming from the second barn.”
       Cerryl picked up the broom.
     
     

White Order
    VI
     
    Clang! Clang!
       At the first bell, Cerryl peered out from the blankets, shivering. His breath was a white cloud that billowed into the air.
       “Darkness,” he murmured, trying not to move, not to let any of the cold air slip inside his blankets. There were no cracks in the heavy planked walls; the door fit snugly; and the window door was shut tightly-frozen shut, Cerryl suspected. But his cubby room had no hearth, not even a warming pan, though Dylert had sent him back down to bed the night before with two fire-warmed bricks.
       Clang!
       Cerryl clambered out from the blankets and began to shiver. His feet were cold and stiff as he wedged them, one by one, into his boots. Then he struggled into the patched canvas-and-leather jacket Nail had made for him. It was getting harder to tie shut. Had he grown that much over the fall and early winter?
       He lifted the two warming bricks-cold as ice-then tucked them under one arm. He opened his door, stepped outside, and shut it quickly, trying to keep the little heat in the room from escaping. Beside the path that led across to the mill and then up to the house the snow was more than knee deep,