Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1)

by Brad Strickland

  With great care Jeremy transferred the pinch of burning tinder to the fireplace, where more tinder awaited it, and piled on top of that splinters of kindling. The fire touched the tinder, shrank for a second, then grew again. Fingers of flame found the wood and claimed it, and in less than a minute the kindling was burning, crackling as the fire continued to grow. Jeremy felt its grateful warmth on his face, and by its light he found a bin beside the hearth, stacked full of firewood. He selected some thin pieces from it and put them on the burning kindling.

  The wonderful smell of wood smoke struck him as he leaned over the fire, taking him back in time to his grandfather's farm. He and Bill had spent parts of Christmas vacations there, in the drafty old farmhouse. His older brother had never taken to farm life, had never once volunteered to get up in the blue-black cold of a winter's morning to start the fire, but Jeremy had. Billy had missed something very special: the feeling of accomplishment as the cold cracked, splintered, melted before the onrush of warmth and light from a fire well made. Jeremy, stuck in an alien universe, cursed in his dreamings by the memory of the man he had killed, felt himself relax now in the glow of the fire, his fire. After a quick trip to the windowsill to repack the flint and steel, he stacked more wood, serious firewood, on the blaze, and stood to warm himself.

  With his back to the fire Jeremy could make out more of the room. A sink, very much like his grandfather's old sink, with a hand pump for water, shared the wall with the fireplace. In front of him was a wooden table with four chairs shoved up to it. To the left of the table were the windows, and beyond the table were three floor-to-ceiling pantries, their doors closed. To the right of them a sturdy door, also closed, probably led outside. On the wall to Jeremy's right a profusion of pots, pans, and cooking implements hung, and when he turned to toast his front, he noticed a medium-sized black cauldron hanging on a hook, swung out from the fire, and the metal door of an oven built into the stone chimney beside the fireplace. He also noticed some candles on the mantel.

  He peeled a long splinter off a piece of firewood in the bin, lit it in the fireplace blaze, and then lit one of the candles. When the wick gave a clear light, he tossed his improvised match onto the fire and used the candle to light the other three on the mantel. In their light he could see even more, could see half a dozen potted plants in the corners and on the windowsills, and could see three candles on the table, five more in wall sconces. He lit these as well, relishing the warm golden light they gave, relishing the simple fact of color. Thaumia, whatever else it might hold, at least was a world of color, and he had missed that in the gray Between, had thirsted for it. He drank it in now.

  The women came in arm in arm. “Well,” Melodia said, “you started a fine fire. This will have the house toasty by morning.” She had brushed her hair and had tied it with a gold ribbon, and she wore a simple green gown, satiny, undecorated, tied at the waist by a golden sash. The hem was weighted with tiny golden bells, and they shed melodious music with each step she took. Kelada, beside her, was actually blushing as she stared defiance in Jeremy's direction: she wore a white pullover blouse of some coarse, linenlike material, with elbow-length sleeves, and matching trousers. Her feet were in sandals that scuffed a bit on the stone floor as she walked. Melodia nodded toward her. “Kelada wouldn't take a dress.”

  “This is good enough for the likes of me,” Kelada murmured.

  “It's very pretty,” Jeremy said, but he couldn't take his eyes off the way Melodia moved. She glowed with assurance, her tiniest motion unstudied, beautiful, elegant. Aristocracy showed in each gesture, in the tilt of her head, in the shape of her smile. Next to her Kelada was gawky, boylike, ordinary.

  “I will brew some sleeptea,” Melodia said. “I think I will need some after the excitement. Are you hungry?”

  “Not very,” Jeremy said.

  Kelada lifted her chin. “I'm starving.”

  “Well, we'll see what we can do about that, too,” Melodia said. She took a brass teapot off its wall hook, filled it with water from a wooden bucket in the sink, and put it on the grate to boil. While it did, she found a loaf of bread and a round of cheese in one of the pantries. She brought them and some plates over to the table. Jeremy was enchanted by the way she cut the bread, by the way she carved the cheese. Every homely action she accomplished with simple grace, with a quality of—what? innocence?—of something that almost stopped the heart.

  The teapot whistled, and Melodia took it off the fire. She brought some aromatic leaves, spicy and exotic, smelling like spring gardens in early twilight, and from them she brewed tea. This she served to them in mugs, and she provided honey for sweetening. As she placed Jeremy's mug in front of him, she paused as if listening. “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  Her face was serious, abstracted. Jeremy listened. “I can't hear anything.”

  “Me either,” Kelada volunteered. “What did it sound like?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Maybe only my imagination.” Melodia put down the mug and set a platter of sliced bread and cheese on the table, but she seemed a little subdued, and somewhere in his mind Jeremy felt uneasy, too. He had sensed, not a sound exactly, but a presence. He couldn't shake off a sense of foreboding.

  “Where are we?” Kelada mumbled around her first, gigantic bite of bread and cheese.

  “Westforest Downs,” Melodia said. “In my father's domains of Blackriver Holdings. Farmlands.”

  Kelada nodded and slurped her tea. “I know of it. Never visited it, though. I was raised in Ranfora Harbor.”

  “I am never comfortable in cities,” Melodia said.

  “And I am never comfortable out of them. Not enough places to hide in the country. A thief needs hiding places.” Kelada drank again. “This is good.”

  “It will bring sleep. You will be refreshed in the morning.”

  “Good. I need to start early. It's many days’ journey to Ranfora.”

  “But why don't you use my father's travel magic—oh.”

  Kelada grinned. A fragment of cheese clung to her front teeth. “Outlaws and poor folk can't afford it,” she said. “It's foot travel for me, or else ride the back of whatever beast I can steal.”

  Jeremy had drunk two cups of the tea and had nibbled some bread. He found himself staring deep into the heart of a candle flame, noticing for the first time in his life the intricate layers, the onionlike structure: first a dark flame, more like the border between fire and not fire than something in itself, but there, tapering to smoke at its pointed tip: then the bright yellow light-giving zone, seeming almost solid: then a blue teardrop of flame right at the wick, but at its base, and much smaller, a valentine-heart dark spot, filled, if you looked very closely, with swirls of vapor. His eyes closed on the beautiful, complex flame and opened in darkness. “Here,” a voice, Melodia's voice, said in his ear. “The straw is clean.”

  Jeremy became aware that he was standing on unsteady legs. “What? Straw? Where are we?”

  “I walked you out to the stables. Here, I've spread a blanket for you.”

  Her hand tugged him down. Too tired to think more about it, Jeremy eased himself onto a mounded, yielding, crackly surface. Melodia threw another blanket over him. In a whisper she said, “I feel a shadow over my house, not a good one. Do you remember what I told you?”

  “Mm?” he said.

  She sighed. “Listen,” she said. “Remember. Tomorrow morning, go back to the house by the passage, not across the yard. My house is watched. I think the ancient inviolacy of the homeplace will keep others outside, but if you stray in the open, outside of the walls of the house, they will regard you as fair game. Will you remember?”

  “Mm.” Jeremy slipped away from her, into the warm dark of sleep. One dream troubled him, a vision of Niklas File staring at him with accusing eyes. The thief appeared as he had in life, gaily dressed, lithe, tough, but he stood silent, merely staring at Jeremy, his face slack and without expression, his eyes empty as the Between itself. Jeremy groaned in his sle
ep. “I'm sorry,” he said to the apparition. It faded away, and from then until dawn Jeremy slept deeply, visited by no dream that he could later remember.

  Waking was slow and comfortable. The morning air chilled the tip of his nose and made his breath plume visibly, but beneath the blankets, snuggled into a hollow in the straw, Jeremy was warm enough. Pale sunlight came through the main door of the stables, really a slatted gate wide enough to accommodate the animals. Streaks of light slanted in shallow buttresses to the straw-strewn floor, and in the light yellow dust motes swirled and danced. The sun had a watery and washed-out quality, the kind Jeremy had often seen at home on winter days with high clouds overcasting and filtering the light. At any rate, the bars of sunshine brought with them no warmth.

  A sound of breathing made Jeremy turn his head. He lay in a stall above the level of the ground and filled with loose hay, evidently a storage bin. To his right and below him, a dappled mare stamped occasionally and munched on more hay. He watched her, appreciating the fine movement of muscle beneath her hide, the delicate spattering of white against the light gray background of her back. She looked at him once, with large, dark, mild eyes. Then she ignored him and went back to breakfast.

  Jeremy took a great lungful of the cold air and decided it was time he rose as well. He wrapped one blanket around him for warmth, shook straw and hayseeds from the rest as well as he could, and folded them over his arm. He looked at the slatted gate—the sun was wholly gone now, and outside was the soft light of a fully overcast day—and remembered Melodia's last caution to him. He climbed down from the hayloft. Between it and the first, occupied animal stall he found a door. That led into a narrow hallway, windowless and perhaps twenty feet long, dark except for cracks of light outlining a door at the far end. Walking down the hall, Jeremy could smell the dry, sweet smell of stored fruits and vegetables, and he sensed rather than saw the shelves and niches lining the way.

  He tapped on the door at the end. After a moment Melodia, still wearing the green gown, opened it. “Just in time,” she said. “Kelada has finished her bath, and I'm heating more water. When you're bathed and properly dressed, we'll have breakfast.”

  “Ah—thanks,” Jeremy said. Melodia walked away from him, over toward the fireplace, the jingling of her hem bells accompanying her. Jeremy noticed that her feet, peeping out from the hem as she turned or began to walk, were bare and small. She dipped the back of her hand into the cauldron, which was swung over the fire now, and nodded. A large wooden tub had been drawn up close to the hearth.

  “I've emptied and rinsed it,” Melodia said, putting a folded towel down next to the tub. “When you finish, please do the same.”

  “Empty it where?” Jeremy asked.

  “The sink,” she said. “Where else? The pump is already primed.”

  “Uh—thanks.”

  “I've gone through an old trunk,” Melodia continued. “If you'll give me a moment before you begin your bath, I'll bring some things of Sebastian's you may use.”

  Jeremy nodded. Melodia was out of the room and back in a minute or less. From the clothes she brought with her, Jeremy selected a set of underwear, pearly gray and silky, a tunic, trousers, stockings, and slippers. Melodia spread them over a chair and took the rest of the clothing and Jeremy's blankets away with her. From the hallway she called back, “Just shout when you've finished.”

  Alone, Jeremy dipped hot water from the cauldron into the tub, then tempered it with a bucketful of cold water raised from underground by vigorous sweeps of the pump handle. He shed the blanket and black robe—on this cold morning the air in the kitchen was nippy despite the good roaring fire in the grate—and slipped into the tub. He had left half a bucket of cold water on the hearth beside the tub, and near that were the towel that Melodia had brought and a small pewter dish that held a jellylike soap. It lathered well, and smelled pleasantly (if femininely) of rose petals. He scrubbed away with enthusiasm, but once he halted, suddenly hit by an uncanny sensation of being watched. He turned his head, soap dripping over his chest and off his raised elbow, but the room still was empty, and no eyes pried through the lightly curtained windows. None that he could see, at any rate; still, Jeremy hurried as he soaped his back and legs, and he kept one eye on the windows. His bath finished, Jeremy stood in the tub, tipped hot water from the cauldron into the bucket, and poured the resulting warm water over himself. He toweled himself pink before the fire and sighed with pleasure. It had been a long time between baths.

  The silk underwear, a pullover top with half sleeves and knee-length pants that buttoned to the top, made him feel decadent. But the gray trousers, with baggy legs of an Arabian cut, and the blue tunic, its seams embroidered in silver and black and a five-pointed silver star worked in over the left breast, fit perfectly and felt comfortable. The gray stockings were thin but warm, and the silver-buckled black slippers felt soft and light on his feet. Dressed, he dipped water from the tub and emptied it until he was able to lift the whole thing and tilt the remaining water out. Then he used the last dregs of boiling water from the cauldron as a rinse. He pumped more water to refill the cauldron, rinsed the sink, and called out, “Finished.”

  Kelada came to stand in the doorway. “Well,” she said, “you look different.”

  Jeremy blinked. “So do you.” The blond hair, though still cut short, had been evened and washed. It shone now in the pale light from the windows, and, trimmed, it framed the tough little face in a way that softened it, that made the heavy brows and the broken nose less important somehow. The gray eyes seemed now to be softer, too, and more vulnerable. Kelada still wore the white clothes she had borrowed last night, but in the light of morning they seemed to fit her better, to accentuate her awkward charm.

  Under Jeremy's scrutiny Kelada dropped her gaze and blushed. “I know how silly I look,” she muttered.

  “No.”

  “Don't worry, you won't have to look at me for long. I'm leaving as soon as I can.”

  “That isn't a good idea.” Melodia had emerged behind Kelada. “Look out the window and you'll see why.”

  Jeremy went to the window. Outside he saw a landscape that looked very Earthlike, very familiar: gentle hills, covered in winter-yellow grass, rolled away into the distance, to the eaves of a forest black and bare of leaves. A few isolated nearer trees also stood sketched against the landscape, and little patches of ground under their protecting shade were white with frost or unmelted snow. Here and there a short evergreen splashed a little color into the landscape.

  But the arresting feature was the sky: truly dark now, with ragged clouds shading from a luminescent white to charcoal gray and even purple, the firmament seemed to be spinning around an axis directly over the cottage. Kelada's breath was warm against Jeremy's cheek as she spoke behind him: “Weather magic.”

  “Someone knows you're here,” Melodia said. “The house is watched. The clouds are like a warning sign. No farmer will bring an ill animal here today, and I fear that anyone who leaves the house will be noticed and followed, at the very least. Until the watchers decide to reveal themselves, I counsel you to stay.”

  Kelada turned away and sank into one of the chairs. “I am dead,” she said. “If any of the magi capture me, they will exile me to the Between again. I cannot bear that. I will kill myself first.”

  Jeremy had drawn aside a curtain. He let it fall back into place and paced back and forth in front of the fire. “Would anyone have ways of knowing if Sebastian had returned to your house?” he asked.

  Melodia, in her matter-of-fact way, had busied herself with the teapot, with a small cooking pot, then with a loaf of bread and a knife. “Tremien, perhaps. He is very sensitive to lines of magical force and to disturbances in them. If his attention were on my house, yes, he would know if Sebastian had returned. Or my father might know, but only if Sebastian were in Thaumia and used his travel spell.”

  “They may think I'm Sebastian,” Jeremy said. “Everyone else seems to believe that.”

/>   “Possibly,” Melodia agreed. She took a complicated, many-branched toasting fork from its place on the wall and impaled slabs of bread on it. “Please toast these for me,” she said, giving the fork to Kelada. Without a word the thief rose and went to sit on the hearth, where she stared into the flames as she held the bread close to the heat. “Whatever happens,” Melodia continued, setting the table, “we will need a good breakfast in us to be able to face it.”

  Breakfast, with the thick cuts of buttered toast, a creamy yellow porridge, honey, and a minty tea, proved more welcome than Jeremy anticipated. Munching the homely fare, he was struck with how insubstantial, how unreal, all his meals in the Between had been. They had seemed filling enough at the time, but now in memory they were tasteless and insipid, the dream of food and not food itself. As the three ate, they debated courses of action. Kelada was bent on leaving, on striking off on her own, heading south and east to the seaport city of her birth, where she could hope to lose herself in the teeming and transient population. Moon wanted more than anything to consult Tremien, the mysterious great magician, but Melodia assured him that no lesser mortal could hope to make his way to Whitehorn without Tremien's active interest and aid. She counseled waiting, for someone certainly knew they were there, and before long they would hear from that someone.

  Over Melodia's objections Jeremy helped wash the dishes after breakfast as Kelada dried them and Melodia stored them away. Going to the window and looking out on her way back from the pantry, Melodia idly remarked, “You worked good fire magic last night. It's freezing outside, but the house is nice and warm. I hope Whisper is warm enough in her stall.”

  Jeremy laughed as he emptied and rinsed the sink. “No magic,” he said. “I just used the flint and steel.”

  “But you summoned the elemental,” Melodia said. “And you made the offering to his liking.”

  “What?”

  Kelada was wiping the last crumbs off the table. “Fire elemental,” she said. “You call them by striking flint and steel together, and you give them an offering of wood to stay and provide warmth and light. There's one in the grate now.”