Frostflower and Windbourne (Frostflower & Thorn)

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  Where farmers’ folk preferred splashing and sprinkling, the sorceri washed their bodies, like their clothes, by immersion in a trough. Since the bathhouse was also the laundry house, the same trough probably served both purposes. It was carved from mountain stone, the outside sanded down into smooth, gently curving shapes. The inside was set to within half an arm’s length of the top with glazed tile, the same sort farmers used except that the colors were arranged in a plain spiral rather than in symbolic designs. The tile had surprised Thorn on her first visit, as had the short copper tube that connected the trough’s central drain, now stopped with a plug of linen-wrapped wood, to the clay pipes that carried the water down to a dugout pool below the bathhouse.

  Well, there were the few merchants who peddled wool, linen, and cotton cloth so finely woven it could hardly be distinguished from silk. (Only farmers in the southern edgelands could hope to grow cotton, and only the richer ones tried, since it needed a long, fortunate summer and the saying was that the cotton harvest failed two seasons out of three.) There were the gemstones from the mountains; when you thought about it, who else but sorceri would gather them, with the mountains so full of sorcerous retreats? And there were the dreamberries—more of the damn things for sale in large towns like Five Roads and small, lousy ones like Sludgepocket than honest farmers’ folk could have found if they combed the woods for a year. All these trade items were whispered to come from the sorceri; often the midlands merchants themselves, while avoiding any actual mention of sorceri, would assure buyers that such goods had been “thoroughly blessed and incensed” or “purified by untold generations of honest handling.”

  The copper was more surprising than the other evidence of wealth and trade, with the way priests and farmers’ folk used that metal against sorceri in the midlands. But then, no warrior would have hesitated to eat stew from an iron kettle because she had been sliced by an iron sword, and sorceri turned out to be as practical as warriors in that respect.

  Carefully depositing Stabber and the bag that contained Slicer on a long table used for folding laundry, Thorn ripped off her clothes, wound them up into a lumpy ball, and hurled them out the door. If the sorceri didn’t understand that as a signal she needed something clean to put on after her wash, they would have to risk seeing her come out wrapped in a couple of towels. She tested the water, stirred up the charcoals on the ledge beneath the trough, felt the tiled bottom to be sure it was not overheating, and jumped in. She regretted the lack of hard scrubbing brushes, and to her there was something not quite right about trying to soak clean in still water—the trough was warmer than a river or lake, but it did not flow, it held you trapped in your own dissolved dirt. Nevertheless, it was relaxing in its way. She wondered if any sorceron had ever relaxed to the point of sleep and drowned in the water, chest-deep as it was when you were sitting up in it.

  She filled her palms with soap and massaged thought away for a few moments by scrubbing her hair until the scalp slid back and forth on the skull. The last time she had gotten her hair cut to a decent warrior’s length was in Five Roads, at least ten days before the priest’s death. By now it was long enough to stick on her shoulders when she turned her head, long enough that she could pull a handful of it into sight and make sure it was washed back to its natural tawny color.

  So little Frostflower really had carried out her intention to learn priestly writing and study the ways of the gods and goddesses. She may know more about them by now than I do, the warrior thought with a mental laugh. Wonder if she’s chosen any favorites yet?

  Draining the dirty water, Thorn knelt and poured dipperful after dipperful of clean, cold water from a nearby stone jar over her hair, her body, and the tiled interior of the trough, stirred the coals up again to start the new water heating for the sorcerer, dried herself in a cotton towel almost the size of a blanket (simply as they thought they lived, in some ways sorceri enjoyed as much luxury as the richest priests), and found a pile of clean clothes at the very end of the laundry table, just inside the door: gold-colored trousers and knee-length red tunic, both of velvet-soft wool; linen undergarments of the kind a sorceress wore—the bodice was impossible to tie as firmly as a good warrior’s halter, but it would do for the soft life of the retreat—a pair of boots made of several layers of linen and wool quilted together and coated on the outside with some sort of wax or treegum, and a long blue cloak of heavier wool. Thorn would have had to save most of her wages as Third Wallkeeper of Five Roads for a year before she could have bought clothes like these in the midlands.

  She recovered her sword and knife and strolled outside, picking the dirty wax off Slicer’s sheen-amber. She might need to disguise the pommel stones of her weapons again when they left Windslope, but for now she wanted to show off her two gems against the beauty of her borrowed clothes.

  Windbourne was sitting alone on a stone bench, shoulders slumped, eyes staring down into a cup that tilted unsteadily in his hands. At least his face and hands were wiped clean, and a crust of bread lay on the bench beside him, all of which suggested that his people had been able to talk a little sense into him, not merely given up and left him to welter.

  “Trough’s waiting for you,” said Thorn, walking over and putting one foot on the bench. “Water may not be very warm yet, but you look as if a cold dousing might do you more good than a hot one.”

  “It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it, warrior?” he said without looking up. “A little water and soap, clean skin and clothes, and you think all your disgrace is washed away in the sight of your gods, such as they are. And I suppose it might be—a few rites, a few words, a little ceremony…I could almost envy you your superstition.”

  Thorn shrugged. “I wasn’t washing away disgrace, I was washing away dirt. And yes, I feel a lot better for it. So will you if you stir your…legs and get in there. As for disgrace, I was hoping your own kind might finally convince you—”

  “God!” he set down his cup with a thump, sloshing its contents.

  Thorn jerked her leg out of the way. “Watch it! That stuff’s wine!” Blasted wine stains were worse than mud.

  “What sort of retreat is this?” he went on. “Sorceri who let one of their own go to study the gods of the farmer-priests! What cleansing can I find here?”

  “You can start by scrubbing the stink off your skin. Smell less like bogbait and you may feel less like bogbait. And then you’d better stick to milk and water. All this damn wine inside you to simmer your brain—no wonder you can’t think right!”

  He finally looked up at her. “Because you saved my life, does that give you the wisdom to explain the state of my being to me? God, warrior! I think your own farmer-priests would call you heretic!”

  “I had to put up with your damn moods all the way north. Now I’m going to see if my bread’s baked yet.”

  There were a number of small outdoor ovens in the retreat, but only one of them seemed to have a sorceron sitting beside it—Starsinger, recognizable by her strange, rounded lute. Her high-backed wooden chair was placed near enough to the oven for the heat to warm her old blood, but her voice still sounded like that of a woman thirty years younger. She acknowledged Thorn’s approach by nodding without interrupting her song. Returning the nod, Thorn sat in another chair nearby, relaxed in the sun, and listened to the music.

  She had been surprised last summer when she learned that sorceri, like farmers’ folk, commonly judged time by singing songs when they had food to bake or other work that entailed waiting in comparative idleness. The songs were different, both in melody and subject matter; sorcerous ballads tended to be boring tales with no fights, no lovemaking, and long descriptions of the mental growth someone had enjoyed by watching a butterfly’s wings in the sunlight. The only exciting one the warrior had yet heard was about a young sorcerer who saved a traveler’s life by crumbling away a boulder that had fallen on his leg—seemingly a difficu
lt feat even for a skilled sorceron—and even this ballad went on to tell how the traveler converted to the sorcerous creed, which took much longer to recount than the rescue. Thorn preferred to daydream about her meal: a loaf of hot, brown, crusty bread almost as long as her lower arm, stuffed with vegetables, some of them maybe fresh-grown.

  Once she opened her eyes to look across the footpath at Windbourne, still sitting hunched over his wine. There’ll be a loaf of bread in the oven for him, too, she thought, and the bastard had better get his rump into that bathhouse pretty soon if he wants to eat his meal hot. She closed her eyes again and thought it was inconvenient that sorceri could not hurry the cooking of a meal the way they could hurry the growing of one. As she understood it, they had to let things cook at their own speed because they could not touch food while it was cooking without burning their fingers like everyone else. The most they could do was increase the heat of the air in the stove or above the fire, through a process something like the manipulation of weather; and they preferred not to do even this much. “Why do you prize your powers so much if you’re so stingy about using them?” Thorn had asked Frostflower. Frost seemed to have an answer to that in her mind, but she had never been able to explain it to the warrior’s comprehension.

  So Frost was free-traveling now? Well, that was good. It was the reason she had been wandering around in the middle Tanglelands last summer like a stray piglet squealing to be skinned and roasted—seemed the old sorceri did not teach the young ones this third power of theirs until after a period of real travel, something like the way a warrior could not become raidleader in a farm without having wounded or captured an enemy in a real raid, nor wallkeeper in a town without having caught a thief or brought in an outlaw’s head, with or without the outlaw’s body. Frostflower had been afraid her people might refuse to teach her free-traveling when she came back to them raped and full of doubts about her own god (goddess? Thorn had welcomed the God of the Sorceri into her own group of favorite deities, and it would be nice to know whether to think of this new one as a He or a She).

  Windbourne had probably been traveling around for the same reason. Frost had come back determined to find some sorceron in another retreat who would teach her free-travel if her own community refused; but Windbourne acted as if now he himself would refuse to ask for the instruction. For Frost, Thorn would go through everything again, several times over; for Windbourne, she sometimes regretted having gone through it once.

  The swordswoman pressed her finger to her chest, between collarbone and left breast, where the brandscar that canceled out last summer’s outlawry lay hidden beneath the tunic. Get far enough south or west of Center-of-Everywhere, someplace where Maldron’s symbol, now Inmara’s symbol, was less known and where it was less likely that both tales would come up in the same time and place, and she might be able to make the first scar do double work. But if she wanted to stay anywhere in the northeast, even to breathe easily in the south, she had to get a second brand somehow from Youngwise or Eleva. The priestess’ would carry more honor, show a higher degree of forgiveness; but the townmaster’s would have just as much practical effect and might be easier to get.

  Without that second brand, she would always know herself an outlaw. Even if she escaped discovery in life and Hellbog afterwards, she could never again think of herself as an honest woman. Azkor’s talons! she thought, I’m almost as bad as that sorcerer, in my way. I just don’t make myself and everybody else suffer about it, that’s all.

  CHAPTER 5

  Frostflower found Dowl waiting at Nearest Curve. After his initial outburst of leaping up on her, licking her face, and threatening to overturn them both with the force of his tail-wagging, the dog was content to sit with his head in her lap, letting her fondle his ears, while she rested a few moments on the old boulder, chiseled into a chair so long ago that now only tradition reminded them its shape was artificial rather than natural.

  She did not often stop to rest this close to the retreat, but the climb had seemed especially hard this afternoon. Yesterday had exhausted her, with the work of preserving Elvannon’s orchards from the ice storm, the need for spending the night in the farmer’s Hall, and the unexpected temptation to read one of his scrolls of secret knowledge, guarded from all save the ruling and a few scholarly priests.

  Yesterday’s crowning triumph had been the ease of her free-travel back to Moonscar’s cottage. Her progress in the skill had been very slow throughout the winter, much slower than her ability to manipulate time and weather would have suggested. Moonscar, Silverflake, and Windspur, the other three sorceri of Windslope who had developed the third skill, had assured her it was almost always difficult at first but—after a period of staggering as if the disembodied entity were drunk or moving through liquid—suddenly the consciousness would break free, the vision would clear, and all would be simple from that moment on, with only the finer embellishments left to learn. This might happen at any time, even during the night, when it could be mistaken for a dream, until at the next effort free-travel came easily.

  But as spring approached and Frostflower still labored as if swimming through mud, she knew even Moonscar had begun to share her fear that the losses of her virginity and certitude, though leaving her other skills untouched—perhaps stronger than before—were hindering her progress in free-travel. Windspur and Ringwood had frankly advised her that if she ever hoped to free-travel easily, she should give up her studies at Elvannon’s Farm.

  And now, at last, it had happened…in Elvannon’s home, shortly after her decision not to use her chance opportunity to read some of his people’s secret knowledge. Had it been a reward for her decision to keep faith with a priest, or for her turning away from the deepest parts of the priestly creed? Or had it been mere coincidence? Even in her triumph, she was left with doubt. Moreover, free-traveling took the same time it would have taken in the body, and she had had to wait a while, once in Moonscar’s cottage, before he woke and entered the free-traveling state, as he did almost every night. So she had not returned to her chamber in Elvannon’s Hall until nearly dawn, and then she had risen with the farmers and spent the day in the study alcove until her usual departure time after the midday meal. Her flesh had rested, true enough, as thoroughly as in sleep; but her mind had not rested for two days and a night.

  Sighing, she gave Dowl’s head a final pat, rose, and started around Nearest Curve and up the last four hundred paces. She was glad the first cottage was Puffball’s. With luck, she could see Starwind again at once. No matter how healthy he was at each of her departures, no matter how safe she knew him to be in the keeping of Puffball and Silverflake, she still must always see him on her return. And she could share Puffball’s supper before climbing the hundred paces farther to her own cottage and bed.

  She rounded the curve. The buildings of the retreat, which were visible from lower down on the slope but hidden from view for long, winding stretches of the path, would have come back into sight. She lifted her head to look at them—she always liked them in the heavy golden air of near-sunset—and saw Weatherwatcher waiting for her less than a hundred paces farther up the path.

  No—not Weatherwatcher, only wearing a red tunic like his!

  “Thorn!” cried the sorceress, beginning to run despite her weariness.

  The warrior dashed down to meet her, caught her up, swung her round, set her down again. “Knew me right away, did you? Claws and tails!”

  “I had not expected you for at least a full hen’s-hatching yet!”

  “No? Well, we can thank our gods I made you that promise last summer, or maybe I wouldn’t have gotten back at all.”

  They were both laughing, but suddenly—from the warrior’s words, not from her tone—Frostflower understood something was wrong. “Thorn, you found good work and left it again only to keep—”

  “Gods, what a lovely thought! Here, you look worn out—lean on me,
that’s the way. Your brother’s house?”

  Nodding the sorceress accepted her friend’s support, with Dowl running before and around them. “But what did you mean, Thorn, about your promise?” She would have said that she did not wish to hold her back from any plans she might make among her own kind. But to put such a thing into spoken words seemed ungrateful.

  “There has to be at least one god—yours or mine, I’m just as thankful—who doesn’t want me breaking promises and is helping me stay alive long enough to keep them. Otherwise…Well, I’m here as I promised, but if you’re still set on another trip through the midlands this summer, maybe you’d better not plan on my company.…I’m an outlaw again, Frost.”

  They walked in silence for fifty paces, Frostflower leaning heavily on her friend’s shoulder and wondering if in some way Thorn was leaning on her for support of the mind. “I do not know all the laws of all the priests in the midlands,” the sorceress said at last, “but I know it was not for dishonesty, Thorn.” Some things, even if understood without words, gave additional comfort in the speaking and hearing.