Hobby by Jane Yolen

1. LIES
    THE BOY BURIED THEM ALL IN A SINGLE GRAVE : dog, woman, and the charred remains of the others. Of the birds in the mews there was nothing left to bury. Nothing except one tiny brass bell from the littlest hawk's jesses. He pocketed this treasure without thinking.
    A single grave. Digging five separate ones would have been too hard for him. At twelve he did not yet have his full strength. But he did it also because he could not bear that they should be apart: Master Robin, Mag, Nell, the two dogs. They were his family, all that he had had for the past four years. A family, he knew, must stay as one. He did not know how he knew it, but he did.
    He would have thrown himself into the pit as well, as penance for not understanding his dream of the bird in flames and rising sooner. The guilt of all their deaths, of the fact that he was still alive, was almost too great to bear. But there was something in him, a kind of sense as strong as that of sight and hearing and smell, that told him to stay alive.
    "And remember," he whispered to himself. By that he meant
remember
Master Robin, who had rescued him from the woods and taught him to read, both the words on a slate and the passage of a hawk across the sky. And remember Mag, who had kept him cosseted and fed. And Nell, who had taught him all the games he had missed as a child. And the dogs who guarded him at night and brought back thrown sticks and licked his face. And the falcons who came to his hand. If he remembered them, they would still be alive, in some odd way. Not alive
beside
him, but
inside
him.
    He said a prayer over the grave, a prayer that took in the fact that though his own world seemed to have ended, the world seemed still to go on. And he spoke words he vaguely recalled in Latin, though he didn't know it was Latin he was recalling. "
In nomine Patris,
" he said.
    And he told himself the first of many lies he would tell that fall. "I will not cry."
    It was a lie before he left the farmsteadings.
    He drove the old dry cow before him, led the great-footed mare. They had been out in the pasture and thus been spared of the fire. He wore his nightshirt tucked into a pair of singed trousers and carried the one pair of boots the fire had not taken, their lacings tied together and slung across his back. They were not his boots; his boots were ash. These were an old pair of Master Robin's boots that had been set out by the door, too dirty for Mag's fresh flooring. He would grow into them in time.
    He had slaughtered the two hens, after gathering their last two eggs, because he couldn't herd them properly and didn't want to leave them for the foxes. And he cooked them on the embers of the house and mews to have food for the long walk ahead. One chicken and the eggs he finished before leaving, for grave digging was hard work and he was famished. The other chicken he put in the leather pouch, along with the little bell.
    He did not know where he was going, exactly, but he could not bear to stay at the ruin of the farm. Once he had gone to a great fair with Master Robin and it had been several days' walk west. If he could find it again, he thought he might sell both cow and horse there and make a new life on his own.
    Chewing thoughtfully on a drumstick, the boy turned to look one last time at the burned-out hulk that had been his home for four years.
That
was when he began to cry, the tears falling quickly.
    But he did not make a sound as he cried. He was afraid if he started, his howling would never stop.
    Â 
    The woods were cold and spattered with sunlight wherever the interfacings of yellowing leaves thinned out. For a while he rode the horse, a big-hearted Dales mare named Goodie. She had a walk better suited to the plow and he had to ride her bareback. Still, he was such a light weight, she hardly noticed him.
    The cow plodded placidly behind the horse. They made an uncommon pair, but so long together in the same barn and pasture, they were as easy with one