When the lamp had grown too dim to see by, Chant fed in a few more bitter leaves. After a few moments, as was their way, the worms had turned the leaves to light.
He wasn't good at sleeping, he didn't really know how; there was some trick to it he never could quite figure out. It seemed to come so easily to everyone else, that surrender, but Chant had the sense - had always had the sense - that something was at the door, peeking under it, or gazing hungrily through the crack, waiting for his guard to drop. When the fires were lit on the Big Wall, the yawning started at the edge of the village and traveled toward the center, carried mouth by mouth, he was somehow immune to this force. His mother and father seemed to have a hard time staying awake; maybe they could teach him their secrets.
No, to sleep, to really sleep, he needed his brother.
They shared a bed in the corner of their house, but it should be said that "bed" was a generous name for what it was: a heap of old fishing nets crowned with a tan sheet. "House" might be a little grand also, come to think of it. It had been a place for hanging river trout or a fat, silver-scaled oarsman to cure, before the Eyrewood had led their river away and turned its channel into a road. The bed wasn't big enough for both of them, not really, but when Chant was alone he disappeared into it. His worms had eaten all their leaves now, and the room was dark again, but the effort of extracting himself from the heap didn't seem worth it this time. He raised an arm in the direction of the globe, and let it fall back down.
What he was waiting for was Oram to come back from scouting the outroads. He needed him to be there, still humming the gate-song that had gotten him past the wall in the dead of night, so that Chant could silently form the words:
The Eyrewood, it is done with us, Another day we borrow; We Lookouts have come home again, but we may not, tomorrow.
Everything was the same color at that time of night, but even so, he knew each of them. He knew the Lookout green of the cloak, the yellow sparks in the half-sword's keeper that twinkled like a handful of river gold washing away in a stream. The toasted walnut of the boot. The hen's blood of the kerchief. Oram would fold what could be folded for tomorrow, and then he would fall into bed. Then there would be their wordless negotiation for space, one he typically lost. Then, sleep.
So when he heard the sound of their return, at some distance, a little yawn fought its way out in anticipation.
Peals of laughter and triumph accompanied them, and he heard someone throw their door open so hard that it swing back and hit the house. He rolled himself out into the floor and crept to the doorway just in time to see his mother. His father passed him gruffly on his left, scooting Chant out of the way like you would a chair or a stubborn dog.
There were only five Lookouts at the front of a column of singing men. A lucky number. Running after his mother and father, he read the faces of the boys in front. But he didn't have to, not really. He had wondered, as soon as he'd seen a seven legged beetle that morning, if there would be glory. And there was.
He heard his mother scream beneath the weight of that honor; he could not know it, but it was the same scream that had brought him into the village, when it had rained all night and she could not get warm, and then Oram was born and she forgot what cold was. This scream was only the rest of the first one, it had waited in her for this moment. The other women held her up, singing.
The Lookouts had brought no body with them as they'd been shepherded in, which meant Oram had been given completely to the forest; a doubling of his family's already great honor. They had carried pale boys to a place very near the Middle Fire, the one they all shared. But the ice that had seeped into them was not held in their bones, and so a fire of wood could not ease it. Chant looked at the oldest of the boys, a friend to Oram who was called Keen, but Keen could not meet his eyes for long. He looked back at the flame, now heaped with logs by old men who had been Lookouts themselves, old men who then heaped song and praise on the boys for the same reason. Keen stared hard at the fire, as though it were speaking to him. Hot bowls of their birch porridge were set next to the five boys; perhaps two had the mind to eat. Chant's father had coaxed them into it, a sheepish smile on his face.
The screaming had stopped, her heart sung out, but his mother made a sound now like a saw pulling through a hunk of driftwood. With the other women - or, perhaps guided by them - she came near to Chant at the outer edge of the fire, lifting a half-sword from the folds of her shift. Chant reached for it, or for her; but she withdrew the offer before he could touch it. Heat like a night in the dead of summer passed her face, and anger, which made him feel that he had failed some kind of test. But the mothers closest to her helped to steel her resolve, and the sword raised again. There was a chip - a bite? - out of the half-sword's keeper, right at the tip, and whatever had cut it had gone through the blade also. He had to tug it a bit, like a tooth, and the moment it came free in his hand, the women closed around her and she was gone.
He knew what it meant to take it from her, and she knew what it meant to give it, even better than he did. It might be that his family would give the Eyrewood two sons. He felt ashamed even wishing for it, and his cheeks flushed; this was an earned thing. Back in his room, having wandered with the blade away from the celebration he knew was coming, he could let himself hope.
If Oram had called the half-sword Brother; Chant would call it Oram, though he knew the older boy would not have liked that. His brother was not here, though, and would not be again. Chant burrowed into the sheet of his bed. The hilt, what Oram had called the hilt, was still warm. He placed this warmth on his cheek, and followed it into sleep.
