The Wind-Witch (13 page)

It was pushing things just a touch, to expect Enna to tolerate Kellis at table with them. He made that reality less awkward by staying behind in the barn watering the stock after Dalkin had finished doling out feed and returned to his own supper. Druyan took Kellis his portion later, after angrily adding more bits of meat to the stew and the breadcrusts Enna had left cooling in the crockery bowl by the door. The scraps put down for the cats were more generous, Druyan noted. Not that carding wool was fieldwork, but the man was thin enough almost to see through—and with Enna bound that he’d not have one morsel more than would keep life in his body, likely to remain so, just when every other creature on the place was laying on fat to better withstand the winter cold.

She heard humming as she entered the barn and paused a moment to listen. Dalkin slept in the kitchen, but that was not to be thought of for Kellis—he still had a bed in the unused stall and seemed content with the arrangement. That door was shut, but Valadan’s stood ajar, and she could see Kellis within, busy with brushes. He was humming as he worked—or perchance singing a song that was all but wordless—Druyan caught what seemed like a word now and again, the same one or two, repeated like a chorus.

The song ceased when Valadan pricked his ears at her and nickered softly. The stallion’s winter hair was thick, but it shone no less than had his summer coat, in the lantem’s buttery glow, and his mane and tail fell tangle—free as rain, testament to Kellis’ diligence.

“I should think you’d be weary of brushing,” Druyan commented lightly as she set the cloth-draped bowl down on a nearby bench. Kellis put the brushes carefully away and dusted his hands clean against his trews. He was cleanshaven—he’d presented himself for work that way one morning, with his hair cropped, too, at about the level of his earlobes. Druyan had no idea how he’d managed that. The hairline was ragged at the back, where he’d had trouble reaching. The shears they used on the sheep were bronze and were kept in the barn, but she hated to think of him trying to get right down to his skin with those.

“Easier to curry him than to comb burrs out of fleece,” Kellis said, giving the stallion’s neck a pat. “Different brushes, another grip, eases the cramps out. The wool grease is good for the hands, though. I should have asked before whether you had any.”

Keeping clear of iron had done much to heal him, of course, but Druyan had frequently observed Kellis plucking herbs as he chanced upon them in field or dooryard, rubbing the crushed leaves and juices onto his skin, and knew by that token that his hands still bothered him. She was sorry she had not thought of the wool grease, either. She knew how soothing ’twas, if only on the surface. And there were herbs she might have added to it. . .

“It would help Enna’s hands, too,” Kellis offered. “My people fill mitts with fleece and herbs, warm them by the tire. The patient sleeps with them on, and usually come morning the joints are less swollen.”

Druyan frowned, considering. “It certainly wouldn’t harm her. It grieves me I’m not a better healer—all Enna’s joints go stiff when the weather turns wet—which is most days, here—but her hands always seem the worst, and I have never known what else to do for her. She’s in a lot of pain sometimes. Too much for willow tea to deal with.”

“Hard to do without hands. You can’t favor them like a bad leg—if they hurt, you just have to use them anyway.”

He made the statement matter-of-factly and did not seem to notice how Druyan flushed. “If the wool grease helps her, I’ll tell Enna whose suggestion it was,” Druyan said lamely. “I’m sure you’d rather eat in the kitchen once the weather gets really cold.”

“I’m fine here, Lady,” Kellis said, and sounded sincere, even anxious that she believe him. Possibly he didn’t want to eat close by the kitchen knives, any more than Enna wanted him there. Among the animals, he might feel safer.

But horses and cattle grew thick pelts to keep themselves warm. Humankind did not. By midwinter, the water in the barn buckets would be freezing right to the bottom of the pails, some nights, and you couldn’t have a fire for warmth in ia barn. Even if she gave him thick blankets, she couldn’t allow Emma to deny the man a little warmth for part of the evening. There had to be some way. . .

Well, didn’t she intend to do an hour or so’s worth of spirming before the fire, that night and every night until the needful task was done? What with plying and skeining, didn’t the work take most of the winter evenings? And didn’t spinning go more than twice as fast as carding? Why should Kellis have his evenings idle? she might ask, if Enna pressed. No harm his doing a few more hours of carding, handy to where she and her spindle were.

Enna was predictably discomfited when Druyan brought Kellis back with her from the barn. Kellis wasn’t much happier, Druyan thought—he hitched himself as far back around the edge of the hearth as he could manage, so that he was absolutely out from underfoot and where Enna’s gaze would be least likely to fall upon him—pa1ticularly once she’d set Dalkin to sharpening the knives and cleavers. Druyan lodged a protest at that, unable to bear the noise of the grindstone and Enna’s instructions as to how sharp she wanted the implements to be.

“Enna, I believe he’d get a truer edge if he did that when he could see. Tomorrow, and outside.”

“I’d like it done now, Lady.” She fixed Dalkin with a glare, to be sure he knew what the order was.

The grindstone whirred uncertainly to life again. Druyan’s spindle twirled its way toward the floor. Metal screeched against sandstone. Druyan wound thread about the spindle’s shaft, dropped it spinning once more. The thread thinned, broke. She cursed under her breath, then spoke aloud. “That’ll do, Dalkin. If the cutlery’s too dull to manage the breakfast ponidge, there’ll be time to hone the cleaver before you start chores. Take the dogs out to the sheepfold”

Dalkin abandoned the grindstone happily, whistling for the sheepdogs and making his escape ere the order could be countermanded. When the door had been slammed twice to close it against the wind nosing outside, the only sounds in the kitchen were the hissing of the fire and the soft brushing of the carding combs working against one another. The spindle traveled in hypnotic silence to the floor, trailing sturdy newmade thread.

Druyan began to hum, the comforting simple rhythm of an ancient carol. When that palled, she shifted tunes to a many—versed ballad about fate—crossed lovers, and stayed with that till she’d run out of verses in her head, even though every verse and chorus hummed just alike. By then the spindle was filled, and she wound the thread off into a skein, ready for dyeing. She thought about colors, mentally tallied the dyestuffs she had already gathered in. The room was still quiet save for the snap of beanpods under Enna’s fingers, the whisper of the combs in Kellis’ hands.

“Do your people sing, Kellis?” Druyan asked lightly.

He gave a start, and the right-hand comb scraped the inside of his left wrist rather than the wool waiting on the left—hand comb. The flrelight washed his face with gold as he looked at Druyan, giving his nose back the straightness it must once have had. The wound on his forehead had finally healed to a pink line that ran crookedly from his hairline to the outer corner of his right eyebrow, and that brow, no longer prisoned by caked blood, raised when something surprised him, even if the rest of his face held carefully illI st. t did so now, went up like a startled horse’s head. He glanced across the hearth at Enna, sorting dried beans and half turning her back, still put out about the matter of the grindstone. “If you ask it, Lady,” he said, clearly reluctant, obviously preferring to huddle out of sight, overlooked.

Druyan maweled to herself, that Enna should waste so much of her precious energy safeguarding herself from a man who was manifestly scared to death of hen “Give us a tune,” she said to Kellis, suddenly full of mischief. “To pass the time.”

Sing
, she bade him, and there was no way Kellis could tell her—not in front of the other, hostile woman—that his folk sang sometimes for a quite different purpose than passing the hours, and that he had not had a song on his lips for a very long while. She only innocently intended a little entertaimnent to lighten the work, and if he refused he’d be uncooperative, ungrateful, and deserving rebuke. She had no idea what she was asking. He couldn’t say what it . meant, when his people sang together, couldn’t speak of the bindings made and reinforced within the clan, between families, between lovers. He couldn’t tell her that the solitary songs were only for mourning, were so brimming with grief that a lonely person might die just from chance-hearing one . . . His wrist burned, where the misstroke of the comb had scored it, and he tried to let that little pain distract him from the greater agony.

He should sing her one of their weaving songs, she would like that. It was probably what she wanted. But Kellis knew none of those—weaving had not been his craft. He ransacked his mind for something safe, a tune that might not start his pain and loss pouring out of him in a flood he could not stem, a flood that would tear out his heart. He had refused to sing that grief out when he should have, refusing to let himself heal because that healing was an unearned comfort. He did not deserve, it. He deserved much the reverse. The result of that denial, however it came about, was a chained wolf, mad from imprisonment and too dangerous to release.

Well, then, a song that could ner touch his dangerous heart. Something he had learned by rote, something thereby safe, a song that only told a story, or better still merely played with sounds. Something he had known so long that he would not remember where he had first heard it, or from whose lips. A song sung so often that all the meaning in it had been used up. . .

Druyan couldn’t understand a single word of what Kellis sang—pressed, he revealed ’twas a hunting song and did not translate it—but the sound made a pleasant background to chores. His voice was rich, full and expressive, never rough. Even Meddy, lying at his feet and worrying a bit of fleece into felt with her teeth, seemed to appreciate the diversion, and thumped her white-tipped tail when he got to what sounded like a chorus.

Meddy. . .

“What’s that dog still doing in here?” Druyan asked, which was not exactly the sort of applause one accorded a performance.

Meddy, who knew very well what “dog” meant and knew trouble when she heard it better than any other creature on the farm, being so often the maker of it, strove to hide once more in the shadows, but Kellis snared her by the ruff without even losing the combs.

“Can’t that boy even be trusted to count so high as two?” Druyan wondered, while Kellis rescued the bit of wool . Enna began exclaiming angrily as she discovered bits of dog—chewed beans scattered across her formerly immaculate floor. “You’d think Dalkin would have noticed she didn’t go out with Rook. One and the other one—how hard’s that to keep track of?”

Kellis was still holding Meddy’s fur, looking down into her unrepentant blue eyes. “That was ill-done, little sister. I had already combed that wool.” Meddy’s tail brushed the floor in hopeful apology. “Shall I take her out?” Kellis asked of Druyan.

“That would be best.” There was something odd about his expression, but Druyan couldn’t name it. “When the animals are tended in the morning, come back to the hall—where the loom is. Plenty more wool.” He half smiled, and the puzzling glimpse vanished. “Good night, Kellis.”

When he—and the brown and white wriggle of Meddy had gone out, Enna dropped the door bar into place and added a new touch—an iron meat skewer thrust through the latch. There were already three iron horseshoes hanging above the door, and Druyan thought Enna might have buried a nail or two under the threshold—there was freshturned dirt there, less than Meddy left with her clandestine but irresistible excavations. None of that had impeded Kellis’ passage through the doorway, but Enna remained hopeful. Druyan raised a brow of her own, when the older woman turned from the door.

Enna was as unrepentant as Meddy. “Now the dogs have got onto trusting that villain, I’m the only one can keep us safe from being murdered in our beds, seems to me.” She walked past Druyan, and something in her skirt clanked faintly as she moved.

Kellis proved to be as handy with the sheep as he had been at carding their shom wool. As the weather warmed into spring, the flock was let out into the marsh to forage once more, but it was the shearing time and the larnbing season, too, so every evening the sheep were brought back to the shelter of the fold again, lest lambs birthed into a sudden last-of-winter storm be lost. ’Twas easy enough to lose a ewe to a difficult confinement, so someone had to sit watch with the flock through the night, ready to give whatever help was needed. Increasingly, that someone was Kellis, even if he had spent long hours shearing by day.

Druyans family had not kept sheep, Glasgerion being better country for cattle. She had only learned to manage the animals after Travic brought her to Splaine Garth. She had loved the beasts from the first, and not merely as the providers of the wool she spun and wove into her marvelous webs of cloth. She rejoiced at each new lamb as if ’twas the child she herself had never born, and mourned every death among her flock as if the sheep had been close kin. She would happily have delivered each and every lamb ih wther own capable big hands.

Which of course did not befit the lady of Splaine Garth , as Enna was never unwilling to point out to her. It was farm hands work, to sit up all night waiting for a nervous ewe to decide to lamb. Pru’s work, in fact, and Lyn’s, and the girls could send for help if they needed it, which they should not.

So Druyan would steal out to the fold in the small hours, when Enna was long safe abed and the ewes were most apt to begin their business. Increasingly she found Kellis there ahead of her, helping a wet wriggling creature to find its wayfree of its weary mother, drying the lamb with a bit of straw so it would not take a chill, being sure that it fed from its dam and that she accepted its attentions if the birth was a Hrst for the ewe and she might therefore be confused about what was taking place.