Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories

by Naomi Kritzer

  “Was he executed?” Tomas asked.

  “Oh, no. He repented fully and was spared the fire. But he was left unable to play his instrument, and returned to his home village.”

  Tomas shook his head. I thanked the Lord and the Lady that he hadn’t looked at me. I was sure that my face must be the color of chalk, and my hands were shaking too badly to play my instrument. Marietta calmly went through the rest of the papers, handed them to Tomas, and wished him a good day. “I will see you this evening,” she said. “I hope you’ve got your costume ready.”

  “Oh yes,” he said with a smile, and took his leave.

  Tonight. Of course. The festival.

  Marietta turned to me with a gentle smile. “Why, Domenico, you’re looking quite ill.”

  “Am I?” My voice came out in a stammer, in a squeak.

  “I’m so sorry, we were discussing your good friend right in front of you, weren’t we? I quite forgot you were here. Well, of course, Fedele business is entirely confidential, and I trust that you won’t discuss this with anyone. Why don’t you go back to your room and rest up. It would be a shame if your illness caused you to miss the festivities tonight.”

  I stumbled back to my room and dropped the violin on my bed beside my costume. Nolasco’s offer was sounding better and better, but as I tried to gather my wits, there was a knock at the door. The errand-boy had a message from Falco—directions to the street corner where the Fedeli would have their party.

  I can’t go, I thought. I can’t look him in the eye, not after what I know.

  I can’t not go, I thought a moment later. It’s too late to leave for Verdia today; the party is already underway. I’d need to buy food, and sturdy boots and clothes for the walk . . . Even as I thought out my excuses to myself, I knew I could find what I needed, if I tried. No. I was going to the festival, because I wanted to see Falco, one last time.

  ***

  AS THE THIN midwinter sunshine faded to twilight outside my window, I shaved very carefully, painted my lips and cheeks, and put on the velvet dress, filling out the bosom with unspun wool. As I reached for the wig, I paused and looked at my wardrobe. I still had that black silk robe that Falco had loaned me. It was missing the sigil, but in truth, it was the robe people saw first. A Fedele priestess, I thought. I’ll dress as a priestess. I pulled the robe on over the dress: the generous cut of the robe completely covered the blue velvet. I set the wig in place and stepped to my mirror. Beautiful, I thought, looking at myself. Beautiful and terrifying.

  Outside the enclave, the streets were crowded, with music and dancing. I accepted a swig of wine from a stranger with a wineskin, then rounded a corner to see brilliant lights bloom in the sky like roses—during celebrations, some of the Circle mages would create fire in the sky, just for the sake of artistry. I paused to watch the display, then applauded at the end as the three masked mages bowed deeply.

  Finally I found my way into a throng of Maledori—terrifying masks, some beautiful and some hideous, and robes in a rainbow of colors. There was drumming here to dance to. I looked for a red robe but didn’t see it.

  “A priestess! A priestess! Have mercy on us, Mother!”

  The Fedeli-Maledori had seen me, and I was swept into the crowd on a swell of raucous approval. I stretched out my hands, and the “Maledori” fell away from me with cries of mock terror. I laughed, for a moment reveling just in the fun of the moment. The Fedeli priestess costume was, for my earlier purposes, perfect: the Fedeli themselves approved heartily.

  “Dance with me,” I commanded one of the priests, a man wearing a mask that looked like a possessed raven. He bowed in mock terror and took my hand, whirling me briefly to the drum music.

  “I obey your command, Mother Fedele,” the priest said, cringing as I released his hand and returning to the circle that now surrounded us. I seized another priest, and another, until I finally reached Falco.

  Falco’s eyes were watching me behind his mask, and I saw them slide appreciatively over me. He was smiling as he bowed in mock submission to my “authority.” “Oh Mother Priestess,” he said. “Holy Defender of the Lady, please do not hurt me. I am only a little demon, not truly worth your time.”

  “Dance with me,” I ordered, and he seized my hand and whirled me into the dance.

  “You’re beautiful,” he whispered in my ear. “Please, Domenico, tell me you’ll meet me in my room after the party. It will be a little late for music, but I’m sure no one will notice.”

  Instead of answering, I thrust him away. “This one has incurred my wrath,” I shouted. “Seize him!”

  “We hear and obey, Holy Mother Priestess,” the nearby revelers said, and seized Falco.

  “Oh, have mercy on me!” Falco begged, smiling.

  We were in a courtyard with some broken statuary. “Tie him there,” I said, and pointed. With sashes and scarves, the other priests bound Falco to the pillar.

  “Don’t hurt me, I beg you!” Falco said, cringing unconvincingly.

  I stepped towards him, and everyone else stepped back.

  “You may be possessed,” I said loud enough for everyone to hear. “You may even have become the Maledore we all fear in the night. But I am Fedele. I can lead you back to the mercy of the Lady, if you’ll trust me.”

  “Oh, he’s MUCH too far gone for that,” someone shouted, and everyone laughed. Everyone except Falco, who had just taken a good look at my face.

  I stepped very close to him, and whispered into his ear: “Tell me about Agosto.”

  Falco blanched. His eyes went wide; his lips parted, but no sound came from them. I slipped my hand under my robe to rest on the hilt of my eating-knife. “I could gut you before your friends would ever think to stop me. If you call for help right now, they’ll laugh. Tell me about Agosto.”

  Falco shook his head wordlessly.

  “He was your lover, wasn’t he? Like me? And to deflect suspicion, you offered to torture him yourself. You’d do that to me, too, wouldn’t you?”

  “No, no, Domenico, never you. Never you.”

  “Then why Agosto?”

  Silence.

  “Why?” I shouted. There was a laugh from the Fedeli who were still watching, and one of them shouted, “You’d better answer her, Falco, I think you’re making her mad.”

  “I had to,” Falco whispered. “He’d been accused. It would have happened regardless, whether or not I participated. I couldn’t save him.”

  “So there wasn’t any point in trying,” I whispered. “And so you crippled him yourself.”

  “Most musicians break if you just threaten their hands,” Falco hissed. “I wasn’t expecting to have to actually do it.”

  My hand still under the robe, I drew my knife and pressed the point against Falco’s gut, just above his pelvic bone. “Oh sweet Lady have mercy,” Falco said, his voice sounding strangled. I was half afraid that the people around me would realize at that point it wasn’t a game anymore, but there was more laughter and one of the priest shouted “Confess, Falco, confess!”

  “I’m sorry,” Falco said, and now he was crying. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Tell me what you want me to say, and I’ll say it. Do you want me to say I’m sorry? I am sorry.” He dropped his voice to a broken whisper. “Do you want me to tell you that I still see his face in my nightmares? I do. Don’t hurt me, Domenico, please. Please.”

  I could smell a rising stench as Falco lost control of his bowels, and I realized, with a hint of shame, that I had enjoyed my moment of power over him. And I knew that if I walked away now, he would make no attempt to stop me. I thought of the other musician, with his broken hands, and for a moment I almost plunged the knife into his gut. But we were surrounded by Fedeli, and I knew that they would make me pay for any real violence, in ways I didn’t like to contemplate. And unlike Agosto, I could still walk away, and go play my music somewhere else.

  “Goodbye, Father,” I whispered, and pulled the knife back. “I hope the Lady casts your so
ul into the pit of snakes.” I stepped back from him and strode rapidly out of the square.

  On my way back to the enclave, people shied away from me with looks of fear; though on one hand they must have known that I was not Fedele, the response to the black robes was instant and instinctive. The Fedeli do not come here, Nolasco’s letter had said. I hoped he was right.

  It is difficult to find provisions and traveling clothes on a festival night, but it is not impossible. By dawn, I was on my way out of the city. A gentle rain started and I realized, as I looked back towards the city one last time, that I was still wearing my mask.

  I took it off, and dashed it to the ground, where it splintered into shards. “For you, Falco,” I said, and turned south.

  KIN

  THIS IS ALSO short fiction set in the same world as Fires of the Faithful. It is somewhat noteworthy that with this story, I finally cracked the first market I ever submitted to—Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword and Sorceress.

  ***

  WHEN I WAS five years old, my father took me into town, to an inn, where a man in black robes waited for us. The man was old, and stern, and he frightened me, but my father gave me my doll, Emilia, and said that I needed to be calm and obedient to set a good example for my baby.

  “Can you make a witchlight for me, Julia?” the man in black robes said.

  Clutching Emilia with my left arm, I held out my right hand and easily willed a small glow into my palm. Witchlight was nothing. Everyone could make witchlight; I couldn’t remember not being able to do it.

  The man set a small log onto the hearth. “Can you make that burn?” he asked. I knelt down beside the log and touched it lightly to make it burst into bright flame.

  “Oh, very good,” the man said. “Very good indeed.” I straightened up with an impatient frown. Most people could light fires. His praise was empty, and I knew it.

  “Now,” he said, and my ears caught a new note in his voice. “I have something else for you.” Out of his pocket came a small gray pebble, which he tucked into my hand, where the witchlight had bloomed a moment before. “Can you make this burn?”

  Still holding Emilia tightly with my arm, I turned the pebble over and over. Here, at last, was a new task—a new challenge. I set the pebble down on the hearth, so that it wouldn’t burn me, and laid my whole hand over it flat, the way I had when I first began to start hearthfires. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, and reached for the energy under my feet. The rock was different from wood—very different. But when I pulled my hand back, it glowed a deep orange-red.

  “Very good,” said the man in black robes, and from the look in his eyes when he glanced at my father, I knew his praise was not perfunctory. Nervous, I wrapped both arms around Emilia and retreated to my father. I heard the jingle of coins, and my father exclaimed his thanks as he pocketed what the man in robes handed him. Then the stranger crouched down to my level.

  “In a few weeks,” he said, “a young woman is going to come live with your family. She’s going to bring gifts for you and your parents, and she’s going to tutor you in magery. You’re unusually good at it, for a five-year-old, but you’re going to get even better. She’ll teach you to work with others to create really big fires, to set fires from a long way away, even to make fires in the sky. When you’re a grown-up, you’ll get to come live in Cuore with the other mages, isn’t that exciting? But for now you’re going to stay with your family, and this woman will come to teach you.”

  I nodded hesitantly.

  “All I ask in exchange,” the man said, “is your doll.”

  My doll? I wrapped my arms around Emilia as tightly as I could. “No!”

  The man laughed, and my father laughed with him, and I realized that the request had not been serious. He straightened up and ruffled my hair. “Mages don’t have babies,” he said. “And you’re a mage. You’ll get used to the idea soon enough.”

  ***

  MY TUTOR WAS named Anna. She was a few years older than my eldest sister, younger than my youngest aunt, and as promised, she came with gifts: a sack of apples, soft wool scarves, new needles, new boots for my father, even a tiny pouch of cinnamon. “I don’t want to be a mage,” I said to Anna at our first lesson. “They say mages can’t have babies, and I want to have babies someday.”

  She laughed and took my hand. “Magery is better than babies,” she said. “I’ll show you; make a witchlight.” When I summoned a light, she sent a surge of power through my body like liquid fire, leaving me gasping. It felt like flying; it felt like swimming in hot cider. “You’ll be able to summon this power on your own soon,” she said. “If you ever want babies, all you have to do is stop using magery, just as your mother does when she wants to conceive.”

  I nodded, relieved to know that even as my pounding heart said more, more, more in my ears. Of course, it wasn’t nearly so simple. My mother, an ordinary woman, could light her way with a candle instead of witchlight, and use flint and steel to start fires, and the only price was a bit of inconvenience. When I tried to stop using magery, a few weeks later, I was rewarded with racking nausea and pounding need until I gave in. The reward, though—the reward was magic, the soaring feeling that was there anytime I cared to reach for it. The reward was to be a mage—one of the elite, one of the wielders of power, one of the privileged of Cuore.

  It wasn’t enough.

  ***

  “WHAT HAPPENED TO Emilia?”

  “I can’t remember. I know I brought her with me to Cuore—just to annoy Anna, I think. And then I packed her in my bag when we went to war. I was thinking about her last night, and I don’t know. I don’t know where I lost her.”

  Silvia shifted, wrapping her soaking wet cloak tighter around her shoulders. It was raining, and the bottom of our rabbit-hole was a filthy, sodden mess. Silvia’s hair hung lank and tangled around her face, and I knew I looked the same way. Ah, to be a mage, one of the privileged few. Silvia and I were the only mages who’d survived an ambush of our unit; a handful of Circle guardsmen had survived as well, and had dug a rabbit-hole for us and gone looking for reinforcements. Silvia had wanted to go along, but we’d been told rather forcefully that we’d just get in the way. I had known better than to try to argue.

  “Maybe someone stole her to use the rags to line their hat,” Silvia said. We’d both lost our hats somewhere before the ambush.

  “She was a pretty small doll,” I said.

  “I never had a doll,” Silvia said. “I used to have a pouch with a lock of my mother’s hair in it, though.”

  “A lock of your mother’s hair?” Mothers carried pouches with locks of their children’s hair, so that they could pray for their children even when separated from them. But children did not usually reciprocate.

  “Yeah, why not? Back when I was six, when my mother snipped a lock of my hair during the Birth of the World festival, I asked for a lock of hers. She thought it was cute. I carried that with me to Cuore, and then to war. I don’t know what happened to it. The thong probably rotted out from being wet all the time.”

  “I think the rain’s letting up,” I said.

  “Never,” Silvia said. “I fully expect to drown in this pit.”

  But I was right; the rain slowed, then turned to a drizzle, then stopped altogether. I tried to wring some of the water out of my cloak, without much success. For some reason, now that the rain had stopped, I felt even colder.

  “Listen,” Silvia said. “What’s that?”

  I held my breath and strained my ears. “It sounds like a cat. No, I take it back. That can’t be a cat. It sounds like—”

  It sounded like a baby.

  “I’m going to check.”

  “Gemino and Lucio told us to stay here.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not going far.”

  “How do you know it’s not the Vesuviani trying to lure us out?”

  “Why would they bother? Do you think you could summon magefire worth a damn right now?” I hauled myself out of the rabb
it-hole, getting even more covered in mud, and lay on the ground for a moment, trying to tell where the sound was coming from.

  The rabbit-hole was on the outskirts of what had, a day or two ago, been a village. I looked around at what was left. We made a really big fire, all right, I thought as I picked my way over a pile of rubble that had probably once been a cottage. The war had begun over border raids from Vesuvia; in several cases, families of our farmers had been killed, their fields and houses put to the torch. Well, this was one village that certainly wasn’t going to be put to anything as puny as a torch. The first time I’d seen the remains of a firefight, I’d been promptly and thoroughly sick, but the war had been going for almost two years now, raging east and west along the border with Vesuvia, and I’d been there for all of it; one more ruined village hardly made me blink.

  Absurd to think anyone could survive, I thought, stepping over the remains of a stone wall, but I could still hear the high, lonely wail. I realized that the I was standing in what had been the blacksmith’s shop; there was an anvil at my feet, and a fallen hammer close by. And there, behind the wall of what had been the blacksmith’s furnace, sheltered in a niche made from stones and a fallen piece of metal, was a tiny, tiny, living baby.

  “Lady’s mercy,” I said, and picked it up. The baby was as light as a kitten, fragile and delicate and terribly cold. It was a miracle it had even survived, first in the fire and then the cold and the rain. The baby was wrapped in a wool blanket, and the serendipitous shelter had stayed reasonably dry, but that didn’t explain how it had escaped the fire. The baby quieted when it felt itself lifted in someone’s arms, and started searching with its tiny mouth for a breast.