Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Not Jehandru. It was the silver dagger. Lady, let none of your people point metal toward the sky during a storm.”

  “Aye. The sacred dagger…pointed toward the gods whom he had challenged to cross his own will.”

  Inmara paused again, struggling with her emotions. Frostflower waited in silence. Could she remain so confident that it had not been the farmers’ gods who struck down their own priest? Had she any right, even if she knew the truth, to argue with the priestess? Inmara seemed to find some pattern, some consolation, in the thought that her husband had died for breaking part of his own creed; take that pattern away from her, and Maldron’s death would be a meaningless loss. No, unless Frostflower saw Starwind threatened, she would not argue against Inmara’s beliefs. But why did the priestess remain here? It was as if she had meant to say something else, and Frostflower had distracted her with the ill-timed plea for forgiveness.

  “Frostflower, if you can grow a child in the womb…can you also feel a child in the womb?”

  “I felt Starwind, Lady.”

  “Will you…feel my womb?”

  “Lady?”

  “We had tried for so long. Perhaps I am barren. It seemed I must be barren. But we made our offering to the goddess Aeronu, that day at the forest altar. He had not sinned then; he had done nothing to defy the gods, and I think that I have always… Frostflower, I must know! I must know if I carry his seed!”

  Was a farmer requesting sorcery of a sorceron? “Lady, I felt Starwind before I began to speed his growth, but he was already more than a hen’s-hatching old. If the child were too small, I might feel nothing unless I first sped the mother’s time.”

  “But could you feel him, if he had been conceived that day on the forest altar?”

  That day…it had been fourteen days ago? Fifteen? No more than fifteen. “Yes, if it had been conceived then, I would feel it without further sorcering. But if it were conceived any later…and you will learn very soon in your own time, Lady.”

  “I must know, Frostflower. I must know at once! Even if you had to grow him to a hen’s-hatching old, that could not be so greatly wrong. It could be no worse than your healing of our warriors last night, and Daseron permitted that, did he not?”

  Aye, but perhaps the young farmer had been too much in awe of her to forbid it. Last night, Frostflower thought, I must have behaved strangely, speeding time for woman after woman, demanding to return here with Maldron’s body. “Rest tonight, Lady. If, in the morning, you still wish it, then I will feel your womb.”

  “No. In the morning, it may seem sinful. I may fear it, and then I would have to wait.” Inmara put her hand on Frostflower’s arm. “My thoughts are clear, sorceress. I have thought of this since you returned last night, and I believe my thoughts are clear. Now, tonight, I see no wrong in it. And if I am mistaken, the gods will not blame a poor priestess who weighed her action on a day of grief and strain, with no grown priest to guide her. Frostflower, will you search my womb?”

  Perhaps Inmara wished somehow to associate herself with her dead husband’s guilt, to remain joined with him in the judgment of their gods. Perhaps she was only desperate for a certainty to help support her through the days to come. “Very well, priestess, I will do as you request.”

  “Will you do it in our Truth Grove?”

  A place was not good or bad, sacred or fearsome, except as humankind used it. Frostflower nodded. “Wherever you wish, Lady.”

  Inmara drew closer and gave one sob, as of relief. “Thank the gods! It was the only sign I asked of them—that if you agreed to return and do it in the Truth Grove, I would know surely there was no wrong in it.”

  She had asked for an omen. There can be no omens, Frostflower thought; the future does not yet exist; there is only an emptiness waiting to be filled, and not even God knows surely how…but can I be confident even of that, now? Perhaps, after all, the future is already before us and we have only to move into it from hour to hour.

  “But we will not go to the Truth Grove,” said Inmara. “I could not, not so soon after today. Besides, they will still be scrubbing the altar. We will go to my own private alcove in the garden.”

  They went. They passed Thorn, already asleep near the herbs, and they glimpsed a few white-robed figures moving in and out of the Truth Grove, carrying censers and brushes. They came to Inmara’s alcove, a quiet place, screened from the rest of the garden by curving rows of peach trees and lilac bushes. The thick garden wall was hollowed out to accommodate a polished granite altar and several niches, set into the rougher masonry. The tops of the peach trees and the upper part of the wall were still golden from the late afternoon sun, and the farmers’ gods seemed peaceful and beneficent, although mysterious, in their niches.

  Inmara lay on the altar. “Must I raise my skirt? Will you need to…put your hand into me?”

  She must be thinking of the operations physicians were said to perform. Smiling and shaking her head, Frostflower put one hand lightly on Inmara’s abdomen. “No. This is all.”

  “If you must grow it in order to feel it, do not tell me.”

  “If I must speed your body’s time, I will have to put you into a trance afterwards, or the natural span of your own life will be shortened by the equivalent number of days.”

  “I will pay that price. Do not tell me.”

  It was perhaps as well. To put both mother and unborn child into the trance of cool breathing together was very difficult to accomplish without some risk to the infant…if there was an infant. Ah, God, if the priestess has remained barren, how shall I tell her that?

  Letting her hand rest a little more heavily on Inmara’s robe, the sorceress closed her eyes and concentrated upon the firmness of the flesh beneath the cloth, then sent the vibrations of her mind deeper, gently probing the layers of blood and tissue, so well-fitting and hallowed when they were joined in living coordination as nature’s God had planned them…for a moment, she forgot her doubts while she found the new nubbin of life within the priestess.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, it is here.”

  Inmara sighed deeply. Her body had seemed relaxed before, but that had been the relaxation of a mind willing it so. Now her mind no longer needed to will away her tension. It went of itself, and the sorceress felt the difference.

  “Is it male or female?”

  “I cannot tell.” That seemed to Frostflower a very strange question. “Does it matter?”

  She could tell, however, that the child must be at least thirteen days old, possibly as old as sixteen days. It might well have been conceived that day of the farmers’ fertility rites on their woodland altar.

  “Priestess,” she went on, “I did not have to speed your time.” She knew, from the way Inmara pressed her hand, that she had done right in telling her.

  “If he is a boy,” said the priestess, “I will name him Maldron. If a girl, I will name her Arrana. Perhaps she will become as great and priestly as Maldron’s grandmother. I will teach him…or her…to respect the sorceri, Frostflower.”

  * * * *

  Even though she believed Maldron to have been killed by his gods for sinning against them, Inmara gave him a burial of honor, according to the farmers’ customs. His family cut the body devoutly into small pieces, and chosen warriors ploughed the pieces, still fresh, into one of his fields: the same field in which his grandmother Arrana was said to have been buried before him. The thought sickened Frostflower, although she tried not to show it. Her own people buried the bodies of their dead whole, or cremated them; and she was grateful that a sorceron, no matter how uniquely favored for a time by a ruling priestess, could hardly attend the priestly ceremony. Nor did Spendwell attend it, being a commoner. They sat in one of the orchards outside the farmers’ hall and cared for Starwind and small Nikkon, who alone of Maldron’s family was considered too young to join the burial rites. Thorn, however, witnessed the funeral. For her, it was a signal mark of pardon and restoration to be permitted there.

 
That evening, learning that Inmara planned to make the swordswoman Clopmule her chief raidleader (the old leader having been killed at the Rockroots), Thorn told the priestess something that had happened during her escape from the Farm—Clopmule had risked the safety of the child in her eagerness to capture Thorn.

  Frostflower, who sat near them in the garden, had never heard of this before; and Inmara was as horrified as the sorceress to learn it.

  “I thank you, warrior, for telling me this,” said the priestess. “I had not guessed the woman’s true nature. I will not keep her here.”

  “She’s fairly competent in a fight,” said Thorn. “You can’t turn out all the warriors who’re like Clopmule, Lady Reverence. But you need someone better than that to lead them.”

  “How am I to find the right woman?” Inmara took the golden wreath from her head and turned it nervously in her hands. “To have been so mistaken in Clopmule… I know so little of warriors, so little of ruling a farm. I never expected… Thorn, perhaps you…”

  Thorn stared at her for a moment, then looked down and smiled ruefully. “Not me, Lady Reverence. Your women would never accept me, even if you could forget.”

  “You are right. But I think…I could have trusted you, and learned to forget. Who else can I…”

  “You have at least one warrior you can trust,” said Thorn. “Silverstroke. She’s still young for a raidleader, but if you could find a more experienced woman to work with her, you might have a damn good team of leaders.”

  “Silverstroke…yes, I think she is the one who is said to be the daughter of a priest by a warrior in the western Tanglelands.” Inmara nodded, and after a pause went on, “Maldron spoke of hiring an old townwarrior called…Wiltleather…from White Orchard.”

  Frostflower rose softly and left them. Her milk had come, and she was uncomfortable with talk of raidleaders.

  * * * *

  The following day they began the journey north once more, riding in Spendwell’s wagon. This time they met no danger; but Frostflower became nervous at Spendwell’s attentions to her, and at his continued refusal to cook meat for himself.

  On the sixth afternoon, when Thorn seemed to be asleep after the midday meal, Spendwell brought his cushion and sat near Frostflower, who was nursing the child beneath an elm tree some paces from the fire.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said the merchant. “Maybe it really doesn’t have anything at all to do with your powers.”

  “Generations of us have believed otherwise.”

  “But maybe none of you has ever tried it before. Maybe all sorceri until you have only assumed their powers were lost. If any of them had tried…”

  Few of them had survived rape and returned again to their retreats. Yet, of those few…how could Frostflower be sure that none of them had ever made a small experiment, alone, in secret, and afterwards grown morose not for loss of power, but for loss of faith? Perhaps other sorceri had survived rape and never returned to their retreats, living instead as renegades and outlaws, practicing their powers for harm and revenge among the Tanglelanders. Any stories of such women and men would be accepted by faithful sorceri as still more superstitious exaggerations of the farmers’ folk; and any good sorceron who met such a renegade might well keep the knowledge secret in horror and grief.

  “Virginity is essential for the practice of power,” she said. “This has been taught from the times of the first sorceri.”

  “Maybe you’re…well, not quite mistaken, but…maybe your people haven’t made the distinction they should have made between, well, marriage and…the other.”

  She did not look at him, but she tried to rearrange her robe so as to hide from his view the breast Starwind was sucking.

  “Maybe…sorceress, maybe I didn’t affect your powers because we were meant to marry, you and I.”

  Again the half-formed notion of farmers’ folk that the future already existed somehow. “You have not heard that sometimes two sorceri wed?” said Frostflower. “They do not practice their old powers after coming together for the sake of children.” Yet could she be sure even of that, any longer? Could she say certainly that married sorceri never slipped away by themselves to grow a small flower or bathe in a clean wind? Those childhood walks with her own mother…could Frostflower swear, now, that the weather they enjoyed had always been purest coincidence, or that she had never found a plant that had not been there a few moments before? Had they not sometimes found a blossom opened very early for the time of year, or a few berries ripened when all the rest were still green?

  Yet if this were so, then her mother and all those other parents were living a lie far more brutal than their mere silence among farmers’ folk—they were lying to their own people! No, rather believe that nature had cracked somehow in her own case, than believe her people were lying!

  “Frostflower? Frostflower, I wasn’t so very…? I’m ready to convert, Frostflower.”

  “I do not think you could ever learn the power, merchant. Even if you are right, I do not think…”

  “No, but you get other converts like me sometimes, don’t you?”

  Her own grandmother had come to Windslope already carrying a child. That child, Frostflower’s mother Dawncloud, had married a convert who was a widower when he joined the sorceri. Could Frostflower be sure that her father, Wintergreen, converted because he came to believe in the One God, and not because he desired Dawncloud?

  Frostflower looked at the merchant and blinked, trying to clear her eyes. No, not even if married union did not destroy sorcerous power—not even if, as he had suggested, their marriage was foreknown and she would lose her powers (as well as her faith) unless she accepted him as husband—not even then could she bear the touch of that part of his body upon hers again. She did not even think she could have borne, now, to mate with Wonderhope. But how could she tell the merchant this, so that he would understand and not be hurt?

  “I do not think you would enjoy our life, Spendwell. It is very different among us, up in the mountains.”

  “I would have you.”

  “If you did not have me? We are mortal, too. We die of disease and accident—we do not always live our full span of time before the body uses itself up.”

  He was silent. She hoped he was considering his chances for returning and building up his success again as a merchant, after a lapse of years and with the tainted reputation of one who had joined the sorceri.

  “If you join us, Spendwell, it must be for more than myself. You must know what life you will enter, and you must think well of what you give up.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it since—well, since we saved you.”

  “You cannot have known anything of our life, except in your own imagination.”

  “Then teach me. Tell me about your retreats. Tell me about your God.”

  She shook her head. She no longer knew anything about the One God. Moreover, she realized vaguely that instead of understanding her words, he would continue listening to the mere sound of her voice and watching the movement of her lips. “Think it through again, merchant. Carefully. If you must, then go to another retreat, in a far distant part of the mountains. Learn from them.… Let them teach you for at least a year. Go to Mildrock, in the western mountains.”

  Mildrock—Wonderhope’s retreat. Perhaps, if she herself could not make Spendwell understand, Wonderhope could.

  “Milkrock,” he repeated. At that moment Thorn snorted and woke up.

  Later that afternoon, in the wagon, Thorn slipped close to her and said softly, “Don’t worry, Frost. I’ll milk that nonsense out of the mushhead.”

  “You were not asleep?”

  “Na. Just curious to hear how far the idiot would go.”

  Either the merchant did not try to speak alone with Frostflower again, or Thorn did not give him the opportunity; but more than once Frostflower awakened in the night to hear movement and grunting outside the wagon, and to find Thorn’s place on the wagon floor empty. On one of these occasi
ons, she thought she heard the swordswoman mutter, “You bastard, you could never be a bloody merchant again. You think the farmers’ cattle would…” (some words Frostflower could not understand) “… Besides, where would you find another milker if…”

  Spendwell still cooked no meat for himself, but he did not ask how to find Mildrock. When they reached the mountains, the prospect of spending even a night in Windslope seemed to unnerve him slightly.

  Frostflower and Thorn sat together on a rock that afternoon, looking north toward Windslope while Spendwell put out the fire and reharnessed the donkeys. They would be in the Retreat by nightfall; but as yet only the study-house was visible, looking much like another distant boulder unless one knew what it was.

  “You can’t see anything from here,” said Thorn.

  “We do not build our dwellings to be seen easily from below.”

  “No, I guess not.” The warrior cleaned her fingernails and whistled a slow tune.

  “Thorn, you need not come the rest of the way. You and Spendwell can turn back here and pass the night at Elvannon’s Farm.”

  “The bloody merchant can turn back if he likes. I want a look at the place. May want to come back here again sometime.”

  “To watch your son grow?”

  “Don’t remind me the little bugger’s my son.” Thorn reached over and pinched Starwind’s cheek. He gurgled and raised his arm as if trying to reach her hand. “Unh. I’m getting better—he didn’t cry that time. If I get another one inside me, I’ll come up and let you get it out.”

  “We will welcome it. What will you do now?”

  Thorn shrugged. “First, I’ll work awhile for Spendwell. Ran up quite a debt, cloth and suchlike—no, damn it, don’t worry about it, it’s my expense. I owe you something for saving me a borter’s price.”