The Magic of Recluce (30 page)

O
VER THE NEXT
few eight-days, my cash flow improved, and I stopped going to the market, instead displaying my products on the stage in Destrin's window. With winter full upon Fenard, mostly demonstrated with howling winds, and occasional light snows, being able to sell without either paying the market fee or shivering on the cold stones of the square was a definite improvement.

The first chair brought three silvers, although I ended up having to buy a finish varnish for it and putting a satin sanded gloss on it.

Destrin “hummphhedd” and moaned, but finally gave in when I insisted that his cut came after deducting the expenses for materials, since I was the one buying them. Deirdre still watched occasionally as I worked, and Brettel still let me have the small scraps free. Even the larger mill ends cost but a few coppers.

Gairloch liked every opportunity to leave the confined stall, and that was another problem. Stalls had to be cleaned, something I had forgotten. Cleaning the sawdust and scraps from the shop, with the fragrance of cut wood, was almost a pleasure compared to wielding a shovel and slop bucket. Sometimes I even had to wash parts of the planking—and my hands turned red from the freezing water and coarse soap—but something inside me wouldn't let me not keep either the stall or shop spotless.

As I worked more with the tools, and Dorman had left tools every bit as good as Uncle Sardit's, my hands became nearly an extension of my thoughts, and I could almost feel how the grains and the strengths and lesions in the woods flowed together. Sometimes it wasn't even boring, and I could begin to understand how and why Uncle Sardit looked at wood.

“What are you?” demanded Destrin as I stepped back from the parlor chair I had gotten a commission for. It wasn't perfect, not to Uncle Sardit's standards, but even he would have called it a good piece. I had deepened and widened the seat grooves, knowing who would use it, and the spools and braces were a shade heavier to bear the extra weight, yet the proportions did not show that extra strength. “Acufff…cuffff…” He reached out a hand to steady himself. His face paled.

I leaned toward him. “Are you all right?”

“…Be…all…right…just an instant…”

He wasn't. Even when he straightened up and stopped coughing, he was pale. For the first time since I had come to Fenard, I reached out with my feelings beyond the woodworking to touch Destrin…and nearly recoiled from the impact. The threads of order within his body were faded, dying a fraction of a span at a time. Yet there was no chaos, no tinge of evil, just as though he were far older than he was, as if he were an ancient.

Almost without thinking, I lent him some internal order, a touch of strength.

“Who are you?” he repeated, as though his coughing attack had never occurred, but he edged closer to the hearth.

I wiped my forehead. “I'm Lerris.”

Destrin shook his head. “A master trained you, Lerris. I'm a poor excuse for a crafter, and I know it, but I can recognize quality and skill. Sometimes you look like Dorman when you touch the wood, or just let the plane graze an edge. You are in a different world. When you look at a piece of wood, you look like you see all the way through it.”

I did, but there wasn't any reason to tell Destrin that. So I shrugged, and I was shrugging a lot in Fenard. “Like you, Destrin, I'm trying to make a living.”

“…accuffff…acuuu…” He waved me away.

This time, with what I had given him, he recovered quickly.

“Damned chill…” he mumbled. Then his eyes met mine, and, as if he recognized what I was, he shook his head. “What will I do when you leave?”

I looked back at the chair. Destrin had raised a real question. “You had this shop before I came,” I said firmly, but it was no answer, and we both knew it.

Outside, the wind whistled, shaking the front shutters and rattling the display window.

“Are you ready for supper, Papa?” Deirdre stood by the stairs, looking as petite and fragile as always, as if a good breeze would carry her away. Yet there was iron behind that seeming fragility, as I had discovered watching her negotiate with a merchant's wife over some curtains she had provided.

“Good time to stop,” agreed the crafter.

While Deirdre served a barley soup, it was a hearty soup, and the biscuits were fresh. Young or fragile-looking, she could cook, and she always had a pleasant, if shy, smile.

That night, with my back against the brick of the wall and my feet up on the pallet that served as couch, bed, and study area, I eased out
The Basis of Order
. The cover was getting battered, perhaps because I had read through the slim volume at least twice.

Reading didn't mean understanding, unfortunately. Some things were easy enough, like the business with the sheep had been. Or like helping strengthen Destrin's body to fight the wasting disease. I could understand what the disease did to Destrin, but there was nothing I could do. Oh, Destrin looked better after my intervention, and I would do what I could, but slowly, slowly, he was dying.

Even the damned introduction to the book didn't help: “Learning without understanding can but increase the frustration of the impatient…”

Or how about “…All things are not possible, even to the greatest…”?

Wonderful, just wonderful.

I closed the book and looked at nothing.

Too many questions kept nagging at me, even as I continued to force my way through the damnable
Basis of Order
. At times, I would sit there under the lamp, later than I should have been up, knowing that my eyes would burn the next day, struggling with the conflicts and the ambiguities.

I couldn't read the book from front to back. That I had given up early. So I read the back sections first, the ones on the mechanics of order, and I tried some of them out, like aligning metals to strengthen them or change their characteristics. Those were easy, at least on nails or scraps, after a little practice.

And, using a pot of water and a candle as a burner, I could figure out how the weather modifications worked…sort of. What scared me there were all the qualifications and warnings about large storms changing harvests later in the year and creating droughts elsewhere. But the pot of water and the burner weren't going to change anything except make the air in the shop a little damper, and that didn't hurt the wood at all.

So I sat there, back against the wall, feet up on my pallet, trying to make sense of what I had learned…or thought I had learned…and realizing that some things were not possible—even for the order-master I wasn't.

A glimmer of yellow from the shadows caught my eye.

…whhsttt
…A whisper of slipped feet followed.

Deirdre stood back from the curtains to my alcove. How long she had been there, I didn't know, but her dark eyes flickered from me to the book and back.

In my shorts and nothing else, I felt undressed.

“You can come in, Deirdre.”

She did, but not far, only just inside the curtain that served as the doorway to my alcove. She wore an old maroon woolen robe over a worn white shift, and her shoulder-length hair was tied back.

“Lerris?”

“Yes?” I turned and swung my feet off the bed, setting them on the floor and sitting sideways on the pallet bed.

“Were you once a priest?” Her voice was soft, as it always was. Not timid, just soft.

I did not answer her, and she said nothing, finally sitting on the end of the pallet, the faintest scent of roses reaching me.

“You couldn't sleep.”

She shook her head. “I worry about Papa.”

“So do I.”

“I know…” She edged herself toward me. “He sees it, too. He won't say anything.” She reached out a slender hand and laid it on my forearm. Her fingers were firm and cool against my skin, and I swallowed, fighting against wanting to hold her.

“Lerris…” She eased even closer.

I tried not to shiver. It had been too long since I had held a girl, far too long.

“Please…stay…whatever you want…” Even though she had moved almost beside me, deep within she was shivering, and not with desire; yet at the same time she was calmly purposeful.

Taking a deep breath, I removed her hand. “Deirdre…I will do what I can for your father.” I took another breath. “I want to hold you—really hold you—and more, but that would not be fair to you or to your father.” Then I smiled crookedly. “And if you stay that close to me for long, it will be
very
hard for me to behave myself.” I wasn't kidding. She smelled warm and wonderful, and she brought home how lonely it had been. But she didn't want me. She wanted me to save her father.

She edged back, just enough to let me know she was grateful, but not enough to make me think she found me that unattractive—or something like that. I wasn't sure.

“Thank you.” That was all she said, but she meant it, and that was enough. She sat there for a time. Finally, she asked, “Where are you from?”

“A place far away, so far that I may never be able to return.”

She looked at me, and I looked back, and she opened her mouth and then closed it before asking another question. “Why are you here?”

“You'd have to say that it's a pilgrimage of sorts, a time for me to learn, and to decide.”

“Have you learned things you didn't know?” She wrapped the robe around herself more tightly, reminding me that the shop was chill, that winter still held Fenard.

The cold didn't bother me as much as it once had, but that was because I had begun to look at my own internal order, I suppose.

“Some days…” I admitted. “I never seem to learn what I thought I was going to learn, though.”

She nodded at me to continue.

“I left woodworking once, when I was an apprentice, and I wasn't sure I'd ever do it again. It seemed…well…it was boring. Why would anyone want to care about whether the grains lined up just right, or whether there was too much pressure on the clamps?”

“You seem to like it now…some days I stand and watch you, and you don't see me, even when I'm almost beside you. Grandpapa was like that.”

I licked my dry lips, catching the scent of her again, and feeling my heart beat faster. “You'd better go.”

A faint smile crossed her face as she rose, almost a grin, but touched a little with a sadness I could feel without reaching. “Thank you.”

She was gone too soon, and almost too late, and I wondered what harm it would have done to have taken what she had offered. But the words of my father, and Talryn, and the book hammered at me, and I knew I had done what was best. Enjoying Deirdre would have been deceiving her, and, more important, deceiving me. Yet my heart was still beating too fast, and my body ached, and I dreamed of golden-haired girls, and a black-haired woman, and even a redhead, and woke sweating and sore. But I woke knowing what I had to do.

T
HE SQUAD LEADER
looks over her shoulder. “Tell Gireo to drop back another hundred rods.” Her body adjusts automatically as her mount starts down the long slope that will lead to the Demon's Triangle—the mythical intersection between Freetown, Hydlen, and Kyphros.

“A hundred rods?”

“Twice the separation he's got now.”

“But we can't reach him if they attack from the rear…”

“We can. We're not his good-luck piece. He's a big boy.”

“But…”

Her hand touches the hilt of the blade. “You replace Gireo.” Her soft voice carries across the road, still shrouded in the mist laid down before dawn. Under the cavalry cloak and hood, her long hair is tightly bound up in black cords.

The man shakes his head, but turns his mount back uphill.

In time, the trooper called Gireo urges his gelding up beside the dark-haired woman who has shed the cloak and folded it into a saddlebag. She wears the still-untarnished silver firebird on the collar of the leather officer's vest.

Gireo's eyes burn as he takes in the slender officer. On foot he would look down on the woman by more than a head.

Her eyes seem to look through the fog ahead.

He opens his mouth.

“Quiet.” The word barely carries the distance between them, yet it arrives with the impact of a quarrel.

Gireo shuts his mouth, but his teeth grate inside his cheeks.

“Gallian regulars,” mutters the squad leader. “Damned ghouls.” Her eyes look again into the mists. “Wizard…not this far from Gallos.”

She unsheathes her blade, nudging her mount into a quick walk. “Get the others to close up…quietly.”

Gireo drops back, but says nothing to the two troopers in file behind him, as he glances from them to the squad leader. The road flattens out as it nears the valley below, and the damp and packed clay of the roadbed dulls the sounds of the Kyphran squad.

Ahead, a flickering pinpoint of light appears, then disappears, shrouded and unshrouded by the ground fog rolling out of the Little Easthorns.

Gireo looks back toward the squad leader, but she has vanished into the mists. He frowns, but does not unsheathe his blade.

The Kyphran squad rides downhill.

Whhheeee…eeeee…eeee
…

…eeee…eeee
…

Clink…clunkh
…

The sound of a single set of hoofs thunders toward the Kyphrans.

“Form up!” The single command is snapped out of the fog like an iron lash, and even Gireo turns his mount.

The squad leader lets her charger carry her past the first two files. “Move it!”

Almost reluctantly, the Kyphran troopers urge their mounts forward into a trot.

Nearly a dozen Gallians are in the saddle as the Kyphrans break out of the fog and lumber toward the invaders.

The squad leader has resumed the van, and her blade flashes, though there is little light to reflect from the cold steel.

Whhhsttt…hhstttsss
…

“…damn…”

“Your right, Gireo!”

“…aiee!…”

All the sounds are from the Kyphran side. The Gallians fight silently.

Whhsttt
…

“…you!”

“…chaos…bastard…”

Whhssttt
…

In time, the Kyphran squad draws up not far from the abandoned fire that still flickers through the morning fog. One mount and man are missing. Another mount's saddle is empty. A dozen figures wearing the purpled gray of Gallos are sprawled in and around the camp.

The squad leader reins up by the fire. “Gireo, get the weapons and strap them to one of the Gallian mounts.”

“Get them yourself.”

The squad leader sighs, but the blade is in her hands. “Do you want to die on your horse or on your feet?”

Gireo shrugs. “You couldn't win on foot in an honest fight.” He swings off the chestnut gelding.

She smiles and dismounts.

He leaps forward even before her foot is clear of the stirrup.

She dives under his blade and emerges from the roll with her own blade before her.

Whhssskk
…

Clinnkkk
…

Whhhstttt
…

His blade slips from his fingers as the blood fountains from his throat, as his knees crumble. “Bitch…”

Even before he has finished dying, she has resumed her seat on the charger. “Hyster…gather the Gallian weapons.”

The thin bearded man looks from the giant on the ground to the slender woman upon the horse. He swallows, then dismounts without a word.

Two other men exchange glances.

“…see how fast her blade is…”

“…kill you as look at you…”

“…killed seven of the Gallians, though…”

She lets the whispers continue for a time, then clears her throat. “Let's go.”