Fire in the Mist

by Holly Lisle

  From her pack she pulled eight wooden circles—already glyph-marked with a drop of wolf urine painted with a wolf-hair brush—and laid these in a circle on the stone altar that sat just outside the fence on the north edge of the circular corral. She set her knife across them, and brought out the round, shallow stone bowl that was kept under the altar. She placed the bowl in the center of the circle, and crumbled a handful of kwilpie leaves and sweet-smelling ress powder into it, then grounded and centered herself, and visualized a circle of blazing blue that grew like a bubble from the altar. Her protective circle stretched to encompass the whole of the corral plus the stay-station that lay at the exact south point of the circle. She rested for a moment, gathering energy from the earth, then lit the leaves and powder with a quicklight. The incense blazed brilliant green.

  Softly she chanted:

  "Lady of the Beasts, Tide Mother Woman,

  Lady of the Earth, Virgin, Mother, Crone.

  Lady, loan to me your eyes;

  Loan to me your faeriefires

  To watch and ward us while we sleep,

  That flock and folk will safely keep

  Until the night is done."

  Faia finished her chant, and touched the point of the knife to the green fire, then to each round circle in turn. As she did, there appeared above the circles small dots of green light, each no bigger than a robin's egg. They held position two fingers' breadth over the center of the disks.

  When each wolfward held its beacon of faeriefire, she bowed her head for a moment.

  "Lady, thanks," she said, and the fire in the bowl guttered out. She picked up the wards, and following the path of the Tide Mother around the corral, laid them out in the shape of the Lady's Wheel. Only when this was done did she gather her things and head gratefully for the stay-station. Hot tea, a soft bed, and a late rising; they all sounded awfully inviting.

  She left the heavy wooden door unbarred. First, the wolfwards would warn her not only of wolves, but also of the arrival of any other danger. Second, if the wolves were desperate or brazen enough to challenge the wards, she would need to get through the door quickly. With that in mind, she also placed her sling, her staff, and her wolfshot on the stand beside the door.

  Huss and Chirp settled themselves on the stone step outside. Faia dug through the stockroom, found the food kept there for shepherds' dogs, and put a bowl out for each of the two exhausted border collies. They grinned at her and wagged their tails and ate like they had never seen food before.

  "Poor pups," she snorted. "Faljon says, 'Best is the meal/earned by the brow.' You two should be thankful for the hard work we did today."

  Huss glanced up from the bowl and cocked an eyebrow with an expression that seemed to question the sanity of hard work, Faljon, and anyone who would quote such a ridiculous proverb.

  Faia laughed and scratched her behind the ears. "Indeed. I wonder myself whether Faljon ever chased idiot sheep across the hills or fought off wolves and mountain lions or tromped for leagues with prickleburrs under his erda—or whether perhaps he just sat in his cottage and thought of ways to tell the rest of us how to do it."

  "Still," she added, mostly to herself, "he is right about the food."

  She rose and stretched and went back into the stay-station. From the storeroom, she took a packet of tea, a small box of soup powder, and two little potatoes. She put a single copper fourth-coin in the box on the storeroom door in exchange. When she had the fire in the fireplace going, and water heating for tea and soup, she sprawled across one of the station's narrow bedframes and stared at the ceiling.

  It is good to be on my way again, she thought. Sore muscles and all. Away from Bright, out from under Mama's roof and Mama's worries, maybe I'll have a chance to think.

  She had a lot to think about. Much as she loved her mother, her brothers and her sister, she had never been so glad to leave Bright as she was this spring. All winter long, her relatives had hinted to her mother that perhaps Risse would like to send her flock with one of their older children, since surely Faia would not be heading into the hills with the sheep again. When they asked, Risse had looked hopeful, and Faia sullenly defiant.

  Risse alternated between moments of understanding her youngest child's yearning for freedom, and bouts of fury at what she perceived as lightmindedness. In the bad times, mother accused daughter of dithering with her life, of doing what amused her instead of planning for her future, for work that would be to the long-term good of the village. "You can't be a shepherd forever, Faia," she had said. You're a woman, full of woman's magic. You could become a healer, learn with me, and take over for me when I am too old and weak to continue. You could be better than I'll ever hope to be—"

  Faia thought that she was quick enough with the healing lays, but she hated the idea of spending her time picking and drying herbs, mixing decoctions and elixirs, and running from house to house to deliver babies or tend the sick, dead, and dying.

  Then there was Kasara, her sister, who, with a shuttle in her hand and her babes playing on sheepskin rugs on the packed dirt floor, had offered to apprentice her little sister, and give her a room out from under their mother's roof. But while Risse was gentle and thoughtful, Kasara was shrill and shrewish and wanted an apprentice, Faia suspected, to double her output without significantly increasing her costs. While Kasara had remarked that she liked the workmanship of Faia's keurn cloths, Faia doubted that once in her sister's employ she would ever be judged good enough to earn her own master's shuttles. Kasara would see to that.

  The girls in Bright who were Faia's age now had babies and bondmates with whom they worked their dowry fields. And as for unbonded young men—well, there now remained only Rorin and Baward in her own age group. Either would be happy enough to form a public bond with her, but...

  Faia rolled over on to her stomach and sighed. But what?

  Faia did not want to be a weaver, nor a healer, nor a bondwife with babies.

  When she closed her eyes, she could hear her father's voice as sharp and clear and wistful as the last time she had heard him, talking, as he had loved to do, about far-off places. "Faiachin, my little lambkin," he had said, "there is a world beyond these hills, flat as a table, full of odd folk with odd ways, and magic such as your mind cannot imagine. Flatters have not the need to chase sheep in the hills, so they spend their days playing at music and illusion and pretties for rich men and women." He had stared off toward the unseen wonderland, and sighed. "Someday, littlest, I will take you to the Flatters' lands."

  He would have, Faia believed, had he lived long enough. But her mother had loved an old man, whose body wore out long before his spirit. He had given Faia his wanderlust, but had not survived to slake it.

  Faia stared at the ceiling of the stay-station. She had no real wish to see the Flatterlands anymore, she admitted to herself. Her dogs were her friends; her flock, riches; and the wondrous wild beauty of the upland fells was the magic her father had spun for her in his tales of other lands. Her hills would satisfy her—if only she could stay in them.

  Though Faia heard the wolfsongs nightly during the week's travel to the high country, she never saw the wolves. They were always a few valleys away, always hunting other game that did not carry the freight of a human guardian. She stayed cautious—but her caution began to seem more a formality than dire necessity.

  In the highland pastures, spring flowers poked out of the edges of melting snowfields. The rocky hills were alive with the chirruping squeals of busybody conies; otherwise the meadowland pastures were idyllic. Faia kept the wolfwards replenished nightly, and spent a busy few days as the waxing of the Tide Mother brought the majority of the lambs in a rush. For a while, it seemed she was running from sheep to sheep, working tiny hooves free from a birth canal, calming a first-time mother, making sure that each ewe was willing to nurse her own lamb or lambs, and lastly watching for signs of sickness in mothers or newborns. Lambing went well. She lost only two newborns—and them to deformity—and on
e mother to old age; and she tricked the mother of the deformed lambs into thinking the dead ewe's baby was hers by rubbing both beasts down with skunkweed until they smelled to high heaven... except to each other.

  After the peak of the full Tide Mother, the rhythms of her days settled down. She watched the clouds as she had hoped to, sent the eerie melodies of her rede-flute whistling down the valleys by the light of the stars, and danced in the high meadows for sheer love of the goodness of life. Her anguished arguments with her mother receded into her memory, leaving only ghostly tracks at odd moments—the highlands were their own balm. Mild weather and an abundance of small rodents kept the wolves politely at their distance, and kept her and Huss and Chirp supplied with the occasional fresh cony or rabbit to supplement their steady diet of jerky and shepherd's stew.

  The Tide Mother, waxing when she left Bright, was waning when premonitions started.

  From a sound sleep she woke, a scream caught in her throat.

  Something is wrong!

  Her heart pounded; she was drenched in sweat. She sat shivering in her bedroll in the gray light of pre-dawn. She grounded herself and reinforced her shields, then sent out searching tendrils.

  There was nothing nearby. Nothing. But the terror was as palpable while she was awake as it had been in her dreams.

  Where is this coming from?

  Wolves howled in the distance, the echoes ringing up the valleys from far down into the lowerland.

  Lowerland? Where the village is? Why?! In the winter, when they have no food, when the cold and ice force them out of the wilds toward the flocks, of course they migrate toward the village—but in the midst of the most abundant spring in years?

  Something was wrong.

  Faia shivered again.

  Faljon says, "A goose on the grave/means that grain has grown there." That is all it is—bad dreams, the wolves hunting an animal that has fled downland, every bit of it is my nervousness.

  Still, she pulled off the necklace that her mother had given her and slipped the wolf talisman off it. She ran the chain through her fingers. The chain was an old piece, a kordaus or scrying cord her mother had used for years, decorated with thirty-three round, incised beads of varying types of stone, bone, wood, and metal, no two alike. Faia could feel the reassuring tingle of power in it. She closed her eyes and calmed herself, while the beads slipped across her fingertips with soothing steadiness.

  One caught, and the comforting rhythm ceased. She opened her eyes and looked at it.

  Black iron. Disease.

  She winced, then closed her eyes again, centered, breathed deeply, reached inside herself.

  Click, click, tick, clack, stop.

  Red-stained clay. Death.

  Faia's hands began to tremble. One final time, she began her rounds of the beads, begging for the reversing bead, for some sign that things were as they should be.

  Click, tick, click, click, tink, click... stop.

  Polished white shell.

  —Home!—

  And the wolfsong echoed up from the lowerlands, foreboding, deadly.

  Goddess of Life, what am I to do?! The lambs are too young to take all the way back to the village yet—and I could be reading this wrong, or it could mean nothing, even yet, except the reflections of my own fears. That I read disease and death at home could be meaningless. Sometimes, after all, the beads do not work—at least not for me.

  Faia shivered, trying to decipher the import of the wolfsong in the valley. Knowing the languages of animals was not among her talents.

  Then inspiration struck. Baward had planned to leave Bright a week after she left, moving his flock of goats along a harder, faster route to the Haddar Pass pasture so that they would meet there. She and her flock were only two days from Haddar Pass.

  With Baward would come information—and, she hoped, peace of mind.

  She held that thought close to her heart and tried to banish her anxieties.

  He is three days late. That can only mean he is not coming.

  She sat nestled between the two sheltering stones, her wide-brimmed hat covering her neck, her erda staked like a tent over her. Both dogs crowded in beside her, understanding that their duty was temporarily suspended. Diana and the sheep and their lambs huddled miserably, their backs to the wind and the blowing, chill rain that gusted and spattered in erratic torrents. As long as the weather held, they would not go anywhere by choice. A tattered gray cloak of mist hid them from view at intervals, then parted to reveal them still in the same stodgy clumps, commiserating with each other. When the fog hid them for too long, Faia Searched to check their positions, drawing the power of the earth into her and linking with the flock. With her eyes closed, she could see the bright glow of each sheep, a glow that meant life.

  Faia peered through the early twilight, still praying to the Lady that Baward would arrive. But when she Searched for him and his flock, which should have made a huge glow to her mind's eye if he were anywhere near, there was nothing but darkness.

  He has been detained by the birthing of his flocks, or some sickness among the beasts. A wolf attack. Nothing serious. Or he forgot the time we agreed upon.

  The excuses didn't ring true.

  Come morning, lambs or no lambs, I am going home.

  Several lambs died in the forced march, and the ewes dropped weight, fretted, balked. A mountain lion attacked, and won a weary ewe from Faia, at the price of one of his eyes. Her body ached, the dogs complained—and the premonitions never left her.

  But if the return trip was bad, her first sight of Bright was worse.

  From the hilltop on which she had last stood long weeks ago, she saw the village frozen in the cool, brilliant sunshine—the dark, blank eyes of houses stared vacantly at each other from across lifeless streets. She heard the silence that told of a smithy stilled, children hushed, farmers leaving all the fields for fallow, the market closed.

  No smoke, her nose told her. Not from the cottages, not from the baker's ovens, neither from the kilns nor the washers' fires nor the dyeing vats; not from cookfires. But the air was scented—the reek was heavy and cloying; sweet, putrid.

  Deathstench.

  And on the cobblestone streets and in the pastures, Faia's eyes registered still forms. Unrecognizable, they lay scattered in piles of red and gray, bloated, tattered, with gleams of white.

  Then the sheep clustered together, bleating terror, and huge dark monsters shot from the edges of the forest, and for a while Faia could not ponder the meaning of the motionless village.

  The attack was not wolf madness, but wolf boldness. They had come, had taken what they wanted without challenge, and they had grown confident. Now they wanted her sheep.

  Now they wanted her.

  The sheep—stupid sheep—scattered in a dozen directions. A few made it to the woods intact; more, as they broke from the flock, were hamstrung or gutted or had their throats ripped out. Diana, poor old goat, stood her ground, horns slashing, and cloven hooves flying, but she was overpowered, too. The dogs darted and blurred, flashes of black and white amid the bulk of gray—and first Faia saw Chirp die, with his neck crushed between one wolf's massive jaws, then Huss screamed, and Faia saw her, her teeth still latched to a big bitch's throat, with her belly opened and her guts dragging in the dirt.

  The pack leader, silver-tipped-black and immense, faced Faia and strode stiff-legged forward; head down, ears flat back, pale, cold eyes gleaming. His lips drew back from yellowed teeth. He rumbled a warning growl as he advanced.

  She clutched her staff, and her belly tightened with fear. There was no time to reach for the slingshot and the studded wolfshot. She made a quick thrust at the beast with her walking stick that caught him in the teeth. He danced back, and crouched for a leap, his eyes fixed on her throat.

  Lady, help me!

  Faia drew the earth's energy, thinking it into her staff, thinking, Give the staff strength!

  And somehow, she was outside of herself, and staring down at
the massive black wolf and the tall, rangy girl who faced him off with nothing but a brass-tipped walking stick.

  At the same instant, she was inside herself, and the strength was there—earth-strength, Lady-strength, confidence. Faia, stilled inside, deadly calm, swung the staff up as the wolf lunged and caught him across the chest; the impact of his great weight flung her backward a staggered step. But light flowed from the staff around the wolf, blazing green fire. The wolf screamed, its voice for a moment disconcertingly human. Then he crumpled to the ground and was still—unmarked, stone dead.

  At the scream, the other wolves vanished into the forest, disappearing like the memories of shadows.

  And Faia was left with the remains of her flock—clumps of white and bloody red—and the mangled goat, and the dogs, two motionless bundles with ripped and dirty fur that blew in the chill wind. And below her lay the village.

  Her feet moved slower and slower as she approached her cottage. The stench, which had only blown in suggestive eddies to the top of the hill, was inescapable in the sheltered valley. Faia took two of her scarves and wrapped them around her face. The wolves had been at the village. Carcasses of horses and cattle lay on the road and in the street, Baward's goats in their pen, all their bellies ripped and tattered, the entrails gone, decay well set in. All of them lay where they had fallen, while vultures glared at her as she passed and flapped their wings in threat. She abandoned the idea of making any attempt to clean the carcasses up. And as she drew closer, she could see things that had not shown up from the hill. Rats were everywhere. Doors hung partway open, and flies roiled out of them—the sound of the village was the sound of flies.

  Faia's own door was closed, and that gave her hope. She opened it, and inside, things were in order. There were no flies; the deathstench was muted and obviously not coming from the house. Sunlight filtered through the oilskin windows onto the table where Mama's healing bag lay, empty of supplies. There was no fire in the fireplace, but the wood was laid by the side, ready to start. And Mama had some weaving spread out.