Bastion

by Mercedes Lackey

  But strangely, they didn’t. They stayed out of each other’s way. Jakyr went into a food frenzy, making trail bread, smoking most of the venison, and making the rest into meat pies that he set near the entrance to freeze. That seemed eminently sensible to Mags; it meant that they’d have pies waiting when they returned from a village, and if they were tired, all they would have to do would be to put one on the top of the stove to thaw and warm. And trail bread kept nearly forever in this weather; it wasn’t his preferred meal—it wasn’t anybody’s preferred meal—but it was a good deal better than making porridge out of the Companions’ oats if they were forced to use another ill-prepared Waystation.

  There was no point in trying to shovel any paths through the stuff or even clear it from the entrance until it finally stopped. It would just pile back up. So mostly, they all rested, and the cave was strangely quiet and peaceful. Oh, he and Bear had a couple of silly snow fights right in the entrance, and coming back into the warmth of the living area was heaven. The steam bath was in near constant use, and Jakyr had even introduced Mags and Bear to a curious custom of using it, then running full-tilt through the cave—in nothing but a breechcloth—to throw oneself into the snow, then running back to it again. He said that people did this up north. Bear was not a fan of the practice at all. Mags found it invigorating, but he wasn’t a fan of running mostly naked through the caves while the ladies laughed at them.

  As for the ladies, Lita was in the throes of composition, and so was Lena. They washed clothing, hanging it from the caravan, which imparted a nice scent to the air. They all read and slept. Or in Mags and Amily’s case—and likely Bear and Lena’s—“slept.”

  And on the fourth day there was sunshine.

  Mags was the first one out, because as usual he woke before anyone else, and went to poke at the mound of snow, expecting to discover that it was heavy and wet. Instead, he came back to where the rest were gathering to get breakfast to report some good news. “Sun’s out, and snow’s deep, but it ain’t too hard to clear away,” he said. “Stuff’s pretty dry and fluffy.” He accepted a plate of hotcakes and bacon and tucked in.

  Lita sucked on her lower lip and took a sip of tea. “Well, there’s the question: Do we want to try to clear a way to the cleft and see how things are beyond it? With that wind, we might end up lucky, with the track drifted to either side but otherwise clear.”

  “I’d still prefer to wait for something of a thaw,” replied Jakyr. “And don’t forget what that weather-witch said. Not just a storm but several storms. Maybe she’ll be right, maybe she won’t.”

  Mags shrugged. “I’m gonna break a path to them two caves, anyway. If we’re stuck here, I wanta see what’s there. While I’m at it, I’m gonna break a path to the cleft when I’m done. Might as well. Less to clear even if it does snow again.”

  Jakyr shrugged. “I’ll help until my old bones won’t let me, once I’m done with feeding you and cleaning up,” he offered. “No guarantee how long that will be. You are right, though, Mags. The more we clear to the cleft now, the less we’ll have to clear if there is a second storm.”

  “I’ll give you a hand,” Lita offered, putting down her gittern and capping her ink. “I was born and raised in the country before I got sent to Bardic. I’m not afraid of a little snow. Not like some people city bred.”

  Ah, there it is, that’s more like I expected. Mags was almost relieved to hear Lita start sniping again. At least now he wasn’t waiting for something to erupt.

  “Suit yourself,” Jakyr retorted. “It’s not as if you were doing anything useful in here. Just making us crazy by plunking the same notes over and over with minor variations.”

  Lita stood up and actually looked as if she might hit him, her eyes flashed with such anger. Mags handed Lita her hooded coat and hurried her out before she could start anything.

  While the storm had been raging, Mags and Bear had looked for anything like a shovel in the stored supplies. At first, they hadn’t found anything of the sort, but after staring at some inexplicable “broom handles” and something that looked like oversized shingles, they had suddenly realized that the two were meant to go together to form flat, broad-bladed wooden shovels. Perfect for shoveling snow. And also a lot easier to store in that form than as a single unit. It turned out that there were even holes bored in the right places, and bolts of the right diameter to hold the things together. If the shingle broke, you just unbolted it and bolted a new one in place. It would be easy to find someone to make you more shingles, too, if you broke all of them.

  He and Bear had put four of the shovels together, figuring that it was unlikely more than four people would want to shovel at any one time.

  Now he hurried Lita up to the entrance and gave her one of the four he and Bear had left there.

  “I think we ought to clear the entire entrance, not just a path,” Lita said, considering the waist-deep snow that confronted them. “If it does start coming down hard again, we don’t want to find ourselves sealed in here.”

  Mags didn’t think that was likely to happen, but he was no expert on snow. So the two of them worked until they were both losing feeling in their feet and getting chilled enough for their teeth to start chattering. By that point they had cleared the entire entrance and a good distance out past it. What was more, they had made bulwarks of the discarded snow to try to hold back drifts from the cleared space.

  It was a perfectly gorgeous winter day, if you liked winter. The air was cold enough to keep the snow from melting and turning hard—but it was rather hard to breathe unless you wrapped your face in a scarf as Bear had done. It cut into the lungs like a knife. The sun would have been blinding, except that for most of the morning it was just behind the hills. But Lita had an answer for that; when it did poke over the hills, she went in and brought out straw summer hats, which they tied on their heads over the hoods to shade their eyes.

  They came back in around luncheon, cloaks snow-caked, and ready to eat just about anything. Bear took their cloaks and went off with them. He came back with all of them beaten clean of the snow, and he spread them over a cushion to warm. “I beat the snow off in the steam bath,” he said with a shrug. “Not like it isn’t already wet in there.”

  Jakyr handed them fresh meat pies and mugs of hot tea and went back to something he was working on without a word. Whatever it was involved harness straps and big, thin squares of wood. Lita didn’t ask him about it, but, then, she looked exhausted. She really had been working terribly hard.

  When Mags was warmed up, he fetched his cloak and his shovel and went right back out again. He meant to cut a path to the nearer of the two caves that interested him—and maybe to the second one, if he could manage it. He reckoned that by sticking close to the cliff wall, he’d deal with slightly shallower snow. Lita was half asleep on the cushion, and he wasn’t about to ask her to come out and help again.

  But Bear followed him, bundled up to the nose. “Reckon I can help a bit,” he said, his voice muffled by the scarf he had wrapped around his face. “I’m pretty fit, I reckon, and I think I got a few more candlemarks in me of work. Besides. If I don’t get some sun, I’m going to start talking to myself anyway.”

  “You already talk to yourself,” Mags teased.

  “There! You see!” Bear retorted. “It’s happening already!” There was a grin in his voice, and it was infectious. Mags felt himself grinning back.

  Since Mags only intended to make a path one shovel wide, the two of them took turns; when one tired, the other took his place.

  “I haven’t asked, how are things going with your herbal kit?” Mags said over his shoulder when it was his turn to shovel.

  “Better than how things have gone with you Heraldic lot,” Bear replied. “Nobody’s met me as if they figured I was that cousin nobody likes. So far, everybody’s been right happy to see me. I got treated real well.” He sighed heavily. “If I’d known people were that desperate for something they could use when there isn’t a Healer a
round, I’d have done the kit a long time ago.”

  “You’d have had to fight your pa over it, and afore you pretty well proved yourself at the Collegium, I dunno that you’d’a got anywhere,” Mags pointed out. “You had to fight your pa over it, anyway, but at least you had the Collegium backing when you did. Sometimes ye gotta wait for exactly the right time.”

  “Like you and Amily did?” Bear teased.

  Mags flushed bright red, and suddenly his cloak felt far too warm.

  “Hey, I understand,” Bear continued as Mags shoveled faster, trying to work off his embarrassment. “It’s not like you two woulda been able to do anything with everybody and his dog trying to play guardian.”

  “Guardian of virtue, more like,” Mags grumbled. “And every one of ’em self-appointed. I didn’t hear Nikolas sendin’ out a call for people to tell him every little thing me and Amily done, but they sure figgered they needed to. Not just Heralds, either. Everybody on the Hill, it seemed like. I was even startin’ to think the cats and dogs was lookin’ at us funny.”

  Bear patted him clumsily on the shoulder. “’S all right. Me and Lena got lucky. After my father showed up and made a damn fool of himself, especially after the second time, people were practically throwing me and Lena together. Only reason there was a fuss when we up and got married was cause we didn’t tell anybody but you.”

  “Makes me almost wish her pa were someone other than Nikolas.” He sighed. “Nikolas is . . . I wish he was my pa, an’ I’m real happy to have him for—whatchacall?”

  “Father-in-law,” Bear supplied.

  “Aye, that. But I wish he wasn’t King’s Own. It makes things a lot more complicated.” He sighed again. “As if things weren’t complicated enough.”

  And if she wasn’t the daughter of the King’s Own, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped, either, he thought. His stomach still lurched whenever he thought of her, scared and alone, in the hands of those bastards. How in hell could they even dream he’d want to join them when they had done that to her?

  Resolutely he turned his thoughts away from that grim period of time and quizzed Bear about his view of the goings-on in Therian. Bear had seen an entirely different village than Mags and Jakyr, of course; the village he had seen was one where people still felt secure enough to complain a bit about their Headman, but they were beginning to look over their shoulders while they did it. It seemed that the Heralds had come and stirred things up just in time.

  Mags was beginning to feel weary as the afternoon wore on and the sun dropped behind the hills again, but the end was in sight. The entrance to the cave was not more than a few arm lengths away.

  “But, you know, about Nikolas not being Amily’s father . . . if he wasn’t, then she wouldn’t be Amily,” Bear pointed out, when the conversation circled back around to how things were going between them. “And now you two are really together, and Jakyr and Lita don’t care and won’t preach, and by the time we get home again, you’re gonna get married anyway. Oh, and don’t worry about . . . uh . . . needing to think about getting married in a hurry, I got all the stuff we all need, enough to last all the way into summer. And if I can’t find more by then, everybody in this part of the Kingdom’s gonna be in trouble.”

  That took a bit of weight off his mind. Amily hadn’t been forthcoming about it, only assuring him she was taking great care that there were no unfortunate accidents. Mags knew, from listening to the lecture everyone got on the subject, that the herbs in question were almost foolproof—so much so that some people regarded a child that happened anyway as being a child that the gods were determined you would have! He just wasn’t sure how big a stock Bear had with him, and now would be a bad time to discover they were running out.

  A clatter back at the entrance to their living cave made both of them look up.

  The first thing they saw was one of the vanners, in harness, coming out of the cave. The second thing they saw was that the horse was pulling something that looked like a giant plowshare made out of wooden shingles. The horse plunged into the snow, and the “plowshare” dug in and began turning the snow over and to the side, making a giant “furrow” in the snow itself, creating a small path in its wake. The horse seemed to be having a grand time, plunging into the snow like a happy dog. His shaggy coat was soon sparkling with the snow crystals he was throwing up.

  He got the plow about two lengths into the virgin snow. Then the horse stopped, evidently at a signal from someone on the other side of him, out of sight.

  Jakyr’s head and hands, and then the rest of him, appeared as he heaved himself up onto the vanner’s back.

  He turned and waved at Mags and Bear, gathered up the driving reins in great loops in both hands, and chirped to the vanner, who went back to forging a path through the snow, the plow cutting along in his wake.

  Mags heard something from his friend that sounded like choking. When he looked to see what was wrong with Bear, he found the young Healer convulsing with laughter, doubled over, laughing so hard that he could hardly breathe.

  “What?” he asked.

  “He gulled her!” Bear choked. “Lita! He gulled her into clearing out the entrance the hard way, so he could put that plow together, get the vanner out, and cut the actual path the easy way! Oh, glory! He gulled her! You know how Bards are always so sure they can’t be gulled, ’cause they know how to use words so well! Oh, she has got her comeuppance!”

  Well, now, he didn’t know that. But Bear lived with one, so Mags was going to take his word for it. Lita especially was likely to have that kind of pride, he considered, given that she was not just a Master Bard, but the head of the Bardic Circle. He wondered just what Lita’s reaction was going to be.

  “Tell you what,” he said. “Let’s get this finished up quick. We might need a place way outa earshot when she finds out.”

  13

  Amily had persuaded him to do one thing before he began his explorations: move wood, food, bedding and some basic supplies into each of the caves he was going to look through, enough to hold him for a week, at need. He didn’t see any problem with that. The Guard had cut them enough wood to last for two winters at the rate they were burning it, and that was assuming that they ended up spending the entire cold season here instead of in Waystations. He wondered if they had a weather-witch of their own. It would make sense if they did. They needed to be as prepared for a hard season as everyone else put together.

  In the treasury cave, he had filled all of one side of the first big room—the one that supposedly had held all the loot—with wood stacked as high as he could reach. He’d brought in plenty of the frozen meatpies, and, since Jakyr was using actual kitchen stuff to cook in, not pots you put on a fire, he and Bear had lugged over the box of pots that was usually slung under the caravan. Several armloads of hay and some of the extra blankets that the Guard had left completed the preparations. When he was done here, he would move it all to the cave where the prisoners had been held. He didn’t actually expect to find anything there. The bandits would have stripped everything from them that even looked as if it might have some value.

  But still, he wanted to go through the cave anyway. If nothing else, it was where his parents were buried. It didn’t seem right to be here and not put some kind of marker there. Pay his respects. He didn’t remember them . . . but that didn’t change the fact that they had probably died to save him.

  Anyway, Amily was right. It was better to be prepared. What was the worst that could happen? He’d have a fire to keep him warm, food right at hand, and—well, a place to retreat to if Lita and Jakyr escalated their quarrel.

  “If that weather-witch is right, and we do get more storms, I want to know you aren’t going to be in any trouble, or get in any trouble trying to get back to us,” Amily had said, earnestly. It had been a sensible precaution, and one that cost him only a little effort with Dallen’s help, so he’d given in.

  The nearer cave was the one where the bandits had kept their loot, fortunately. Obvi
ously everything of real value had long since been taken away, but as he sifted through the dirt and trash on the floor, he was finding little bits of things, brass and glass and semiprecious stone. Which was promising; it suggested that he might find some bits of things that had belonged to his parents, things that had escaped because they were worthless. It looked as if small animals, mice or rats or something, had been in here. But there were better, less open places for them to go, and they hadn’t found anything to eat or bed down in, so they had mostly left the area alone. What was here was mostly the remains of the few leaves that had been blown in over the years and the churned-over dirt from people digging, trying to find one last bit of treasure that had somehow missed being discovered.

  The work was tedious, but he didn’t mind it. In a way, it was soothing. He had a fire going behind him for heat as well as light and a lantern above him so he could catch the gleam of metal or polished stone as he patiently sieved through the sandy soil. It was like the better parts of sluicing through the gravel looking for sparklie chips, back at the mine—with no one hectoring him or threatening to thrash him, no one growling at him to work faster. He could rest when he wanted, warm himself when he wanted, and there was peace in doing something so repetitive and simple.

  Already, he had an interesting collection of bits. Lita might want them; she was a bit like a magpie herself, for collecting odd and shiny things. If nothing else, perhaps they could give the collection to some child along the way.

  He was getting the strangest feeling of being . . . watched . . . as he worked, though. He couldn’t shake it. He began to wonder if maybe the place was haunted. A lot of people had died here, after all.

  Finally his back and shoulders got weary, and he took his collection up in the scrap of cloth he was using to hold things, put out the fire, and headed back toward the living cave.

  He handed over the pile to Lita, who was glowering over her work, hoping it would put her in a better mood. It did at least distract her, which was positive. Anything to prevent her from starting another argument.