The Wind-Witch (20 page)

The hoe rang against a stone, and stilled. “You’ll
trust
me. Lady, I have been
trusted
ere this.” His face was nearly as white as his hair, immobile as a stone mask except for his darting eyes. “My family’s dead. My entire Clan has ceased to exist because they
trusted
me to see clear enough to protect them from danger. And I saw everything peaceful and hadn’t the wit to know I was seeing
back
instead of ahead. They didn’t get a warning. That’s what comes of
trusting
me.

If he’d leapt up and struck her, the message couldn’t have come plainer to Druyan—she knew
nothing
of this man before her. Not his past, not his likely reaction to anything she might say to him—nothing at all. He was unknown and exactly as dangerous as Enna held, and naught but sheerest luck had kept her safe thus far. And luck could run out . . . She took a step back.

“I liked being the prophet,” Kellis said harshly, staring at her. “Looking into the mirror of the water, singing the vision into being—not everyone could do that. Knowing every eye in the clan was on me while I did it. I liked the status—after the chief, they looked to me. I liked the attention. I could reassure the old people that all would be well, and the women would smile at me. The girls would be so grateful. . .

“But I never learned how to give them anything real. I never took the trouble to learn
how
to look, how to see past the surface and whatever would give itself to me easily. Our shaman was dead, there was no one to take me to task for it, no one even to know the difference—but I knew, knew I was only playing at it, for what I could get out of it. Respect, and fine goods, and women. I suppose I knew in my heart that I’d have to pay for that ease, one day what I didn’t know was, it wasn’t
me
who’d be asked for the payment. I just had to watch.”

Druyan wanted to break and run, from him and from his confession, to put a safe distance between them. But that was showing weakness, and once she began, where would she stop? At the kitchen door? The twice-mended gate? The edge of the sea? She dared not run, and she would not.

“All right,” Splaine Garth’s lady whispered, her voice dry as sand. “I won’t trust you. I’ll weigh every word you tell me, and doubt it twice before I ride out. Will that satisfy you?”

That flying brow came down, level as a line squall over the waves. “We had a bargain, Lady. And none of this was in it, that I recall.”

“I didn’t
know
about any of this!” Druyan shouted, outraged.

“Now you do, and you think you can just add it in with the rest? Plow a field, fix a roof, shear a sheep, and order up a vision so you’ll know where the raiders will strike next?”

“I don’t expect it matters to you, if they do to Esdragon what they did to your people,” Druyan accused. “It’s not your home or your problem. You’re only here till you can get to somewhere else. Well, I hope for your sake that the city you saw is
real
, that it’s being built
now
, that it isn’t so far in days to come that you’ll never live to see it.”

“It wasn’t one of my visions,” Kellis answered sharply. “I wouldn’t have trusted anything I saw all the way across the Great Sea!”

“Probably you wouldn’t,” Druyan agreed. She set the bowl down at the edge of the garden. “You can have this for a shaving basin. I suppose if you happen to see raiders coming
here
again, you’ll mention it? That’s far enough in your own interest?”

He looked stricken. “I’m refusing for
your
good, not mine, Lady.”

“Of course you are,” Druyan said, and turned away, swirling her skirts about in a tiny, angry wind.

The flax field greened up rapidly under the light daily rains. They didn’t grow a great deal of the fiber, but Druyan liked to have the wherewithal to make her own household linen. Wool was warm and shed the rain wonderfully, but for comfort she wanted a soft sark beneath it, next to her skin.

Once fields were plowed and planted, the early season of the year held fewer urgent tasks than the harvesttime pressed with. Druyan took the winter’s worth of saved wood ashes and rendered pig fat, and spent a week making soap, scented with a tisane brewed of last year’s dried lavender blossoms. She worked daily with the three new foals, seeing to it that they learned to lead while they were still small enough to muscle if they proved reluctant, knowing they needed to learn early to do as humans told them if the habit was to hold when they were grown. Same for the new calves, though not to quite the same extent, as leading would be all they were expected to do. Playing with the lambs was a temptation she struggled to resist—’twas foolish to make pets of creatures you expected to eat. She felt a little safer about the orphan lamb—it had particularly silky wool and would be kept for its fleece.

Druyan seized the chance to dye the accumulation of winter-spun wool, working the craft in around cheesemaking and the last of the soapmaking. She held back no skeins—there were dyestuffs she could not gather at that time of the year, but there was the wool from the spring shearing still to be dealt with. She colored her yam with the skins of onions, the shells of black walnuts, the first green coltsfoot leaves, and the last of the wintered-over beets. By the time she had finished with all the possible colors, ’twas time for a first cutting of salt-grass hay.

In an ordinary river-bottom field, they’d have cut and left the stems to dry and cure in the sun—but that was not to be thought of in a marsh soaked twice daily by the tide. The hay would have molded, or been clotted with salt, or turned to peat like the natural edges of the marsh. Instead, they cut wain-loads and hauled them back to a hilly pasture that caught a good breeze and whatever sun there was, and hoped for a few dry days in a string. Druyan did what she could to ensure a lack of rainfall, but she would not risk whistling up a breeze.

She had not tasked him ftuther about the bowl.

She had not taken it away with her, either. She had abandoned it on the dark earth, hard by the feathery tops of the new carrots. If he left it there, the rain would till it to the brim, till its surface was a perilous mirror for his unwary eye to fall upon while he was at his chores.

It belonged in the kitchen, probably. But Kellis dared not step foot therein—Enna was having a bad spell with her joints and never left the shelter of the room for any sure length of time. Her knees were hurting her nearly as badly as her hands, she could not walk far, and her temper was exactly what one would imagine it to be under those circumstances.

He could put the bowl in the barn. And Kellis did, but he could not put it from his mind. He hoped a hen would choose it for a nest. There was one that prowled the barn, obviously broody, plainly not trusting the daily raided nestboxes the lady provided for her fowl. Her fluffed feathers would hide all of the bowl from him, from his sight. He would be able to forget.

Days, that goal was possible. His work took him far from the barn and the bowl, and the regular movements of his arms and legs could lure him into a sort of trance, when Kellis thought of nothing but the ground underfoot and the air about him; he could be mindless as a beast.

They cut hay in the marsh. Kellis dared not be mindless about
that
—he was required to wield a scythe with a wicked crescent blade of which he had a morbid fear—or a healthy respect, depending on one’s point of view. Fortunately, the scythe’s snathe was wood, and long, which meant he was able to keep the cold iron at some distance from his shivering flesh while he worked. But reaping required constant tense vigilance if some disaster was not to overtake him. Kellis could not carry the tool to the marsh, over his shoulder with the iron crescent pointing down his back as Dalkin did. Nor dared he hone the dulled blade on the bit of sarsen stone Dalkin had for that purpose. He had to ask the boy to tend the tool for him, to carry it and sharpen it.

And then, if he narrowed his attention down until his head ached and his shoulders twitched, Kellis could cut hay without slicing his own legs out from under him.

In a broader field, he would have been so slow as to be useless. But the marsh was his friend, its twisty channels and narrow ribbons of grass rewarding rather than punishing the care he took in cutting. Had he embraced the scythe like a brother, he could have cut the salt grass no differently, no more swiftly.

Come night he should have slept like the dead, worn out by strain and exercise. But Kellis lay nightlong in the dark cave of the barn, listening to the horses breathing and sighing and nibbling at their fodder, wide awake. And in the blackness there was one spot of greater darkness yet, and an empty space at the center of that darkness, a cup to catch and hold all the overflowing misery in his heart.

He shut his eyes. It didn’t matter—he wasn’t seeing the bowl with them. That was why the farthest corner of the barn was not half far enough away for it. That was why covering the bowl with hay did no good. Probably smashing the fragile crockery would be no use, either, though he had not yet tried that last resort, since there was no retreating from it if it proved faulty.

You were quick enough to look into the water for those murdering savages
, his dark thoughts accused him.

The answers didnt matter
, he responded, flinching.
All I had to do was tell them what they wanted to hear And hope I was right enough for my own sake. Never for theirs
.

As a plan, it had been stupid, and it hadn’t worked for long—but he’d done it, without a qualm, without this agonizing. Means to an end, using the Eral to ferry him over the sea, that broadest barrier on his quest for the city where wizard-folk gathered, where he might find a place.

Night after night he felt the bowl’s presence, like a bad tooth that would not hurt him unless he bit upon it, but would not leave him in peace, either. What sleep he did find was tainted by dreams of uncomfortable intensity, worse than any that the iron-sickness had ever given him.

If he looked into the bowl—even once—there was no going back from it. If he asked to see, he would see. See, and be once more cursed with the conundrum of sifting truth from deception, today from tomorrow, with always the chance that it might as easily have been yesterday. He couldn’t do it. He knew too well what the responsibilities were and that he was not equal to them. His clan had died to prove that to him.

Better, anyway, that he not tell the Lady Druyan what she wanted. She had shown him kindness, she had more than likely saved his life—mixed blessing though that deed was. He did not think he would fairly repay her by giving her a cause to ride that wonderful, terrifying horse of hers into danger. He was right to refuse her, if only for her own good.

Her good—or his cowardice?

The straw stuffing his pallet felt like so many bundled sticks. Kellis arose, unable to bear it longer. morning must come, sooner or later, whether he slept or not. Time always passed, however distorted his sense of it. The nights were shrinking as the sun rode higher into summer. He leaned wearily against the wall that separated his stall from the next.

Warm air brushed his cheek, startling him. The boards creaked as Valadan rubbed his shoulder against them, perhaps soothing an itch. He blew another breath in Kellis’ direction, through the narrow gap betwixt the boards.

“Am I keeping you awake?”

There was a snort for an answer. Horses dozed much, but did not sleep deeply nightlong. They preferred to spend the hours attending to their hay.

“What would
you
do?”

Kellis had heard the lady speaking to this horse as if he were a human soul, able to make her answer. He knew the stallion had speed beyond that of any mortal steed—had it not hopelessly outdistanced him when he tried to follow their shared mistress to Falkerry? And in the dark, Kellis could see the stars glowing, the uncanny constellations that filled Valadan’s eyes. But the horse did not speak to him, the horse who was not afraid to be entirely whatever he was.

It was Dalkin’s task to turn the hay over with a wooden fork, so it would dry evenly. The final stage was to spread the fodder on the barn floor for a while, before ultimate storage in the mow above. There was a contraption of rope and pulleys and a platform for lifting the fully cured hay up to the loft—good work for a rainy morning.

The pulleys were squealing like pigs at slaughtertime as Druyan ventured into the barn in quest of the overclever hen who’d made a nest in the henhouse but had steadfastly refused to lay in it—Druyan knew she had a true nest somewhere, and suspected an overlooked corner of the barn. Or else the fresh, inviting hay. Either way, the hen was destined to lose her clandestine brood.

Kellis lowered the platform carefully, then came down the ladder to load it once more. Druyan inquired whether he’d seen a hen.

“I didn’t. She gave herself away when she pecked my ankle—I had almost stepped in the nest.” Kellis indicated the general direction with an inclination of his head. “There’s just the one egg, Lady, and she seems most determined not to give it up.”

Druyan sighed. “I suppose she might as well hatch it out. Do you think we’re finished with this cutting?”

Kellis glanced roofward, cocked his head to listen. The pattering of drops was less steady than it had been an hour before. “There’s more I might get to, just the other side of the main channel.” They only cut from the upper edges of the marsh—go too far in and the wagon would mire hopelessly. “Worth cutting if we get another dry week for the curing.”

Druyan took stock of her weather charms, a review to help her decide whether she could entice a few days of rainlessness out of the sky. A breath of wind would break up the clouds. . .

Or invite a storm, like the last wind she’d whistled up, destruction and inconvenience because she’d played with powers she didn’t in the least understand. Not a risk she should take, just for a bit more hay. Still, the wind had been shifting on its own, doing exactly what she would have asked it to do. . .

“Start cutting in the morning, even if it’s wet—we’re due some clear weather,” she said, and went off to see about it.