Frostflower and Thorn

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “Good pricking, peddler. You free tonight?”

  “Must’ve liked it, the stinking bitch.”

  “Say, sorceress, how is he? Pretty damn good, is he?” This last came with a kick to her hip. They were no longer afraid of her.

  “Silence!” said the priest. “Away from her with your foul tongue, Snaste. Spendwell, you wish to take a warrior now for your refreshment? No? Into your clothes, then. You will return with us to my hall for your wagon and your pay.”

  The merchant mumbled something. Frostflower thought it was a question about payment, although she had no reason to listen…except that any point of concentration was preferable, now, to her own body. “Fifty more goldens for every year?” said Maldron. “She did not add a hen’s-hatching to your age, merchant! Accept your two hundred goldens and safe-passage token, and show some gratitude.… Very well, you shall look into the mirror in my hall, and search for gray hairs and wrinkles yourself, but remember that the gods abhor a dishonest merchant. Go and dress.”

  The voices were quieter now, and the dog’s unhappiness seemed louder. Starwind began to cry. Someone else was near Frostflower, touching her cheeks, gently wiping her body, drying the warm liquid from between her legs, holding a cloth to her nose. She opened her eyes and saw the old nurse bending above her.

  “Have you all forgotten your duties?” said Maldron. “Unweight her. Gammerstang, hold the dog or I will choose another to do it. No…no…hush, small one, hush…”

  Maldron had taken Starwind, as if he trusted no one else to hold him; and the baby had stopped crying again and was resting quietly in his arms. Young creatures forgot their griefs so readily…old creatures not so readily. Dowl was still straining to come to the sorceress, although she was no longer screaming or sobbing, not even trembling so violently as before.

  They removed the weights and unchained her ankles from the sprunging-stick. Cradlelap helped her to sit up so that the warriors could free her arms and pull off the remnants of her clothes. Perhaps she should feel grateful that they had stopped jeering her, but she felt only a numb wonder that she was still alive.

  The old nurse finished wiping her and dropped a long, straight garment over her, with slits for head and arms. She rubbed salve into the wounds on her cheeks and ears, and gave her a large, clean kerchief for eyes and nose. Numbly, Frostflower noticed that the cloth was soft, the salve sweet-smelling.

  Maldron helped the old woman to her feet and returned Starwind to her care. “I rejoice that one of my people, at least, is not a fool.” Then he pulled the sorceress up and knotted a cord around her wrists, not tightly enough to cause pain.

  She stared at him in confusion. “Starwind’s parents are a warrior who did not want him and a father who does not know of him,” she repeated.

  “I hope you will choose to tell the truth before tomorrow.” His voice, at least, did not baffle her. It was hard, uncompromising.

  * * * *

  She had come alone through Beldrise Forest in the night and darkness; she was led back in the night, but no longer in darkness. Warriors carrying torches came first and last in the procession. Maldron led the sorceress on a longish rope and her dog on a short one, close to his side. She could not have Dowl nearer; but since she no longer moaned, he trotted contentedly beside the priest. Cradlelap followed, humming to Starwind. From time to time the little part of Frostflower’s body that still cared about comfort noticed gratefully that they had left her her own sandals, with thick soles of many layers of cloth stiffened with tree-gum. Indeed, these had been left on her feet all the time she was otherwise stripped naked; and the part of her mind that had once responded to humor recognized the incongruity.

  Had she been less miserable, she understood, she would have felt terror at passing through the high, dark stone walls of Maldron’s Farm.

  Once inside the walls, with the gate bolted behind them, the party stopped to rest while Maldron sent a young watch-girl ahead. Frostflower was allowed to sit on a wooden bench, not quite near enough to the old nurse to touch Starwind. Someone held a cup of wine to her lips; and when a wagon came, she was lifted into it, to ride with Cradlelap and Maldron—although he still prevented her from touching her child or her dog.

  Perhaps it had been merely exhaustion that numbed her. During the ride, through several moonlit fields and a small orchard, many of the old terrors returned. She was captured and powerless, already trapped inside the walls of a farm, and soon to be locked in the dungeons of a farmer.

  There were tales of the dungeons beneath farmers’ halls, tales of what was done to power-stripped sorceri before their public scaffoldings and hangings…but she found that hitherto, whenever she had contemplated rape as a thing that might happen to herself, her imaginings had stopped just short of the actual loss and never gone on to what would follow—as if she had expected to die at once.

  Maldron intended torture—why had he not done it there at the Rockroots? The thought of rats and cesspools, stale sunless dungeons and strange, blood-encrusted instruments glimpsed by the light of burning coals, could still make her cringe. She was quivering again, although still able to walk unaided, when the wagon reached the hall.

  The front doorway was covered only by a loosely-woven curtain, weighted at the bottom with small stones that clicked as Maldron pulled the cloth aside. They passed through a small entranceway into a great, echoing chamber. Frostflower glimpsed clean mosaic tile beneath her feet, murals in gilt and dark colors that would be bright by daylight, a high ceiling that glinted here and there as if the torchlight were catching polished decorations. But she had always known that farmer-priests lived in splendor.

  Two women and a young child, all in farmers’ white, were waiting at the far end of the long chamber, sitting on a dais in the light of several thick wax candles. The women seemed to be playing with the child. At Maldron’s entrance, they rose and came forward to him, the child running, the women following more slowly. The farmer stooped and let the child run into his arms. It seemed to be a boy of four or five years old.

  “Did you catch her, papa? Did you catch the nasty sorceress?” The child looked up and saw Frostflower standing in the shadows behind Maldron. His eyes widened and he huddled out of her sight in his father’s embrace. “She won’t hurt us, papa, will she?”

  “No, no, Nikkon, she won’t hurt us. Look—see what I brought you.” The farmer put Dowl’s leash into his son’s hand. The dog, his head on Maldron’s knee, had already been sniffing at the child. Nikkon began to pat his head, shyly at first; and soon dog and boy were playing together on the tiled floor, not too far from the light—a single torch-bearing warrior had come into the chamber, standing behind them like a human light-stand; and one of the priestesses carried a small oil lamp.

  Maldron kissed the women in turn, the shorter, lamp-bearing one first. He seemed to hold the taller more closely. “Have any come forward to complain of losing their child?”

  The taller priestess shook her head, the silver wreath gleaming in her copper-colored hair. Inmara, the farmer-priestess of the glade. “No. Nor have our messengers found any parents mourning such a loss.”

  “She has stolen him from farther south or west, then. We must send messengers to Eldrommer, Arun, and Inravan. Take him, Inmara. See if he has any birthmark.”

  The priestess accepted Starwind from the old nurse’s arms. For a few moments Inmara and Frostflower looked into one another’s eyes. “His name is Starwind, Lady,” said Frostflower, “and he has no birthmark, save a red mole exactly on the knuckle of his left middle finger.”

  “Vile sorceress,” said Maldron’s other wife. Frostflower lowered her gaze.

  “It is not necessary to tonguelash her, Enneald. They have no other way to get children.” Taking the lamp from Enneald’s hand, the priest led Frostflower down the long chamber and through an arch into a narrow passage. She saw a line of doorways, each one covered by a thin linen curtain weighted at the hem and bulging slightly with the air currents. Onl
y one room, near the end, had a wooden door; and that door stood open. Maldron led the sorceress through it, set the lamp on a table, and turned to untie her hands.

  The room was dark, but it was above-ground and seemed dry. The air was fresh and smelling of new-baked bread. At the back and to one side there were windows, thickly latticed but clearly visible as they let in the moonlight; and, by their distance, she guessed the cell was larger than Burningloaf’s secret room. The small table on which Maldron had set the lamp was spread with jugs and covered dishes; a high-backed chair waited behind the table; and beyond, by the light of a votive candle in a wall niche, she glimpsed a long, wide bed.

  He finished untying her and crossed to the door. Was this to be her prison? She did not understand. “Reverence?” she said.

  He paused. “Well?”

  “If I could…if you would let me hold Starwind again…only for a few moments?”

  “You do not deserve even to look at the infant, sorceress.”

  He had admonished his wife Enneald for speaking less harshly to her than this. “Dowl, then? Reverence, if I could at least have my dog with me?”

  “He is my son’s dog now.”

  “You cannot think, Reverence, that I stole the dog, too? You accuse me of stealing a child—you will never find Starwind’s parents—and yet you yourself will steal Dowl from me?”

  “You are hungry and tired, sorceress. Eat and rest. And think, while you are alone, of a father and mother lonely and mourning for their son.”

  He left her alone, closing the door. She heard a bolt fall into place outside. But for that, she might have been in such a room as a farmer-priest would give to an honored guest, or even sleep in himself. She went to the windows. The latticework was thick and deepset, the interstices barely large enough for her to slip her hand through; and yet, though they served tonight as bars, they were clearly designed for ornament, carved in the shapes of fanciful animals, and supporting vines that grew up on the outside.

  It would have been simple, if she still had her powers, to have grown the vines thicker than the season ever allowed in their natural time, until, crowding rapidly through the lattice, they cracked it. Or even to speed time for the lattice itself, rotting away the wood. The lattice gone, she could have crawled through the opening.

  She had eaten almost nothing since her supper in Burningloaf’s upper room. With a little relaxation of her fears—the calm of despair coupled with the unexpected comfort of her prison—she realized her hunger. Returning to the table, she sat and gazed at the dishes in the light of the oil lamp. Strange. They were not, of course, such silver and gilded pieces as the farmers themselves must eat from in these rich middle lands; but they were of good white clay, well-crafted and finely glazed. The bread-saucer, beneath its small loaf, was painted in symmetrical designs; the goblet was similarly decorated, and had a thin bowl with gracefully rounded rim. Not the pottery a prisoner, especially a sorceron, would expect from a farmer-priest.

  One of the jugs held wine, one water, the last and smallest milk. The milk brought back thoughts of Starwind sucking at her nipples. She filled her goblet with wine, drank deeply, tore off a crust of bread, and slowly ate it with some soft cheese. To her surprise, her fondness for cheese, which had developed since she first tasted it at the beginning of her travels this summer, remained in her tongue. She lifted the thin bronze cover from the largest bowl on the table.

  The stench of cooked meat rolled out at her. She dropped the lid back over the bowl and gagged.

  She must have come to tolerate that odor more easily than she had thought, traveling among farmers’ folk and eating near or with them. Eighteen days ago, at the beginning of her journey, not even the bronze lid and the fragrance of hot bread, sweet wine, and aromatic candle and lamp oil could have disguised the stink of cooked meat for so long.

  She stood up trembling, choking down her nausea—she saw nothing with which she could have washed away vomit, and she had, after all, taken nothing but bread and cheese and wine—all clean and wholesome. But she understood, at last, the mockery of her comfortable surroundings, the insult that lay in the fresh, above-ground air and the fine pottery.

  Butchered, cooked flesh! To offer a sorceron the slaughtered, roasted carcass of a farmer’s enslaved animal, between the time of power-stripping and the torture and execution that must follow—what was that but to show her she was nothing to them but more meat to be butchered and cut?

  She groped her way to the bed, fell upon it, and lay sobbing. Vaguely, through the images of skinned and scaffolded beasts and chunks of dripping flesh, she realized the wine must have held herbs to make her sleep, or she could not have drifted away like this, so wet, so bloody, so spidery between her legs…

  * * * *

  Not until she woke was she aware of the smoothness of the sheets, the thickness of the pillows. The room was filled with the pale blue light of early morning. She turned her head on the pillow and lay watching the wall murals gradually take on their color. Most of them were stylized flowers, green, red, blue, and gold, with here and there two dots and a slash that suggested a face. Someone had removed the offensive food from the table, and only a single jug and the goblet remained.

  She rose and found the close-stool, in a small corner closet shut off from the rest of the bedchamber by a door with only the simplest latch, and ventilated by several high, tiny windows to the outside, hung about with small baskets of fragrant herbs. She used it cautiously, somewhat afraid of new bleeding. Then she returned and lay again on the bed.

  The herbs in last night’s wine had been good herbs, leaving her with no headache, only a feeling of torpor. Maldron’s Farm was quiet, more quiet than she had expected. She could hear the faint sounds of the morning’s work, but far in the distance. The farmers, then, lived secluded by space and thick walls from the noise of their own farms. Within the hall itself, she heard now and then a thump, a footfall, a muffled voice; but generally the farmer-priests and their household servants seemed, by the silence, to move with quiet dignity even in their homes. As her own people moved in their retreats—that comparison made her thankful for the times she had scrambled as a child, shouting and jerky, with Puffball, Dreamberry, and Dawnstar in the rocks above Windslope.

  Now she heard pattering on the tiled floor, a child’s squeals and a dog’s yipping—Dowl’s yipping. Maldron’s son was playing with Dowl in the long chamber. She listened so intently to their play that she hardly heard the nearer sounds of the bolt being drawn up from her door.

  The door opened. Maldron came into the room. The sorceress sat, moved to the edge of the bed, and swung her legs so that her feet touched the floor, ready to stand. She waited warily, feeling covered but insecure in the loose, draping garment they had put on her last night.

  “You did not eat,” said the priest.

  She gave him no reply. Had he expected her to eat his foul, cooked flesh?

  “Have you thought of the mother who labored to give her child birth, only days before you stole him?”

  “I have thought of her.” The quick-tongued warrior who had been so thirsty for life and so afraid of the farmers’ mythical Hellbog, and who now was lost in the real bogs. “But I did not steal her child. She gave him gladly.”

  “You will not hold him again, sorceress. Is it not better he should be returned to the parents who waited twelve hen’s-hatchings for him?”

  “I have told you how little his parents wanted him.”

  Maldron closed the door. He could not secure it from the inside, but no doubt he had warriors in the passageway; and even if he did not, how could she have fled, by daylight, from a farmer’s hall, through his fields and the midst of his workers, and gain the other side of his distant, fortified, guarded walls?

  “I do not know your name, sorceress. Is it against your superstitions that I should know it?”

  “We have no superstitions, Reverence. My name is Frostflower.”

  “Cold. It does not fit you.” He ap
proached her…began to brush his hand down her long, tangled hair.

  Shuddering, she rose and went quickly to the far window. “You have taken my power already.”

  “What power your kind pretends to wield against us, I have taken.”

  “We do not pretend.”

  “Perhaps some of you do not.”

  She had not aged his young merchant; probably Maldron had never guessed how near the lightning had come to his silver dagger, nor who had aimed it away from him to save Inmara from Thorn’s threats. He had never seen any other evidence of her power, and now he thought she never had it. She turned once more to the window. “But you feared to rob me in your own person. You forced your poor hireling to the work.”

  “I did not fear. A priest’s body is sacred, not to be defiled with that of a sorceress.”

  He had followed her to the window. He stroked her hair again, and again she cringed away. “Then do not defile yourself now, when your people are not looking on,” she said.

  “You do not understand what I have given you in exchange for what you thought of as power? You desire children, Frostflower, or you would not have stolen the infant you call Starwind. I have freed you from your superstitions, so that you can bear children of your own.”

  “Don’t touch me, farmer!”

  “You need no longer be a sorceress, Frostflower. Purified, you could become wife to a farmer.”

  Purified! Part of her brain laughed, though the smile did not reach her lips. “I have had enough of your rites of purification, farmer-priest.”

  He laid his hands on her shoulders, holding her with her back to him. She stiffened and tried to break away, but this time he held firm. She stopped pulling and stood quietly, weak with lack of food and return of fear.

  He stepped closer, relaxing his grip and rubbing his hands up and down her upper arms. “I regret the need to hurt you the first time. I regret the clumsiness of that terrified fool. But it need not be like that, Frostflower. Not on smooth sheets, with the freedom of your limbs and with a skilled lover. Even last night, in your fear and discomfort beneath that mewling idiot, I could see how you responded—”