Tempest

by Mercedes Lackey

  The kind of dreams that really happened.

  “Ya really are a dolt.”

  Riann pushed herself into a sitting position, dusted off her hands, and looked around dazedly, struggling to remember how she’d ended up sprawled on her back in the middle of the road.

  She’d been on an errand . . . delivering dresses that needed mending to Miz Podahl, the seamstress who also owned the fabric shop. Riann glanced at the butcher shop off to her left, then at the general store on her right.

  She’d almost made it to her destination, then. Only a little bit farther, past the foundry and the leather shop—

  Images of dead and dying villagers flooded into her mind and her stomach convulsed.

  “Where ya bound in a such a hurry, girl?” a deeper voice asked.

  “She’s too stupid to—”

  “Shut yer mouth, boy. She’s the one I’m wanting answers from.”

  Riann swallowed hard and focused on the men towering over her, driving the memories from her mind. It took a moment for her to make out faces against the bright glare of the midmorning sun, and when she finally recognized who they were, the world stopped breathing and so did she.

  Mikael, one of the village elders, and the Sunpriest Tondjen.

  Handehl, the elder’s sixteen-year-old son, stood to one side, hands on his hips, glowering at her.

  “Beg pardon,” Riann mumbled, lowering her gaze to the ground. She rose to her knees and reached for the packages she’d been carrying, gathering her scattered load into a single pile. Her heart thudded painfully in her chest, and her mouth felt dry as the hard-packed road beneath her. Why, why, why did it have to be the Sunpriest?

  “Miz Burdock tole me ta hurry,” she said, keeping her gaze fastened on the packages wrapped with paper and twine as she pulled them together, keeping her thoughts focused on what was happening here and now, not on what had made her lose touch with reality long enough to—evidently—run right into the Sunpriest. “Says I always take too long, look at too many things, so I stopped looking at things, that way I’d be faster, that’s wha Miz Burdock says . . .” She let the words trail off, hoping the men would chalk the incident up as just another one of her clumsy accidents.

  One of the packages had torn, revealing the vibrant indigo cloth inside. She exclaimed in horror, pulling the package to her chest and letting tears rise into her eyes. “Miz Burdock gonna have a fit she find out ’bout this.” Riann pressed her eyes closed tight, rocking back and forth, clutching the package tight. “Riann did a bad thing, a bad bad thing.”

  She heard a sound of disgust, though she couldn’t tell whether it was from the elder or the priest, followed by footsteps moving away.

  When she finally opened her eyes, she was alone in the middle of the road.

  She took a shaky breath, and then another, breathing deep the musky scent of sunbaked earth and the surprisingly sweet flowers growing on the brinle bushes outside the village walls. The hard-packed dirt felt warm and solid beneath her, and all she wanted to do was lie down, warmed and supported by the earth below, warmed and comforted by the sun above.

  She listened to the sounds of villagers going about their business. No one called out to her. No one offered to help. They were used to her little accidents. With any luck, this would be chalked up to Riann’s clumsiness, as quickly forgotten as the other mishaps that were part of her everyday life.

  Riann wouldn’t forget. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get the Sunpriest’s look of disgust out of her mind, no matter how hard she tried. She wanted to forget she’d run into him . . .

  She wanted to forget what she’d seen. What had consumed her vision so completely that she’d run into the Sunpriest like a blind cow she’d once seen blunder into a bull. The furious bull had knocked the cow to the ground, then proceeded to stomp and gore the poor thing until his fury was spent.

  At least the Sunpriest hadn’t stomped her. Hadn’t gored her either.

  Not yet.

  Slowly, Riann rose to her feet and held the packages tight in her arms, heedless of the chalky dust smeared across the “cape” she’d created from scraps of brightly colored cloth. She straightened her ankle-length skirt, kept her thoughts focused on the packages and getting to her destination.

  Everyone knew Sunpriests could pull thoughts out of someone’s mind.

  Had Sunpriest Tondjen seen her thoughts? Did he know what had really been on her mind when she’d barreled into him?

  She kept her head down, moving in the peculiar shuffle-step she was known for, a movement as much a part of her now as her “village idiot” persona. She finally reached the fabric shop on the corner—

  And the world exploded in a sea of sparkles.

  Her head spun and her vision blurred, and suddenly she wasn’t seeing the rough wooden exterior of the fabric shop, she was seeing the village square. The square buzzed with villagers filled with excitement. There were newcomers in town, a wagon family, the first in Riann’s memory, traveling in a brightly colored wagon of painted wood and canvas. Mystified, Riann wove her way through what seemed to be a crowd, listening intently to the bits and pieces of conversation.

  She heard the words “—twins—” and “—don’t look too good—” and then the vision shifted and she found herself looking down from a height that allowed her to see most of the village square. The villagers still filled the square, only . . . their bodies were crumpled and lifeless . . .

  Someone screamed as Riann tried to look away and couldn’t. The faces stared up at her, lips slack, skin pale, eyes dull and accusing. Adults and children lay tangled together. The bodies swollen, the skin stretched almost to bursting . . .

  Slowly, Riann realized what she was seeing wasn’t really happening. Not yet.

  But the screams were real.

  And judging by the pain in her throat, they were coming from her.

  “There now, girl, what’s gotten inta ya? Hush now. Hush.”

  The voice grew louder, penetrating the hazy shroud that seemed to be covering everything. Riann blinked hard, struggling to see through the haze, to focus on the voice . . .

  Until once again she was looking at the fabric shop. Miz Podahl, the shopkeeper, had an arm around Riann’s shoulders. She froze in place, words of warning—Don’t let them in! Send the strangers away!—poised on her lips, words that would tell the shopkeeper she wasn’t who she appeared to be.

  Words that would wrap Riann in a deadly blanket of suspicion.

  It only took one person to call for the Sunpriest. The priest would know in an instant who she was—what she was.

  And then she’d burn in the cleansing fires—as so many had burned before her.

  Generally, Riann “saw” things just before they happened. She’d known her mother was about to die—had seen her death—moments before it actually happened, and as she’d grown, the knowing and the visions intensified. She’d discovered that the difference between what she’d come to call a Happening and a simple dream, waking or sleeping, was the feeling in her gut. When she sensed a Happening, she got a flash of an image, then an awful gut-wrenching sensation that made her wish she could be sick.

  Whatever it was that she’d seen, happened—generally—moments later . . .

  Riann felt her eyes widen in horror as the realization sank in.

  Whatever she’d just seen was almost upon them.

  She covered the expression, looking around as if searching for something.

  “Are there travelers, then?” she asked, lines of worry creasing her face. Everyone knew Riann didn’t like change, and travelers meant change. She peered up at Miz Podahl and clung tighter to the woman’s arm.

  “No one here but us villagers,” Miz Podahl said with a smile. “Though t’would be nice to have some folks visit so’s we hear somethin’ of what’s happening out beyond Brinlevale.”

 
She patted Riann’s hand and nodded at her legs. “There now. It looks like you’ve skinned up yer knee. Come along inside and I’ll fix it up fer ya. No need ta go looking fer a healer fer that tiny thing.”

  Riann kept the grimace from her face. Not that there was a real Healer in the village. Yes, they had a Sunpriest. Every village did. But Sunpriest Tondjen was a grumpy old man, resentful of his post and prone to flashes of irrational anger. If he’d ever had a gift for healing, that gift had disappeared along with his reason.

  She let the woman help her up, clinging to the plump shopkeeper’s arm, and wondered despairingly how she, a girl who everyone thought had the brains of a worm, could prevent the disaster she’d just seen coming.

  “I’ve got a pretty bit a cloth fer ya, too,” Miz Podahl said. “But maybe we should get that cape a yers cleaned up a mite afore ya go addin’ any more ta the thing.”

  Riann glanced down at her cape in dismay. “Oh . . .”

  “Just dirt, nothing major far as I kin see.” Miz Podahl brushed at the cape, beating it as she would a rug, only not quite as hard, though Riann still took a step back. “There now,” she said. “Good as new. Well, maybe not new, but at least as good as twas before ya decided to plow the road with yer noggin.”

  Riann gave the shopkeeper a beatific smile, feeling her worries ease as she did so. It had always struck her as odd that simply smiling could make her and others feel better, but it always had and, it appeared, always would.

  “That’s a girl,” Miz Podahl said, her smile widening. “There’s the smile that always brightens my day. Come on, then.” The shopkeeper turned and led the way inside.

  A pang of guilt ran through Riann as she followed, though she kept her smile in place. She hadn’t come up with the simpleton act by herself. She’d learned from the best—her mother. Her mum had been the real thing, though. Old Man Burdock had found Mum crumpled and pregnant in a half-flooded ditch beside the road. He and his wife had nursed her back to health, caring for her—and for her baby when Riann was born.

  Miz Podahl led the way past the counter loaded with new bolts of cloth of every color. Riann didn’t even stop to look, the burning in her knees increasing as she limped into the back of the store, keeping her mind off the burning by remembering . . .

  Mum had done everything the Burdocks asked of her, from scrubbing floors, cleaning fireplaces, and washing dishes to milking the cow. As long as directions were given clearly and she was given plenty of time to complete her tasks, Mum could do most anything that didn’t require figuring or scribing.

  She cared deeply for Riann, though the caring was more like that of an older sister to a younger sister than a parent to a child. When Riann had turned seven, the relationship gradually changed, with Riann taking over more of the responsibilities that tended to perplex her mother.

  And she had been normal, at least as normal as an adult in a child’s body could be.

  When Riann was eleven, Mum took sick, and Riann wouldn’t leave her side. An herbalist came and went, and Mum got worse.

  The Sunpriest came and performed a “healing.”

  Mum never again opened her eyes.

  A day later, the priest’s assistants came and took Mum to the village Temple. They returned with her ashes . . .

  “Have a seat.” Miz Podahl waved at a chair pulled up to the kitchen table. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Riann eased herself down into the chair, heart aching.

  It wasn’t long before she’d come down with the same sickness that had taken her mum. She’d experienced her first vision when her mum died, a vision that still gave her nightmares. During the fever that left her feeling weak as a newborn kitten, Riann experienced her second vision: the baker’s four-year-old son falling into the village well.

  Riann didn’t take the vision seriously and neither did the cleaning woman Miz Burdock had set to watching her. The woman claimed Riann’s ravings were fever-born and never said a word about them to anyone.

  Even after the boy was found dead in the well after being missing for more than a day.

  The woman—Riann couldn’t remember her name, and she had long since moved away—had shushed Riann when she’d panicked after the boy’s body was found.

  “Nothin’ ta be gained by saying somethin’ now,” she had said. “Ya keep yer dreamin’ ta yerself, elsewise, ya’ll find yer ashes being scattered ’cross the fields, just like yer mum’s.”

  It took some time to figure out the meaning behind the woman’s words. And to find out the woman had seeded the ground for what came next, claiming Riann’s brain had been taken by the fever. But even in her weakened state, Riann could sense the wisdom of the woman’s words. By the time Riann felt like living again, she found herself mimicking her mum, in both words and mannerisms, and had continued to do so ever since . . .

  “Here we go now. Put yer leg up here and let me get ta work.” Miz Podahl thumped down in another chair and patted her lap. Riann obediently lifted her leg, sliding her chair forward until her knee was centered on the old woman’s skirts. The shopkeeper bent her head and started gently cleaning the knee with a damp rag . . .

  Two days after Mum’s death, Old Man Burdock was killed by a runaway cart, and Miz Burdock changed. Though she hadn’t denied Riann a roof over her head, that roof came in the form of a chicken shed, while meals depended on what was left over from Miz Burdock’s plate.

  Many of the villagers had taken pity on her. Petre the baker left a bag—filled with discarded bread heels and rolls too dry to sell—at the bakery’s back door every night. Lavina at the butcher shop slipped her pieces of dried sausage and the overdone ends of roasts when she could. Miz Podahl, seamstress and shopkeeper, gave Riann leftover pieces of cloth and showed her how to fashion those pieces into items of usable clothing, like her cape . . .

  Riann stared at the silver-and-gray hair streaking the top of Miz Podahl’s head as the woman finished wiping the grit from her knee. The shopkeeper waved a hand at her bare toes.

  “Bilcha’s got some shoes going unused. His girl’s feet’ve got so big she’s wearing his shoes now. I’ll see if he’ll pass them along to ya. Yer gettin’ too old ta be going ’bout without proper footwear.”

  Riann wiggled her dust-speckled toes. She didn’t mind not wearing shoes. Her feet were tough enough that she never really paid much attention to putting anything on them until the weather turned cold and winter moved in. She looked from her toes back to Miz Podahl’s smiling face, and a lump threatened to choke her throat closed.

  Most of the villagers had been kind to both Riann and her mum. There was no reason for them all to die because she was afraid of revealing her true self.

  But she was petrified of the cleansing fires.

  Every time she thought about telling Miz Podahl what had happened—to warn the shopkeeper not to let any strangers into the village—she felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach, and her vision started to darken.

  • • •

  It took the rest of the day for Riann to figure out what she needed to do. At least the villagers were used to her stumbling about, so there was no need to come up with reasons to explain why she’d forgotten to pick up Miz Burdock’s mending at the end of the day, or why she’d walked into the bakery and just stood there, staring at the walls.

  Heavy thinking, in any form, was not something Riann was used to doing. Yes, over the years she’d worked out ways to prevent as many of the Happenings as she could, but that was more a case of being in the right place at the right time than actually planning something out.

  She’d found out the hard way that she couldn’t save everyone.

  Riann loved children and was often allowed to tend the younger ones when there was an older woman nearby. When she’d seen Lavina’s mischievous seven-year-old daughter being stung to death by bees in one of her visions, she’d managed t
o lure the girl away from the newly found beehive before the girl got it into her head to climb the tree and knock the hive down.

  She’d come up with a good plan that time, one that would keep the girl from a deadly stinging and teach Handehl—an arrogant idiot who thought he could do anything he wanted because he was the elder’s son—a lesson. It hadn’t been hard; after she’d gotten the girl safely back to the village, she’d started talking about the hive at the same time Handehl was nearby. Riann knew the boy loved to listen to other people’s conversations, either spreading whatever he’d heard throughout the village before day’s end or using the information he’d heard to get something he wanted.

  He also loved anything sweet. The thought of his own secret beehive was enough to send Handehl on a wild bee hunt.

  Riann would never let that boy lay his hands on anything living if she could help it. So she’d asked Lavina’s girl questions that drew out the wrong answers when Handehl was near. He’d searched for that hive for over a week, though Riann wasn’t certain he’d really learned anything from the experience.

  The visions made being in the right place at the right time fairly easy at first. Then the timing between vision and event faltered, and Riann found herself failing almost as often as she succeeded. Sometimes the event happened so soon after the vision, she didn’t have time to prepare. She’d been too late to keep Jona from opening her oven. Jona’s burns had been so bad—and the priest’s incompetency so great—that the old woman had died in agony less than a day later.

  But the visions had never come more than a half-day before the Happening occurred.

  Which made this vision even more unusual.

  The travelers still hadn’t arrived, which almost set Riann’s mind at ease. If she hadn’t had both visions—first the quick flash of dead and dying villagers that had made her walk right into the Sunpriest, then the more extensive vision that had left her screaming—she might have actually thought she’d been mistaken.

  But her gut wouldn’t let it go.