“I miss my dog. He wasn’t any trouble.” Matty glanced over to the corner of their homeplace’s plot of land, beyond the garden, to the small grave where they had buried Branch two years before.
“You’re right, Matty. Your little dog was a good companion for many years. It would be fun to have a puppy around.” The blind man’s voice was gentle.
“I could train a dog to lead you.”
“I don’t need leading. Could you train a dog to cook?”
“Anything but beets,” Matty said, making a face as he threw another into the basket.
But when he went in the afternoon to the schoolteacher’s homeplace, Matty found Jean distraught. “Two died last night,” she said. “They took sick. Now there’s only one puppy left, and it’s sick, and the mother as well.”
“How have you tended them?”
Jean shook her head in despair. “Same as I would for my father or myself. Infusion of white willow bark. But the puppy’s too little to drink, and the mother’s too sick. She lapped a bit and then just put her head down.”
“Will you take me to see them?”
Jean led him into the small house, and though he was concerned for the dogs, Matty found himself looking around as they walked through, remembering what the blind man had asked. He noticed the sturdy furniture, neatly arranged, and the bookcases filled with Mentor’s books. In the kitchen, Jean’s baking pans, and the bowls in which she mixed dough, were set out, ready for her wonderful breads to be made.
He saw nothing that hinted of a trade. Nothing silly like a Gaming Machine, nothing frivolous like the soft upholstered furniture decorated with fringe that a foolish young couple down the road had traded for.
Of course there were other kinds of trades, Matty knew, though he didn’t fully understand. He had heard murmurs about them. There were trades for things you didn’t see. Those were the most dangerous trades.
“They’re in here.” Jean opened the door to the storage shed attached to the house at the back of the kitchen. Matty entered and knelt beside the mother dog where she lay on a folded blanket. The tiny puppy, motionless but for its labored breathing, lay in the curve of her belly, the way any puppy would. But a healthy pup would have been wiggling and sucking. This one should have been pawing at its mother for milk.
Matty knew dogs. He loved them. Gently he touched the puppy with his finger. Then, startled, he jerked his hand away. He had felt something painful.
Oddly, it made him think of lightning.
He remembered how he had been instructed, even as a small boy back in his old place, to go indoors during a thunderstorm. He had seen a tree split and blackened by a lightning strike, and he knew that it could happen to a human: the flash and the burning power that would surge through you, looking for a place to enter the earth.
He had watched through the window and seen great fiery bolts split the sky, and he had smelled the sulfurous smell that they sometimes left behind.
There was a man in Village, a farmer, who had stood in the field beside his plow, waiting as dark clouds gathered overhead, hoping the storm would pass by. The lightning had found him there, and though the farmer had survived, he had lost all his memory but for the sensation of raw power that had entered him that afternoon. People tended him now, and he helped with farm chores, but his energy was gone, taken away by the mysterious energy that lived in lightning.
Matty had felt this sensation—the one of pulsating power, as if he had the power of lightning within his own self—in the clearing, on a sunny day with no storm brewing.
He had tried to put it out of his mind afterward, any thoughts of the day it had happened, because it frightened him so and made him have a secret, which he did not want. But Matty knew, pulling his hand from the ailing puppy, that it was time to test it once again.
“Where’s your father?” he asked Jean. He wanted no one to watch.
“He had a meeting to go to. You know about the petition?”
Matty nodded. Good. The schoolteacher was not around.
“I don’t think he really even cares about the meeting. He just wants to see Stocktender’s widow. He’s courting her.” Jean spoke with affectionate amusement. “Can you imagine? Courting, at his age?”
He needed the girl to be gone. Matty thought. “I want you to go to Herbalist’s. Get yarrow.”
“I have yarrow in my own garden! Right beside the door!” Jean replied.
He didn’t need yarrow, not really. He needed her gone. Matty thought quickly. “Spearmint? Lemon balm? Catnip? Do you have all of those?”
She shook her head. “No catnip. If cats were attracted to my garden, the dog would make a terrible fuss.
“Wouldn’t you, poor thing?” she said sweetly, leaning down to murmur to the dying mother dog. She stroked the dog’s back but it did not lift its head. Its eyes were beginning to glaze.
“Go,” Matty told her in an urgent voice. “Get those things.”
“Do you think they’ll help?” Jean asked dubiously. She took her hand from the dog and stood, but she lingered.
“Just go!” Matty ordered.
“You needn’t use a rude tone, Matty,” Jean said with an edge in her voice. But she turned with a flounce of her skirt and went. He barely heard the sound of the door closing behind her. Steeling himself against the painful vibrating shock that he knew would go through his entire body, Matty placed his left hand on the mother dog, his right on the puppy, and willed them to live.
An hour later, Matty stumbled home, exhausted. Back at Mentor’s house, Jean was feeding the mother dog and giggling at the antics of the lively puppy.
“Who would have thought of that combination of herbs? Isn’t it amazing!” she had said in delight, watching the creatures revive.
“Lucky guess.” He let Jean believe it was the herbs. She was distracted by the sudden liveliness of the dogs and didn’t even notice how weak Matty was. He sat leaning against the wall in the shed and watched her tend them. But his vision was slightly blurred and his whole body ached.
Finally, when he had regained a little strength, he forced himself to stand and leave. Fortunately his own homeplace was empty. The blind man was out somewhere, and Matty was glad of that. Seer would have noticed something wrong. He could always feel it. He said the atmosphere in the homeplace changed, as if wind had shifted, if Matty had so much as a cold.
And this was much more. He staggered into his room off the kitchen and lay down on his bed, breathing hard. Matty had never felt so weak, so drained. Except for the frog . . .
The frog was smaller, he thought. But it was the same thing.
He had come across the little frog by chance, in the clearing. He had no reason to be there that day; he had simply wanted to be alone, away from busy Village, and had gone into Forest to get away, as he did sometimes.
Barefoot, he had stepped on the frog, and was startled. “Sorry!” he had said playfully, and reached down to pick the little fellow up. “Are you all right? You should have hopped away when you heard me coming.”
But the frog wasn’t all right, and couldn’t have escaped with a hop. It hadn’t been Matty’s light step that had injured it; he could see that right away. Some creature—Matty thought probably a fox or weasel—had inflicted a terrible wound upon the small green thing, and the frog was almost dead of it. One leg dangled, torn away from the body, held there only by an oozing bit of ragged tissue. In his hand, the frog drew a shuddering breath and then was still.