Winterling

by Sarah Prineas

  The Lady is very beautiful, and she makes things hard to think about. She says my mother was her most trusted ally and warrior, and that I should serve her as my mother did. At first I thought I would serve her, but now I know that I can’t do that.

  My father brought me to you, and then he came back here to help my mother put things right. But they didn’t. I think I’m supposed to do it instead, and I will, once I find out what, exactly, is wrong, and how I can fix it.

  I haven’t forgotten my oath to you. I will come home. But I can’t come yet.

  Love,

  Fer

  After signing the letter, Fer stuffed it in the bottle and sealed it with the cork and left it on the tray. Hopefully the same person who had left Grand-Jane’s note would take her note back to the Way and send it.

  Now she had another day of lessons with the Lady while trying to fight off the glamorie without letting any of her doubts show. Instead she would have to watch the Lady closely, to see if she could discover any clues about what she had done to bring wrongness to the land.

  And meanwhile, where was Rook? If he was supposed to be watching her for the Lady, he wasn’t doing a very good job.

  The Lady greeted Fer with a cold kiss on her forehead, and she looked just the same, glowing with beauty and power. But now that she knew that the wrongness in the land came from the Lady who should be the land’s defender, Fer felt herself resist the glamorie as it dropped over her. Just to see what would happen, Fer tried turning her head to catch a glimpse of the Lady out of the corner of her eye—to see what was really there, behind the glamorie.

  But she stumbled over a log hidden in the snow and saw only the Lady’s chilly, pale face.

  Fer and the Lady trudged through the knee-high snow to the field, where two badger-men held the horses. Fer felt her heart lift when she saw Phouka. Leaving the Lady, she ran up to him and patted his flank. “Hello, you bad horse,” she said, and laid her cheek against his neck. He smelled of hay and warmth and earth. He whuffled and turned to rub his nose against her shoulder.

  The Lady swung up onto her horse’s back. “Mount up, Gwynnefar,” she ordered.

  “Be good, Phouka,” Fer whispered into his ear, then gripped his mane and did her belly-flop mount. She scrambled into a sitting position.

  “We will ride for a short while today,” the Lady said, “and then I will teach you to shoot the bow and arrow.” Then she dug her heels into her horse’s side and trotted off into the snowy field.

  Fer followed. Overhead the sky was clear and light blue, and a chilly wind blew, making the tips of Fer’s ears and her bare fingers burn with cold. Her breath huffed out as clouds of steam. As always, her patch-jacket kept her warm. She bounced after the Lady. After an hour of riding, the Lady led them out of the forest to the wide field. At its other end, Fer could see the encampment, the blue and green and violet-purple tents clustered under the eaves of the forest, smudges of gray smoke drifting from the campfires, a few glimpses of the Lady’s people coming and going between the trees.

  Fer had a question that she had to ask, even though she didn’t trust the Lady to tell the truth about anything. Might as well risk it. “Lady,” she asked, “I haven’t seen Rook in days. Do you know where he is?”

  “He is probably sulking,” the Lady answered. “His kind is terribly moody.”

  “What is his kind?” Fer asked. She knew what Grand-Jane had told her about pucks, but she was curious about what the Lady would tell her.

  “The pucks? They are different from all the others of our kind. Pucks have very keen vision, for one thing, and are valued for that. They are tricksy and not to be trusted unless they are carefully bound by an oath of loyalty. Also, they can shift into other animals. Horse and dog. Some can shift into a goat, as well.”

  “How does a puck do the shifting?” she asked, since the Lady was in a strangely answering mood.

  The Lady cast her a sharp, sidelong glance. “The pucks use an animal bone or a tooth to shift.”

  Fer had found a dog tooth in the box in the Lady’s tent, and a bit of bone. She hadn’t seen another puck in the camp, so it must be Rook’s, the tooth he used to shift into a dog, and a bone for a horse. Why did the Lady have them?

  “When a puck is a horse or a dog,” the Lady said, “he is not a mindless wildling, he can still think and remember and act with intelligence. Usually the pucks serve no one. However, they can, in very rare cases, be oath-bound, and a bound puck is beyond value.”

  Fer asked the next question without thinking. “What would happen if a puck broke his oath?”

  The Lady pulled her horse to a stop. Phouka walked on a few steps, then stopped, and Fer turned him back. The Lady’s face was pale and tight. “What has he told you?” she asked.

  “He won’t tell me anything,” Fer answered. Her heart gave a little lurch. “I just wondered.”

  “Ah.” The Lady fell silent. When she spoke the edge had left her voice. She almost sounded sad. “Our oaths and our rules bind us together, Gwynnefar. When an oath is broken there is a price. And it is always more than the oath breaker can pay.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Before Fer could ask any more questions, the Lady and her horse galloped ahead to the waiting badger-men, where she dismounted and took the two bows and quivers of arrows they were holding. Fer followed, sliding down from Phouka’s back.

  “See you later,” she whispered, giving him a pat as one of the badger-men led him away.

  For the rest of the morning, the Lady taught Fer how to shoot with the bow and arrow. She set up a target on a pine tree and, after strapping a leather guard onto Fer’s left wrist, had Fer stand in the snow twenty paces away. She taught her to raise the bow, aim, and shoot. The Lady could hit the target every time, her arrows flying straight and true.

  Fer’s arrows splattered and splayed around the target, but after a few hours of the Lady’s teaching, Fer raised the bow, drew back the string, sighted along the arrow, and felt something settle into rightness inside her. Even before she released the string, she knew the arrow would find the target. She nodded, hearing the thunk as it hit, dead center.

  “Well done,” the Lady said. “Someday you will be as skilled with the bow as your mother was.”

  Fer gulped. But her mother’s bow had shot down her father by mistake. That’s what the Lady had said. She looked down at the bow in her hands, the smooth, curving wood, the taut string. Did she even want to be a warrior?

  “I have some business to see to,” the Lady said, interrupting Fer’s thoughts. “I am meeting with the Huldre. Practice by yourself for another hour.” She stared down at Fer for a moment, her face cold. “Tomorrow you will face a test to see if you’ve earned a place by my side.” Then she left Fer, striding away toward the camp.

  Fer gulped. A test? That sounded bad. The Lady’s certainty that Fer would serve her as a warrior made her feel shaky inside, but Fer went on practicing, feeling the rightness a few more times. She sighted down the arrow and sent it straight into the target, thunk. Then she tramped through the snow and yanked the arrow out, holding it in her hand.

  Then she closed her eyes. She could feel the land beneath her feet and all around her, and she could feel the stain on the land, like a shadow over the sky, almost like a bitter taste in her mouth. It was wrong, all wrong.

  The Lady felt this too, she said. But how could she, if she was the one who had caused it?

  Hearing footsteps in the snow, Fer opened her eyes. One of the wolf-guards.

  “Hey-ho, healer-girl,” the wolf-guard said. It was the female, the tallest of the three guards.

  “Hi.” Shutting away her awareness of the land, Fer examined the fingers of her right hand. The skin was blistered from holding the string of the bow and pulling it back. And her shoulders felt heavy and stiff. Time to stop and find something to eat.

  “It’s like this,” the wolf-guard said, walking beside Fer as she headed back toward the encampment. “We hear you’re
a healer and like to help people and you have good magic.”

  Fer shrugged and stuck an arrow into the quiver slung over her shoulder. She wasn’t really a healer, at least she didn’t think she was, but it’d be too hard to explain everything to the wolf-woman. “What’s wrong?” she asked, though she could guess the answer already.

  The wolf-guard stepped closer. Fer looked up into her worried face, at her grizzled gray hair and heavy eyebrows and yellowing teeth. A thread of connection tied them together; Fer felt it, just like her connection with Twig and Burr. She had to help.

  “We’re wildling,” the wolf-woman said.

  “I’ll get my stuff,” Fer said.

  After stopping at her own tent for her backpack and the OWEN box, Fer followed the woman wolf-guard to her tent. They ducked inside.

  Fer heard growling and blinked until her eyes adjusted to the dimness. One of the wolf-guards still looked like a person; the other still was a person, but was crouched on all fours, snarling, long ropes of drool hanging from his slavering jaws. The other guard gripped his shirt collar, holding him back so he wouldn’t leap at Fer and tear her throat out. Wildling for sure.

  “I’ll mix up the herbs to make the medicine,” Fer said, turning to the wolf-woman. “But you are giving it to him.”

  When she’d finished mixing the herbs and saying the spell, and they’d managed to get some of the honeyed paste into the wildest of the three wolves, saving some for the other two, Fer checked them through the seeing-stone.

  “You’ll be okay,” she said, putting the stone into the OWEN box. “But he”—she pointed at the wildest—“might need another dose. Let me know if he does.” When she’d healed the two wolf-guards of their wilding, she’d felt her connection to them spin out strong, like a bow string drawn taut. It was a strange feeling, sensing how their hearts beat, how they feared the way they lost themselves in the wildling. Knowing that they looked at her and saw . . . not a girl, but something else. She wasn’t sure what.

  “You did us a favor, healer-girl,” the female wolf-guard said. “You going to take our oaths?”

  “No,” Fer said. She was starting to get tired of promises and oaths.

  “Yep, that’s what we heard,” the she-wolf said. “So now we do you a favor.” Her partner nodded.

  “All right,” Fer said. She closed the OWEN box and stuffed it into her backpack. “Here’s a good favor. You can tell me where Rook is.” She got creakily to her feet and slung her backpack over her shoulder.

  “The puck is sick,” the she-wolf said.

  The other wolf-guard pushed her. “Shhh, don’t tell her that.”

  The she-wolf pushed back. “No, the healer-girl likes the puck. And we owe her a favor, you said.”

  “If Rook is sick,” Fer put in, her stomach giving a sudden twist of worry, “you’d better take me to him.”

  “Righty-oh!” The shorter guard turned to Fer and bared his teeth.

  Fer blinked and stepped back. Oh. He was smiling. A very wolfish smile.

  The wolf-guards led her away from the tents, through the forest on a wider track trodden through the snow to a tent pitched in the middle of a clearing. Unlike the Lady’s tents, this one was made of stained canvas. Piles of hay were stacked on either side of the wide-open door at one end, and on the other side of the tent was a pile of old straw and manure. Pulled up next to it were the two wagons used to transport all the gear during the wild ride.

  The tent was the stable for the horses and the deer and goats who served as mounts to the Lady’s people. Another, smaller tent must be for the animals’ grooms, the badger-men.

  The tent had a dirt floor and a long central aisle interrupted by tall poles, and it had canvas walls strung up on wires to make separate stalls for the mounts. Fer followed the wolf-guards to the end of the tent farthest from the open door; one of the guards pulled a flap aside to reveal a stall. Not much light reached this end of the tent from the door; the stall was dark. Fer saw shifting shadows.

  Then Phouka poked out his nose and snorted.

  Fer reached out to pat his neck, but he shifted back and stood stiff-legged across the stall, his head up and ears laid back. He was blocking her way in.

  “Rook’s in here?” Fer asked.

  Both wolf-guards nodded.

  She stepped into the stall, peering into the shadows behind Phouka. Curled into the corner, his back against a tent pole, was Rook. His eyes were closed. “Rook?” she whispered, taking a step forward.

  Phouka snorted again and stamped a hoof, but didn’t move out of the way. He was protecting Rook.

  Fer reached up a careful hand and laid it against Phouka’s nose. “I’m just going to help him,” she said. Phouka pushed against her hand, then shook his head.

  Taking that for wary acceptance, Fer ducked past the horse and crouched next to Rook. He lay on a pile of hay, hunched into his coat. He shivered, as if he was cold, but his face was flushed. She leaned over and, brushing his shaggy hair out of the way, rested her lips on his forehead to check his temperature. Hot.

  His eyes flickered open. “Oh, not you,” he muttered. “Go ’way.”

  “Rook, you’re sick,” she said, her heart pounding. The Lady had said that pucks didn’t turn wildling like her other people, but she had to be sure. Opening her backpack, she pulled out the OWEN box and took from it the seeing-stone. It showed the same Rook she’d seen before. Because the horse was leaning over her shoulder to poke his nose into what she was doing, she turned and looked at him through the seeing-stone too. She saw a horse, but behind the animal was a young man with long black hair and yellow-gold eyes. The young man looked an awful lot like Rook, but older. She lowered the stone. Phouka was a puck, just like Rook. But why was he a horse and never a person?

  Setting the seeing-stone aside, she dug in the box. Rook’s fever was from his wolf bites, which must have gotten infected. He could easily die. Even so, her herbs and spells had been working so magically well here, for sure she’d be able to heal him.

  But no. She peered into one herb bag after another. All empty. The vials of tincture were all used up too. All she had left was a bit of valerian root and a few tablespoons of honey. Not enough to help much. She gulped down a knot of worry. It was winter here; nothing was growing in the snow-covered forest, so she couldn’t go search for wild herbs.

  Oh no, wait. She felt in her jacket pocket for the bag of herbs, the protective spell Grand-Jane had made her. And the sprig of lavender. Carefully she picked apart the stitches and opened the bag. Taking a clean T-shirt out of her backpack, she spread it on the ground, then spilled the herbs onto the cloth. More lavender, good. And mugwort and loosestrife, which would be good both in a poultice and in a tea infusion.

  Tea first so he’d keep still for the poultice. Phouka poked his nose over her shoulder again. She pushed him aside. The wolf-guards were lurking by the flaps that served as the stall’s door. “I need some hot water,” Fer said. “Boiling hot.” And to the other guard, “And some butter, if you can find any.”

  The taller guard tapped her nose and sketched a bow, then left, followed by the other guard.

  “Why does she want butter?” Fer heard the first guard ask.

  “Dunno,” answered the other. “Maybe we’re going to have toast.”

  Then they were gone.

  Phouka shifted, and Fer felt his breath tickling the back of her neck. She sorted the mugwort from the loosestrife. The puck-horse nudged her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Phouka,” she said. “He’s going to be all right.” She hoped he would, anyway. Rook had been stubborn and stupid, trying to deal with the wolf bites on his own, and now they were infected and they’d be a lot harder to heal.

  Carefully she took the sprig of lavender from her pocket and laid it alongside the other herbs. Too bad she didn’t have any dried willow bark left. That would’ve helped with the fever. From her backpack she took the stone she’d been using as a mortar and crushed the mugwort and loosestrife together, addin
g a few of the lavender flowers.

  A shuffling at the door, and Fer looked up to see the she-wolf guard hunched over a steaming cup, almost like she was protecting it.

  “Put it here,” Fer said, pointing at the ground beside her. The guard edged past Phouka, set down the cup, and then headed for the door. “Don’t go anywhere,” Fer said while picking a few more tiny lavender flowers off the sprig and adding them to the cup. She’d need the guards’ help to get Rook to drink the tea.

  She stirred the crushed herbs into the hot water and added a little honey, only a very little for sweetening, because she’d need the rest for the poultice. While waiting for the herbs to infuse, she closed her eyes and whispered over the cup the healing spell Grand-Jane had taught her, the one that called on the essence of the herbs. She saw the garden, and the bees, and Grand-Jane with her big floppy hat and canvas gloves cutting the herbs, laying them out on drying racks, then sorting them into cloth bags. “By the fields of lavender,” she whispered, as Grand-Jane had taught her, “by the valerian root, by the steadiness of mugwort artemisia and by loosestrife, also called lythrum salicaria, tall and bold.”

  There. It was ready. When she opened her eyes, the other guard stepped into the stall and bent to hand Fer a lump of butter wrapped in wilted leaves. Broad burdock leaves, Fer was glad to see. If any of their merit had gotten into the butter, her poultice would be even more effective.

  Setting the butter aside, Fer picked up the cooling tea and nodded to the wolf-guards. “Sit him up for me,” she ordered.

  Both guards barged into the stall, setting Phouka to stamping and snorting again. One of the guards seized Rook’s arms, the other a leg, and they started to drag him out of the corner he was huddled in.

  “Gently!” Fer said. Stupid wolves!

  The guards cowered. “Sorry,” one said, and, “Sorry,” the other echoed. Moving very slowly, keeping an eye on Fer, they eased Rook up, holding him by the shoulders.

  Rook opened his eyes and, seeing the guards, started to struggle. “Wolves!” he gasped.