by Susan Dexter
Kellis shook his head at her, then glanced away at the ground, which might look awfully far away if he wasn’t used to riding. “It’s been a nice, diy week,” he said, explaining. “Enna’s bones won’t have been bothering her, she’ll have attention to spare. Let me down. I’ve got a headache, I don’t want to come in like this, with you, and be answering her questions halfway to tomorrow.”
Or facing the kitchen knives, Druyan thought. She braced her hand against Valadan’s neck as Kellis slid down from the horse’s back, was relieved to see that the man was able to stand steady when he arrived at the ground. “That out wants tending,” she said. “I’ll bind it up when you get back.” It hadn’t bled much—the dark smear in his hair was no larger than it had been.
Kellis shrugged, unconcerned. “Just a scrape. Woundwort grows all over up here. I can take care of it.”
“It’s over your ear, there’s no way you could possibly see what you’re doing.”
Kellis only shrugged again.
“I could tell Enna you were with me,” Druyan went on, working it out aloud. “She might just be relieved to know someone was looking out for me.”
“What else will you tell her, Lady?” His tone was reluctant, but unshirking. In the morning light, his gray eyes looked clear as water running over limestone, shafts of golden sunlight striking through now and again.
“Oh. I hadn’t thought about that.” Now that she was forced to, Druyan had no idea what to do. She sidled up to the issue like a nervous horse. She could well imagine Enna’s reaction to the truth about what Kellis was probably not far off from Robart’s, only the kitchen knives in place of a sword. Maybe she shouldn’t be told—but was it fair not to tell Enna what she was helping to harbor? Was she sure how she felt about him herself?
Some of that dilemma surely crossed her face. Kellis was watching her, knowing every twist, every turn in the conflict of loyalties assaulting her, or guessing them. There was no vestige of hope in his expression—not for mercy or anything else.
“Are you dangerous?” Druyan whispered, wondering how she’d know whether he answered her truly. She remembered how guileless those changeable eyes of his could be, the size of the secret he’d hidden effortlessly behind them. There was still blood around his mouth—only now she knew how it had gotten there.
“Lady, you have given me shelter and kindness, where I had no reason to expect either,” Kellis said gravely. “I swear to you, I will never do harm to you or yours.”
“But you’ve warned me not to trust you.” It was out before she thought, she couldn’t help herself. Valadan jigged under her, restless, tense with her sudden unease.
Kellis looked stricken. “The prophecies. I told you not to trust the prophecies. You do it anyway, no matter what I say, no matter how often I say it! You’ve dragged all those men into doing it, too—”
“And I suppose if you weren’t trustworthy—you, not your foreseeings—we’d have lost a sheep or two ere this?’ She didn’t want to bring the prophecies and the post riders into it, Druyan thought. That was only smoke.
She wanted an answer, and Kellis gave it to her, looking straight into her eyes.
“Wolves take sheep because it’s easy, Lady. Or it’s the only food. I’m not lazy, and I am not starving. I’ll do you no harm.”
“I know,” Druyan whispered, ashamed. “I shouldn’t have asked. It was an insult.”
“It was a reasonable question, and taken so,” Kellis said mildly. “And I answer it. I am dangerous—but never to you.”
“Then it’s not anyway unfair to Enna—she’s at no risk I can see if she doesn’t hear about any of this. I won’t tell her,” Druyan said, relieved to have made the choice. “Now go find your clothes—I’m sure that cloak’s lousy, and even if it isn’t, it’s mostly holes, and the wind’s cold up here.”
That right eyebrow lifted, then one corner of his mouth, just as she turned Valadan toward home.
He should not have told her. He would not have, Kellis told himself, except he had been dazed by the glancing blow to his head and the resulting loss of his wolf-shape. He had not been himself. His tongue had escaped his control and gone its own merry wayward way. She’d asked, and he’d answered, while his wits were still so scattered that he hadn’t quite realized what he was doing—till he’d said it and it was too late to dodge back from telling her the whole truth.
Not that he likely could have managed such wordy nimbleness if he had been able to think about what he was doing. Feeling well enough on the horse, he had misjudged himself. Once he was on his own legs, matters were much otherwise. Kellis discovered it was all he could do to get himself down from the upland pasture—his balance was unsure and his sight as unreliable as his visions, showing him double the usual number of sheep in Rook’s flock as he staggered through them, a fuzzy mist on the peripheries. Putting one foot in front of the other took concentration, seemed a miracle when he succeeded at it. He never actually fell, but there were near disasters and many a clutch at a fencepost or outbuilding, while sea sounds came and went in his ears.
Finally, the weather-silvered bulk of the barn itself swam before his eyes. There was a dark, cavelike opening in itthe door standing welcoming wide. Kellis made for that and held onto the jamb, getting splinters in his fingers and happy beyond measure that there was no sill to trip his feet.
Once he was inside, there was nothing more for him to cling to, just a vast dim space lit by the doorway at his back and slanting rays of sunlight that entered through gaps between boards. Kellis stopped, swaying uncertainly, staring at the light-lances. Somewhere within the maze lay his goal, the soft pile of blanket-covered straw he used for a bed.
He heard a horse nicker, part greeting, part question. For a long moment, Kellis could not determine which form he was presently in, man or wolf. He remembered dashing unwarily in wolf-shape past a corner and being surprised by a horse earlier. He had surprised the beast, too—the horse had kicked out in a panic. He had dodged, of course, but only enough to prevent the hoof’s catching him square and shattering his wolf’s skull. The blow glanced, but flung him a dozen feet and out of his senses . . . not to mention out of his wolf-shape, courtesy of an iron horseshoe. If this horse, now, had it in mind to stomp a wolf, he did not think he could save himself, man or wolf, either one.
He smelled horsehide and hair, right in front of his face. Warm, sweet air puffed across his skin as the stallion blew at him. “Good boy,” Kellis said with relief, recognizing Valadan, the only horse he knew to be allowed free run of Splaine Garth. He patted the stallion’s neck, then took an unsteady step forward, trying to decide if two legs were superior to four or in fact inferior. Less of them to manage, certainly, but ’twas so much easier to fall on one’s face after a misstep. . .
A great, warm bulk came alongside him—the horse had circled around him, was walking with him instead of at him. Kellis put a grateful hand on Valadan’s withers. Six legs were better than four, so long as he had to personally direct only two of them. He tangled his fingers firmly in the long black mane. “Where are we going?” he asked.
The stallion turned his head. His near eye was as dark as the night sky and full of twinkling stars. Kellis looked automatically for the green of Valint, but the Wolfstar must have set or else had not yet risen—he could not find it. The stallion snorted. When Kellis looked away, the sunshafts looked like a thousand sword blades, slanting all about him. He had lost his bearings, but he didn’t much care. He didn’t need to find his bed—if he could just sit down, somewhere out of the way, where nothing could step on him. . .
He smelled hay, and pearwood, shavings from the fork he had begun carving what seemed half his lifetime ago, with a thick handle that a woman with sore hands could comfortably grasp. Kellis put his left hand out and swung the half-door open. He’d made it after all, thanks to the horse’s support. His bed was only three steps ahead, and he could hold onto the wall the whole way. . .
A racket of happy barks
exploded behind him. Meddy had discovered he was back and was headed at him with her usual riotous greeting.
“No, little sister,” he begged her, but she flung herself at him anyway, paws on his shoulders and warm tongue on his face. Falling, Kellis hoped he would fetch up on the cushioning straw, not bare wooden boards.
She will hate me.
He returned to the thought as the dark whirled about him. Kellis couldn’t remember whether the sun had gone down. The Wolfstar had set, hadn’t it? He smelled hay and horse sweat. Dust tickled his throat. He coughed, and pain stabbed alarmingly through his skull. Somewhere near, a dog whined.
She will fear me and, being brave as she is, try to hide it . . . Straw poked his cheek; he had either lain down or fallen. Either way, he need not fear a ftuther collapse, and he seemed to have made it to his bed after all. But there were other fears to plague him. She will hate me. . .
“Kellis?”
Hands touched him, shifted him so that he lay on his side rather than his face. The process hurt. He had no notion why he was being tortured so. Kellis bit his lip till he tasted salty blood.
Truth was, he should never have come back at all. He should have taken the wolf-shape back, then denned up somewhere secret till he recovered. And then he should have vanished.
Of course she’ll hate you. She saw you with blood all over your teeth; even your own womenfolk don’t much care for that. And she’s not one of the Clan . . . no reason to expect . . .
Blessed coolness touched the pain biting into the side of his head.
“Is that better?” Druyan asked, sponging again with the wet rag.
Actually, it was not. She was probing gently at the wound, trying no doubt to decide whether his skull was cracked, and Kellis thought he could not have born a spider’s walking across his skin just there, just then. But the lady was speaking to him, she had searched him out—his astonishment at that reality swallowed most of the pain. It would be ungrateful of him to groan at her touch, so he did not.
Ungrateful, too, to faint, but he had less choice as to that. His senses slid sideways, like a horse shying.
His hearing came back first, but only as a ringing in his ears, a bothersome buzzing, like flies round a carcass. Then touch reasserted itself, witl1 the water’s cool comfort. For one delicious moment, Kellis was in no pain at all, and he would have felt perfectly well, save that his heart was so heavy, like a great wooden weight in his chest, for some unremembered reason. He tried to hold the memory away, but it found him, sniffed him out, came racing home glad as Meddy to see him awake once more. Pain stabbed his head and his heart, both of them at once. He groaned. I should not have told her . . .
“Hush.” A firm touch on his shoulder. “Lie still. You’ve had a bad knock on the head.”
I know, he wanted to say. I wish I’d died of it.
“No, you don’t.” A chuckle. “Well, maybe you do, right now, but you’ll feel better presently. Try to sleep.”
Kellis opened his eyes instead. She was there. Truly there, not just put there by his half-dazed dreaming. He could smell the apple-blossom scent of her hair, the smoke smell of Penre still lying faintly atop it. “Lady, I am sorry—”
“So am I,” Druyan said wryly. “I should never have let you walk back. I wasn’t the one kicked in the head, I ought to have known better even if you didn’t. I ought to have known not to listen to you.” She dipped the cloth back into the water, wrung it out, and laid it on his forehead.
She’d been in the kitchen, with Enna, when she’d seen him come weaving and stumbling across the yard like a blind man, and she’d gone sick and cold inside. Druyan sponged the wound_again, frowning. The bone was whole, but he’d slipped in and out of consciousness thrice at least since she’d run into the barn and found him lying on the floor, with Valadan standing over him and Meddy curled in a scared, guilty ball by his side. At least this time Kellis had his eyes open and made sense when he spoke. She squeezed his hand, to reassure him. “You’ll be fine.” Willow tea, she thought, for the headache-but willow tea made you bleed, for all it tamed pain. Better not, at least not yet. She wished she had some poppy sap. “Just lie quiet.”
Kellis wanted to tell her how glad he was to see her, what it meant to him, that she had not forsaken him—but relief and sleep surprised him more decidedly than ever that scared horse had.
“I wasn’t his first choice for an apprentice,” Kellis whispered, not opening his eyes. Druyan had thought him finally asleep, but he was still drifting restlessly on the edge of it, like a boat with no hand on the tiller, at the mercy of the waves’ whim. She felt his forehead—no fever. His wound had stopped seeping blood, and the wet rags had kept the swelling down as much as they were likely to. Come morning she could bind it up with herbs, to start the skin healing. She had been on the point of seeking her own bed for a few hours, leaving Meddy curled by his side for company. She sighed, stretched a little to ease her back. Not much different from the broken nights of lambing time.
“He didn’t even make a choice, till the chief got nervous about it. Wisir was old, and if he wasn’t training someone to be shaman after him, what were we to do when he died?” Kellis asked plaintively. “He lived all alone, out past the edge of the camp, he didn’t have any family. No one to watch over him so he’d be able to watch over the Clan.”
Druyan was not entirely certain Kellis was awake. His eyes were closed, though the lids twitched now and again. She made sure he was well covered by the blankets, that his bare toes weren’t poking out into the chilly air. He had come back without his boots. She had no idea where he’d left them. She’d have asked, but didn’t think he’d answer. She didn’t want to risk waking him—he needed rest.
“So Wisir told us he’d picked, finally, and everyone felt better,” Kellis said conversationally. “He was going to make a formal ceremony out of it, Wisir was. Dancing. Feasting. We were hunting deer, a whole pack of us, to have venison for it. The stag was a big one, and it was early in the rut. He was fierce as a catamount, and we should have left him alone. But we didn’t, and the boy Wisir had chosen got an antler in his throat, and he bled to death, right there. So fast.” He sighed. “Nothing we could do. We just stared. We couldn’t take it in.”
His dark brows knit together. “Wisir wasn’t very good at foreseeing. Not to know that the person he’d picked to succeed him wasn’t going to live out the week—it would have been a scandal if the Clan had known it.” He sighed again. “Which they did not. Wisir made sure of that—he wasn’t smart, but he was clever. He made another choice, right on the spot, as if that was what he’d had in mind all along. Just pointed his finger, blind—and I wish to all the gods there are that someone else had been standing in front of him when he did it.”
Druyan had not been paying much heed—she had no notion whether Kellis was even speaking to her, if he had any idea she was there to listen. The implications of what he’d just said made her catch her breath sharply. He was explaining himself.
He knew she was there. His eyes were open, staring at her, and both of them were wet. The first few tears had already run down past his cheekbones.
“My qualification for being our shaman’s apprentice, the talent he saw in me—I was there,” he said brutally. “My training you can guess at—how hard either of us tried. Wisir was a fool and I was resentful. If I had tried at all, my people might have survived. They trusted Wisir. They trusted me.” He shut his eyes again, on the shame of that trust betrayed.
“I don’t think it’s your fault,” Druyan said unsteadily. “Not all of it.”
Kellis didn’t answer.
Constable of Esdragon
Kellis hunched over the bowl, scowling refusal at Druyan when she strode up and tried to prise it from his fingers.
“You don’t have to do this now,” Druyan told him angrily. “It’s not likely there’s a ship striking near again, so soon.” The raids had taken on a discernible pattern—heavy, then nothing, after that a period o
f light forays, followed by another crest. They were due a respite, assuming they had learned to read the pattern accurately. And Kellis was due one even if they were wrong—she’d caught him trying to do the milking when she came back to the barn at dawn, and the stuff in the pail had more color than his face did.
“Better to know,” Kellis said stubbornly, tightening his hold on the crockery. “We don’t know that ship was alone. Or that it wasn’t.”
They did know that the sea raiders did not repair to their cross-seas homes upon meeting the setback of a defended village—more likely they fell back upon places they knew from past experience to be weak, along the Clandaran beaches. More than once the bowl had shown faint, misty images of places Druyan was certain were not in Esdragon.
“Anyway, one headache’s no different from another.” Kellis dismissed her concern. He looked wan and unwell, and was moving rather cautiously, but he was up and determined to resume his duties, including the prophecies he dreaded. Doing so without reference to those things he had confessed during the passage of the night—if he suspected he had revealed them. He wasn’t staggering any longer, so Druyan let him have his way, however reluctantly.
She protested the bowl, he fought her on it, and she let him do as he pleased about that, too, but was not sorry when the effort came to naught.
“Waves on a beach,” Druyan said a few minutes later, trying not to say told-you-so. “And fishing boats. Not much to judge by, but it didn’t look like they were having any trouble.”
“No.” Kellis dried the bowl with a rag. His tone was neutral, but his movements were abrupt with frustration. “I’ll look again later.”
“You can look again tomorrow,” Druyan corrected.
“We don’t know that was a foreseeing!” he snapped back at her.