Dalton blinked, true concern roiling through him. “You mean you think the man has some kind of magical power? That he cast a spell, or something?”
“I don’t know,” Franca growled, “but he did something.”
“How do you know?”
“I tried to listen to conversations at the feast, just like I always do. I tell you, Dalton, I wouldn’t know I had the gift if I didn’t know I did. Nothing. I got nothing from no one. Not a thing.”
Dalton’s frown now mimicked hers. “You mean that your gift didn’t help you overhear anything?”
“Don’t you hear anything? Isn’t that what I just said?”
Dalton drummed his fingers on the table. He turned and peered out the window. He got up and lifted the sash, letting in the warm breeze. He motioned to Franca, and she came around the desk.
Dalton pointed to two men engaged in conversation under a tree across the lawn. “Down there, those two. Tell me what they’re saying.”
Franca put her hands on the sill and leaned out a little, staring at the two men. The sun on her face showed how time truly was beginning to wrinkle, stretch, and sag what he had always thought was one of the most beautiful, if not the strangest, women he had ever known. Even so, despite the advance of time, her beauty was still haunting.
Dalton watched the men’s hands move, gesturing as they spoke, but he could hear none of their words. With her gift, she should be able to easily hear them.
Franca’s face went blank. She stood so still she looked like one of the wax figures from the traveling exhibition that came through Fairfield twice a year. Dalton couldn’t even tell if the woman was breathing.
She finally pulled an annoyed breath. “Can’t hear a word. They’re too far away to see their lips, so I can’t get any help by that, but still, I don’t hear a thing, and I should.”
Dalton looked down, close to the building, three stories below. “What about those two.”
Franca leaned out for a look. Dalton could almost hear them himself; a chuckle rose up, and an exclamation, but no more. Franca again went still.
This time, the breath she pulled bordered on rage. “Nothing, and I can almost hear them without the gift.”
Dalton closed the window. The anger went out of her face in a rush, and he saw something he had never before seen from her: fear.
“Dalton, you have to get rid of that man. He must be a wizard, or something. He’s got me all tied up in knots.”
“How do you know it’s him?”
She blinked twice at the question. “Well . . . what else could it be? He claims to be able to eliminate magic. He’s only been here a few days, and I’ve only had this problem a few days.”
“Have you had trouble with other things? Other aspects of your gift?”
She turned away, wringing her hands. “A few days ago I made up a little spell for a woman who came to me, a little spell so she would have her moon flow back, and not be pregnant. This morning she returned and said it didn’t work.”
“Well, it must be a complex kind of conjuring. There must be a lot involved. I expect such things don’t always work.”
She shook her head. “It always worked before.”
“Perhaps you’re ill. Have you felt different of late?”
“I feel exactly the same. I feel like my power is as strong as ever. It should be, but it’s not. Other charms have failed, too—I’d not let this go without testing it, thorough like.”
Troubled, Dalton leaned closer. “Franca, I don’t know a lot about it, but maybe some of it is just confidence in yourself. Maybe you just have to believe you can do it for it to work again.”
She glared back over her shoulder. “Where’d you ever get such a daft notion about the gift?”
“I don’t know.” Dalton shrugged. “I admit I don’t know a great deal about magic, but I really don’t believe Stein has the gift—or any magic about him. He’s just not the sort.
“Besides, he’s not even here today. He couldn’t be interrupting your ability hearing those people down there; he went out to tour the countryside. He’s been gone for hours.”
She slowly rounded on him, looking fearsome and at the same time frightened. Such opposing aspects at the same time gave him gooseflesh.
“Then I fear,” she whispered, “that I’ve simply lost my power. I’m helpless.”
“Franca, I’m sure—”
She licked her lips. “You have Serin Rajak locked away in chains, don’t you? I’d not like to think him or his lunatic followers . . .”
“I told you before, we have him in chains. I’m not even sure he’s still alive. After all this time, I doubt it, but either way there is no need to worry about Serin Rajak.”
Staring off, she nodded.
He touched her arm. “Franca, I’m certain your power will return. Try not to be overly concerned.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Dalton, I’m terrified.”
Cautiously, he took the weeping woman in his consoling arms. She was, after all, besides being a dangerous gifted woman, a friend.
The words from the song at the feast came to mind.
Came the thieves of the charm and spell.
Chapter 25
Roberta lifted her chin high in the air, stretching her neck, to guardedly peer off past the brink of the cliff not far away and look out over the fertile fields of her beloved Nareef Valley far below. Freshly plowed fields were a deep rich brown among breathtakingly bright green carpets of new crops and the darker verdant pastures where livestock, looking like tiny slow ants, cropped at tender new grass. The Dammar River meandered through it all, sparkling in the early-morning sunshine, escorted along its route by a gathering of dark green trees, as if they’d come to watch the river’s showy parade.
Whenever she went up in the woods near Nesting Cliff, she had herself a look from afar, just to see the pretty valley below. After allowing herself that brief look, she always lowered her eyes to the shaded forest floor at her feet, the leaf litter, and mossy stretches among dappled sunlight, where the ground was firm and comforting.
Roberta shifted the sack slung over her shoulder, and moved on. As she maneuvered through the clear patches among the huckleberry and hawthorn, stepped on stones set like islands among dark crevices and holes, and ducked under low pine boughs and alder limbs, she flipped aside with her walking stick a fern here or a low spreading balsam branch there, looking, always looking, as she moved along.
She spied a vase-shaped yellow cap and stooped for a look. Chanterelle, she was pleased to see, and not the poisonous jack-o’-lantern. Most folk favored the smooth yellow chanterelle mushroom for its nutlike flavor. She hooked the stem with a finger and plucked it up. Before sticking the prize in her sack, she ran her thumb over the featherlike gills just for the pleasure of the soft feel.
The mountain she searched for her mushrooms was only a small mountain, compared to the others jutting up all around, and but for Nesting Cliff, reassuringly round, with trails, a few made by man but most made by animal, crisscrossing the gentle wooded slopes. It was the kind of woods her aging muscles and increasingly aching bones favored.
It was said a person could see the ocean far off to the south from many of the taller mountains. She’d often heard it to be an inspiring sight. Many people went up there once every year or two just to view the splendor of the Creator by what He’d wrought.
Some of those trails took a person along the scruffy edges of cliffs and scree and such. Some folk even tended herds of goats up on those steep and rocky slopes. But for a journey when she was a small child, when her pa, rest his soul, took them off to Fairfield, for what she could no longer remember, she had never even been up there. Roberta was content to remain near the alluvial land. Unlike a lot of other folk, Roberta never climbed the higher mountains; she was afraid of high places.
Up higher yet, in the highlands above, were far worse places, like the wasteland up above where the warfer birds nested.
There wa
s nothing in that desolate place, not a blade of grass nor a sprig of scrub brush, except those paka plants growing in that poison swampy water. Nothing else up there but the vast stretches of dark, rocky, sandy soil, and a few bleached bones, as she heard tell. Like another world, those who’d seen it said. Silent but for the wind that dragged the dark sandy dirt into mounds that shifted over time, always moving on, as if they were looking for something, but never finding it.
The lower mountains, like the ones she hunted for mushrooms, were beautiful, lush places, rounder and softer, mostly, and except for Nesting Cliff, not so steep and rocky. She liked it where it was full of trees and critters and growing things of all sorts. The deer trails she searched stayed away from the edges she didn’t like, and never went very close to Nesting Cliff, as it was called because the falcons liked to nest there. She liked the deep woods, where her mushrooms grew.
Roberta collected mushrooms to sell at market; some fresh, some dried, some pickled, and others fixed in various ways. Most folk called her the mushroom lady, and knew her by no other name. Sold at market, the mushrooms helped earn her family some trading money for the things that made life easier: needles and thread, some ready-made cloth, buckles and buttons, a lamp, oil, salt, sugar, cinnamon, nuts—things to help a body have an easier time of it. Easier for her family, and especially for her four grandchildren still living. Roberta’s mushrooms provided all those things to supplement what they grew or raised themselves.
Of course, they made good eating, too. She did like best the mushrooms that grew in the forests up on the mountain, rather than those down in the valley. Touched as they were up there by clouds so much of the time, the mushrooms grew well in the damp conditions. She always thought there were none better than those from up on the mountain, and many folk sought her out just for her mountain mushrooms. Roberta had her secret places, too, where she found the best ones every year. The big pockets in her apron were plump and full with them, as was the sack over her shoulder.
Because it was still early in the year, she’d mostly found heavy clusters of the tawny-colored oyster mushrooms. Their fleshy, tender caps were best for dipping in egg and frying, so she’d sell them fresh. But she’d been lucky, and would be setting out chanterelles to dry as well as offering fresh. She found a goodly number of pheasant’s-backs, too, and they’d be best pickled, if she wanted to get the highest price.
It was too early for woolly velvet in most places, even though it would be common enough later on in the summer, but she’d gone to one of her special spots—where there were a lot of pine stumps and she’d found some of the ocher-colored woolly velvet used to make dye. Roberta had even found a rotting birch with a cluster of smoky brown poly-pores. The kidney-shaped mushrooms were favored by cooks to keep a fire blazing and by men to strop their razors.
Leaning on her walking stick, Roberta bent over a harmless-looking brownish mushroom. It had a ring on the off-white stalk. She saw that the yellowish gills were just starting to turn a rust color. It was that time of year for this mushroom, too. Grunting her displeasure, she let the deadly galerina be and moved on.
Back under the spreading limbs of an oak, as big around as her two oxen shoulder-to-shoulder when they were yoked up, she plucked up three good sized spicy chanterelles. The spicy variety grew almost exclusively under oak wood. They had already turned from yellow to orange, so they’d be choice eating.
Roberta knew where she was, but was off her usual path, so she’d never seen the huge oak before. When she’d seen the tree’s crown, she knew that with all the shade it provided it would be a good spot for mushrooms. She was not disappointed.
At the base of the oak, around part of the trunk where it came up from the ground, she was delighted to see a bunch of small pipes, or beef vein as some folk called them because the standing tubes were sometimes a vivid red like a whole passel of veins bunched together and cut off even like. These, though, were pinkish, streaked with just a bit of red. Roberta preferred the name small pipes, but she still didn’t hold much favor with them. Some folk, though, bought them for their tart taste and they were on the rare side, so they brought a decent price.
Under the tree, in the deep shade, was a ring of spirit-bells, so called because of their bell-like tops. They weren’t poisonous, but because of the bitter taste and woody texture, no one liked them. Worse, though, people thought that anyone stepping inside the ring would be bewitched, so folks generally didn’t even want to see the lovely little spirit bells. Roberta had been walking through spirit-bell rings since she was a toddler when her mother would take her along mushrooming.
Since she held no favor with such superstition about her beloved mushrooms, she stepped through the ring of spirit bells, imagining she heard their delicate chimes, and gathered up the small pipes.
One of the spreading branches of the oak grew down low enough to make a seat. Big around as her ample waist, it was comfortable enough, and dry enough, for a good sit.
Roberta slipped her sack to the ground. She sighed with relief as she laid her weary bones back against another branch, which turned up at just the right angle to rest her shoulders and head against. The tree seemed to cup her in its sheltering hand.
Daydreaming as she was, she thought it was part of the dream when she heard a whisper that sounded like her name. It was a pleasing, low, warm sound, more a feeling of good things and pleasant thoughts than a word.
The second time, she knew it wasn’t part of her daydream, and she was sure it was her name being spoken, but in a fashion somehow more intimate than a mere spoken word.
The thing was, the way it was spoken strummed the strings of her heart. Like the spirit’s own music, it was. All lovely with kindness, compassion, and warmth. It made her sigh. It made her happy. It fell across her like warm sunlight on a chill day.
The third time, she sat up to look, longing to see the source of such a touching voice. Even as she moved, she felt like she was in one of her daydreams, all peaceful and content. The forest all about seemed to sparkle in the morning sun, seemed to glow.
Roberta let out a small gasp when she saw him not far away.
She’d never seen him before, but she’d always known him, it seemed. She realized he was a familiar friend, a comfort, a partner from her mind since youth, though she never really gave it much thought before. He was the one who had always been there with her, it seemed. The one she always thought about when she was daydreaming. The face without definition, yet one she knew well.
Now she realized he was as real as she had always imagined when she kissed him in her fancies, which she had done ever since she was young enough to know that a kiss was something more than your mother, gave you before bed. His were kisses given in bed. All warm and ardent.
She’d never thought he was real, but now she was sure she’d always known he was. As he stood there, gazing into her eyes, how could he not be real? His tumble of hair swept back from his glorious face, showing his warm smile, though she thought it puzzling that she couldn’t say just what he looked like. Yet at the same time, she knew his face as well as she knew hers.
And, she knew his every thought, just as he knew every thought and longing of hers. He was her soul’s true mate.
She knew his thoughts; she didn’t need his name. That she didn’t know his name was only proof to her that they were connected on a spiritual level that transcended words.
And now he had stepped out of the mist of that spiritual world, needing to be with her, just as she needed to be with him. His hand opened to her, as if avowing his need. Roberta reached for the hand. She seemed almost to float above the ground. Her feet touched like dandelion fluff drifting on a breath. Her body floated like weed in water as she stretched out to him. Stretched out for his embrace.
The closer she got, the warmer she felt. Not warm as if from the sun on her face, but warmed as if from a lover’s arms, a lover’s smile, a lover’s sweet kiss.
Her whole life came down to this, to needing to
be in his arms feeling his tender embrace, needing to whisper her yearning because she knew he would understand, needing the breath from his lips on her ear, telling her he understood.
She burned to whisper her love, to have him whisper his.
She needed nothing in life so much as she needed to be in those arms she knew so well.
Her muscles were no longer weary; her bones no longer ached. She was no longer old. The years had slipped away from her like clothes slipping from lovers shedding encumbrances in order to get down to the bare essence of their being.
Because of him, because of him alone; she was again in the winsome bloom of youth, where everything was possible.
His arm floated out to her, his need for her as great as hers for him. She stretched for his hand, but it seemed farther away, and she stretched more, but it was more distant still.
Panic raced through her as she feared he would be gone before she could at last touch him. She felt as if she were swimming in honey and could make no progress. Her whole life she had longed to touch him. Her whole life she had longed to tell him. Her whole life she had longed to have her soul join with his.
But now he was drifting from her.
Roberta, her legs leaden, leaped through the spring sunshine, through the sweet air, racing to her lover’s arms.
And yet he was farther still.
Both his arms lifted to her. She could feel his need. She ached to comfort him. To shelter him from hurt. To sooth his strife.
He could feel those longings in her, and cried out her name that she might be strengthened in her effort to reach him. The sound of her name on his lips made her heart lift with joy, lift with a terrible pang of need to return such passion as he put into her name.
She wept to know his name, now, that she might put it to her undying love.
With all her might, she stretched out to him. She put her entire being into her reckless lunge for him, forsaking all care but her fierce need to reach him.
Roberta cried her nameless love, cried her need, as she reached for his ringers. His arms spread to take her into his loving embrace. As she rushed into those arms, the sun sparkled all about, the warm wind lifted her hair, ruffled her dress.
Soul of the Fire tsot-5 Page 28
