by Susan Dexter
There came a rustling from the pallet. Slight—he might only have turned his head. She hadn’t seen movement. It might as easily have been a mouse, running through the bedding. Druyan hesitated, then lifted the bar and went in careful to leave the door standing wide, and Valadan’s, as well. That way she had both an escape route and a rescuer ready to hand. She did not expect she would need either.
“Are you awake?” Druyan knelt and began to open her bundle, folding the napkin back from about a wooden bowl full of scraps of chicken and bread soaked in gravy. Straw whispered once again—the prisoner had turned his head toward her. His eyes were open.
The last thing Kellis expected to wake to was amber lamplight and the comforting smell of food. He blinked slowly, his eyelids heavy as if they had been weighted with coins for his burial. He found himself in a little room, a most curious room, and he was lying on the floor. He had no idea why. After a while he recognized the snort of a horse feeding close by and decided that the inexplicable thing he could see partway up one wall must be a manger. He was in a stall, then, lying on soft straw or hay rather than the damp earth of the cellar, with what looked like a vast space above him—the lamplight did not pierce it well, but he could see that there was room for him to stand without bumping his head against the roof.
He could remember—assuming he hadn’t dreamed it—that the barley was all cut, every stem of it in every field. Therefore, thereby, he was free, though that didn’t explain why he was in what must be a barn or byre.
Free—and crippled, thanks to the cold iron sickle. Kellis did not have to glance at his hands to know that. He did not need the confirmation of his eyes, when every beat of his heart sent a throb of pain through his hands, lightning flashes into all ten of his fingers. The rest of him ached, from work and possibly from being dragged to wherever he was from wherever he had been, and even as he lay quite still his half-seen surroundings seemed to move gently to and fro, like weeds underwater. A fever sensation, probably, very like the aftermath of dream trance, unpleasant but not lasting. The hands could be another matter; there was no knowing.
Kellis was afraid to look, terrified of what he might see, so he watched the woman instead, as she fussed with the food she’d brought for him. He had no appetite for it, but as she moved the lamplight gleamed on her hair, and he could watch that, trying not to think of anything else save the play of gold on that red-gold. . .
It was hard to remember to be properly wary of the raider—he looked so afraid of her, and so ill on top of it. Druyan felt pity, whether dangerous or not. “I’ve brought you some supper, and some aloe for your hands,” she said. Wind lashed the barn wall, little cold rivers of air raised dust whorls inside, made the lantem light flare and waver before the gusts got smothered in her skirts. Druyan considered whether she’d need to feed the man. He hadn’t reached for the food, and she doubted he could grasp it, now that she got a better look at his hands.
He let her lift his head and give him a sip of water. “You fainted,” Druyan told him, though he hadn’t asked what had befallen him, or where he was. Perhaps he wasn’t well enough to question good fortune or to know he wasn’t back in the cellar and out of his head with fever. He didn’t look very well, and her fingers’ brief contact judged his sldn as too warm for the shift in the weather. Gone dry, too, which was fever, or too much work in the heat, or both together.
He couldn’t swallow well enough, lying flat, to quench his thirst. After a moment he struggled to hitch himself into a sitting position, and Druyan let him, offering the cup again when he could drink more easily. He shook his head weakly at the food, so she set it aside for the moment and turned to the cloths and salve she had brought.
She stroked aloe sap onto his appalling hands and wrapped them all round with clean rags to hold the healing juice in place longer. The treatment must have hurt him, but the man gave no sign beyond a single flinch when the sap first touched his darkened skin. The swelling was so bad, Druyan couldn’t feel his knucklebones, and she was glad when the bandages hid the worst of it from her sight. Some part of her dinner wasn’t lying easily in her stomach. She wished she knew healing charms as well as she did those for weather.
He had handled cold iron, and his hands had puffed up after, like a cow dying with the bloat. What did that mean? That question had brought Druyan out, into the night, as much as any love of the weather or concern for a sick man. What else could it mean, but what she suspected? Druyan offered more water, and he drank with his eyes shut, carefully‘not looking at her.
“What was your job, in the raiding?” she asked him when the cup was empty.
“I was the scout, Lady,” he confessed reluctantly, watching her warily now.
“Hard to scout a place you’ve never seen.” Druyan swallowed, then risked, “Does being a wizard help with that?”
There was real fear in his eyes, instantly. Panic, even, as if she’d shown him a weapon. He tried to scramble back from her and to stand as he did it. He collided with the wall before he’d gone ten inches and sat helpless on the pile of hay and sacking, his breath coming hard and fast, his swaddled hands fumbling to either side of him. “I’m no wizard,” Kellis said unconvincingly.
Druyan shook her head. “Of course not. What happened to your hands?”
“I’m not—” He seemed to think hard about that, as if his life depended on his answer. Maybe he thought it did. “I’m not used to the work,” he settled.
“Neither am I.” Druyan looked him straight in the eye, then lifted her two hands as evidence. “All I got was a broken blister and a few cuts from a fresh edge.”
“Lady, you said I could go when the harvest was in He spoke desperately, reminding her of their bargain, buying time to gather himself for another attempt at rising. His skin had gone the color of brown eggshells, the only blood in it around that nasty cut on his forehead. His eyes looked dark as stones, unfocused. “You said I’d be free.”
“That’s so.” Druyan cocked her head at the persistent drum of rain on the slate roof above the mow. “You might want to wait for daylight. The rain will_ probably have stopped by then. You might even want to wait till your hands heal. You’ve worked hard. I’ll feed you till you’re well enough to go. Seeing as how you aren’t a wizard,” she added.
“I should go now, Lady.” Better for both af us, his gray eyes suggested.
She couldn’t sanely dispute that. This was a stranger, come to steal and do murder-that was what she knew of him. Dangerous. If he was willing to go, that was surely a fine thing. It did away with a lot of problems. Anyone would agree with that—the storm must be warping her judgment, making her wild and foolish enough to suggest that he stay. She’d had too much cider, toasting to the barley maid.
Druyan numbly watched the man get his legs under hirn and struggle to his feet, watching him pressing a shoulder against the wall till he found his balance and could step away, cradling one hand with the other. She knelt frozen and watched him walk to the door. She’d never have wagered that he’d achieve three steps in a row, but he did. Over the partition, Valadan’s sparkling eyes likewise observed.
Thunder cracked just overhead. With every window close-shuttered to keep out the rain, there wasn’t the usual warning of a flash. Just the appalling noise, as if the sky li spt, the earth cracked. Druyan saw the man startle at the explosion of sound, miss his unsteady footing entirely, and try frantically to get his balance back. He couldn’t do itKellis went sprawling headlong, landing helplessly on his outflung hands. Druyan thought he screamed, but more thunder drowned lesser sounds and shook the rafters.
He didn’t try to get up again. He didn’t make another sound, just lay there like a discarded doll wearing odd white mittens. Hail began to hammer the roof. After a moment it was plain enough that he had fainted, and that he would be going nowhere anytime soon, whether he should or not, no matter what was best. Druyan dragged him back to the pile of hay, rolled him onto it, and fetched a blanket to throw over her uninvi
ted guest.
Kellis had taken a fever, whatever else ailed him, whatever he was or was not. His forehead was blistering hot when Druyan took a few moments after breakfast to check on him, and he would not open his eyes, though he mumbled and turned away from her touch. It was difficult to get food into him—he spent most of the next three days drifting in and out of wakefulness, quite uninterested in his surroundings. Druyan brewed every tisane she knew in an attempt to bring his temperature down again—feverfew blossoms and willow bark, comfrey leaves—but no remedy seemed to work. He had no spots, no cough or other sign of plague. The fever might have to burn itself out, Druyan thought. She hoped he would survive the conflagration. She salved his hands each day with fresh aloe and wrapped them with comfrey leaves and clean linen, but there was little improvement to be seen. Mostly the man slept, as if waking or dying were equally too much trouble to bear.
Enna upbraided her mistress for wasting time and energy nursing a wretch she should have been thankful to see dead, but Druyan ignored the criticism. More work to bury him than to nurse him, she said wryly, and put an end to the discussion. No one else took sick, depriving Enna of an argument; and before she could try out others, there was a change at last. The third night, the fever broke, for no cause Druyan could fathom and no credit at all to her herb lore.
Had he been sufficiently aware, Kellis would have willed himself to die—it seemed the only escape left open to him. But he lay adrift on a sea of heat and pain, prey to unpleasant dreams that robbed his sleep of any true rest, unable to think with clarity enough to put an end to his misery.
He knew, of old, that courting death hardly guaranteed achieving it. It was monstrously unfair, but true. His spirit was firmly bound to his body, and he was too confused by illness to remember how to sever the link deliberately. The irony of that made his cracked lips twitch into a smile—he knew so many who had found their way along the trails to the afterlife so easily, without any effort on their parts at all. His family, for instance. His clan. In his buming dreams they all lived again, all died once more, and he was helpless again, unable to follow his people on their final migration, abandoned and cast out and alone. He howled as he had then, screaming his grief to the darkness that surrounded him—and woke drenched in sweat, still tasting bitter medicines on his lips.
He wept scalding tears till sleep swept him up once more.
No one in Esdragon had an outdoor threshing floor. Some farmers built special barns for the purpose of processing grain—Splaine Garth used the large floor space of the main barn, where the cattle were penned during the worst winter weather. There was room to drive the threshing sledge around in a tight circle atop the spread barley, its ih wegt beating the ripe grains loose from the straw. Usually one of the draft horses provided the power, but Valadan’s nimbleness made him apt to the work, too—his strong legs stood up to the constant circling with none of the strain and swelling the more massive drafters suffered betimes.
The sledge bumped merrily over the fanned-out sheaves, weighted with as many bodies as would climb atop it. This was great fun—at the outset. After a couple of days every soul on the farm was heartily sick of the process. The girls complained that Meddy was letting the sheep stray and Rook was not preventing her; Dalkin was eager to begin winnowing the threshed grain once the rain had stopped, while the wind held strong. Myriad farm tasks pressed, offering opportunities of escape and respite.
Druyan was as bored as any of them. She had never threshed before, only seen it done, but it wasn’t hard work for the driver, and it wasn’t enthralling. It just went on , endlessly, numbingly. Sensing impending mutiny, she released her crew to other tasks and wondered what she might use to weight the sledge in their place. Rocks would do, of course, or barrels, but something that could get itself on and off the sledge bed under its own power would be nicer. Enna was enduring a bad spell thanks to the wet weather, and the bouncing would be sheer agony for her. One sheep didn’t weigh enough to help and more would be impossible to manage. A pig was unlikely to cooperate.
Druyan felt eyes watching her, and saw them, in the open doorway of the box stall. She’d been leaving it unbarred—what use locking up a man too sick to stand? A notion teased at her. Kellis was just well enough to navigate from one side of the stall to the other—the fever had left him wobbly as a wormy kitten. But he could sit—and he was close by. She halted Valadan—and the sledge—with a quiet word, a twitch of the reins.
“Kellis, come over here.” He looked startled, probably because her tone made it as much an invitation as an order, but he stepped through the doorway after only the barest hesitation.
The slippery grain stalks were tricky footing, but he managed, frowning at the effort it cost him. “Lady?” he asked, arriving at her side a little out of breath.
“Climb on. Better sit down,” Druyan recommended, amused by his perplexed expression. Maybe he was expecting her to order him out of the barn, off the farm before she had to feed him another meal. When he had settled, she started around in another circle, fairly slowly. His added weight helped, she could tell by the way the sledge rode.
“What does this do?” he asked after their third circuit, bracing against the bouncing, then yielding to it as he realized his stiffness let the motion jar him.
The query was startling—hadn’t he been watching, and hadn’t they been threshing right under his crooked nose? Had he never seen such work before? He seemed serious. He was watching intently, waiting for her answer.
“There are rollers under the sledge,” Druyan finally explained. “Dragging them over the barley loosens the seed heads, beats them off the stalks. The more weight on the sledge, the better it works.”
He digested that gravely, shifting again to a more secure position. Hard when you couldn’t use your hands, Druyan supposed. He was trying to hold on, also trying not to hurt himself.
“Don’t your people farm?” she asked, wondering how they threshed their grain, assuming they grew any. By beating it with flails, by hand? That would be even more tedious than sledging.
A startled, wide-open gray glance. “No.”
Small wonder he’d had to be shown how to use the sickle. “City-born?” Druyan guessed.
“No, Lady.”
There’d been much speculation about where the raiders hailed from but precious few firm answers. Captured men had proved reluctant to talk. The bandits came, stole, and vanished, leaving only destruction and anger behind. Druyan wondered if this man might tell her now, not realizing what he did. Worth a try. “Where am you from?” Clever of her, if she could find out.
“Vossli.” His answer was muffled, as if he were struggling not to put feeling into the name.
“Where’s that?” Druyan asked, genuinely interested. “I never heard of it.” Certainly it wasn’t a place anyone had guessed, gossiping.
“Across the sea.” He inhaled sharply, let the breath out slowly. “It isn’t called that anymore. The name means ‘the purple grassland’ ” His gray eyes slipped out of focus, as if he looked over a far distance, rolling waves of lavender and green.
Over the sea. That meant none of his people would be back till the next spring, Druyan realized. They were entering into the season of storms, out upon the Great Sea. Even Esdiagon’s bold coastal iishers stayed in sight of land during those foul months, and no ships crossed the sea roads. Kellis had been left behind, abandoned, and must know that. It was too late for him to get home. He was still every bit a prisoner, whether of hers or merely of sea reach and weather.
“Kellis—” She put a hand out, almost touched his shoulder. “Come sailing weather, you can send word. Your family will ransom you.”
He turned his head away, rather than shaking it. “I have no family,” he said softly. “There’s no one to pay to have me back. And if there were, they wouldn’t do it,” he added bitterly. “The sea raiders swept over my people long before they found yours. I am not one of the Eral, and when I joined them I made myself an outc
ast from my own clans.” He rubbed at his forehead with the side of his hand. “I don’t want to go back.”
The sledge bumped and boimced. “There are probably better ways of winning a welcome in Esdragon than scouting for a band of murdering pirates,” Druyan observed wryly.
He shot her a look, out the tail of his eye. “They have all the ships. I needed to get across the Great Sea.”
“Why?”
She could tell he wasn’t going to answer. He’d said more in the last circle over the grain than he had the whole while he’d been with them. After a moment she observed: “Your hands are better.”
He could not deny that, she’d seen him using them to hold onto the sledge, however gingerly. “Yes, Lady. Thank you for the aloe—there’s nothing I know of that could have done more to heal them.” He flexed his left hand—she could tell he didn’t have the full range of its motion back, but it was coming, and obviously using it hurt him less than it had a few days earlier.
“Last time I saw a hand swell like that, it was snake-bit,” Druyan said. “And it had to be taken off, in the end. You’re lucky—but then it wasn’t a snake that bit you.”
She was begirming to suspect that he wanted to get off the sledge, away from her interrogation. Druyan deliberately drove a little faster when she saw Kellis shift, so he’d have to think harder about jumping. Finally he nearly fell off, and she took pity and halted. She turned toward him, so he could not as easily look away from the confrontation.
“I asked you flat out whether you were a wizard. You said rw with your lips, but every other part of you screamed yes, loud enough to wake the stones. They say wizard-folk can’t handle cold iron, and you don’t seem to be able to touch it without some cost. Am I wrong about that?”
He still looked trapped, although the sledge no longer moved. He looked a touch green, as well. He might not feel able to stand, Druyan supposed. She pressed on, undeterred by mercy.