The Wind-Witch (16 page)

The bullocks, while not so easily excited as the horses, decided they nonetheless craved the safety of their normally quiet pen, and sought it at a lumbering canter. Druyan went after them fast, before the raiders could see that part of the "mounted men" were only a brace of plow oxen. She yelled every sort of cry she could think of, particularly the names of the men who wenen’t there but should have been, and took more swings with the mattock whenever she saw an opportunity.

The raiders were beginning to put their backs to the buildings, which gave them leisure to look about. That would have been unfortunate, and the problem was dealt with by every shift possible. The dogs chivvied their legs, dodging sword blows as easily as they did cow kicks on a normal day. Enna slammed a frypan solidly into a raider’s head and knocked him nearly off his feet, though she lost hold of the pan and had to scramble away without it. Dalkin rained blows with his sharp hoe. There was only one torch still alight, and that went out as Kellis got lucky with his water pail. He followed up that shower with a malodorous rain of turnips.

The horses were out of even Valadan’s fonnidable control, dashing madly wherever they pleased, mostly wanting to escape the noise and the strangers and even each other. When one crashed a banicade, it did not return, and the others were apt to follow it and be lost to the defenders. Valadan’s own charges were more effective—he willingly went at his targets with hooves and teeth, and ’twas all Druyan could do to keep in her saddle. They chased one raider as far as the gate and sent him flying over it, but they couldn’t do likewise with the others.

Three of them had managed, Druyan saw with sinking heart, to group despite her efforts. The now-panicked horses were running around them instead of scattering them, and ’twas growing plain indeed that they were merely loose horses. A fourth raider joined his friends, and he had Pru fast by her collar despite Meddy’s leaping and barking at his back. There was another downpour of vegetables, halfrotted potatoes this time, followed by frantic chanting.

Druyan rode to Pru’s rescue, swinging the mattock like a sword. Out of nowhere a bullock came bawling, big as a cottage, and slammed into Valadan’s near shoulder so that the stallion all but fell. Druyan shot helplessly off over l1is right side, to land with a great thump against the horse trough.

The impact drove all the breath out of her. Dazed, Druyan saw Valadan rearing and striking out with his forefeet, dropping down to avoid—barely—a sword cut. Struggling to fill her lungs, she saw Enna dash for the kitchen door-forgetting it was barred, not one of the several escapes they’d chosen. Druyan tried to warn her, but her shout was only a wheeze. Enna tugged uselessly at die door, then turned at bay, and Dalkin leapt to her side, swinging a sickle in either hand, which was stupid—he’d be more likely to cut himself than slash a raider. Druyan tried to get up, but her limbs answered her sluggishly, as if she was beneath deep water.

A fifth man joined his fellows, and they all held their swords at the ready, impervious to attack from most directions now. Kellis’ chanting from the roof had ceased, and there was only Lyn still desperately clashing pans. Most of the horses had either escaped or were clumped together by the smokehouse. None was still running.

A tendril of wind brushed Druyan’s bruised cheek. Tears sprang to her eyes—the storm had passed them by. If only they’d had its help, perhaps they wouldn’t have failed.

A sixth stranger appeared from behind the barn, dragging Lyn by her yellow hair. Meddy was barking as if she’d lost her wits. There was a curse, and then she began to yelp.

Druyan put her lips together. She had barely been able to draw a breath in, but she had enough air for one oddly pitched whistle.

Valadan heard and swung toward her. So did something else, farther away and swifter yet.

A great, icy gust of wind came howling through the gap between the buildings. It had not even died before a counterblast ripped through from the other side. Both gusts raised dust—Enna dodged away under its cover, snatched up a pan, and jumped back to Dalkin’s aid. Rook’s sharp teeth found an ankle, and all at once Pru was loose. Lyn’s captor let go his hold of her as he turned toward his shouting mates. Meddy flung herself at him, sending him sprawling.

The wind howled like a starving wolf. Thatch lifted off the kitchen roof, there were great stinging pebbles mixed with the choking dust. Valadan reached Druyan’s side, and she scrambled back into his saddle. Two of the draft horses, used to working as a team, rallied to Valadan’s call andigalloped at the little knot of men. Dalkin was yelling and running toward them, too, his twin weapons waving.

Now the rain—not gentle drops, but a virtual sheet of falling water, as if the lightning that flashed above had ripped open the belly of the cloud. The wind drove it sideways as it fell, and it struck like slashes of a dagger blade. Thunder cracked, and Druyan flung back her head and screamed encouragement to the wind, squeezed her legs about Valadan to send him running with the storm.

Kellis yelled something from the roof—Druyan thought at first he was in fear of the wind, but he yelled it three times, and all at once there seemed to be thirty horses running with Valadan, and as they swept through the gate at the raiding party’s heels, she wondered where the army had come from, with their swords and spears and clashing armor, fooled herself by Kellis’ illusions.

Lightning hit the tree at the end of the lane just as they reached it—Valadan sat back on his haunches and slid to a desperate halt as branches fell in front of his nose, and Druyan felt every hair on her head lifting and crackling, like a cat’s fur on a dry winter’s day. The crash of thunder—just overhead—deafened her for an instant. She steered Valadan around the shattered tree and begarito gallop down the lane, but he halted again, in air so thick with rain as to be nearly solid water, ears flat against the lash of the wind.

They have gone
, he said, sounding disappointed.

The storm that saved them cost Splaine Garth three venerable apple trees, one beehive, and half the kitchen roof-the last doubly unfortunate, as the storm took the best part of a week to blow itself out and considerable rain fell in the meantime. Kellis got blown off the roof with the thatch, and came out of the adventure with a lump on his head and a much-bruised shoulder. No one else was injured, i though the wet weather made Enna pay dearly for her active part in the defense.

Before the sun had chosen to show his face that first morning after, the girls had rushed off to discover how the sheep had fared, and Dalkin had gone to the marsh to see whether the pigs and piglings were in any difficulty, then to fetch the cows home. As the rain eased, Enna began dragging things out of the kitchen to dry if they could, and Druyan rode out to round up horses and to assess damage they hadn’t had leisure to notice.

Everywhere she pointed Valadan’s nose, scenes of distress assailed her eyes. They had no very large trees along the Darlith coast, but most trees she passed had limbs a-dangle, torn entirely off or hanging by a scrap of bark, the leaves withering. The ground was blanketed with leaves fallen too soon, and bramble canes had been whipped about till they tore each other. Here and there bird’s nests lay overturned, the fledglings dead beneath them after a wild plummet earthward.

The birds would nest again, of course. Some would releaf themselves, and even the spots where the little streams had tom out their banks would be hidden by normal vegetation in a month’s time, troubles forgotten. The grass, most flexible of all, stood cheerfully already, waving green fingers at the now-gentle breeze.

It was Druyan who could not forget or forgive.
She
had done this, unleashed this mighty force on her home and her people. And she had reveled in it.

The raiders would have done worse
. Valadan pawed the turf as she sadly examined a dead badger. Where was its sett? If there had been kits, were they drowned, too, or merely orphans?

“The raiders would only have done it to the farm,” Druyan said sadly. “I did it for leagues.”

Valadan snorted deprecatingly.
Storms come
.

“I called it.”

It chose to answer.
He nosed the badger.
Male. Look for no cubs
.

Druyan leaned against his shoulder. “I called the wind, knowing I couldn’t just send it away when it had done my will. Knowing it would do this.”

The nature of storms
. The stallion reached for a mouthful of grass.

I liked it too much
, Druyan thought, watching him graze.
I cannot yield to that again. Not even a little. It’s too easy.

Small wonder the fisherfolk forbade women to board their boats, to whistle at all, ever. On the off-chance that one of those women was the one the wind would answer to. The seductive power carried a fearful price.

Returning, she found Kellis struggling up to the roof with fresh barley straw, the last from the previous year’s crop and luckily not all stuffed. into mattresses. Under Enna‘s protests, Druyan went up to help him.

Kellis seconded Enna. “Lady, you should not be up here. It’s too far to the ground.” He took the bundle of straw from her and tried to spread it over the planking in a layer thick enough to keep out further rain.

“You’d know about that,” Druyan agreed pleasantly, staying at the top of the ladder. “How’s your shoulder today?”

He shrugged it a trifle and “It complains but lets me use it. That was a provident storm, Lady. I thought it would pass us by, sweep up the coast—but it turned.”

“It did,” Druyan agreed, dodging his questioning gaze by descending for more straw. What exactly had he seen that night, from his rooftop vantage? Was he wizard enough to know?

Kellis did not press, but went on with the repairs. There was an art to thatching, in which he plainly lacked instruction—he was doing his best to make a watertight covering, but in the end it was still going to leak, and the roof was likely to be much thicker at the repaired end than at the other, unless he ran out of straw. Druyan, no better schooled at the craft, could only hope that Edin the thatcher was one of those men the duke sent home when the threat of the raiders was finally ended.

She said as much, and Kellis agreed cheerfully, not deceiving himself as to the permanence or the efficacy of the job he was doing, taking no offense as he pushed straw about and tamped it hopefully into place.

“Without you warning us, there probably wouldn’t be a roof left at all,” Druyan said. “Or any of us still here, likely. We’d never have stood them off, storm or no storm, without you helping? She laid a hand on his arm. “We’re all grateful.”

Kellis smiled lopsidedly. “I know. Enna put
milk
in my porridge this morning. Or else I got the cat’s breakfast?”

Druyan began to chuckle. “Next thing you know, there’ll be actual meat in the stew. What a change of fortune!”

Or virtue rewarded. He
could
, Druyan knew, have used the raid for a chance to disappear, stolen a horse and gotten clean away in the ample confusion. Success would have been virtually guaranteed. Instead, he’d cast his lot with theirs, to succeed or fail as they did. It was such folly, to trust too far a stranger who’d come as Kellis had—but how many times over must the man prove himself?

“WiIl they come back?” she asked, suddenly alarmed, clinging to the top of the ladder, looking out over her cropland. It was so early, there was all the summer before them, and the autumn. All that time of peril and good weather, while crops ripened and stood ready for the stealing. “What do they want, that they have to steal from us? Where do they come from?”

Kellis inched his way up the slope of the roof, tucking straw into rows. Druyan had no idea what he was going to do when he got to the peak—she didn’t see how the thatching was going to hold. The first fresh breeze would strip it away again.

“They all
want
to be older sons,” he said, after she’d thought he either hadn’t heard or had no answer. “There’s not land enough in their homeland, to divide it among all the sons, so the younger ones get nothing at all, unless they’re strong enough to take it for themselves. They grow up having to fight for everything—every song I ever heard them sing was about war, or raiding, or a blood feud.”

“I always heard they took everything that wasn’t nailed down and went away with it,” Druyan said, puzzled. “There weren’t more than a dozen of those men here. They couldn’t have thought tl1ey’d just move in, keep the farm?

Kellis laughed. “That lot? Not likely. They’d have stolen whatever they could carry and left with it. They don’t want farms—they want gold and adventure. They’re very simplehearted that way.”

“Younger sons
here
don’t inherit much of anything.” Not to mention daughters, who got less still, no matter where they came in the line of kin. “
They
don’t go raiding over the sea.”

“There probably aren’t half so many of them.” Kellis worked another row of thatch, and Druyan saw him pass his right hand over it, fmgers cocked in a small binding magic. “I wish you had some tar—this isn’t going to shed water very well. Any Binding I can put on it will wash away with the first rain.”

“That’s the reason it’s so steep-pitched. Run die rain off the straw before it soaks through,” Druyan told him.

“I’m trying not to think about that, Lady. This roof is anxious to shed
me
again.” He made more hand-passes over the surface, sometimes with straw, sometimes with spellcraft. “Anyway, my folk tell tales of a wondrous golden time—my grandmother’s time, I would guess—when the weather was so fair, there wasn’t a winter you could notice. Lasted for years. Everything grew—crops, grass, and herds. The Eral, too, on their home coasts. I would guess that while they had plenty of food, they grew big healthy babies. Worst luck, lots of them were sons. And they all had big families when their turns came. More sons, so many that fighting among themselves didn’t cull enough, and they started spilling out to plague other lands.” He reached, lost his balance, and flung an arm over the roofbeam hastily. Straw showered down. “Lady, when you see me come sliding down at you, get yourself out of the way.”