Messenger by Lois Lowry Page A

dangerous for the blind man to return. Those who had tried to kill him, who had left him for dead years before, thought they had succeeded. They would have slain him instantly had he found his way back. But Matty, a master of stealth, had brought him secretly, at night, to meet his daughter for the first time. He watched from a corner of the room as Kira recognized the broken stone that Seer wore as an amulet, and matched it to her own, fitting it to the fragment given to her by her dying mother. Matty saw the blind man touch his daughter’s face, to learn her, and he watched in silence as they mourned Kira’s mother together, their hearts connected by the loss.
    Then, when darkness came the next night, he had led the blind man back again. But Kira would not come. Not then.
    â€œSomeday,” she had told Matty and her father when they begged her to return with them to Village. “I’ll come someday. There’s time still. And I have things to do here first.”
    â€œI suppose there’s a young man,” the blind man had said to Matty as they traveled back without her. “She’s the age for it.”
    â€œNah,” Matty had said scornfully. “Not Kira. She has better stuff on her mind.
    â€œAnyways,” he had added, referring to her twisted leg, “she has that horrid gimp. No one can marry iffen they got a gimp. She’s lucky they didn’t feed her to the beasts. They wanted to. They only kept her ’cause she could do things they needed.”
    â€œWhat things?”
    â€œShe grows flowers, and—”
    â€œHer mother did, too.”
    â€œYes, her mum taught her, and to make the colors from them.”
    â€œDyes?”
    â€œYes, she dyes the threads and then she makes pictures from them. No one else can do it. She has like a magic touch, they say. And they want her for that.”
    â€œShe would be honored in Village. Not only for her talent but for her twisted leg.”
    â€œTurn here.” Matty took the blind man’s arm and guided him to the right side of a turning in the path. “Watch the roots there.” He noticed that a root lifted itself and stabbed slightly at the man’s sandaled foot. It made him very nervous, guiding on this return trip, because he could feel, being familiar with it, that Forest was giving small Warnings to the blind man. He would not be allowed to come through again.
    â€œShe’ll come when she’s ready,” he reassured Kira’s father. “And till then, I’ll go back and forth between.”
    But it had been two years since he had last seen Kira.
    Â 
    Matty emerged from Forest with a stumble, blinking at the sudden sunshine, for he had been in the dim thickness of trees for many days now and felt that he had almost forgotten light.
    He fell on the path and sat there panting, slightly dizzy, with Frolic pawing worriedly at his leg. In the past he had always—what would the word be?
strolled
—from Forest, sometimes whistling. But this was different. He felt that he had been expelled. Chewed up and spat out. When he looked back toward the trees, in the direction he had come, it seemed inhospitable, unwelcoming, locked down.
    He knew he would have to reenter Forest and return by those same dark paths that now seemed so ominous. He would have to lead Kira through, to the safety of her future with her father. And he knew suddenly that it would be his last journey in that place.
    There was not much time left, and he would not be able to linger here, to look up his boyhood pals, to reminisce with them about their pranks, or to brag a little about his status now. He usually did that when he came. He would not even have time to say good-bye to the stranger his brother had become.
    Village would close in three weeks from the time of the proclamation. Matty had calculated very carefully. He had counted the days of his journey, adding in the extra days it took for his side trips