A Mankind Witch (40 page)

Eric followed the man's pointing finger and noticed a layer of chalky dust. And also saw the small footprints in the dust. "Powdered limestone. I claimed I needed it for the glass."

"You can hardly deny that's magic," said Manfred. "Invisibility, I mean."

"Watch me," said Cair, tapping the wall carefully, where the dwarf's footprints neatly appeared to walk through it. He looked a little startled. Tapped further across. It sounded identical. Coming in from the other side of the cave, Signy stared at him in puzzlement.

"His brain has finally overheated, Princess," explained Manfred, cheerfully. "He's hoping someone is going to say 'come in,' and show us the way out."

"Oh, I know where that is. I saw it today," said Signy. "The Bifröst bridge. It's beautiful. And I have something for you, Cair." She held out a handful of dirty pink crystals. "This is what you collect is it not? I've watched you."

"Walls have ears, my princess," he said, looking startled.

"Not now," she smiled. "I've found that I can see them if I want to. Fjalarr was the hardest, but they're visible now that I know how to look."

Erik looked at Manfred, and said nothing. But that look conveyed a fair amount of alarm. Maybe, just maybe, she was a witch after all. Or at least, as the dwarves said, not entirely human.

Signy had had the strangest day. The first strange thing had been coming through to the herb conservatory and finding green shoots peeping through the soil that only yesterday she had been determinedly but inexpertly forking dung into. She'd seen thralls doing that, and never realized just what hard work it could be. But she had such a lot to think about, that the hard physical labor had been a release of sorts. An exhausting release, as she found. Thralls did this every day? No wonder they got beaten so often to make them work. But she'd worked and thought, and wheeled more barrows of dung to the garden, and petted the horses a bit. It came to her that there were worse things to do—like embroidery. A large part of her mind had been taken up with thinking over both what the dwarves and Cair had said. It had been much easier to think about what the dwarves had said, and even what the cartooned outlines of the picture on the tambour frame had shown. Virgin princesses weren't supposed to think about that sort of thing, but she'd seen dogs and horses, and been curious.

He was a thrall. Not a man. Yet, here she was, working like a thrall. If a princess could work like a thrall, forking dung, then could a raider captain not do the same? Honor could be regained. And when his eyes rested on her she felt like a woman, not a thrall or a princess. Did a brand destroy a man forever? Thralls were freed. It was rare, but not unheard of.

Maybe such a person could become a franklin. Or a trader.

But they did not associate with the royal house.

A part of her said that she did not care.

She turned her thoughts elsewhere, hastily, when this happened. This morning she was turning them to the real possibility that she could indeed do magic. She was well enough versed in the patterns of planting and harvesting that happened around Kingshall to realize that plants do not appear overnight, not even with the most liberal application of water and all of the horse manure in Norway. She found herself singing in sheer delight when she saw the first shoots, not the formal ballads that her stepmother had insisted on, and that she'd hated, but a strange, wild tune that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside her. The words were in a language she'd always known, never used. The conservatory was a wonderful echo-chamber and there was no one to hear her . . . and to her amazement the green shoots were actually growing as she watched. Leaves opened.

She stopped, staring.

"Powerful
galdr
!" said the dwarf from the corner. "You are worth far more than Bakrauf has offered. She'll have to increase her price."

"You would sell us all to Bakrauf?"

"No, she just offered for you and the big one. We'll consider her offer for him, for all that he's a strong worker. But she undervalued you. She said she'd buy the glassworker, too, if the price was right. But he's not for sale. Too useful."

"None of us are for sale," she said firmly.

He laughed. "That is not really for you to decide, half-blood. I doubt if my brothers would sell you for less than the
brisinghamen
itself. But Midgarders . . ."

"Are mine," she interrupted sternly. "Oath-bound. And I will sing such a
galdr
over your halls that everything here will wither and die, if you try."

He snorted and laughed. But she got the feeling it was more for show than in disdain. "We'll decide."

He vanished. She found herself wishing that she knew where he'd got to, and then to her further surprise she saw him as a wavy outline, near the stable passage, scowling at her. He looked far from laughter now.

And Signy, with not the vaguest idea of how to sing to anything but the herbs, and not at all sure of how she knew how to do that, felt good about herself. It was a feeling that continued throughout her day. Not even moving loads of dung could take it away. It was only when she looked at the tambour frame with the half-finished embroidery that it faded a little. But it still felt as if she had discovered a small spring somewhere in the desert inside her. She'd found loyalty—she would venture no further than that, yet, and she'd found that she could do things. She found that she was not useless, and that she could make things live and grow. The spring had been forcing a trickle upward in her ever since Cair had handed her the key to free the others. It was moistening ground, and shoots were beginning to grow in her, too. There were seeds that had been waiting, dormant but alive, all her life.

Signy wanted to help her companions. Loyalty was as much part of her as breathing. She would not let them go back to the troll-wife. Not if she could prevent it. But in her heart of hearts, she didn't really want to go back to Telemark either. Not to the half-dead existence she'd tolerated, not knowing anything better.

In his glass foundry Cair had not been feeling very good about himself. Blowing glass was a lot less simple than watching others blowing and trying it out under expert supervision had been. Even faking coins had been an easier task. And he had to make clear glass somehow. Clear, clean, bubble- and flaw-free glass. And then somehow he had to make an iron bird that could fool these dwarves that it both flew and sang. He had an idea about the singing. Well, whistling anyway. But flying had him flummoxed for the moment.

He'd realized that he was being watched, and somehow knowing that had made him work better. He patted and shaped the gather of glass on the end of the pipe against the piece of polished stone he'd found to make do instead of flat metal for marvering. He began to blow. And turn it slowly . . . It expanded without bursting or unevenness. He put it back into the furnace, hoping that the watcher would go away. But he felt they hadn't, so he pulled it out of the furnace. It had sagged slightly, so he shaped it against the stone and then blew it some more. He'd learned by now that the glass retained heat and must cool slowly. The glass bubble was carefully heated again and flattened on the base. And then he used tongs from the furnace to shape a rim into it, before taking it off the blowpipe.

A Venetian apprentice glassblower would have laughed at it. The watching dwarves had cheered instead. "Elgerr used to make models out of clay and dung, put them on a metal rod, and then dip them in the molten glass," said Sjárr.

"Or he made some small clay molds he pressed the glass into," said Vitr. "But the blowing produces finer and thinner glass items than he did. And it is much quicker, too. He used to take forever picking out the model, too. Do it again, we want to watch."

"It doesn't always work," admitted Cair. "Sometimes they break."

The dwarves grinned and nodded in unison. "It happens to all of us. Try."

So Cair tried. And this one was even better. The third one broke, but by then he'd delighted the dwarves enough to get them to agree to provide arsenic. They found the idea very funny. "You can make one for Bakrauf as a gift," chuckled Sjárr.

So he'd got his arsenic. And discovered that it did clarify the brown tint in the glass and make it more transparent. Getting from there to a polished convex lens was still a large step.

"We don't really have much use for beads," said Vitr looking rather scornfully at the clay concavities Cair was pressing molten clear glass into. "We want containers that can hold acids, particularly."

"These are not beads, Your Wisdom. They're tools for my fine-work. Maybe they'll be useful to you, too."

The dwarves were, true enough, holding them as prisoners, but Cair found that, compared to the other denizens of what he was convinced was a gray-skied Norse hinterland, he could get on with them. Artifice was a compelling fascination for the dwarves. Well, he found it that way, too. The three of them argued about acids, and how they worked, as he polished the best concave glass pieces. Of course their ideas were rotten with magic, but they were ingenious thinkers all the same.

When he put two of the concave lenses together and produced a bubbly and uneven magnifying glass—the two dwarves were excited enough to go and fetch a third one. Þekkr was quick enough to grasp the principle immediately and also to work out the need for a uniform curvature on the lens. He promised a metal die for this and agreed that Cair's work deserved a bellows man and an assistant to keep the furnace temperatures even. The dwarves were happy with the magnifying glass—But Cair was not. He knew that they were a long, long way from an adequate lens.

"It's not easy. I'll want a man who understands my language and needs. Erik would do fine. Some moron like the kobold people gave me is worse than no one at all."

The dwarves sniggered. "That's typical kobold, isn't it?" said Þekkr. "Pointy-headed idiots. You can have him."

By the knowing look the dwarves gave him, they knew he was up to something but obviously weren't worried enough to care. It was all part of the game to them.

Either he'd prove them wrong, or he was the one who should be very, very worried.

He settled for being uncomfortable about it.

Manfred didn't really mind carrying ore sacks. He wasn't about to tell anyone this fact, but it was not overwhelmingly hard work. Tedious and moderately strenuous, yes, but not too much so. And it left his mind free to work. Many people made the mistake of assuming that because he was big, he couldn't think, or at least not about anything above his belt. That suited him fine.

Having people underestimate you is always useful.

He occupied himself during his last trip in working out just how long they'd been captives—or rather how long it had been since they'd blundered into that kobold hole. It was a difficult exercise. For part of it there'd been no decent measure of night and day at all. But, unless he had it wrong, they had six to eight days before the truce sworn on the arm-ring was null and void. And assuming they'd moved in a straightish line, they had to be a good many days' travel from Kingshall. Probably at least as much as the eight days.

That led him on to pondering just how to deal with the situation between Cair Aidin and Princess Signy. Signy, yes, could make a good foil for her half-brother if the treaty was annulled and Telemark was free to pursue its expansionary policy. The Danes and the Empire could stop it. Probably. Provided the little Norse kingdoms stayed divided, and provided that the Svear stayed out of the mixture. Even then there were just too few people to seriously challenge the might of the Empire. But they could bleed the Empire white, while others attacked. Conquest of Norse lands would be easy enough, but occupation in these mountains and forests would be near impossible. So it would be containment: expensive, difficult, and sapping of resources that were needed elsewhere. Signy had overheard Bakrauf in communication with Jagellion. It was undoubtedly all part of a far bigger geopolitical game that the Grand Duke of Lithuania played against the Holy Roman Empire. Manfred wished that Francesca were here, and not just for the obvious, physical reasons. Not that that would not be, well, more than pleasant, but also because these sort of political machinations were meat and drink to her, just as combat was to Erik.

He wondered how Erik was getting on with the corsair. That was an even bigger problem than the Norse, really. Cair Aidin was the enemy of the Empire. Both from religious convictions and also as a raider that had cost the Empire and all the Mediterranean states dearly. It would in some ways have solved a lot of Manfred's own moral dilemmas if the man had indeed been squashed flat under the troll.

Manfred wondered if Cair's presence was yet another one of Jagellion's machinations. He also wondered, with wry amusement, how Signy was going to get around her noble scruples to bed Cair. He knew that look of old. And most women—hell, make that most people—could persuade their minds to do what their hearts and bodies wanted to. Manfred had often thought that if he could have harnessed all the mental energy he'd put into the subject himself, he'd have been able to out-think Francesca.

Erik watched Cair—he had a delicacy of touch, did the corsair, that was totally out of keeping with his bloodthirsty reputation. But then, there were many things about him that didn't actually add up to the image that the Empire had of the raider. Erik began to suspect that it was not beyond Cair to cultivate the rumors. "Now, if you can press down gently and evenly on that, Erik," said Cair.

"I'll do my best, but you'd have done better with Manfred for these technical tasks. He likes fiddling with metalwork and I've seen him pull apart the trigger mechanisms on guns for fun. I tend to regard artifice as something to use, not to play with."

"I'll probably get him in here as well, as soon as I find some work for him. The only thing I'll fail with is the princess in here. The dwarves are very pleased with the way she's making their garden grow. They'd like to keep her."