Mother of Winter

by Barbara Hambly

  “You shouldn’t.” They were standing under the dying sycamore tree in the courtyard where she had first been attacked, looking down at the ripped sack that lay on the ground. It contained what little was left of the thing that had attacked her, torn down and chewed by vermin as if no spells had been placed upon it, as if no Wards had ringed the tree.

  “Then I trust myself,” he had said, picking up the maggoty hindquarter and stowing it—and the remains of the original bag—in another sack pulled from Yoshabel’s numerous packs. “Whatever it is that is driving you to assault me, if it can quicken your timing and get you out of the lamentable habit of telegraphing your side lunges, I’d like to meet it.”

  He’d smiled at her—with Ingold as one of her sword-masters, she could take on almost any of the other Guards and win—and Gil responded to his teasing with a grin and a flick at him with the pack rope. Even that small and playful assault he’d sidestepped as effortlessly, she knew, as he would have avoided a lethal blow.

  “Thoth?” she heard Ingold say softly now. “Thoth, can you hear me? Are you there?”

  She turned her head and looked. A slice of amber light lay across one scarred eyelid and down his cheekbone, refracted from the crystal in his hand. His brows, down-drawn in a bristle of fire-flecked shadow, masked the sockets of his eyes.

  “Has that ever happened before?” she asked. “Before last week, I mean?”

  He raised his head, startled. “I’m sorry, my dear, did I wake you? No,” he answered her question, when she signed that it didn’t matter. “And the troubling thing is, I’ve frequently had the sensation that Thoth—or one of the other Gettlesand wizards—is trying to signal me, but for some reason cannot get through.”

  He got up from his place by the fire, crossed the room to her, a matter of two or three steps only. The former library was one of the few remaining chambers with four walls and a roof, though the wooden latticework of the three wide windows had been broken out. Wickering ember-light revived the velvety crimson memory of the frescoes on the wall, lent renewed color to the faces of those attenuated ghosts acting out scenes from a once-popular romance.

  She curved her body a little to make room, and Ingold sat beside her, still turning the crystal in his hand. “I had hoped,” he went on quietly, “that if Rudy could get through to me I would be able to get through to Thoth, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There’s only a deep sense of … of pressure, of heat, like a river far beneath the earth. Like a rope pulled taut and about to snap.” He put the crystal away and sat silent for a time, gazing at the broken window bars and toying one-fingered with a corner of his beard.

  “What did Rudy have to say?”

  Ingold told her. At his description of the thing Rudy called a gaboogoo, she was seized with the flashing sensation of familiarity, a tip-of-the-tongue impression that she had seen such a thing, or dreamed about it, but the next instant it was gone. Her dreams had been strange, and even deeper than the urge to hurt Ingold, to destroy him, was the reluctance to speak to him of the things she saw in them … And indeed, when she tried to frame those bleak, fungoid landscapes of pillowlike vegetation, the amorphous, shining shapes that writhed through it or flopped heavily a few feet above its surface, the very memory of those visions dissolved and she couldn’t recall what it was that she had seen.

  And so it happened here. When Ingold paused, raising his eyebrows at her intaken breath, her words jammed in her throat, like a stutter, or like tears that refused to be wept, and she could not remember whether she had dreamed about such a thing or not. She shook her head, embarrassed, and was deeply thankful when Ingold only nodded and said, “Interesting.”

  And she thought, almost as if she heard a voice saying it in the back of her mind, It will appear at the window. She didn’t know what it was, but she automatically checked her hand’s distance from the sword that lay next to her blankets and mentally triangulated on where Ingold’s back would be when he turned his head. Her mind was starting to protest,… like Sherry Reinhold … when Yoshabel threw up her head and squealed in terror.

  Ingold swung around; Gil came out of her blankets like a coiled spring, catching up the scabbarded blade and drawing in a single fluid, killing move. She had a dim awareness of something large and pale clinging to the lattice with limbs more like pincers than claws, of a round fanged mouth where no mouth should be and of a wet flopping sound, all subsumed by the vicious calculation of target and stroke. She wrenched the blade around and drove it into the dirt with a chop that nearly dislocated her wrists, hardly aware that she cried out as she did so, only knowing afterward, as she stood shaking like a spent runner with her hair hanging in her eyes, that her throat hurt and the painted walls were echoing with an animal scream.

  Ingold was already moving back toward her; she rasped “No!” and fell to her knees, sweating, the wound in her face radiating a heat that consumed her being. There was an interim when she wasn’t able to see anything beyond her own white-knuckled hands gripping the sword hilt, was conscious of nothing but a wave of nausea, but he must have used the moment to stride to the window. In any case, he returned instants later. The thing outside had vanished.

  “Are you all right?”

  His voice came from a great distance away, a dull roaring like the sound within a shell. Though her eyes were open, she saw for a moment a vision of red laced with tumbling diamond fire. Then he was holding her, and she was clinging to the coarse brown wool of his robe, her face crushed to his shoulder, gripping the barrel chest and the hard rib cage to her as if they both floated in a riptide and she feared to be washed away.

  “Gilly …” He whispered her nicknames. “Gillifer, beloved, it’s all right … it’s all right.”

  The desire to pull out her knife and shove it up between his ribs drowned her in a red wave, nauseating her again. She locked her hands behind his back, fighting the voices in her mind. Then the rage ebbed, leaving in its wake only the wet shingle of failure and utter despair.

  As Rudy suspected, Graw’s urgent demand that something be done about slunch meant that patches of it had developed in his fields and pastures—which happened to lie on the best and most fertile ground in that section of the Arrow River bottomlands. Though the sun had long since vanished behind the Hammerking’s tall head when the little party reached its goal—what had once been a medium-sized villa, patched and expanded with log-and-mud additions and surrounded by what Rudy still thought of as a Wild West–style wooden palisade—Graw insisted that Rudy make a preliminary investigation of the problem.

  The villa and fort were Graw’s homestead, and everyone in them a member of the red-haired man’s family, an outright servant, or a smallholder who had pledged fealty in exchange for protection. Three of the nobles who had made the journey to the Keep from Gae had established such settlements as well, populated both by retainers and men-at-arms who had served them before the rising of the Dark, and by those farmers who sought their protection or owed them money.

  Even had Gil not filled Rudy in on their own world’s Dark Ages, he’d have been able to see where that practice was leading. It was one reason he’d acceded to Minalde’s pleading, in spite of his own unwillingness to leave the Keep with the gaboogoo question unanswered. That, and the white look around her mouth when she’d said, “It’s only a day’s journey.” The livestock at the Keep would need hay from the river-bottoms to survive the winter. Not all the broken remnants of the great Houses were particularly mindful of their vows to Alde as the Lady of the Keep.

  She didn’t need more problems than the ones she already had.

  “Now, when you folk up there started putting all kinds of rules on us instead of letting us go our own way,” Graw groused in his grating, self-pitying caw, “I had my doubts, but I was willing to give Lady Alde consideration. I mean, she’d been queen all her life and was used to it, and I thought maybe she did know more about this than me.” He shoved big rufous hands into the leather of his belt as he strode along
the edge of the fields, Rudy trailing at his heels. The split rails of the fences had been reinforced with stout earth banks and a chevaux-de-frise of sharpened stakes, heavier even than the ones around the Keep wheat fields that discouraged moose and the great northern elk. This looked designed to keep out mammoths.

  “I did ask why we were supposed to send back part of our harvest, and everybody said, ‘Oh, shut up, Graw, it’s because the Keep is the repository of all True Laws and wonderful knowledge and everything that makes civilization—’ ”

  “I thought the vote went that way because you were taking Keep seed, Keep axes and plows, and Keep stock,” Rudy said, cutting off the heavy-handed sarcasm, vaulting over the fence in his host’s wake.

  Graw’s face reddened still further in the orange sunset light. “Any organism that doesn’t have the courage to grow will die!” he bellowed. “The same applies to human societies. Those who try to hang on to all the old ways, to haggle as if the votes of ten yapping cowards are somehow more significant than a true man of the land who’s willing to go out and do something—”

  “When did this stuff start to grow here?” Rudy had had about enough of the Man of the Land. He halted among the rustling, leathery cornstalks, just where the plants began to droop lifeless. They lay limp and brown in a band a yard or so wide, and beyond that he could see the fat white fingers of the slunch.

  “Just after the first stalks started to come up.” Graw glared at him as if he’d sneaked down from the Vale in the middle of the night and planted the slunch himself. “You don’t think we’d have wasted the seed in a field where the stuff was already growing, do you?”

  Rudy shook his head, though he privately considered Graw the sort of man who’d do precisely that rather than waste what he wanted to consider good acreage, particularly if that acreage was his. Silly git probably told himself the situation wouldn’t get any worse. “So it’s gone from nothing to—what? About twelve feet by eighteen?—in four weeks? Have the other patches been growing this fast?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Graw yelled. “We’ve got better things to do than run around with measuring tapes! What I want to know is what you plan to do about it!”

  “Well, you know,” Rudy said conversationally, turning back toward the fence, “even though I’ve known the secret of getting rid of this stuff for the past three years, I’ve kept it to myself and just let it grow all over the fields around the Keep. But I tell you what: I’ll tell you.”

  “Don’t you get impertinent with me, boy!”

  “Then don’t assume I’m not doing my job to the best of my ability,” Rudy snapped. “I’ll come out here in the morning to take a good look at this stuff, but—”

  Voices halooed in the woods beyond the field, and there was a great crashing in the thickets of maple and hackberry along the dense green verge of the trees. Someone yelled, “Whoa, there she goes!” and another cried, “Oh, mine, mine!”

  There was laughter, like the clanging of iron pots.

  Rudy ran to the fence, swung himself up on the rails between two of the stakes in time to see a dark figure break from the thickets, running along the waste-ground near the fence for the shelter of the rocks by the stream. Two of Graw’s hunters pelted out of the woods, young ruffians in deer leather dyed brown and green, arrows nocked, and Graw called out, exasperated but tolerant, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s only a damn dooic!”

  It was a female—mares, some people called them, or hinnies—with one baby clutched up against the fur of her belly and another, larger infant clinging hard around her neck, its toes clutching at the longer fur of her back. She ran with arms swinging, bandy legs pumping hard, dugs flapping as she zigzagged toward the tangle of boulders and willow, but Rudy could see she wasn’t going to make it. One hunter let fly with an arrow, which the hinny dodged, stumbling. The smaller pup jarred loose as she scrambled up, and the other hunter, a snaggle-haired girl, laughed and called out, “Hey, you dropped one, Princess!”

  The bowman fired again as the hinny wheeled, diving for the silent pup in the short, weedy grass.

  The hinny jerked back from the arrow that seemed to appear by magic in the earth inches from her face. For an instant she stared, transfixed, at the red-feathered shaft, at the man who had fired and the wriggling black shape of the pup: huge brown eyes under the heavy pinkish shelf of brow, lips pressed forward like pale velvet from the longer fur around them in an expression of panic, trying to think.

  Graw muttered, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and whipped an arrow from the quiver at his belt. He carried his bow strung, on his back, as most of the men in the Settlements did; nocking and firing was a single move.

  Rudy reached with his thought and swatted Graw’s arrow as if it had been a stinging fly. At the same moment he spoke a word in the silence of his mind, and the bowstring of the male hunter snapped, the weapon leaping out of his hands and the nocked arrow, drawn back for another shot, jerking wild. The man cursed—seventy-five pounds of tension breaking does damage—and the hinny, gauging her chance, slipped forward, grabbed the pup by one foot, and flung herself in a long rolling dive for the rocks.

  “You watch what you’re goddamn doing!” Graw bellowed, snatching Rudy by the shoulder and throwing him backward from the fence. As he hit the ground, Rudy could hear the girl hunter screaming and the retreating, furious rustle of the streamside laurels as the hinny made good her escape. Breath knocked out of him, he rolled, in case Graw were moved to kick him, and got back to his feet, panting, his long reddish-black hair hanging in his eyes. Graw was standing foursquare in front of him, braced as for a fight: “Go on, use your magic against me!” he yelled, slapping his chest. “I’m unarmed! I’m helpless! I’m just trying to protect our fields from those stinking vermin!”

  Rudy felt his whole body heat with a blister of shame.

  Ingold had taught him what he had to do next, and his soul cringed from it as his hand would have cringed from open flame. The man was hurt, and Rudy was a healer.

  Turning his back on Graw, he slipped through the stakes in the fence and strode up the broken slope toward the hunter who lay among the weeds. The buckskin-clad girl knelt over him, her wadded kerchief held to his broken nose. Both raised their heads as Rudy approached through the tangle of hackberry and fern, hatred and terror in their eyes; before he got within ten yards of them the girl had pulled the hunter to his feet, and snatching up their bows, both of them fled into the green shadows of the pines.

  The shame was like being rolled in hot coals. He had used magic against a man who had none and who was not expecting an attack. He had, he realized, damaged the position of wizards and wizardry more by that single impulsive act than he could have by a year of scheming for actual power.

  Ingold would have something to say to him. He didn’t even want to think about what that would be.

  He stood still, feeling suffocated, hearing behind him Graw’s bellowing voice without distinguishing words beyond, “I shoulda known a goddamn wizard would …”

  Rudy didn’t stay to hear what Graw knew about goddamn wizards. Silently he turned and made his way down the rough, sloping ground to the fence, and along it toward the fort as the half-grown children of the settlement were driving in the cattle and sheep from the fields. The long spring evening was finally darkening toward actual night, the tiger-lily brilliance of reds and golds above the mountains rusting to cinnabar as indigo swallowed the east. Crickets skreeked in the weeds along the fencerow, and by the stream Rudy could hear the peeping of frogs, an orchestral counterpoint to Graw’s bellowed commentary.

  Well, he thought tiredly, so much for supper.

  He was not refused food when the extended household set planks on trestles in the main hall to eat. What he was offered was some of the best in the household. But it was offered in silence, and there was a wariness in the eyes of everyone who looked at him and then looked away. The bowman whose nose he’d broken sat at the other end of the table from him, bruises d
arkening horribly; he was, Rudy gathered, an extremely popular man. Rudy recalled what Ingold had told him about wizards being poisoned, or slipped drugs like yellow jessamine or passion-flower elixirs that would dull their magic so they could be dealt with, and found himself without much appetite for dinner. The huntress’ eyes were on him from the start of the meal to its finish, cold and hostile, and he heard her whispering behind his back whenever he wasn’t looking.

  After the meal was over, no one, not even those who were clearly sick, came to speak to him.

  Great, Rudy thought, settling himself under a smoky pine torch at the far end of the hall and pulling his mantle and bison-hide vest more closely around him. The women grouped by the fire to spin and sew had started to gather up their things to leave when he approached, so he left them to work in the warmth, and contented himself with the cold of the far end of the hall. I guess this is why Ingold makes himself so damn invisible all the time. It didn’t take a genius to realize that from fear like this it was only a short step to bitter resentment. Especially with little Miss Buckskin helping things along with her mouth.

  Ingold—and Minalde—would have to put in weeks of P.R. and cleanup over this one.

  From a pocket of the vest he took his scrying stone, an amethyst crystal twice the width of his thumb and nearly as long as his palm, and tilted its facets toward the light.

  And there she was. Alde, cutting out a new tunic for herself by the light of three glowstones, working carefully around the unaccustomed bulk of her belly—smiling a little and reaching up to adjust the gold pins in her hair, final jeweled relics of the wealth of the High King’s realm. Tir and Geppy Nool and a little girl named Thya made cat’s cradles of the wool from the knitting basket, and Thya’s mother, Linnet—a slim brown woman of thirty or so who was Alde’s maid and good friend—knitted and talked. The black walls of the chamber were bright with familiar hangings; Alde’s cat Archbishop stalked a trailing end of yarn, dignified lunacy in his golden eyes.