Oathblood

by Mercedes Lackey

  When you work on a lock, she heard the voice of her thief-instructor say, Nothing exists for you but that lock. If you let yourself be distracted, that’s the end of it.

  Except that he had never had the distraction of two magic suits of armor trying to make his partner into thin slices less than an arm’s length away.

  She felt the lock give just as Keyjon noticed what they were up to. She shoved the door open as the woman shouted another incomprehensible command, and one of the automata stopped chasing after Tarma, and turned, its blade arcing down over its head—

  But not aimed at Kethry.

  Aimed at Stormwing.

  He couldn’t dodge, caught in the doorway as he was. He had no weapon of his own, and no spell Kethry knew could possibly be readied in time to save him.

  She watched the blade descend, knowing that she would never even be able to get Need up in time—if only he was a wo—

  CLANG!

  When her teeth stopped rattling, her brains stopped vibrating, and her watering eyes cleared, she thought for a moment that she had gone quite entirely mad. For there, with the automaton’s blade held a hand’s breadth away from his head, was Stormwing, crouched down, one hand raised ineffectually to ward off the blow that hadn’t arrived.

  For what had interposed itself between him and the broadsword was Need.

  They all stood like that for a moment, in a bizarrely frozen tableau—

  Then Stormwing dove out from under the arch of sheathed sword and unsheathed, scrambled to his feet as the automaton disengaged and began to turn, and yelled, “Duck!”

  Somehow she knew to drop into a ball, and Stormwing dove at the automaton’s chest.

  The timing couldn’t have been any better if they’d practiced it; the animated suit of armor was very heavy and already off-balance, and when Stormwing shoved it, it went further off-balance, staggered backward, and tripped over her, landing with a hollow clangor inside the cage—

  The cage which permitted no magic to function within it.

  “Move!” screamed another voice from across the clearing; both Kethry and Stormwing scrambled out of the way as Tarma pelted across the intervening space, the other suit of armor in hot pursuit. She fled right into the cage—it had too much momentum to stop.

  Kethry heard a strangled croak, and turned to see Keyjon clutching her throat and turning scarlet with the effort of trying to speak. Stormwing watched her from where he sprawled; his finger traced a little arc, and her arms snapped out in front of her, wrists together, fingers interlaced.

  Only then did he rise, with a curious, boneless grace, and pace slowly to where the woman stood, a captive and victim of her own greed.

  Kethry got up off the ground, wincing as she felt sore places that would likely turn into a spectacular set of bruises. Tarma climbed down out of the cage, favoring her right leg.

  “What happened with the fool sword?” Tarma asked, in a low voice.

  Kethry shrugged. “I guess when she couldn’t identify him as positively male or female, she decided to act first and figure it out later.”

  Stormwing looked up as they reached his side, but said nothing. “What are we going to do with her?” Kethry asked.

  He ran a hand through his hair. “I do not know,” he confessed. “I have a feeling that if I tried to harm her, that blade at your side would turn against me.”

  “Probably,” Tarma said, in disgust. “But she’s killed at least one person that we know of. A shaman of the Clans, at that, and sacred. Blood requires payment—”

  “Would you accept a punishment that left her alive?” the Hawkbrother asked unexpectedly.

  Tarma hesitated a moment, then replied with caution. “Maybe. If she couldn’t get free to try this again. If she couldn’t even leave here—and if it was a living hell for her. My Lady favors vengeance, my friend.”

  He nodded. “My thought as well. Lady, would you be content also?”

  Kethry only nodded; she felt power building, coming from some source she didn’t recognize, but akin to the pool of energy available to all White Winds Adepts. She hadn’t realized he was an Adept before—

  He raised his hands. “All your life, you have sought to be the power in the center of all, to be the manipulator of the fabric of the world around you,” he said to Keyjon, solemnly. “So, I give you that; your greatest desire. Control of all you can see, manipulator of the web—”

  He pointed; there was a ripple of the very fabric of the place—and a distortion that made Kethry’s stomach roil and eyes water.

  Then when she looked again, Keyjon was gone. Instead, hanging from a web that spanned a corner between the hedges, was an enormous gray spider, hanging fat and heavy in the center of the pattern.

  “Spiders are notoriously short-sighted,” Stormwing said, as if to himself. “Now I shall have to see to it that nothing comes here but noxious things, that deserve to be eaten—and old or diseased things, that deserve a painless death.”

  He looked back at Kethry, and in that moment she knew that not only was he enormously more powerful than she had guessed, he was also older. Much, much older.

  “Here is a guide,” he said, producing another ball of witch-light. “I have much to do here, and this will take you back to your horses before dawn.” Now he smiled, and Kethry felt as if all her weariness and aches had been cured. “I could not have been freed without your aid. Thank you, sisters-in-power. Thank you.”

  “You‘re—welcome,” Kethry said. She wanted to say more, but the witch-light was sailing off into the darkness, and Tarma was tugging her arm. She followed the Shin’a‘in into the maze, quickly losing track of where she was, but torn apart by conflicting emotions. There was so much she wanted to learn from him, so many things he must know—

  What have I done with my life? All I have built is one White Winds school. With power like his, I could—

  I could make a mess of things, that’s what I could do, meddling where I didn’t belong. No, I guess that power isn’t such a temptation. What would it earn me, anyway, besides envy and suspicion?

  If she had Stormwing’s kind of power, it would make her a target for those such as Keyjon. Was the knowledge worth the risk?

  Risk not only to her, but to Tarma, to the children, to Jadrek?

  No, she decided. And after all, we were the ones who rescued him. Knowledge isn’t everything. Sometimes it just takes common sense, good planning—

  A chorus of joyful cries arose behind them; she and Tarma turned as one to see the firebirds rising into the air above the hedge, alight with their own flame. They circled, and dove, and sang; everlasting fireworks that made their own music to dance by. She felt her eyes brimming with tears, and beside her, Tarma gasped with surprise.

  The firebirds circled a moment longer, then rose into the tree canopy, still calling in ecstasy to each other. They penetrated the branches, making them glow emerald for a moment, as if each tree harbored a tiny sun of its own.

  Then they were gone. And in the light from the witch-ball, Tarma’s face was wet with tears. So was hers. She understood, now, the other reason why two brave men had been willing to die to save them from enslavement.

  She caught Tarma’s shoulders, and held her for a moment.

  And this is what’s worth having; freedom, and friends, and the ability to see a thing of beauty and not want it all for myself, or because of the power it represents.

  Then Kethry let her sworn sister go, as Stormwing had set the birds free.

  “Come on, partner, let’s go home,” she said. “We have a tale to tell.”

  SPRING PLOWING AT FORST REACH

  This is a new short story suggested by Teri Lee of Firebird Arts and Music, who pointed out that on a working farm, such as Forst Reach, most horses would be put into harness in times of heavy workload like planting and harvest. And she noted that, given the temperament of the famous Gray Stud of Vanyel’s time (an alleged Shin‘a’in warsteed) it was quite reasonable to assume that plowin
g time (with frisky, hormonal horses) would be rather exciting. She also told me the story of an Amish farmer and his two mares, and his very unique technique for bringing misbehaving horses to see sense.

  As for the Shin‘a’in technique of taming (or rather, gen tling) horses, it is based entirely on fact, and the techniques of a remarkable man named Monty Roberts, who without any form of coercion whatsoever, can take a green, untrained, skittish horse, and have it accepting bridle, saddle, and rider in thirty minutes. His technique is based soundly on understanding equine body language and “speaking” to the horse with his own body language, and results in a cooperative partner. His book, The Man Who Listens to Horses, is one every horse lover and owner should read.

  There was no light but that of the hearty fire in the Lord’s Study at Ashkevron Manor, but neither of the two inhabitants of the study needed any other illumination. It was clearly a “man’s room,” comfortably crowded with furniture that the Lady of the manor deemed too shabby to be seen elsewhere, but too good to be relegated to the rubbish room. Distantly related if one looked back far enough, Lord Kemoc Ashkevron and Bard Lauren would seem unlikely companions to an outsider, and sometimes even seemed so to those who knew them both, but the improbable friendship had prospered for many years and showed no sign of changing. The bard played a soft melody on his gittem as Lord Kemoc seemed to doze, the golden firelight flickering over both of them.

  Kemoc opened his eyes and roused, cocked his shaggy-haired head to one side and frowned at something he’d heard that wasn’t music. Bard Lauren stopped playing immediately; he’d been trying to soothe Kemoc’s aching joints with his Healing-music, and had thought he’d been succeeding. With every passing year, Lord Kemoc’s joints hurt more when the cold wind out of the north swept down over Forst Reach at winter’s beginning. Even here, in this comfortable wood-paneled room, deep within the belly of the manor, Lord Kemoc could not escape the aching of his bones.

  “Is there something wrong, old friend?” Lauren asked anxiously. Kemoc shook his grizzled head ponderously, looking more bearlike than usual, and motioned him to silence.

  Lauren held his peace, flattening his palm over the strings of his gittern so that not even a breath of draft would set them murmuring.

  “Do you hear that?” Kemoc asked abruptly.

  Lauren listened, as only a Bard could, taking note of anything that could be termed sound. Past the crackling and hissing of the fire, past the sound of Kemoc’s breathing and his own, there was a different note in the sound of the wind about the walls of Forst Reach. “The wind’s changed direction?” he replied tentatively.

  Kemoc nodded and sighed, both with relief and regret. “It has. It’s out of the south, old boy. In a few days, we’ll have our thaw, and it’ll be time for plowing. And happy as I’ll be to see the spring, it’s just that much that I dread the plowing. I’m getting too old to cope with it; it’s worse than a battle campaign.”

  Lauren blinked at him in surprise. “Dare I ask, why?”

  Kemoc bared his teeth in a grim smile. “Stick around here instead of flitting off as you usually do come spring, and you’ll see for yourself.”

  Now Lauren’s curiosity was aroused. “I’ve nowhere in particular to go,” he began, “And if you’ll have me—”

  “If?” Kemoc’s grim smile lightened. “Don’t see enough of you, old son. I’ll be glad enough to keep you a bit longer—but I warn you, spring plowing around here is not for the weak of heart. I’ve heard it said that at Forst Reach, ‘plowman’ and ’wild beast tamer’ are considered to be one and the same thing.”

  Now Lauren’s curiosity was more than roused, it was avid. “In that case, I don’t think you could be rid of me if you wanted to!”

  He attempted to get more information out of Lord Kemoc, but a spirit of mischief—or maybe devilment—had infected the Lord of Forst Reach, and nothing more would Kemoc tell him. Lauren went up to his bed that night with his curiosity completely unsatisfied.

  Lauren was happy to spend the winters at Forst Reach—winter being the only season when his services as a Master Bard were not needed at Haven, for all the Master Bards that had no families came crowding back to avoid the harsh weather. Kemoc was an old friend from the time Lauren had first gone out on his Journeyman’s wanderings, and since he had nowhere in particular to go in winter and no great desire to spend it on the road or in Haven, Lauren welcomed the invitation. In the spring, he would return to Haven bearing all the news of this part of the world back to the capital—and in greater detail than the Heralds of this region did, since he spent more time here than a Herald on circuit could. For his part, Lauren found in Kemoc’s household the family he had never known. Perhaps it was easier because he had come into this “family” without any of the burden of childhood memories. It is easy for parents to pull the strings that make one dance, he reflected, as he closed his door behind him, After all, they are the ones who tied those strings in place. Perhaps it was just that he was familiar enough for the Ashkevron household to be easy with him, yet not so familiar that anyone inflicted family grievances on him.

  Or perhaps it is because they know that as a Bard, I might well be tempted to turn an absurd grievance into a comic song.

  Lauren knew Lord Kemoc well enough to realize that behind the joking and the grim humor, there was some real worry. But why should he be so concerned over a little matter like spring plowing?

  Lauren crossed the room unerringly, even in the darkness. There was no doubt that the wind had turned; now it blew full against the shutters of his room, and there was a gentler, wetter scent to it, where it leaked in past the leaded glass window-panes, than there had been this morning. He put his gittern into the stand by touch and knelt to blow the fire to flame.

  In the ten years he’d spent winters here, Lauren had never seen anything to make Kemoc this concerned. Forst Reach was a prosperous and peaceful holding. Spring plowing, he wondered again. Why should he have compared it to a coming battle? Just how difficult could spring plowing be? He realized that he was not country-wise enough to know everything about life on the land, but surely the weather couldn’t become that vicious in the spring or he’d have heard something of it by now.

  It was as he thought that—though he did not realize it at the time—that he got his first clue. For on the wings of the warming wind came the squeal of an angry stallion from the stable.

  Lauren listened to the horse telling the world that he was ready to take on all comers, mare or competitor, and chuckled. No doubt; even the beasts recognized the turning of the season. And since Kemoc had gone coy, he might as well get to sleep; he’d find his itch of curiosity eased all in good time.

  Two days later, the last trace of snow was gone, and although the air was chilly and the breeze brisk, it was no longer so bone-chillingly cold. It was time for the first plow to cut the first furrow, while the earth was still damp, but not muddy. Right after breakfast, Kemoc had brought Lauren out to the back of the barns where the harnessing took place, and the sounds of angry horses had rung through the air even before they reached the yard in front of the barn. Now Lauren stared at a pair of fighting, kicking geldings—geldings, not stallions!—being dragged to their harness by two sturdy plowmen, and felt his eyes widening.

  “Spring plowing,” said Kemoc with resignation. “There you have it, the sum and total of our problem.”

  “But—but—I thought plowhorses were, well, docile ,” Lauren protested, trying to reconcile the fact that he knew those horses had been gelded with the fact that they were acting like fighting stallions. The first horse had been dragged to his appointed place and with two people holding his bridle, a third was managing to get a harness on him. The second had already kicked his harness off, and was trying to bite the first horse, whose ears were back and whose yellowed teeth were bared.

  “They are,” Kemoc replied heavily. “Everywhere but here. Come along, old lad. I’ll show you what we’re up to here. This is all due to a decisio
n made by one of my ancestors, and the idea was a sound one, but—well—there are some problems with the execution, you might say.”

  Farther along the row of horses being readied for the field, a pair of mares with foals at heel were also being harnessed up. The foals were clever, nippy little demons, who obviously resented the fact that their meal-producers were being interfered with. The men harnessing the mares had to keep them off by main force, and wore leather shirts to protect against bites. “We’re famous for our Ashkevron breed of war horse,” Kemoc explained. “There was a horse—allegedly a Shin‘a’in warsteed—called the Gray Stud. He was the foundation-stallion; we took him to our hunters and plowhorses—in the first generation. He was a fighter and he was smart, everything you’d want in a war horse, but he wasn’t big enough to carry a man in full plate armor. We were looking for intelligence and fighting spirit from him, agility and speed from the hunters, and size and strength from the plowhorses. We crossed the sons from the hunters to the daughters from the plowhorses, and that gives us our basic warhorse. We continue crossing the best of the best; geld everything we don’t use at stud, and sell the ones we won’t breed. Trouble is, we can’t afford to keep horses around eating their heads off and doing nothing but breeding, so everything is broken to harness and plow except the breeding stallions. Which makes spring plowing time—exciting. The geldings all retain every bit of a stallion’s fight. That’s why people pay a small ransom for them.”

  “I can see that,” Lauren replied, watching with stunned amazement as a gelding—another gelding!— left alone for a moment in a loose box, proceeded to attempt to batter the thing to splinters in an effort to get at the gelding tied to the outside of it.

  “The Gray’s temper went hand-in-hand with his intelligence and both traits bred true, which makes them finely-honed killers on the battlefield, but no joy in harness,” Kemoc continued glumly. “Most of the year you can handle them, but spring brings out the worst in them. There’ll be broken bones before the day’s over.”