Frostflower and Windbourne (Frostflower & Thorn)

by Phyllis Ann Karr

“I sort of hope it’s my own Warriors’ God looking out for me,” said Thorn. “No lack of gratitude to yours, Frost, but I’ve lived a lot longer with mine, and I think I know him a little better, what he likes.”

  * * * *

  “The questions they have brought to us,” said Moonscar, “are what penance Windbourne may deserve for traveling in disguise and for certain thoughts he has had since his capture and escape, and what Thorn should do, now she has been outlawed this second time for her friendship to us.”

  They sat around one of the tables in the cloth-house; with Windbourne, Thorn, and all the sorceri of the retreat except Starsinger and Windspur, who were taking care of the infant, the group was too large for any of the cottages, and Windbourne had requested they not use the House of Gathering, as if he were ashamed to sit in its unadorned austerity.

  Ringwood rubbed the callus on her left forefinger. “Stay with us, Thorn. We’ll soon wean you into the true creed.”

  “Thanks, Ringwood,” the warrior said with a grin, “but if you can’t come up with any better suggestions than that, I’ll just handle my problems alone.”

  Frostflower sighed. Ringwood, like Windspur, never let slip a chance to urge a visitor’s conversion.

  “Thorn knows,” said Moonscar, “that our retreat is ever open to her. She may rest with us as long as she wishes.” He looked directly at Ringwood. “We will not press our beliefs upon her, and should she hunger for her own kind of food, we will not complain if she hunts, cooks, and eats it in the woods—shall we give that privilege to our dogs and cats and withhold it from our human guests? Unless one of us can suggest some way to help her regain her honor among her own people, we will say no more.”

  Thorn grinned again. “You wouldn’t want me around here too long, anyway. Better get on to Wedgepopper’s problems—sorry, Windbourne’s. Spiked tails! After almost a quarter of a year, I think of myself as Bluntend more often than Thorn.”

  Spiked tails? Frostflower smiled. The warrior was clearly making an effort to soften her speech, at least among sorcerous friends.

  “We suggested no penance for Frostflower last summer when she had traveled in disguise to save her life,” said Silverflake. “Shall we suggest one for Windbourne? If his own retreat thinks differently, let them measure his guilt. I say he has none.”

  Windbourne looked up at her. “Your hair may be silver, and mine still yellow, but I say I have great guilt.”

  “If the guilt exists in his mind,” said Wellgiven, “is it not as real as if it existed in fact?”

  “I doubted,” said Frostflower. “I did not go in disguise without misgivings.”

  “Doubt is natural,” said Puffball, who was just emerging from the everyday scruples of youth through which his sister had passed some years earlier. “If we sinned whenever we doubted, we would never be guiltless.”

  “Doubt prevents pride,” said Moonscar.

  “Keeps you humble, hey?” Thorn put in. “The way a little nick every now and again in practice keeps me from going into a real fight with too much confidence.”

  Windbourne started up. “Why did you bring this priests’ woman into our circle, with her foul tongue and talk of fighting?”

  “This foul-tongued priests’ woman,” said Thorn, “saved your blasted guts, Wedgepopper!”

  “As she saved mine,” Frostflower said quickly, reaching across the table for Thorn’s hand. “As she saved Starwind—as she would save any of us. Warriors’ skills may have no place in our thoughts, but when they are used to save our lives, shall we despise them?”

  Windbourne sat sullen.

  “Well, I say if Windbourne feels all that guilty and wants a punishment, punish him,” said Thorn. “It’ll do him good, and we can get on to more serious problems.”

  “Our penances are not like yours, Thorn,” said Frostflower. “Not quite. Your hour of suffering at Inmara’s Farm last summer canceled out your…I cannot say guilt…your lawbreaking, simply by the ritual and the bodily pain, did it not?” The priestly creed had great advantages, the sorceress thought, for active, practical people like Thorn. (And yet it was also adaptable to those like Elvannon’s older daughter, whose study seemed to approach sorcerous meditation.) “Our penances are meant to purify from within,” she continued. “We must not attempt to purify where there is no real guilt.”

  Thorn shrugged. “Let him go back to his own retreat, then. I suppose he can find it safely enough alone, now we’re back in the mountains.”

  “Frostflower doubted,” said Windbourne. “I have never doubted. I recognized my sin from the beginning. If you will not choose a penance for me, let me choose one for myself. I must travel back again to Five Roads Crossing in my own garb. At the farmer-priest’s gate, I must push back my hood and proclaim my innocence of his death. Afterwards—”

  “Afterwards!” shouted Thorn. “You rotbrained bogbait, you won’t get much of an afterwards! If they don’t spear you down before you have your hood all the way off, you’ll wish they had by the time they gibbet you.”

  “Afterwards,” said Windbourne, who by tradition must be allowed to finish before any other sorceron spoke, “I must return to my own retreat crawling on my knees.”

  Moonscar shook his white head. “This last alone would be far too much. But the other…Even those sorceri of the early generations who died of self-imposed penances in the mountains at least left themselves the chance of survival. No, Windbourne, you must think of this not as it concerns your pride, but as if you were choosing the penance for another who had done what you have done.”

  “The priest,” said Frostflower. “Deveron. Can it be that somehow his death distorts Windbourne’s thoughts?”

  Ringwood slapped her hand on the table. “The coincidental death of a farmer-priest?”

  “They are people, Ringwood,” said Frostflower, “not so greatly different from us, despite their creed. Such a death as Deveron’s must bring sorrow, wherever it falls. He may have been as gentle a farmer, in his way, as our own neighbor Elvannon. Might not the very accident of Windbourne’s being suspected of his death have created a link that sharpens his sense of guilt without his understanding why?”

  “There might be something in Frostflower’s thought,” said Wellgiven, who had made his decision ten years ago to give up his own chance at learning free-travel rather than risk seeing wide-spread suffering among farmers’ folk that he was prevented, by their suspicion of sorceri, from helping to relieve. “Deveron’s death sounds like the result of a fever, perhaps one of the spreading sicknesses.”

  “Deveron’s death,” said Thorn, “was probably caused by poison.”

  “Poison!” cried several of them.

  Thorn leaned her chin on one hand and looked at them meditatively. “The people who poison priests are other priests, maybe sometimes an old-fashioned warrior who thinks she’s still half a priestess.”

  Frostflower felt a pain almost of hunger so great it had become sickness. “Thorn, you do not mean that among themselves, they…kill…murder one another?”

  The warrior glanced at her friend. “Sorry, Frost, they do. It’s secret knowledge, of course. Some priests don’t think even warriors should know it. I’ve heard of one or two who killed good women for knowing it—not talking about it, just for being aware of it. But I don’t see any reason to keep it secret here.”

  Frostflower covered her face with her hands. Was this the kind of secret to be found in Elvannon’s forbidden scrolls?

  “Don’t take it so hard,” Thorn went on. “It doesn’t happen all that often. And most farmers don’t like it any more than you do. I’ve heard that the High Priestly Gathering in Center-of-Everywhere executes the ones who do it, when they find out and can get hold of them.”

  Moonscar nodded. “If it were known that priests did not always guard one an
other’s sanctity of person, could they retain that sanctity among the common folk? And charging such deaths to our people is part of covering their own guilt. Who else but a sorceron would dare strike a priest? But your townmasters also know these things?”

  “I imagine Youngwise suspects. He’s a shrewd old prick—sorry, a shrewd old geezer. That’s why he wasn’t particular about what sorceron he had dragged in for the blame-catch.”

  “But why not pass it off as fever-death?” said Wellgiven. “Do they hate us so much?”

  Again Thorn shrugged. “I suppose there wasn’t any other fever sickness in the farm, and his Reverence must have died pretty damn spectacularly. Anyway, I suppose they could have poisoned a few farmworkers and tried to make it look like a spreading sickness that way, but a stray sorceron and one townwarrior or merchant wasted by stripping him or her would be cheaper than three or four farmworkers. Keep the farm and the town happier, too, than if they had some kind of spreading sickness to fear.”

  “Her…her Lady Reverence Eleva?” said Windbourne. “Like all the rest of them? Another—another farmer-priest?” His emphasis on the last word had more force than most of Thorn’s worst epithets.

  Thorn slapped the table. “Windbourne, you made her some sort of goddess—or maybe I should say sorceress—because of her nice voice and her plans for steamgardens. If you want to change your mind now, it’s your own pretty notion of her you’re changing, not the priestess herself. But there are farmers who are just as innocent as you are, a few priestlings and even a few grown wives who don’t believe in the poisonings—or at least don’t believe it could happen in their own farms—and her Reverence Eleva could be one of them. There’ve been priests who died suddenly and nobody got the blame. I suspect a few of them were murdered—a pillow over the face or a better poison than someone used on Deveron—and it passed as a natural death. Lady Eleva may have sent Youngwise instructions to look for a sorceron in order to cover her own guilt, or whoever really poisoned her husband may have persuaded her of sorcery to keep her from realizing the truth.”

  “And why did you not tell me?” said Windbourne. “In all those hatchings we spent together…God! You could have told me that I…I might be creating a false idea of her.”

  “You’re a sorcerer,” Thorn replied. “She’s a priestess. What difference would it make what you thought of her?”

  “But why was Windbourne in Five Roads Crossing during the winter?” asked Weatherwatcher.

  “I was traveling in preparation for my study of the third skill.”

  “In winter?” Wellgiven insisted on Weatherwatcher’s point.

  Gripping his hands together, Windbourne leaned his upper arms heavily on the table. “The skills do not come easily to me. To such as I, the most difficult preparation is the best.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Moonscar. “It could be that the skills do not come easily to you because you will not let them, because you prefer the most difficult way.”

  “I could go to Five Roads Crossing,” said Frostflower. “I am not known there. I could learn what’s happened.”

  “Alone?” said Thorn.

  Frostflower gazed down. Her hands looked strained and somehow unreal spread out on the dark wood of the table. She put them into her lap. “If I must,” she said. “I traveled alone, with only Dowl, to Three Bridges last summer.”

  Windbourne shook his head. “It would not lessen my guilt, my cowardice.”

  “Warriors’ God! I should’ve just gone myself and left you behind, clamped down on that bed!” Thorn exclaimed. “Well, it might not help you to know, Wedgepopper, but maybe you’re not the only creature interested.” Speaking softer but no slower, she went on, “How about free-traveling, Frost?”

  Frostflower shook her head. “How long is the journey to Five Roads Crossing? A full hen’s-hatching in good weather, is it not? Bad weather, night, or bodily fatigue do not stop free-travelers, but to go and return would still require a hatching, and we do not know how long I might need to wander in the town, unable to ask questions, able only to listen for chance talk of last winter’s events. You could keep my body safe here from outside danger, but not from the inner dangers of long idleness and lack of food.”

  “Why not slow time for your body?” asked the warrior.

  “That would also affect the free-traveling entity. Not to so great an extent, perhaps, but still…” Frostflower paused. Her own need to know was great—she could not say as great as Windbourne’s, for no one could be sure of gauging another’s mind accurately—but great enough that learning the truth of Deveron’s death might be worth the risk. “Yet free-travels of such length have been accomplished,” she said. “And I am young and healthy.”

  Silverflake covered her left hand with her right in negation. “Now that you have found your power for it, I think you may become one of the farthest free-travelers of all. But your body is not yet prepared to lie dormant so long. At the end of the summer, perhaps, with diet and exercise aimed toward that one goal. But even then, the risk would be terrible. None of us could be sure of reaching you in time to summon you back. Moonscar and myself are too old to think of leaving our bodies so long, and in ten years of practicing the third skill, Windspur has not yet made so long a journey as you did last night.”

  “Teach me the third skill, and let me go,” said Windbourne. “If I become a wraith wandering alone with no flesh to return into, that will be no more than fitting penance.”

  “Talk sense or keep quiet,” said Thorn. “If we got you to Five Roads in body, Frost? You could free-travel right into the priests’ private alcoves?”

  Wellgiven asked, “Are there friends near Five Roads who will keep her body safe?”

  “The flowerbreeder Crinkpetal,” said Windbourne. “He has long been an unsuspected friend, as well as a rich merchant. Baconcrunch of the Fat Suckling Inn—but that was where they seized me, so it might b best to avoid her house. leatherhands of the western townstable. Others I’d been told of but did not have time to meet.”

  “Our old friend Spendwell may still be there,” Thorn remarked. “But more likely he’ll be off in his wagon again before we can get back. I’d say Crinkpetal’s our best choice, though I’m not sure he’ll be overjoyed to see us again.”

  “Us?” said Frostflower. “Will they not still be watching for you?”

  “If I’ve got any chance at all of making myself an honest woman again,” said the warrior, “it’s by proving I ran away with an innocent man.”

  “But if Deveron was killed by other priests,” said Silverflake, “what good would the knowledge do you? Would they not kill you to keep the secret from the common people, rather than lift your outlawry?”

  “They might,” said Thorn, “if they can get me. Or I might be able to buy another brand from Youngwise or Eleva in return for my promise to keep quiet. Anyway, I’d rather die fighting back—as a really dangerous someone to them—than as a poor, common outlaw scud.”

  “Thorn,” said Frostflower, her mind cringing from the thought of her friend dying either way, “your gods know how I’ve looked forward to traveling with you this summer. But it might be safer for me to travel alone, on this journey.”

  “Teach me free-travel,” said Windbourne. “I must retrace this winter’s journey in my own rightful garb—the black the priests have imposed on us—and with my own name. Only thus can I hope to cancel out the lie of living disguised. If they scaffold me, I will leave my body to die and return in free-traveling essence to tell you what I have learned.”

  Moonscar shook his head. “You have asked for a penance, young sorcerer. As the first part of that penance, I instruct you to advise no grim and deadly penance for yourself. Do you accept this from me?”

  Windbourne stared down at the table in silence.

  “Don’t give him the choice, Moonscar,�
� said Thorn. “Just command him. He’s been begging to be commanded, hasn’t he?”

  “To command is not our way, Thorn,” replied the old First Sorcerer. “But unless you accept this penance, Windbourne, you must hope for no more suggestions from me.”

  Windbourne slowly turned both hands palm up. “I…accept it, Moonscar,” he said, his head still bowed.

  Thorn grunted. “Now maybe we can get somewhere. Let’s see. The robe might just pass, if he keeps his hood over his face, but the name’s out. Then we’ll just call him ‘The Silent One.’ I’ll do all the talking—I don’t mind putting on a disguise and getting a little away from the truth if that’s what’s needed—oh, don’t worry, Wedgepopper, I won’t lie about you. All you’ll have to do is keep quiet and I’ll say ‘The Silent One’ doesn’t talk and let ‘em draw their own conclusions as to why not.”

  “Thorn—” said Frostflower as the warrior paused.

  Thorn held up one hand. “Wedgepopper and me are the ones in trouble this time, Frost, you’re not. So it’s either you going alone, or us going, and since he insists on going, teach him free-travel and let him do the work. As for me, I want to be right there when he finds something out, not sitting up here flattening my…well, lolling in the sun. All right, how long will it take to teach him free-travel?”

  “It varies,” said Silverflake, “but I fear it will take a long time in Windbourne’s case. If the first two skills have never come easily to him, and if he feels this guilt out of measure…he may not be able to learn to leave his body until the guilt is lifted to his satisfaction.”

  “What?” Thorn struck her hands together. “Demons’ claws! And we can’t lift his guilt until he learns the skill!”

  Frostflower smiled. “So you must let me go, after all. And since you were only two when you left Five Roads Crossing, a group of three will be all the less likely to draw suspicion. What disguise will you wear this time, Thorn?”