The Wind-Witch

by Susan Dexter

  “We throw shifty thieves into the marsh to appease the sea gods, so they don’t flood us out.” She had understood perfectly well. “With an iron spike hammered through their hearts to make sure they stay there.”

  Kellis stared, the wind lifting his hair out of his eyes.

  “I know what you are,” Enna said. “It’s not only wizards can’t touch cold iron. How could you leave her?”

  “She told me to!” Kellis exploded. “Do you think I’d have left her otherwise? She’s whistling up this storm to sweep away the raiders, and she doesn’t want Splaine Garth swept away with it. Riders are warning the whole coast, but it’s no use to warn if there’s no one here to do anything! She sent me back to be sure there was. Now what do I do?”

  She wanted to spit invective at him. But the wind’s howl got Enna’s attention. She’d heard its like before, but it wasn’t common. “I always wondered what she could do if she had to,” she whispered. “Now we’ll see—think you can nail shutters closed without nailing yourself to them?”

  Kellis curled his lip in a silent snarl. “I shall manage.”

  “There’s two of my lord’s men just back yesterday, they’ll help. We’re too high here to flood unless all Darlith washes away, but we’ll need anything loose tied or nailed down so it can’t blow away. And the animals need to come in; they’ll drown in the marsh when the water rises.”

  I’ll see to that,” Kellis said.

  Moments later, Rook and Meddy were gathering their charges and chivvying them to safe ground. Reluctant sheep met a most persuasive silver wolf, whose nips at their woolly heels got swift results.

  What have I done? Druyan wondered, not a little alarmed.

  The streaky bank of clouds filled half the sky, and any lingering blue had been transmuted to a yellow gray that made her blood run cold till night fell entirely and colors could no longer be seen. The grass at Valadan’s hooves flattened with every gust of wind. The air above was clogged with tumbling seabirds seeking safety inland, forsaking their normal roosting spots. Druyan’s face felt like a mask to her, cold wood over her bones. Almost she could not remember a time when the gale had not been sweeping the hair back from her forehead and temples, when its ends had not been cracking behind her like whips. There were windtrained trees a thousand yards to her right, bowing like courtiers, hardly arising from one reverence before the next blast bent them again. The wind smelled of lightning and icy hail.

  “Lady, you are not intending to remain here?”

  Yvain’s horse was white-eyed with terror, and if he tried to restrain its flight much longer it would cast him off and make its escape, Druyan thought. She had not desired him to stay by her on the headland, both for the sake of his safety and because she could not bear to see his fear of her in his eyes. She should not think less of him for what was surely a healthy reaction. He was at least facing his terror. But she wished him elsewhere.

  “Druyan, come with me! You cannot stay here any longer!”

  Somehow Yvain wrestled his horse close enough to lay his right hand on Druyan’s left ann.

  The air went uncannily still for a moment, as if the heaving sea held its breath, and the wind waited for its mistress to choose.

  “No,” Druyan said, again, refusing far more than just a sensible retreat.

  Yvain tightened his grip on her forearm as if to argue, not accepting her answer, either of her refusals.

  Valadan pinned his ears, bared his teeth, and lunged at the bay horse, sending it plunging away so that its rider had other uses for his hands—and a great wave of icy air crested over them all, flattening grass and heather. As that wind passed inland, limbs were torn from trees, roofs ripped from houses. Anchored ships heeled over. Ill-made stone walls toppled. Yvain’s horse seized the bit in its teeth and fled, and in an instant all trace of horse and rider had vanished behind a sheet of wind-driven rain. Lightning flashed, and its thunder came not a heartbeat upon its heels.

  Valadan stood steady, unperturbed. A storm wind had sired him, and all winds were by that his kin. He put his tail to the wind, so that his rider might breathe, but that was his sole concession to the violence.

  Druyan leaned close to his ears, along his neck. The gusts beat at her. “If it comes ashore here, it may not be strong enough to wipe out the raiders’ island! Those cliffs will break the force.”

  Then let us take the storm where we wish it to be.

  Valadan sprang into a gallop, racing ahead of the wind. Druyan locked her eight fingers into his flying mane, tipped back her head and whistled, sharp as midwinter. The stallion swerved to follow the coastline, and the winds wheeled with him.

  All was blackness as they ran. Lightning flashes showed the sand of beaches, tussocks of rank grass, and heather, mere distractions with all the color and reality leached out of them. Druyan pictured in her mind the waves lashing Esdragon’s perilous coast. Sea stacks would tumble down, edges of cliffs would be bitten away, there would be new islands made of former peninsulas. All the maps would need to be redrawn. Most particularly, small islets would be wiped right away by the sea’s giant hand. The waves would do the deed, but ’twas the wind that powered the waves.

  Now its howl was like one of Kellis’ winter songs—and suddenly the tune was hers, as well, known all her life, even when she had chosen to turn her back upon it. Druyan lifted her face into the storm and reveled in its boisterous winds. She let its rain wash over her, its lightning illuminate her, its thunder beat a dance measure into her bones. And there was not one single part of it that she harbored the least fear of.

  Each time the wind shrieked, Kellis cast a wary eye at the underside of the kitchen roof, though between the nailed-closed shutters and nightfall, ’twas too dark to gauge its state. If it came off, he was sure he’d know quick enough. There’d be a great roar of wind, drowning out the lesser, varied whines and groans and whistles that the air made as it quested about the windows, the door, and the chimney. It wouldn’t be something he’d be likely to overlook.

  Something hit the outside wall with a thump. An overlooked pail, Kellis devoutly hoped, and not a strayed chicken left at the stomi’s mercy. Whatever hadn’t been stowed was certain to be lost. He didn’t like to think about the apple crop, which had promised to be heavy, or the barley. All the livestock was safe, crammed into the sturdy sheepfold save for the chickens, which they had with them in the kitchen. The hens had obeyed instinct and gone to roost in the darkness, headless-seeming clumps of feathers perched on high shelves and the mantelpiece, safe from the cats.

  They had the dogs, too, as well as Pru and Lyn, fretting because they really wanted to be in the fold with their woolly friends—save there wasn’t room enough with the pigs crowded in there, as well. And the two men, Wat and Drustan, who had been Travic’s farmhands and come home into a situation they must find as puzzling as they found Kellis himself.

  He’d worked alongside them, battening down the shutters. They accepted him that far. Kellis knew what Enna would have told them about him. Kellis tried not to think how many sharp iron objects lived in the kitchen.

  Over the howling wind, he never heard Enna till his keen nose caught a whiff of herbal linament, a fainter scent of lavender. She shoved a soft bundle against him.

  “Here. Put these on before you catch your death.”

  His lingers sorted out trews and a jerkin of woolen cloth, their folds emitting the dried lavender scent. A linen sark, with mended sleeves, tumbled out as he unfolded the jerkin. He tried to give the clothes back. “If I was cold, I’d shift myself into something with fur.

  Not in my kitchen, you won’t.”

  The dogs notwithstanding. “These were your master’s.” Kellis hazarded.

  “Aye. And they smell a deal better than that poxy blanket. My lord would not have begrudged you,” Enna admitted. “Not my place to, either.”

  Thank vou.”

  He didn’t know if she heard. The wind was blasting, as if the Wild Hunt had run right over t
heir heads. They’d had to bank the fire and close the damper to seal off the chimney, and candles didn’t stay lit, because of the drafts. The only one still burning was in the far corner—a little motion there told him that Enna had crossed the room, to settle again in her chair.

  Something slid loudly down the slope of the roof. Kellis began to pull on the trews, with a wary glance or two upward and an earnest prayer that one of the two returned farmhands might be the thatcher.

  “How far have we come?” Druyan shouted into Valadan’s left ear, which was flat back against his neck. She got a generous mouthful of his mane.

  We are beyond Penre.

  Probably far beyond, if that last river had been Penre’s. Druyan had no sense by then of distance, nor of time. But whatever the ground covered, ’twas far enough. She sat up, let her weight sink firmly into her saddle, and Valadan slowed obediently, finally halting.

  Now what?

  She had never once been able to still a wind she had raised. But she had been afraid, those other times, and had not truly expected mastery. It was different now. This storm had come to seem like a pastured horse that ran alongside Valadan. Dangerous, maybe, deserving her respect, but no foe of hers. She could send it on its way, released from service to her.

  The wind still blew upon them, unabated. It was flinging drops of rain, which stung like pebbles on her face and hands. Druyan struggled to draw her cloak close about her—the wind tugged it free and made sport of it. Annoyed, she caught a fold of it in either hand and swept it about her, trapping a swirl of wild wind in the web of her weaving. “Enough!” she cried sternly.

  Upon her command, the wind died. A steady rain began to fall. Valadan snorted in consternation.

  Home?

  Druyan put her hood up against the downpour. “We’d be under a roof sooner. But it must be Keverne—the Riders will all report theme. We should, too.”

  Valadan dipped his head, assenting, and they rode back the way they had come. The rain fell for a time, then ceased. The clouds became threadbare, and by the time they reached Keverne, Druyan could see the moon once more, sinking slowly into the calm sea.

  A Year and a Day

  Floadwaters had surged over every beach, up every river, scouring banks to an extent never seen in any living person’s memory. The winds had been somewhat less destructive—sea winds were a constant of Esdragon’s coast, and no tall trees grew save where the lay of the land offered shelter to them. Roofs were damaged, a few walls fell because the wind had shoved them, but the great storm was felt most on the fringes of the land, in the rise of cold saltwater furlongs beyond the usual limits. The coastal folk, wamed of that, had done what would best let them survive it—whether that had been to batten down and shore with sandbags and straw bales, or simply to move families and livestock inland and upland. Come dawn, the coast of Esdragon resembled an unthrifty farmyard, with trash and oddments lying everywhere, washing listlessly in receding water, but there was very little loss of life.

  The air was thick with seabirds when Valadan and his mistress reached Keverne—their usual resting places disturbed, the birds wheeled through the sky in the first flush of dawn, crying like a thousand aggrieved cats as they searched for edible trash and stranded fish. Druyan rode slowly up to the castle and dismounted. She had not thought she was especially weary, but her clothing was so heavy with water that she moved as one in a dream. Her knees and ankles ached. Someone called her name, but as she turned to answer, her soaked cloak tangled her rubbery legs, and she fell. . .

  Kellis ventured out into the bright morning. The sky was boundlessly blue, scrubbed clean by wind and rain. Puddles stood everywhere, reflecting the sapphire sky a hundred times. Every windward wall was plastered with a green mosaic of wet leaves. The buildings beyond the kitchen were bedecked with straws from the thatch, as well. At least the kitchen still had most of a roof. Likewise the sheepfold, the unhappy bawling of its occupants notwithstanding.

  The windfalls lay in the orchard thick as spring dandelions, but only a few trees had lost branches larger than twigs. All would live to bear again, and a portion of the crop still clung despite all. Kellis told a grumbling Dalkin to start gathering the fallen apples into baskets—very poor cider it would make, but better that than letting the stock munch windfalls till they colicked. He walked on alone toward the barley fields.

  He was anticipating damage, and found it, but not to the extent he dreaded. Only the worst-exposed parts were flattened entirely, and the small trees at the fields’ edges had offered the shelter they were meant to. A crop was possible, especially if no further rain fell for a week or so. And the lady had harvest hands to do that work now.

  There was a further thing to check Kellis put the dead Travic’s clothing carefully under a hedgerow, and a silver wolf sped toward the marsh and the Seacoast. From the height of the Promontory, one commanded a fine view, and needed no wings, once one knew where to look.

  Every beach he passed was awash with bits of timber, tom branches, splintered planks. Kellis thought he saw a body tossing in the swells, pale limbs thrashing and beckoning. Once he began to look for them, he saw others.

  He had to struggle to keep his bearings—the whole coast had been recarved by the storm, and not a few of his landmarks had ceased to exist. Waves had bitten off huge chunks of land and mined beneath other spots so that unsupported rocks fell into the hungry sea even hours later. Seeing one such stretch crumble in, he trotted hastily to safer ground, regretting that bird-form seemed to be out of the question for him.

  The Promontory, too, was changed—its outflung tip had become no more than a reach of shoally water. The air was clear, not a wisp of fog veiling the distance, but Kellis saw nothing beyond large enough to be an island. The storm had seen to that. The raider’s base was no more. His wolf’s tongue lolled out in a contented grin.

  Yet once he stood again at the edge of the barley field, in his human shape and clad in a deadaman’s clothes, which his people would have called unlucky and he accepted as necessity, Kellis was no longer merry. He knew that calms after storms are mere illusion, and he could not conceive of a peace that would last, for such as he was. It was, if anything, an ending.

  His freedom was at hand. He had kept careful track of the passages of stm and moon through the seasons. It had been a year since he had agreed to work away those crimes he had been a tiny, but undeniably guilty, part of. The year was gone. This was the day, and his term of servitude was running out with the hours of it. Come the next dawn, he was free to go his way, to take up his interrupted quest.

  He should have been rejoicing, but found himself instead profoundly unsettled, uncertain. His quest sat as tmeasily on his mind as the late Travic’s clothes did on his back. It was not that he doubted his ability to cross Esdragon—he had run across so much of the duchy already, Kellis knew he could reach the city somewhere past the far side of it, assuming rumor had placed it truly. Even if the tales had been imprecise, he could find what he sought. No different from hunting a deer—easier, probably, since cities did not wander, nor take it into their heads to migrate with the seasons.

  If the City of Wizards existed. If the folk who had told him of it had not needed to believe in it so desperately that wishes were taken for truth.

  Assume the city real, there was no harm to that, and certainly no way for him to check it anyway, at this remove. The city’s reality was not the worst of his uncertainties. If the wizards and sorcerors who had founded it were choosy folk, would they admit to their number such as Kellis knew himself to be—more limit than power, half trained and that half badly, thoroughly crippled when it came to matters magical? Suppose he reached the city at last, only to be turned away at its gates? Refused, he might be doomed to wander forever, a lone wolf in truth.

  His left boot was leaking—he was standing in a puddle that had formed in a wheel rut. Kellis stepped back, staring down at the shining water. After a moment he went down on one knee, heedless of the damp, and sco
oped up a double handful of rainwater. He sang the summoning over it easily, without the least apprehension. It wasn’t lives at stake now, except maybe his own, and he felt no anxiety over that, at least not sufficient to overwhelm a summer’s hard practice in his an. The water’s surface shivered, began to throw back colors other than the sky’s.

  Other than the clear blue sky’s. There was a gray boil of clouds, and Kellis knew for once without doubt what he saw—the past day, the storm-sky Druyan had summoned with her whistling. Towers of lightning-bladed destruction, sweeping across the sea toward the high cliffs near Keverne. . .

  And atop that cliff, two people, locked in one another’s embrace. One had hair the color of a red deer’s summer pelt. The other’s, which the wind spotted with, shifted between red and gold like sunset light on water. Kellis could not have named the color, but he knew the scent of that hair, knew the feel of it, cool silk against his fingers. He had slept once with it tangled all about him. . .

  The last of the water leaked away through his cupped fingers, and the image vanished with it. Kellis lifted wet hands to his face.

  At last, he thought bitterly, scrubbing at his eyes, which bumed with sleep-lack. A scrying that actually makes it simple to choose an action! All it took was practice, after all.

  It didn’t matter whether Kovelir existed, or would take him in. His destination was of no importance, only his departure. What he might not have dared for himself, he owed to her.

  You have no place here, Kellis reminded himself. She took you in like a stray dog, nothing more than that. You dont need Yvain telling you to your face, to know.

  The breeze had dried his face, leaving the skin feeling tight as a mask. Kellis got stiffly to his sore feet. He would need to pack fresh wool into his boots, he. thought, to make walking bearable. He must remember to see to it.