Jackaroo

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I don’t know. It’s not easy, being an Earl,” he told her. She knew enough to suspect just how hard it would be.

  Once away from Hildebrand’s City, Gwyn could uncover her head. No one would know her. The Earl’s servants avoided her, except for occasional pitying glances, and his retinue never noticed her. To anyone else, she and Burl were just a part of the new Earl Sutherland’s entourage, which made its stately way to the cities of his own lands, where he accepted the fealty of his Lords.

  They had only themselves for company, she and Burl, but even so they did not speak much. The cart driver’s ears could hear, or those sleeping close by. Burl played his pipe as the slow days passed, some bringing sunshine, some rain. They saw young crops in the southern fields, and burned holdings, and whole farms where a battle had turned the soil to mud. They saw men and women scarred by famine and battle, and children too. For all that, the people who came out to cheer the Earl seemed glad, with peace upon them.

  The last city was walled, like Earl Northgate’s City, a border fortification. As they had waited for the Lords’ feasting within to come to a close, so that the Earl would return to his camp outside the city walls, Gwyn had known it was time to tell Burl that he might leave her now. Burl had his gold pieces. The land was at peace. He would be able to make a safe journey back to the Inn. She did not like to think of how much she would miss his company. However, only the forest waited beyond these walls, and beyond that the unknown kingdoms to the south where her own destination lay.

  “It’s time you turned back,” she had told him. She still leaned on her crutch, even though they were alone by the broad river, which sparkled under moonlight.

  “Aye and I think not,” Burl answered.

  “But Burl—you said it would not be long,” she reminded him. “You said it would not be for long.”

  He wasn’t looking at her. His eyes studied the surface of the running water. “Did you ever think, Innkeeper’s daughter, how very short life is?”

  “You’re not answering me,” she pointed out.

  He didn’t respond.

  The next day, instead of heading back east to his own city, the Earl led them into the forest, taking only Gaderian and two of his retainers. That day Gwyn walked upright, having discarded her crutch at the Earl’s bidding. The wound had healed to angry red skin that was not even sensitive to the touch anymore. It felt good to walk free again. They slept out that night under trees. This was an old forest, filled with life of its own, where the wind whispered through heavy branches. They traveled for a second day, but on the morning of the third, the Earl and Gaderian told Burl and Gwyn to mount up behind them, and they left even those two retainers behind.

  The path they followed led up to cleared fields, neglected and overgrown with brambles. A two-story stone house, with stone barns behind it, faced across a low meadow to the river. The forest wrapped the holding around.

  The Earl led them through the house, with Gaderian running ahead, from room to room. The house had two bedrooms above and four rooms below, and a privy inside on the ground floor, next to the largest bedroom. The smallest room downstairs was lined with open cupboards in which books stood and flat maps were kept. Gwyn tried not to look too greedily at that room, and she tried not to wonder at the Earl’s reasons for showing them over this abandoned house. The kitchen hearthstone was cold, and the big room beyond that was filthy with dust and cobwebs. The barns held stalls and hay for animals to eat. It was curious, Gwyn thought—the holding was not so much abandoned as neglected, as if it had once been kept ready for visitors who had long since ceased to arrive.

  “These are borderlands,” the Earl said to Gwyn as they all stood again in front of the empty house. “This is a hunting lodge that belongs to me. It’s been empty for—” He looked at his son.

  “Years and years, since I was a boy,” Gaderian answered.

  “I would have you live here, as lodgekeepers,” the Earl announced in his distant voice.

  “But Father, I told you,” Gaderian started to say, then stopped himself at the expression on his father’s face. Gwyn herself would have stopped speaking at that glance. This was the man, she reminded herself, who had fled the intrigues of his father’s court to put himself under the protection of the King, letting his brothers slaughter one another in their greed. Now he gathered up their inheritance for his own. He was also the man, she reminded herself, who had ridden as Jackaroo, for the sake of the people. He was a man to respect and fear and trust.

  “I would have lodgekeepers such as you,” the Earl said. “I would have people I can trust at the borders of my lands.”

  Gwyn thought she could manage the house and a garden and some animals to feed herself. Service to the Lords would be her lot then, and it could have been a harder lot, she knew. It was Burl who wanted to refuse.

  “Merchants travel the river, and our trade with the kingdoms to the south will increase. An Inn here will prosper, in time.”

  “Aye, it might that,” Burl agreed, with doubt in his voice.

  Gaderian subsided, with a grin at Gwyn.

  “Earl Northgate told me a story,” Gaderian’s father said, looking at Burl, not Gwyn, “of his Steward, and Jackaroo. He had to force the tale from the Steward, but he finally got it all out of the man. When I heard it, I thought of the Innkeeper’s daughter. Who had saved my son.”

  Gwyn didn’t dare to look at the Earl or to speak. She couldn’t be sure if the Earl was threatening Burl, or explaining himself. “As you wish, my Lord,” Burl said.

  “I will send you supplies, food, drink, seeds, and animals.”

  “But won’t people ask questions if you do?” Gwyn protested.

  “The people do not question the Lords,” he reminded her.

  And the Lords cared nothing for what people might say, Gwyn knew. Well, neither did she. “I thank you,” she said.

  “I would pay you for these, my Lord,” Burl said. The Earl drew himself up, displeased. “Aye, it will be your own gold I pay you with,” Burl reminded him. “The house is gift enough.”

  “But Burl,” Gwyn started to say.

  The Earl cut her off. “All right then, lad. And I will marry you before we leave you.”

  “But you can’t,” Gwyn said quickly. “I can’t.” She must not force Burl, who had been so good a friend, to be exiled from his own land. What kind of thanks would that be to him?

  “Aye, Gwyn, you can,” Burl spoke at her side. “My Lord, if we could step aside?”

  He pulled Gwyn after him around a corner of the house where they could not be overheard.

  “You know Da made the announcement.” She turned on him angrily with the only excuse she could think of.

  “When I thought you were lost in the blizzard,” Burl told her, “it seemed a long time left that I must live. A long time, and the season would always be winter.” His dark eyes held hers.

  Gwyn was dumbfounded. “Why do you tell me that?” she said stupidly.

  “I thought you would ask.”

  He had said exactly that to her, once before, she remembered, hearing in his calm voice the echo of his earlier words. At the fair it was, when he told her how the man had come to hang above the battlements. And Gwyn herself had thought that day, that if one man had seen the hanging body, as she had, then that man she might marry; but she had not even noticed at the time that Burl was that man. Well then, she must keep her word, she thought. What good fortune that she could keep her word so gladly.

  “But my hair is so ugly,” she said.

  “Would you have your hair keep us from our years together?” he asked her, his voice—for once—not calm.

  She shook her head, feeling oddly shy with him.

  “Then will you have me, Innkeeper’s daughter?”

  She nodded her head, her eyes on the ground, her cheeks warm, her heart rising up in gladness and gratitude. It was . . . more than she hoped for of her life, that such a man as Burl would ask for her.

  She di
d not know how to tell Burl this. “Will we be southerners then?” she asked him.

  “Outlanders, more likely.”

  “Yes. Well, that’s fine,” she said, not recognizing the sound of her own voice.

  Burl led her back to the Earl, who said the words over them and then mounted his horse.

  “My Lord,” Burl said, calm again, to the mounted man. “I would not have my children be servants, unless they choose.”

  “Well, Gaderian?” the Earl asked his son, in that cold and distant voice.

  “There’s land to be cleared,” Gaderian answered quickly. “Holdings could be made from the land, and a village. Empty forest earns no tithes,” he reminded his father. “We’ll come back, sometime,” Gaderian promised. “For the hunting.”

  “I’ll welcome you,” Gwyn answered him.

  “She’s as good as you deserve, lad,” the Earl said to Burl. “I have often thought how much I heard myself talking during those cold hours. I waited for rumors to reach me, but those rumors I never heard. I have wondered how to pay my debt to you.”

  So Burl had known all along. After the two Lords had ridden off, she had turned to Burl crossly. “You might have told me.”

  “Aye, I might have,” he agreed.

  Gwyn had laughed aloud then at his answer, and she laughed again, but softly, remembering it. The river ran singing before her, and she thought they would make a boat, and she thought there would always be fish in the water if she could learn to catch them. She thought how much there was to do and how the work would suit her, and how the holding with its deep hearthstone would suit her, house, fields, forest, and river; and the man, too; the man especially. She thought it was past time to return to the house behind her, the Inn, and she wondered what they would call it. The Falcon’s Wing, she thought; if Burl agreed, that name would do.

  Burl appeared beside her. “Aye, Gwyn,” he greeted her.

  “Aye, Burl,” she answered, having no words to tell her heart.

  While the light held, they stood there together. Then they turned to go back. “But there will be no more Jackarooing about for you, lass,” he told her, as they crossed the long grass of the meadow.

  “What makes you think I would want to?”

  He didn’t bother to answer that.

  “I know my luck,” she spoke seriously.

  “Sometimes I think we make our own luck. Think you? But you will tell me about all that happened, won’t you? I’d like you to tell me. Before you forget the time.”

  “I won’t forget the time,” Gwyn told him. But even as she said that, she could hear in her imagination how she would tell the tales to Burl, and how they would change in the telling.

  Cynthia Voigt won the Newbery Medal for Dicey’s Song, the Newbery Honor for A Solitary Blue, and was a National Book Award Finalist for Homecoming—all part of the beloved Tillerman Cycle. She is also the author of many other celebrated books for middle-grade and teen readers, including the Tales of the Kingdom series and Izzy, Willy-Nilly. She received the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 and the Katahdin Award in 2003 for her work in literature. She lives in Maine. Visit her online at CynthiaVoigt.com.

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  Also by Cynthia Voigt

  The Tale of Birle

  The Tale of Oriel

  The Tale of Elske

  THE TILLERMAN CYCLE

  Homecoming

  Dicey’s Song

  A Solitary Blue

  The Runner

  Come a Stranger

  Sons from Afar

  Seventeen Against the Dealer

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 1985 by Cynthia Voigt

  Jacket illustration copyright © 2015 by Adam S. Doyle

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  The text for this book is set in Dolly.

  This Atheneum Books for Young Readers edition May 2015

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Voigt, Cynthia, author.

  [Jackaroo]

  The tale of Gwyn / Cynthia Voigt.

  pages cm. — (Tales of the kingdom ; 1)

  Originally published under the title Jackaroo. New York : Atheneum, 1985.

  Summary: In a time of winter famine, the People tell the legend of Jackaroo, a masked outlaw who comes at night to aid the destitute and helpless, and sixteen-year-old Gwyn, the innkeeper’s daughter, begins a quest to find the truth behind the legend—or maybe start a legend of her own.

  ISBN 978-1-4814-2179-9 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-2180-5 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-4814-4564-1 (eBook)

  1. Heroes—Juvenile fiction. 2. Famines—Juvenile fiction. 3. Quests (Expeditions)—Juvenile fiction. 4. Adventure stories. [1. Heroes—Fiction. 2. Famines—Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.V874Tal 2015

  813.54—dc23

  [Fic]

  2014044152