The Wind-Witch

by Susan Dexter

  “Look, if I haven’t killed you yet for a murdering scoundrel, what’s to fear? If I wanted you dead, don’t you think I had chances enough while you were sick? I told Enna it would be too much trouble to bury you, but it really wouldn’t have been that bad. I could have fed you to the pigs.”

  He took what she meant for a jest as literal truth, and went as pale as he could. His dark brows looked as if they’d been painted on with lampblack. The gray-gold eyes went dark as wet slate.

  “Don’t faint on me,” Druyan ordered stemly. “I need you to help fork this straw out of the way and spread more sheaves. Can you do that?”

  He flexed his hands again, then nodded reluctantly.

  “If you have to be sick, try not to do it in the grain. The fork’s wooden, it won’t poison you.” She pointed at the pitchfork, leaning among the waiting sheaves. “You want to eat, you work. Got that?

  He nodded again, looking confused. He got off the sledge, took two steps, stopped, and turned back to face her. Druyan unhitched Valadan. She’d let the horse go out into the open air awhile and have some grass while they did work he wasn’t needed for. It was raining again, but he’d never mind that. The horse had been foaled in Esdragon, rained on every day of his life.

  “Lady?”

  Beneath her hand, Valadan’s shoulder quivered. His sharp ears flicked back. Druyan froze. She was afraid to look—a pitchfork made a weapon, even if unskillfully held in crippled hands. What have I done?

  “You guess rightly about my people—cold iron is a poison to us,” Kellis said. He wasn’t moving, she could tell by the distance his voice carried. Druyan relaxed as she felt Valadan settle under her fingers.

  “When the Eral came at us, we tried to fight them. We even learned to band together, all the clans—though that is far from our nature and was a great wonder—but we found we could not stand against their iron swords and axes. We would have yielded them the cropland, we are not truly a farming folk. We had no fixed homes to defend. We were used to moving with the flocks, the herds. Summer after summer we did that. But we would come to our summer pastures, and there were strangers camped there. The Eral. There were more and more of them. And then they began to drive us away. They hunted us like deer, slaughtered us without mercy.”

  “So you came here, with your enemies?” That didn’t follow. Druyan turned and arched a brow at him. “That’s a very odd thing to do, you’ll agree.”

  Kellis looked unhappy—a different shade of a continual misery. “I am not what you call a wizard. I know herbcraft and a scattering of charms—such as I have seen you use yourself, Lady.” The challenge was plain. Was she witchbred? “Beyond that . . .” He shook his head. “I can foresee, a little. Nothing very useful. And that’s all. But long ago my people learned that even so little is enough to get a man killed. Yes, I lied to you—I was afraid. I didn’t want to die here, especially not the way some folk kill witches.”

  She knew what he meant. Fire and cold iron weapons.

  Valadan stretched his nose toward Kellis, snorting gently. The man regarded him nervously, as if expecting to be bitten. He held very still.

  “Some time after . . . when I had been alone for a while, I heard a tale, of a place where other people like me were banding together. Wizards and charmers and healers, protecting one another, studying, learning, sharing their knowledge out with one another.” He shrugged. “My people don’t do that. I was apprentice to our shaman, but really we have each of us just whatever we’re born with—no more. We don’t take from one another or build on what someone else has learned. I would never have gone seeking such a place, I would never have thought I wanted it—but I had no clan. They were all dead, and I was alone. . .

  Valadan was nuzzling his fingers. Kellis looked at the horse as he spoke, as if that made the words come easier. His fingers began to scratch under the horse’s mane, then beneath the harness, where sticky sweat had dried. “I sold my services to an Eral captain gathering a raiding party for the sailing season—it was the only way I knew to get to this side of the Great Sea. I told him I could foresee, that I would warn him if there’d be resistance, tell him ahead which places weren’t prepared for an attack, where the plunder would be rich. The Eral may despise us, but they’l1 use us if they see an advantage. You can imagine for yourself what my folk think of such transactions? Valadan was leaning into the scratching now, since he could not roll to ease himself while he still wore collar and hamess. “I am an outcast. I sold myself, to come here.”

  “Something went wrong,” Druyan said dryly.

  She saw Kellis’ mouth twitch slightly, while his fingers worked beneath the headstall. “I was lucky, at first. Or as clever as I thought I was. The captain had no idea that most times the divining bowl doesn’t show me`much of anything. I didn’t have to do it all that often, mostly just say whether there’d be fog in the morning—and I could guess that without the bowl.” He rubbed behind the stallion’s ears. Valadan tilted his head a little toward him. “Then he split off from his partners. I was just about ready to slip off when that happened, and I got trapped into predicting for real. I looked in the bowl, I saw your farm, all peaceful and quiet. I swore to the captain that there’d be no trouble.” Valadan sighed as Kellis scratched the top edge of his cheekbones.

  Druyan remembered the doughty resistance Travic had put up to being robbed. “You’re right, you’re not very good at foreseeing.”

  Kellis nodded, taking no offense. “The trouble is, when I look in the water, I may know what, but I don’t know when I’m seeing. It’s seldom more than a day, but which? It matters. Tomorrow? Yesterday? I don’t always have a point of reference. So I flat-out guessed.” He adjusted a buckle that seemed too tight against Valadan’s hide. The hair was rubbed a bit, the skin beneath untouched.

  “And guessed wrong?” Druyan asked.

  “I must have been seeing the past day, the day before we’d landed. When all those armed men met us at the gate, the captain was .. . displeased.” Kellis touched his bandaged hand to his forehead. “He gave me this personally. You might have thought he was yelling war cries—that was about my people, about shifty treachery being bred into our bones. The last thing I remember of that night is seeing that iron blade coming at my head.”

  “And that’s why they left you.” It made absolute sense, finally.

  “They could have done worse,” Kellis said pragmatically. “They probably would have, if they hadn’t been able to get out right away.” He gave Valadan a last pat and went slowly to the pitchfork. “Where do you want the straw?”

  Druyan gestured at the golden pile. “Over there, for now. This place you heard about—where was it? Did the stories name it?”

  “It is called Kovelir.” Valadan had followed Kellis, butting his head against his back, so that he staggered and used the fork for a crutch. “And it’s on the bank of a very big river.” He put an ann over the stallion’s neck and stayed upright. “You’re supposed to be outside, I think.” He steered the horse toward the door with a nudge or two and urged him through it. Valadan went to the trough, sipped a few sips, then blew across the water playfully.

  “If you mean the Est, and I think you do, that’s a long way from here,” Druyan said. “All the way across Esdragon. Your raider didn’t take you far enough.”

  “I can walk. It’s not the same as the sea. It’s just land. I can get across it.” Kellis began forking straw aside, bending his fingers carefully about the fork’s handle.

  “You’ll be very well advised not to try it in the winter. It rains twice as much then, it’s cold, and the roads are hipdeep in mud.” Druyan fetched a second fork and set to work alongside him.

  “I’m a good walker.” Kellis stated it seriously, though they both of them knew that at present it was hard work for him to stand, and she was shifting twice the straw that he was.

  He was an honest worker, though. Even half sick as he was, he didn’t quit and he didn’t complain. Druyan glanced around the b
arn, contemplating running the farm with the hands she had at her command—her own, and Enna’s swollen ones, which did not yield to aloe. Lyn’s. Pru’s. Dalkin’s. Most times she could not imagine succeeding, and so she tried not to look ahead much beyond the next day. It made her nervous. One barley harvest was not a year-and-a-day success. If the duke didn’t release her farmhands, possibly she could hire others—assuming she could find any. But surely that would call attention to her precarious position, might even cost her any hope of secrecy and success. Too much to risk.

  Kellis was something of a risk, too, but a lesser one, a private one. “I am freeholding this farm,” she told him carefully, throwing down fresh sheaves of grain in front of the sledge and feeling she threw all caution to the wind with them. “If I do it for a year and a day, it’s mine—so long as no one catches me at it before the time’s out and forces me to remarry and leave. I have the apple crop still to get in, cider to press, plowing come the spring, planting, and all the work with the animals. My husband died iighting the sea raiders, and I am owed a blood debt for that.” She threw another forkful. Kellis was too winded to copy her. But she had his attention. His brows were knitted into one.

  “I’ll admit, you had nothing personally to do with Travic’s death-but you’re the only raider around for me to collect the debt from. If I wanted to be sticky about it, only a life can pay for a life, but you’re no use to me dead. I made you a promise—work the harvest, for your freedom—but that was when I thought there were four of you. Now I want to propose a new bargain, one that suits the realities for both of us.”

  The dark brows knit again. He said nothing, though.

  “You can try walking all winter, to a place that might not even exist. You can starve, you can freeze, and every sword edge out there will have your name on it. Or—” She leaned on the fork.

  She couldn’t tell if she was scaring him. She didn’t much think so—he was used to worse. Valadan strolled back into the barn, nosing at the straw. “Or you can work for me till the farm’s mine. When that day comes, I’ll give you a horse, and you can make your way to this dream city of yours easily, before another winter catches you. If the city’s there naw, it’ll be there then, and you’ll stand a chance of reaching it.”

  She could see him weighing his chances. And trying to stay on his feet.

  “Well? Don’t keep me waiting. I’m risking just as much as you are, and this may start to seem like a bad idea to me again in a minute. Better grab it while you can.”

  “Why would you trust me?”

  There was no good reason. Not desperation, certainly. Not a mad hunch. Never that something in him seemed to call to something in her, the way a distant storm did. Best bury that fancy deeper than the sea’s bottom. “My horse approves of you,” Druyan said, and stroked Valadan’s neck, while the stallion nudged her new farmhand halfway out of his cracked boots.

  Kellis lay on his back, staring toward the underside of the barn roof. Somewhere beyond that, Valint the Wolfstar coursed the moon-deer. He couldn’t see the hunt, of course. If not the roof, then there’d have been clouds to hide the familiar night scene from his eyes. It was always raining.

  He might never see it again.

  What have I done? he asked himself, shifting on the pile of straw. He’d had the chance to go, to get on with his chosen journey—instead he had agreed to stay, in this place he had passed through only by sheerest chance. Why? He was well enough to travel—barely, but he knew he could manage, this way and that.

  Because one place is just like another, his sick heart whispered darkly, the answer echoing inside his head as if he were nothing more than an empty vault of bone. Or a tomb. And for all you know, the Wizards’ City of Kovelir is no more than a fever dream. Stay or go—it’s all one.

  Combing Out Knots

  “I don’t think I care to have that in my kitchen.”

  “I don’t recall asking whether you did, Enna,” Druyan observed, placidly threading another warp through the second heddle of her great loom. “Surely you don’t expect Kellis to chop the vegetables in the barn and then carry them back over here so you can start the stew?” She was pleased with the pale-blue thread in her hands—privet berries stewed for hours to make the dyebath, from her own recipe. The color was mild as the inside of a mussel shell, but once dried it faded no further, come sun or years. It was a flattering shade, too, light yet not showing dirt readily, and cloth woven of it would sell swiftly.

  “And to give him a knife—Lady, he could do for us both and no one the wiser till Dalkin missed his supper and thought to wonder about it. He—”

  “It’s just a little brass blade. He can’t very well chop carrots and turnips with his teeth, Enna. And you can’t chop them when your hands are bad.” Druyan counted carefully, chose another hole to thread. “You keep telling me it’s not my place to be cooking”

  “And it is not! If my lord looked back and saw—”

  “I’d like to think Travic would be proud of us, Enna,” Druyan said. “We paid the tithes. We even managed to get some of the cider laid down for brandy. The root cellar’s bursting with potatoes and turnips, the smokehouse is sniffed with hams and bacon. Considering that Duke Brioc decided that his summer army ought to spend the winter building a seawall and never sent our men home, I think we’ve done wonderfully well.”

  Enna’s eyes flashed. “So well that I’ve got to have a murderer holding a knife right in my own kitchen?”

  Druyan threaded another heddle. “Surely you aren’t afraid of him, Enna? Not with that iron horseshoe sewn into the hem of your skirt?” she added slyly.

  “My lady, you’d do better to copy me than to mock me for that.”

  Druyan shook her head. “I don’t think I could stand bruising my shins on it all day.”

  “Make fun! But he’s not sick and hurt now. He’s dangerous, Lady, that’s the plain truth!”

  “You think I trust him too much, too soon.” She’d heard the accusation a dozen different ways, most of them unsubtle in the extreme. “Should I trust Kellis less than he’s earned? He didn’t have to work so hard to bring the barley in, Enna. Or do all the slaughtering and butchering. Dig turnips till his hands bled. He could have quit. He didn’t. He’s never given us less than a full day’s work.”

  Enna had the grace to fall silent—many a day her swollen fingers prevented her doing much in the way of work. Druyah inspected a snarl in the thread, hoping to avoid a weak spot apt to break halfway through the weaving, at great inconvenience. Someone had been careless in carding the wool—there was a bit of burr spun into the core of the yam, making the bump. She discarded the offending length and put in another. “I feel quite safe enough with a nail in my pocket.” Truth to tell, she’d have felt safe enough without that tiny bit of cold iron. If Kellis did no harm, ’twas hardly because everyone at Splaine Garth carried some object made of iron to ensure his behavior. She’d set him to gathering apples, digging turnips, spreading manure on the fallow fields, tending the pigs and butchering those they’d salted down for winter. He’d never once tried to run away—not that there was anywhere for him to run to. And she had trusted him with all sorts of tools, most of them lethal if he’d wanted them to be. He was unfamiliar and unskilled with some, but never dangerous to anyone other than himself. She didn’t fear a kitchen knife in his hands, whatever Enna said.

  They both heard the door close.

  “Where’s he gone?” Enna asked, voice too shrill.

  “I asked him to bring in a bucket of water when he’d done with the vegetables,” Druyan said patiently. “He can put the kettle over the fire for you—it’s heavy when it’s full. Then ask him to come to me here—I need someone to hold the warp ends while I wind the back beam.”

  Enna’s sharp intake of breath spoke volumes. The corner of the hall, where Druyan’s loom stood, was farther into the house than Kellis had yet been permitted. “M’lady, let me.”

  Druyan shook her head firmly. “You have th
e cooking to see to, and it’s too chill for you in here, even with_ the fire lit. Kellis needs to be in here anyway—I’m going to have him card wool. There’s still most of the spring shearing to be dealt with, and it’s not that long till next shearing, when you think about it. It’s past time that fleece was spun and dyed. I’ve got the dyestuffs, it’s only waiting on the spinning—and that waits on the carding.”

  “Dalkin—”

  “Dalkin leaves too many stems and burrs in the wool.” Druyan forestalled the next argument. “Pru has no interest in wool once it’s off her sheep’s backs. Lyn never did decent carding. The truth is, they’re not children any longer.” Carding was children’s work, while those children were young enough to think of teasing and combing the raw fleece with the teasel carding combs as a sport or at least one of the more desirable of winter chores. Its delights palled as one grew older—Druyan herself preferred spinning the combed wool into yarn, she could not deny that. And she liked dyeing and weaving still better. The best carders were those too young to rebel. Or those like Kellis, who’d do whatever he was asked, and not protest that the task wasn’t properly his.

  She looked up a few moments later to see him standing in the doorway, as if uncertain about his orders, his right to venture farther into the room. Probably Enna had blistered his ears with a description of the fate he’d earn if he overstepped the letter of Druyan’s instmctions. His hands were red from a long bout of scrubbing, peeling, and chopping vegetables for the stewpot. Druyan motioned him closer and thrust a bunch of warp ends into each fist.

  “Just hold these firm. Don’t pull on them, just hold on. I need to keep an even tension while I wind on, but that’s my worry.

  “You’re a weaver,” he said, as if surprised.

  It had not, Druyan supposed, been much in evidence ere then. The busy weeks of the harvest, the necessity of undertaking tasks she’d had only a touching knowledge of in other years—she’d had no leisure for her usual work. And she’d not have been doing it where he’d have seen. “Yes. Most of the cloth for the household, and some to sell at the market fair. Good thing wool keeps—I’m behind, this year.” She cranked the broad back beam slowly, taking up the slack in the warps, ensuring that all ran straight with her free hand. “You can step closer to the loom when that gets tight.” He nodded his understanding. “Do your folk weave?” Surely they must—he wore cloth, not tanned skins. She’d never heard tell of a folk who didn’t make some cloth.