The Wind-Witch

by Susan Dexter

  Druyan decided that if she was fated to walk home, she might as well begin the journey. There’d be rain later—the cool wind pledged it. She could have taken Robart’s castoff roan, but she preferred to leave it for him to cope with—he’d have a job ponying either it or Valadan home, and richly deserved the trouble.

  The racers were dragged into a raggedy line. Someone shouted the signal to begin. Hooves thundered, like a presage of storm. Dru told herself not to look back, but she could not resist watching Valadan run, even with another rider on his back. He carried himself so proudly, his sculptured head so high, his tail an outflung banner. . .

  He leapt to the lead, like a black wave breaking on the shore. So lovely he took her breath, and for a moment Druyan forgot her loss in admiration. There was no horse his equal!

  A black-legged gray had its pink nose at his flank. Druyan waited for Valadan to accept the challenge and draw away with quickened pace—instead, the gray unthinkably gained ground with every stride. Valadan ran steadily, but now the gray’s head was at his neck. And a dark chestnut was overhauling the stallion from the other side, with a bald-faced bay gaining ground on all of them just behind.

  They raced over a full league, and Valadan was the last to make the distance. Druyan watched open-mouthed as he came jogging slowly back, tossing his head. The expression on Robart’s face was one of the purest disgust.

  “Hasn’t got the staying power of a sheep,” he snarled, flinging the reins toward his sister as he vaulted down. “You might have said so.” He walked away.

  Druyan looked into the stallion’s dark eyes, saw swirls of rainbows like laughter deep within. Valadan nuzzled ticklingly at her palm and blew upon her contentedly. He wasn’t even sweating.

  “Smart horse,” Druyan said dryly.

  The black head dipped in agreement.

  The Widow

  Splaine Garth was as much salt marsh as cropland. Druyan could ride half a day—on any ordinary horse’s back—and never be off her husbands land. The marshes looked wild beyond hope of farming, but in fact a substantial quantity of hay was taken from them each year, and cows, pigs, and sheep throve alike upon the spartina grass pastures. Waterfowl were plentiful, too—a heron turned its spear-beaked head to watch Druyan ride by, and she heard a swan calling overhead.

  Many a husband would have found objection in a young wife’s riding out alone as often as Druyan did, but Travic had trusted her. It had not been a cynical assessment that an old horse and a less-than-attractive woman were unlikely to come to harm or mischief—it had been her husband’s respect of her need to take the air for an hour or so most days, his kindness in allowing her a pleasure from the very first days of their marriage.

  And now Travic was dead, of duty and a stray arrow.

  Dalkin had brought the news that morning, after walking alone a day and a night alongside the horse that bore his master’s lifeless body. He was the only one of the little company to return—the rest of Splaine Garth’s men, without a living lord to order them home after a reasonable period of service, had been conscripted into the duke’s army for an indeterminate span of months. But Dalkin was barely ten, old enough to accompany his lord and run messages for him, not grown enough or expected to fight. So home he came, on one last service to his master.

  Seaborne raiders had been harrying Esdragon’s dangerous coasts for the past hand-span of years. Darlith had mostly escaped the attentions of the men in the long black ships, boasting few towns where riches would be clustered for easier plundering; but eventually even quiet Splaine Garth’s luck had run out. It was late in the season, they had begun to hope themselves spared for another year, but the ever-prudent Travic had not relaxed his vigilance while there was still sailing weather and danger to come with it.

  Ready for trouble, he and his farmhands put the raiders to flight in wonderfully short order, and penned those they took captive within the farm’s root cellar. Then Travic had marched every able-bodied man beholden to Splaine Garth downcoast to join the ducal army defending one of Darlith’s scarce port towns, expecting to return in a sevenday. Instead, he met his fate, fletched with goose feathers gray as the sky. Ironically, the arrow was a stray come from his own side—the raiders were not even thought to fight with bows.

  Druyan twisted her big hands tight into Valadan’s mane, bent low over the horse’s neck as a lump swelled in her throat. I just buried my husband.

  Probably few folk would expect her to mourn Travic with an extravant, hair—rending grief, but they had shared married life for eight years, and his passing left a great empty place at the center of her world, as if a tree had been tom from the earth by storm winds. Part of her could not even accept the news. Another part of her looked ahead and saw worse disasters to come. Already she missed what she knew would never return. That was fool’s business—Travic had often been gone from home a fortnight, and she had not then been in an agony of loneliness. It had only been a span of days since he’d ridden out—if all had gone according to plan, he wouldn’t have been back yet anyway. If someone had known how to aim his bow, how to allow for wind and distance drop . . . how to shoot over his own lines. . .

  Their marriage had been arranged by her father, a year before Ronan died. Travic was nearly her father’s age, married once already to a woman who had given him no child, though she had eventually died attempting that wifely duty. Druyan had not given Travic an heir, either, but he had never spoken of setting her aside, or otherwise ill-treated her on that account. If they had not loved one another with passion, they had lived agreeably together, considerate of each other, partners.

  And now Travic was dead, and this barren widow faced the bleakest of futures.

  If only she’d had a child! That old ache cut deeper than the fresh pain of Travic’s death, but Druyan had long since shed all the tears she was able to on that account—each spring as every female creature in sight brought forth young, and her arms ached with the burden they were not fated to hold.

  But if she’d had a child—even a daughter—she would have been allowed to hold Splaine Garth in trust, and she’d have had a home there while she did that. As it was. . .

  The land would pass to some overlooked son of one of Travic’s great-aunts, and Travic’s barren widow would have to leave. Go back to her family, which no longer had a place for her. She’d been settled, dealt with, married off, and if she returned now it would be in disgrace, having failed at the most basic of womanly tasks. Druyan pressed her face into Valadan’s silky mane but could not shut out that desolate future.

  She could marry again. Certainly her family would try to arrange that for her. It would, of course, be a very hard bargain for them to strike, with any man having half his wits about him.

  She had no lands. She had no looks—not with her long, thin nose and her grandmother’s square jaw. Not with hair the color of dead salt-grass and eyes that were pale gray without even a hint of blue—and there were lines at the corners of them, from gazing out over the marshes, from being out in the weather and not caring. She freckled if Esdragon got sufficient sun, though that was rare. And her hands were still too big for grace, though they were deft at spinning and weaving the wool from Travic’s sheep, where more delicate fingers would not have served so well.

  Worst of all, she was barren. What sane man wanted that in a wife, with naught of looks or money to offset the defect? She’d been fortunate with Travic, he had not reproached her or beaten her. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t especially grieved that she’d had far more in common with her husband’s farm dogs than she’d had with the man himself—they shared her devotion to the sheep. She had no reason to expect such forebearance of another man. Outside of Splaine Garth she had nothing, no place, no life.

  Druyan dismounted and looped the reins over Valadan’s neck, out of his way. He followed at her heels like a dog as she walked over her land—which was hers no longer.

  They hadn’t cut hay here—too near the winding stream that clove a
lazy way to the sea. They’d have had to carry it too far, to spread it for curing or even to load it on a wagon. The grass rose to her waist, held secrets of bird nests and rabbit runs among its roots. They were far enough upstream that the salt tide did generally not invade, so purple-flowered mint clothed the streambanks. She should cut a bundle while she saw it, to dry for winter tea. Physick for digestive troubles, pleasant simply to sip with a bit of honey. . .

  Druyan halted abruptly. What was she about, planning as if she’d be there when the mint leaves were dried, much less come winter? Hot tears blurred her sight again, and she put her big hands over her eyes. When Valadan nuzzled her arm, she flung both arms about his neck and soaked his shoulder with her grief.

  When must we go? he asked her. The wild swan called a question of its own.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice was thick. Druyan swallowed hard to clear her throat, blew her nose into a mullein leaf. “I hadn’t thought that far—” She patted his shoulder. “Not today.”

  Nor next day. Travic’s body was barely carried home, scarce committed to the earth. Nothing would or could happen at once. There’d be a search for whoever stood heir to him. Time would pass.

  Who’d search? Druyan suddenly wondered. The question hung in her mind, like the afterimage of a lightning bolt. She listened to the wind sighing through the tall grass.

  The reality was, Splaine Garth was a backwater farm on the edge of nowhere, not a great landholding. Travic’s lands didn’t include a town and its population, just the marsh and the cropland and the few unremarkable folk who dwelt thereon, none of them his heirs, all of them waiting as she did, for whatever happened next. Suppose nothing happened? Suppose no one came from afar to claim the land?

  Travic had taught his wife to care for Splaine Garth, had shared the stewardship of it openhandedly with her. There were few parts of its management Druyan did not have some knowledge of. Day to day, the farm would go on exactly as before, though Travic was gone. Day to day, little would change unless the nature of the world itself did. Plowing and planting, harvest and gathering, making and marketing—all that she could see to. That was the reality, no matter how dark the future might look from her vantage. Day by day, she could go on, and so thereby could Splaine Garth.

  And taking into account such realities, there was a hallowed custom. Should a man die childless, and with no issue from previous marriages, if his widow could thereafter hold the land for a year and a day without remarrying and with all crop tithes timely paid, then the land passed to that widow, became hers to hold in her own right.

  The swan called again, as if to underscore the point. Druyan gave a whoop of her own, spinning around with arms spread wide to Valadan, who threw his head up in startlement but stood his ground.

  “The wool tithe was paid after the spring shearing!”

  He snorted at her, trying to understand. The sun was on the far horizon, and most of the vast sky was the color of a ripe apricot. Druyan looked like a part of the marsh—her hair catching rosy-golden lights as the tall grass did, her eyes the silver gray of the shallow pools scattered among the rushes and sweet flag.

  “There’s the barley tithe, when the crop comes in. And after first frost, we have to send part of a cider pressing. Then that’s it, for the year. If we send the crop tithes on time, there’s no reason anyone would think to come here. It’ll be winter, no one will want to travel—and by spring, the year’s half done!” She was touching her long fingers, one by one, assuring herself of the count. “We can do it! A year and a day is nothing!”

  She rammed a boot into the stirrup and vaulted onto Valadan’s back. He caught her excitement and reared playfully against the pink-peach sky.

  “We’ll do it!” the lady of Splaine Garth cried to the swans and the sky and the salt marsh.

  The Prisoner

  Enna was a childless widow, too. The winter before Druyan had come as a bride to Splaine Garth, an epidemic of lung fever had raged through Darlith and, by the time it had passed, claimed Enna’s husband and two small sons. Enna herself suffered from joint evil, and though she was barely a handspan of years Druyan’s elder, she seemed most often twice that age. The coiled braids of her dark hair were well laced with silver. When the weather turned wet or chill, movement became a torture for her, and her hands swelled till she could scarcely use them for the least task. She had kept the house for Travic after his first wife’s death and continued the service after his remarriage—to expect her to do farmwork would have been a cruelty none of them were capable of. The house was snugger than a farmer’s hut, and even there Enna suffered piteously, especially come winter. That she never submitted to her affliction did not ease it.

  This day, howbeit, had been a good one ere Dalkin came to the gate. After a stretch of dryish weather, Enna had been able to knead the bread as she ought, to set it to rise, and later to shape the loaves. The upsets of the recent raid had faded. She had started a proper meal cooking for her lady, a joint of mutton roasting slow and late berries stewing into a savory sauce for the meat. Then came the news, and no one at Splaine Garth cared a whit for food, which was proper but such a waste of good cookery. And her hands and neck and shoulders had begun to ache from the instant she had seen the burdened horse behind the boy, as if there was rain coming off the sea.

  The lady had ridden out after the burial was accomplished, to have her grief in private, Enna supposed. In the sanctuary of her kitchen, she listened for the sound of the horse returning and heard old Valadan’s hoofbeats just at dusk, when she’d have otherwise begun to fret. She hastened to set out a meal to tempt her mistress to eat. The poor thing might need Enna’s coaxing—the news had hurt them all, but surely the Lady Druyan had first claim to the grief.

  Splaine Garth boasted a lofty hall, a pretention to grandeur by one of Travic’s ancestors, but the great room was impossibly drafty at any time, never pleasant for lingering over meals. Food would freeze to the table in winter. The family had always dined at one end of the kitchen, where a carved wooden screen shut out the common sight of the cook’s work but not the welcome heat of oven and vast hearth. Druyan came in from the stable, scraping her boots clean at the doorstep, and Enna brought her lady water and a linen towel.

  “I should have sent that roast straight to stew,” she fretted aloud as Druyan washed her hands. “I’m sure ’tis dry as bone now.”

  Druyan glanced at the wide board, with only the one place laid on the well-scrubbed wood, a new reality that stabbed her to the heart. “You couldn’t ruin a meal if you set your heart on it, Enna. Did you feed Dalkin? Did the girls come in?” Pru and Lyn tended the sheep and kept an eye on the other beasts pastured in the marsh. When the weather permitted, the sheep stayed out nightlong, their shepherdesses sheltering in one or another of the little huts built for that purpose.

  “They took bread enough yesterday to last another day or so. And Dalkin ate fit for three,” Enna added, complaining.

  Druyan settled herself on the bench. “He had a long walk, Enna. And boys that age—” She broke off. Enna’s sons would have been only a little older than Dalkin. “Won’t you eat?” she asked lamely.

  “I did, a bit.” Enna started around the edge of the screen, back to her domain, both women thinking of losses.

  “Sit with me, Enna?” Druyan begged suddenly. To sit alone to a meal only underscored her situation. Travic’s empty place loomed large, a pity of shadows.

  “My lady? What’s going to become of us now? Without the master?”

  Druyan lifted a portion of roast mutton onto her platter. “Well, next thing’s bringing in the barley crop.”

  Enna watched wide-eyed as Druyan calmly sliced herself some bread. Deranged by grief, might she be? The master gone, and she spoke calmly of harvesting?

  “You don’t think Travic intended to let it sprout in the tield?” Druyan raised a thin brow. “Well, I don’t, either. We are going to tend this farm, Enna, exactly as Travic would have done if he’d lived. That’
s what’s going to become of us.”

  “But, my lady—” Enna’s face twisted in constemation.

  Druyan began to eat her dinner. “This is very fine bread, Enna. You always do wonders with it.” She returned to the matter at hand. “A man’s goods and lands pass to his children.” She chewed a bite of mutton, then swallowed carefully. “But sometimes there are no children. So the law says, if the widow can hold that land, it belongs to her. That’s what I intend, Enna.” It sounded impossibly bold, said straight out for the first time. Not to be unsaid, or stepped back from.

  It must have sounded so to Enna, too. Her dark eyes went very round, and the lines around them smoothed out. “But you’ll remarry.” Not a question, but a stated fact.

  “If Travic had close family, they’d demand it And I could not say them no.” Druyan shook her head. “But there’s no one, Enna. Some far-off cousins, who never came here, who’ve forgotten us. No one will force me.”

  “Would you have to be forced? Was being wed to my lord such an awful state?” Enna huffed, prepared to dodge back into the safety of her kitchen, away from the payment due her impertinence.

  But her lady was not angry. “Travic was a good man, Enna, I don’t deny that. But no one asked me if I wanted to wed a man old enough to be my sire,” Druyan said, pleading for mercy. “They just arranged it for me. Well, no one’s here to arrange another such marriage for me, and I won’t seek one. I will not remarry. I will hold Splaine Garth, and we can all of us stay here.”

  “You could go back to your family.” Enna presented the option uncertainly.

  “They saw me provided for once. They won’t thank me if they have to do it over again.” The gray eyes implored. “Enna, the only place I have in this world is here—if I make it mine.”

  “Well.” Enna sighed deeply. “Who knows what sort they’d give this place to, Lady? I think you’ll be doing right, to try.” Druyan felt greatly comforted, though the victory was surely after the smallest of the battles she’d face.