The House of Gaian ta-3

by Anne Bishop

  There had been times when other children had teased her unkindly about her pointed ears or the shape of her face, when she'd wanted to see the two people whose mating had produced her—to shout and rage and scream at them for being so careless and uncaring. In the end, it hadn't mattered. Not because of the man, her uncle by blood and father by heart, who had taught her to ride as well as to dance. Not because of the woman he'd married, who had shown her with hugs and scolds that she was a beloved daughter—and taught her what it meant to be a witch. In the end, it hadn't mattered because of Rhyann, the little sister who adored her. Rhyann, who had proudly come into her room one day to show her the triangle caps she'd made out of scraps of material and sewed together with clumsy, childish stitches so that she could have pointy ears, too. Rhyann who, the first time Selena had inadvertently changed into her other form, had carried her terrified, furry sister home—and then stayed with Selena for all the hours it had taken their parents to calm her down enough to find the key inside herself that changed her back into a child. And it was Rhyann, when needs seemed to tangle her up until she wasn't sure anymore who she was, who would always tell her fiercely, "You're a witch. You're always a witch, one of the Mother's Daughters."

  Always, forever a witch. A rare and powerful witch, who could wield the power of the Mother's branches—earth, air, water, and fire—in equal measure. There were many in the Mother's Hills who were gifted with all four branches, but most of them had one primary branch and a lesser ability with the other three. But for her, all four were primary and flowed from her as easily as she breathed. In that, she and Rhyann were true sisters.

  But she was also a Lady of the Moon, something she hadn't known until eight years ago. The Crone who had taught her and Rhyann some of the oldest magic known to the House of Gaian had recognized that part of her. The old woman had refused to say how she knew what she did about the Fae—and the Ladies of the Moon and the Lady of the Moon in particular—but that knowledge helped Selena understand the part of herself that had felt like a stranger living inside her skin.

  Now that part of her heritage was rising, calling, commanding her to answer. So she would follow the call to the place where the other Ladies of the Moon would gather, and she would stand as a challenger to find out if she was strong enough to ascend and become the Lady of the Moon—and the Huntress.

  She stood up, stepped away from the dressing table, and shifted into her other form. Then she put her front paws on the stool in order to look into the mirror again.

  Shadow hound. A deadly predator the Ladies of the Moon used for their Wild Hunts.

  Selena shifted again, stared into the mirror, her hands braced on the stool.

  Two shadow hound bitches racing through moon-bathed woods, racing toward a common enemy.

  Who was the second bitch? Was one of the Sleep Sisters just playing with her, haunting her with dreams to weaken her for the challenge ahead, or was this a gift from the Lady of Dreams herself, showing her an ally against a common foe? She would need an ally, especially if she won this challenge. Who was the second bitch?

  Cold again, despite the warm summer night, Selena blew out the candle and returned to bed to huddle under the covers.

  A shadowy male figure standing in the center of a high, wide circle of female corpses.

  Yes, she needed an ally, because tonight, in that circle of corpses, she'd seen her mother—and Rhyann.

  Chapter 3

  waning moon

  Breanna grumbled as she gathered up her bow and quiver of arrows from the corner of her wardrobe. She continued to grumble as she walked the corridors of her family's manor house to reach the kitchen door.

  The trouble with men was that they saw the world in a way that was too rational to be wrong . . . but also just wasn't quite right. And a man who was a baron as well as an older brother was the most stubborn, ornery creature in the world—especially when his argument that she should know how to handle weapons was supported by a Fae Lord who was the Lord of the Hawks.

  "The featherheads," Breanna muttered as she opened the kitchen door and stood on the threshold. She looked down at Idjit, who was laying to one side of the doorway, busily gnawing on a soup bone Glynis, their housekeeper, must have given him. "They're both featherheads, even if only one of them has the ability to change into a form with actual feathers. And where are they? Tell me that. They're both so keen for me to interrupt my day, and then they don't even show up. They're probably off doing important man things—like molting in the case of the Fae featherhead. Or doing whatever barons do as an excuse for being late to an appointment they made."

  The small black dog rolled his eyes, waved his tail, and kept gnawing on the soup bone.

  "You're no help," Breanna said sourly. "Of course you're not. You're male, too."

  She closed the kitchen door and headed across the extensive sweep of grass that was the manor house's back lawn. Since the cousins who had escaped from the eastern part of Sylvalan had arrived earlier that summer to stay with her family at Willowsbrook's Old Place, there were too many animals around the stables and paddocks and too many children running and playing on the back lawn to set up practice targets in those areas. So Clay, who was in charge of the horses, had set up bales of hay near the kitchen garden.

  It wasn't that she objected to target practice. In truth, she often did it as a way to settle her thoughts and regain the balance between mind and body. What she objected to was the assumption that she needed target practice. Mother's tits! She could shoot as well as most men, had been bringing home game for several years now. Even Clay had told Liam and Falco that she didn't need to learn how to hit a target. Had the Baron of Willowsbrook and the Lord of the Hawks listened? No, they had not. The featherheads.

  Breanna stopped and looked at the men and older boys who were cleaning out stables or grooming horses, looked at the women hanging wash on the lines, looked at the youngsters playing some kind of game on the lawn, looked beyond her kin to the woods that bordered the lawn and thought of the Small Folk who lived there. She pulled her shoulders back, trying to ease the tension in her chest.

  "A copper for your thoughts."

  Breanna turned toward the voice. Her cousin Fiona stood a few feet away, her hands filled with another bow and quiver of arrows.

  "You're doing target practice too?" Breanna asked.

  Fiona shrugged.

  Breanna turned away, focusing on the woods again. "Do no harm," she said quietly. "That's the witch's creed. There are good reasons for that creed, good reasons why we should use the power within us only to help, to heal, to maintain the balance between the Great Mother and all the creatures who live on her bounty."

  "And to protect?" Fiona suggested softly.

  "And to protect." Breanna sighed. "I keep thinking that I don't need to learn to use weapons against other people, that I already have a weapon inside me more destructive than anything a man could create. Then I wonder if all the witches who have died at the hands of the Inquisitors had thought the same way and learned their error too late. Or had they been so hobbled by our creed that they hadn't even tried?"

  "Could you kill a man, Breanna?"

  She felt something settle inside her, something that had been haunting her sleep lately. She turned to face her cousin. "Yes, I could. If that's what it took to protect my family or the Old Place or the Small Folk . . . yes, I could." She lifted the hand that held the bow. "It would be easier to do that using a weapon made by human hands than break the creed I live by and use the power inside me to do harm. But I would do that, too, if there was no other choice."

  "We're of one mind about this," Fiona said. "I've lost my mother and my grandmother. My father, too. And too many aunts and uncles. We're a large, sprawling family. Or we were. Sometimes I think we should have fought back, should have stood up to the baron when he started making decrees that took away so much. But we couldn't have done that without doing harm, and the elders held by the creed—and didn't understand the c
ost until it was too late for them to do anything but save those they could by sacrificing themselves."

  "It was more complicated than that," Breanna said gently.

  Fiona sighed. "I know. But some days it's easier to blame those I loved for dying to save the rest of us than to admit that breaking the creed wouldn't have made any difference. Not then. Not there. The Inquisitors already controlled the baron, and the baron controlled the people. What good would it have done to wither the crops in the fields or make the wells dry? All that would have done is hurt the common folk and prove witches are the evil creatures the Black Coats accuse us of being."

  "You don't know the elders are dead."

  "Breanna."

  Fiona's voice held so much knowledge and pain. But not acceptance. If the Inquisitors rode into this Old Place, at least some of the witches here would use everything they could summon to fight back.

  Breanna took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "My primary branch of the Great Mother is air. Yours is earth. It would help to have fire and water as well if it comes down to a fight here."

  "Not everyone will break the creed. Even with what they know, with what they've seen."

  "I know." Breanna tucked some strands of dark hair back into her loose braid. She looked at the bow in her hand. Even if they didn't use their power as a weapon, there were still ways for the witches to fight back. "Do you know how to use a bow?"

  Fiona made a rude noise. "Of course I do."

  "We might as well get some practice in before our 'instructors' show up to give us some practice."

  Fiona laughed, but there was an edge to it. "I imagine Baron Liam and Lord Falco just want to be sure you're available and waiting so that you can protect them when they show up."

  "Protect them from what?" Now that Fiona had said that, she realized Liam did tend to stay close to her when he visited, and when he wasn't with her, he spent his time with his mother Elinore, who, along with his little sister Brooke, was also living at Old Willowsbrook for the time being, or with her grandmother, Nuala. And Falco tended to head for any group of men if he couldn't be with her. What would two adult men need protection from that they would behave that way?

  Breanna felt laughter bubbling up, threatening to burst free. It was the look on Fiona's face that made her force the laughter back. "Jean? You think they're going to that much effort to avoid Jean? Mother's tits, Fiona, the girl is only sixteen."

  "And flirts outrageously with anything in trousers that has a handsome-enough face."

  "All right," Breanna said, uncomfortable with the anger rising in Fiona, "she flirts."

  "You make it sound as if she's too young to think of men and beds," Fiona said fiercely. "And perhaps she is too young to think of men in that way, but she's already become a predator where men are concerned. She wants, and expects, male adoration. She wants, and expects, men to fulfill her every wish and whim."

  "Didn't we all want that at that age?" Breanna asked cautiously. The anger and contempt in Fiona's voice worried her as much as the word predator. "Didn't we all want the romance of being special?" Don't we still want that?

  "You were never sixteen in that way. Neither was I. You never would have . . ." Fiona pressed her lips together until they were a thin, grim line. "She doesn't always live by the creed when she feels slighted by a man's lack of attention."

  A chill raced up Breanna's spine. That spike of fear sharpened her voice. "What are you saying?"

  "That Liam and Falco have a good reason to be wary of being alone with Jean—especially when it's clear to everyone but Jean that neither of them are comfortable with her interest and don't want to play the ardent lover."

  "You can't be serious. You actually think she would use magic to harm them because they aren't interested in her?"

  Fiona nodded slowly. "Because they aren't interested in her. . . and because they are interested in you."

  Breanna stared at Fiona, too stunned to speak.

  "Oh, not in the same way. I don't mean that," Fiona continued. "But you're the one they both inquire about first. You're the one they look to in order to understand our way of life. Jean resents your 'power' over them because she wants it for herself."

  Breanna shook her head, not to deny what Fiona had said but because she still couldn't accept that Jean might be a danger to Liam and Falco. It was one thing to consider breaking the witches' creed in order to defend her family and home; it was quite another to break that creed and do harm simply because you could do it. "Have you any proof that Jean ever harmed a boy because he wasn't sufficiently attentive?"

  "Proof? No. Suspicions? Oh, yes. But she always acted the darling around the elders, and they wouldn't believe sweet, pretty Jean has the heart of a cold-blooded bitch. There was nothing serious, you understand. Just little spiteful things that could have been easily explained as simple accidents if they hadn't occurred soon after a boy she wanted showed a preference for another girl." Fiona sighed. "I didn't want her to come with us. Even knowing what she would have faced if she'd stayed, I didn't want her to come with us. All during the journey, I was afraid she would do something that would call too much attention to us, make the guards in the villages we had to pass look too closely at where we were coming from. Make them look too closely at us."

  "But she didn't do anything," Breanna said. "Perhaps, with Nuala keeping an eye on her . . ."

  Fiona shook her head. "I told you, the elders only saw what Jean wanted them to see—and that's the face she shows to Nuala, too. Pretty, sometimes pouty in a teasing way, fluttery feminine Jean. She was fearful enough of the people the Inquisitors have turned against our kind to behave on the journey here, but the only reason she didn't do anything more damaging back home was because. . ."

  "Because?" Breanna prodded.

  Fiona looked uncomfortable. Finally, she said, "She was afraid of Jennyfer. And she hasn't stirred up much trouble here because she's afraid of you."

  "Me? Whatever for?"

  "You and Jenny . . . you're . . . different. . . from the rest of us. I don't mean that in a bad way, but. . . there's a strength in both of you that runs so deep. A strength that comes from here." Fiona shifted the quiver to her bow hand in order to press a fist against her heart. "I remember the last time you came to visit the family and stayed for the summer. Do you remember?"

  "I remember," Breanna said quietly.

  "There was a brutal storm one night—wind fierce enough to uproot trees and rain that beat down hard enough to bruise skin. The rest of us huddled inside the house, but you and Jenny . . . I heard you sneak out of the room the three of us were sharing that summer. When I crept to the window and looked out, the two of you were outside in your nightgowns, dancing in that storm, celebrating it and . . . changing it. Air and water. You embraced that storm, took it into yourselves, made it part of your dance, gave it back as something gentler. You tamed a storm, Breanna. You and Jenny." Fiona smiled. "The look on your face right now. As if I've suddenly started speaking some strange, incomprehensible language."

  "You are." Breanna shook her head. She remembered that night. Remembered extending her hand at the same moment Jenny extended hers so that they stepped out into that storm with their hands linked, feeling the Great Mother's power swirling around them, rushing into them while they danced. Yes, they had celebrated that storm, had acknowledged its strength, had connected to it in a way that had been so natural it had required no words, no thought. What was so strange about that?

  They are deeply rooted in the Mother's Hills.

  She remembered overhearing one of the elders say that the morning after the storm. Since she had kin in the hills, she hadn't thought it odd. But she also remembered that, while Fiona, Rory, and some of her other cousins had come here a few times to visit after that summer, she had never been invited back for a visit to their family homes. Except Jenny's.

  Confused and self-conscious—and irritated with herself and Fiona for feeling those things—she shrugged dismissively. "Let's
get some target practice." I'm in the right mood to shoot something.

  Breanna had taken only a couple of steps toward the kitchen gardens when a hawk flew overhead, screaming a warning as it passed by her. At the same moment, a boy from one of the farm families who had escaped with Breanna's kin burst from the woods, running toward them as fast as he could.

  "There's a man in the woods!" the boy shouted. "A man wearing a black coat! Coming this way."

  "What were you doing in the woods?" Breanna snapped as soon as the boy stumbled to a halt in front of her. None of the children were supposed to go into the woods on their own. There were still some of those nighthunter creatures out there somewhere.

  "Jean wanted to look for some plants," the boy said, panting. "She told me I had to come with her since we weren't supposed to go into the woods by ourselves and—" He glanced nervously at Breanna, then at Fiona. "And she didn't want to ask one of the other witches to go with her."

  There wasn't time to consider what kinds of plants Jean was looking for that made her not want the company of another witch—or what she intended to do with the plants if she found them.

  "Go—" Breanna looked toward the stables. The men, warned by the hawk's cries, were already in motion, saddling some horses, stabling others, gathering weapons that were always close at hand these days. "Go to the house. Warn Nuala. Go!"

  As the boy raced for the house, Breanna and Fiona looked at each other.

  "Get the children into the house," Breanna said.

  Fiona started to protest. Then she noticed Clay and her brother Rory hurrying toward them—and the hawk flying ahead of them. Nodding, she ran toward the children, who had stopped playing and were now anxiously watching the adults.

  Trusting Fiona to take care of the children, Breanna set her quiver on the ground and grabbed a handful of arrows. She pushed the heads of four of them into the ground in front of her to make them easy to snatch if they were needed. The fifth she nocked in her bow, keeping her fingers light on the bowstring. Facing the woodland trail, she waited.