Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Cry later, Frost! There’s still enough up there—grab another one!”

  “I didn’t! Thorn, I couldn’t! The knife—it was his silver knife! Silver draws lightning! I couldn’t—”

  Outside, the young farmer shouted, “Climb! Climb, cowards!”

  Thorn pulled Stabber away from the sorceress and pushed her face to the crack in the rocks. If she wouldn’t grab lightning to fight back, maybe she’d grab it to save a stinking farmer. “Look there! The priestling has a damn silver dagger, too, doesn’t he?”

  Frostflower looked. “Young priest! Young priest, throw down your dagger! Far from you—throw it down!”

  “Rush them!” The priestling’s voice had not been deep for very long, but already he knew how to take charge, damn him. “Your safest place is on the same rock with her! She cannot strike you there without risk to herself! Climb!”

  “He’ll never drop it, Frost! Shout at him again and he’ll lift it higher!”

  Frostflower stiffened. Her fingers went tight on the rocks. She stared out through the crack, her mouth slightly open and her breath coming in pants. Thorn turned, Slicer and Stabber ready in her hands, and looked out from around the rocks. A couple of the warriors were either hanging back or running away, but five or six were starting for the ledge. A few drops of rain were beginning to fall, loud and wet. The dog was barking—Warriors’ God, keep him back out of my way!—and on the other side of the rocks the brat was screaming in Spendwell’s arms.

  Another crash. For an instant Thorn thought it had hit the priestling. His horse screamed and reared, and he fell from its back. But he scrambled up, still waving both torch and silver dagger, and Thorn saw a small rock split some paces behind him.

  The warriors stopped, looking from the ledge to each other to the young priest. “Climb!” he shouted.

  And a third bolt of lightning struck near the edge of the open space and set a small bush ablaze.

  This was not coincidence! And it was not just the damn silver dagger drawing the bolts now! Not so close together! Thorn jumped out into the open, standing in plain sight and swinging her sword. “You heard your priestling! Come on up, you bitches! Don’t you trust your blasted priests any longer?”

  One of them raised a spear, but before she could throw it, Thorn had jumped down among them. She was reckless, she was no longer thinking more than a few heartbeats ahead, but—Warriors’ God! she was fighting like Bloodraster First of Warriors herself! One against five, and they scattered before her. They didn’t know where and when the next bolt was coming, and they didn’t realize the sorceress was not going to blast any people, only rocks and bushes.

  There was an eerie feel in the air, and it was on Thorn’s side.

  The next bolts came, hitting another small rock—then another—then a second bush, almost all at once, one of those series of bolts that come in a crackle like a bloody dance step. The last of the horses had long ago run for safety.

  “The rain!” shouted a warrior who was staying clear of the fight; and Thorn understood what caused the eerie feeling around them. After the first large drops, the rain had stopped falling on the rock formation and the clear space…but, beyond the torchlight and all around them, they could hear it coming down violently.

  One of the spearwomen dashed back away from Thorn and raised her weapon, aiming it above Thorn’s head. Thorn turned and shouted a warning. Frostflower had come out from behind the rocks and stood in plain sight on the ledge.

  The spear flew toward the sorceress. A bolt of lightning caught it in midair.

  Thorn yelled and turned back. Nobody was left to fight her. Two were dead or unconscious, two more were clutching their wounds, the one who had just thrown her spear was kneeling in abject surrender, two were still bleeding at the base of the rocks where Thorn had tumbled them on the first assault, and the remaining three had either run away or were huddling somewhere on the edge of the scene. The living horses had all disappeared. Maldron lay dead.

  The priestling came forward, clearly scared almost witless but trying not to shake, and handed Thorn his dagger.

  “I don’t want the blasted thing,” she said, and thrust it into the ground. “Break all the spears—you break them, Young Reverence, I don’t want your uncle’s women handling them again. Leave all the other weapons—”

  “I give the sorceress safe passage,” the boy said with some attempt to salvage his pride, though he spoke in a trembling voice. “And you, for as long as you travel with her. You have the word of a priest and the heir of a priest. My father and my aunt will honor my pledge.” He looked past Thorn and his self-control faltered a little. “What is she doing?”

  Thorn turned again and watched. Frostflower had come to the edge of the rock and was sitting, slowly, paying no attention to anything around her. She slid from the ledge and landed lightly on her feet—a warrior would have done it faster, but not smoother. Dowl padded out on the open ledge, looked down, shook himself and, instead of jumping after her, began making his way down through the rocks at the right.

  Frostflower took three or four steps forward, looking at the ground. Then she knelt and began to dig with her fingers. Thorn went forward, arriving near her at about the same time as Dowl, and they both stood watching silently. Thorn became aware of blood running down her side, but ignored it.

  Frostflower still had Starwind’s rattle. Her fingers trembling, she twisted one acorn loose and dropped it into the hole she had dug. She covered it with dirt still moist from the storm before this one and spread out her right hand on top of the tiny mound. Her fingers stopped shaking; but, as if she could not concentrate in two directions at once, the rain began coming down in the area she had kept dry until now.

  The priestling ventured close to Thorn. Taking his torch before the rain put it out completely, the warrior got down on one knee. Frostflower’s eyes were closed, water was dripping from her black hair, and the rain was washing the cut on her hand and splashing mud up between her fingers. Then something else appeared between her fingers—a small green shoot. An oak tree in the first stages of growth.

  Frostflower did not open her eyes and look down at it until it was a finger’s-length high and opening its leaves. Then she lifted both hands to her face and leaned forward sobbing.

  CHAPTER 14

  Her power had come back…or she had never lost it…and she should have lost it forever. She had committed the sin of presumption, and been answered with such a flow of power as she had rarely experienced in all of her life before. First came the drunken, disbelieving glory of seizing charges from every part of the cloud and riding them one after another into anything that was neither human nor animal, dissipating them harmlessly in the deeper layers of the soil—and then, afterwards, she felt for a time as if, had she not already survived so much, she could not have endured this last, most unexpected bewilderment, this apparent self-betrayal on the part of nature’s One God.

  Was the mere fact of power worth regaining, when it meant the loss of all certitude in the very creed she had hoped to teach Starwind?

  Two of Maldron’s warriors were dead. Four were wounded, but still alive; and Frostflower sped their healing, bending above each in turn to manipulate the body’s time. The two who were less seriously injured held back for a few moments, scorning to be touched by a sorceress, until, seeing Frostflower insistent, the young farmer Daseron told them to forget their scruples for this night.

  Frostflower did not know whether Daseron truly believed what had happened here—that she had saved him from such a self-invited death as his uncle’s—or whether he was only cowed into acquiescence by fear of further destruction. All his presumed knowledge of sorcery must have been overturned along with hers, when a sorceress he knew to have been raped, had seen tortured and hung, had yet replied to his threats with a display of full power. He listened meekly to her warning that he should never again offer his ceremonial metal to a lightning-filled sky, and he swore truce with her on the golden wreath he
cautiously worked from his uncle’s head but did not place on his own, holding it in his hands instead. She hoped he believed at least partly in her good faith, her assurances of harming no one and nothing—she preferred not to think that even a young and very frightened farmer-priest would buy his own safety at any supposed risk to his aunt’s farm and people. She remembered his face as being comparatively gentle, that time he came with Enneald and Kalda to prepare her for the Truth Grove; she thought she had guessed, even then, that his words and actions were rough not in malice, but in self-discipline and doubt of his own impulses towards pity. Surely his spirit more nearly resembled that of his aunt, Inmara, than that of her husband.

  After Maldron’s warriors, Frostflower healed Thorn. Thorn’s wounds were not dangerous, but she had a wide, bloody gash in her side, which she had received without realizing it during the last, strange burst of battle.

  They carried Maldron’s body back in Spendwell’s wagon. Daseron rode on the driver’s seat beside the merchant. The warriors stayed behind. Frostflower put those she had helped heal into the trance of cool breathing so that their lives would not be shortened; they lay in the shelter of the ledge, guarded by the four who had not been injured. When Spendwell’s wagon met those warriors who were coming on donkeys, the young farmer sent them on, one to find the other priest, Duneron, and tell him to take his women home; the rest to help find the horses and bring back the dead. Later, when the wagon met still another group of warriors, coming on foot, Daseron ordered them to return to the Farm.

  Inside the wagon, Frostflower put Thorn into the trance. Then she sat, holding Starwind, feeling Dowl against her leg, and gazing toward the dark shape that was Maldron’s body, wrapped in a length of Spendwell’s best silk. Inmara had said of the priest that he was a kind and gentle husband.

  Frostflower kept an oval space clear of the rain around the wagon and donkeys; but sometimes her concentration faltered and a few drops slanted through, patting the tent above or causing one of the donkeys to snort.

  As for why she felt she must return to the Farm, even at the price of repeating the oath of truce Daseron had timidly made her swear, she did not fully understand; but Inmara had been kind to her, and her need to speak with the priestess one more time, to explain, if possible, or to…seek forgiveness?…had become a kind of focal point in her confusion, an immediate goal beyond which she could not yet plan. And there was the question of removing Thorn’s outlawry among her own people.

  The sorceress insisted on stopping in Gammer’s Oak to speed Burningloaf’s recovery and to heal Silverstroke and the axewoman Thorn had left there wounded. The third warrior, the one called Snaste, was long dead and beyond help. Thorn did not awaken from her own trance until they had left Gammer’s Oak behind them again.

  Thorn had been apprehensive about returning to Maldron’s Farm…Inmara’s Farm it would be now, for a few years, by the practice of the farmers; for Varin, Maldron’s elder son, was not yet of age to govern, and Varin’s mother was dead, leaving Inmara the senior wife. But in such a return lay Thorn’s only hope of pardon, and Daseron had promised her safe passage for at least as long as she remained with the sorceress. Daseron was little older than Varin, and his command held good among the warriors only for this short time, while there were no other farmers present. Perhaps that was another reason he had given in to Frostflower’s will—to leave the final decision to his aunt. Had the other wife, the cruel-tongued Enneald, been thrown into command by her husband’s death, the sorceress would not have insisted on this return with Maldron’s body; but Inmara would confirm her nephew’s pledge.

  Thorn’s nervousness increased from the time she awakened in the wagon until the time, near dawn, when they rode through Maldron’s gate. Then she took out her two dice and sat throwing them, sometimes from one hand to the other, sometimes onto a cushion set atop her crossed legs, until the wagon reached the hall.

  When at last they came before Inmara, the warrior lay face downward and extended one hand, trembling slightly, a thumb’s-length above the tiled floor.

  For a few moments it seemed as if, although looking down at the swordswoman in front of her, Inmara saw only her own long vigil, now closed by the knowledge of her husband’s death. Then, finally, she moved her right foot beneath Thorn’s fingers and let them rest upon it. Frostflower learned later that had the priestess put her foot on top of the warrior’s hand and pressed it to the floor, that would have shown she refused mercy. Even while watching, however, the sorceress understood from the curious farmers’ ceremony that her friend was forgiven. Had she thought otherwise, she would have pleaded for Thorn, even to the point of displaying her power in a mock threat; but as it was, she could perhaps best help the swordswoman by remaining aloof.

  The work of speeding folk to health and of keeping the rain away from her party had helped ward off some of Frostflower’s bewilderment; but now she was exhausted—would have been exhausted even had she not spent so much of the night using her powers. The farmers gave her the same room where once they had imprisoned her. For a long time, as she lay there gazing at the curtained doorway in the early morning light, she could not sleep for over-exhaustion and the scars of former fear. Eventually weariness would close her eyes, and then her nerves would gradually grow taut again, and—frequently—a spear would seem to come out of the darkness at her, burst into fire, and yet continue its course, piercing her again and again, painlessly but repeatedly.

  When the spear had actually come towards her, sometime during the confusion at the Rockroots, she had seen it not as a thing that threatened her life, but only as a thing to take the bolt she was just seizing. Possibly it had never threatened her life; trying to remember the scene, she thought it had not been aimed quite true. But later, realizing that for a moment she had, perhaps, been in mortal danger, she wondered if it might have been better had that spear found its mark.

  At last she slept. She woke in the middle of the day, feeling calmer but still sad and bewildered. Her breasts had spurted during her sleep. She rose and went through the almost-deserted building, found Cradlelap with the children, and fed Starwind while the old nurse brought a light meal for the sorceress herself.

  Cradlelap told her that Thorn was undergoing rites of pardon and purification, long and painful, but not dangerous. While the children napped and the old nurse sewed, Frostflower waited in the alcove where the priests kept their scroll books.

  She had never known that priests had the skill of writing. Their symbols, like the form of their books, were entirely different from those of the sorceri, but beautiful in their own way. Frostflower unrolled parchment after parchment, gazing at the rows of stylized figures and angular arrangements of lines, and wondering whether this was the written form of the common language of the Tanglelands, or of the ancient tongue used by the priests in their rituals, and of what the parchment was made. Less than a hen’s-hatching ago, she would have considered herself defiled somehow even to touch these farmers’ books; now, she thought wistfully that here, somewhere in these unknown writings, might—probably did not, but might—lie some hint that could help guide her back to a certainty…if not the same certainty she had lost, then perhaps to a new groundwork on which to arrange her thoughts.

  Now and then she heard the farmer’s chanting, faintly, from the Truth Grove. Twice she heard a scream. The rites must be harsh, to draw screams from that proud warrior—but Thorn had wished for them herself. They would wipe away her outlawry, so that she could again move undisguised, without fear, among the farmers’ folk; and they would free her from the farmers’ Hellbog.

  At last, late in the afternoon, Thorn and Inmara came to the door of the alcove. The swordswoman wore a simple garment of the sort they had put on Frostflower, pure white and hanging to her knees. Her legs and feet were bare; so was the arm she extended to steady herself against the doorway. She seemed exhausted, but well content.

  “Look,” she said, pulling aside the loose fold of cloth at her throat and
grinning proudly. Just above her left breast was a new burn, scorched and blistered, in the shape of the safe-passage mark Spendwell had painted on his wagon tent.

  “I think I’m drunk,” Thorn went on with exaggerated care. “I just drank a cup of…almond-kissed? More wine than I’ve drunk since…since… Last part of the ceremony. No, Frost, no speeding this time. No trances. I’ll sleep it off the old way. See you in the morning.” She gripped Frostflower’s shoulder for a moment, then turned and went back through the hall, very slightly uncertain on her feet.

  “She will sleep tonight in the garden,” said Inmara. “Her couch is ready, near the herbs. If it rains again…I do not think that likely, not tonight…you may go out and keep the rain from her.”

  “Was it necessary to brand her?”

  “It was her own choice. Tokens may be lost or stolen. If she comes to any place in the Tanglelands where they have heard only the first part of what happened her, she will have the proof in her own flesh that she is pardoned.” The priestess sighed deeply. “Thank the gods I did not have to guide the iron. Thank the gods for Daseron’s steady hand.”

  Inmara paused, as if there were still something to say and she was not sure whether to say it now, or to rest for a while first…or whether she would be able to rest before it was said.

  “I could have saved him,” said Frostflower. “Had I made the attempt a few moments earlier, I could have saved him.”

  Inmara shook her head. “Do not blame yourself. He… When he left here, he knew how the child was born. He knew, and he defied the gods to prevent him from keeping and raising the child. He—” The priestess stopped and covered her face with one hand for a moment before going on. “I do not say the other choice would have been right. For myself, I can no longer believe that a child born as Tern—as your Starwind was born is so unnatural. But I am only a priestess, not a priest. My husband believed the gods would want the child killed, and, believing that, defied them.” She shook her head again. “You did not kill him, Frostflower. Jehandru…struck him down.”