The Wind-Witch

by Susan Dexter

  “Our thanks for that, Lady,” the watch captain said placatingly. “We’ll keep a sharp eye out, no fear. You can go back home.”

  Even the post rider seemed to take Druyan’s news in a less urgent light. “Sir, shall I carry a message to the town as I pass?”

  “Don’t bother about it, Kernan. Our usual signals will suffice—if we see anything out of the ordinary.” He touched a linger to his forehead. “Lady.” He strolled back through the gate.

  Druyan was dumbfounded. There was no outcry within the tower, no extra eyes rushed to the ramparts—and no word of warning sent on to the helpless town below. They’d keep watch as they always did—and the town of Falkerry would be overwhelmed by sunhigh, despite her hard-run warning.

  “Captain.”

  He turned back toward her impatiently. “Lady, I’ve a day’s ride ahead of me. I need to be about it.” His horse tossed its head restlessly.

  “Sir, will you at least carry a warning about the ships?”

  He fidgeted. So did the horse. “You’re certain they were ships? I can’t be raising the whole coast just because a school of porpoise came inshore, Lady, no offense.”

  “It was ships! Rider, my own brother’s a captain of post riders. Maybe you know him—Robart of Glasgerion.”

  The captain gave her a searching look. “I’ve ridden with him, Lady. He’s no fool.”

  “Neither am I! I know a ship from a porpoise. My own farm’s been twice-raided—” Maybe that was a mistake to say. He’d take her for an overnervous woman. . .

  The captain chewed at his lip. “Tamsin! Is that beast of yours in his usual overgood fettle? Fine. Then hie yourself straight back to Keverne, and tell them we’ve tidings of raiders and that something better armed than the local watch would be a great help here. It’s a risk, but the army might just get here in time to be useiiil, for once! I’ll ride into Falkerry now, then likewise alert every farm I pass on the way back to Keverne.” He turned back to Druyan. “There’d better be ships, Lady.

  “I know,” Druyan whispered.

  The sea and the river Fal sparkled alike, empty. Druyan thought of how she had half disbelieved Kellis’ first warning, how she’d waited to see the raiders’ ship. It had been no less awful a time.

  Six long, low ships came into the harbor on a flooding tide and a following wind, two hours short of sunhigh. They sailed right up the Fal, whose flow of water did not quite match the tide’s. The watchtower gave its customary warning—Druyan saw the puffs of dark smoke rising upbut it would never have been sufficient had the town not been already roused and prepared for the invaders’ appearance.

  There was pitched battle, all round the harbor. If the duke intended to send men to Falkerry’s aid, there was no time for them to arrive—five of the black ships lifted their anchors when the tide began to slacken, their crews leaving empty-handed lest they be trapped inshore by a lack of wind. The sixth vessel had strayed out of the Fal’s channel and into very shallow water. It grounded in mud on its way to escape and was set afire by determined bands of townsmen. What should have been a fast-hitting raid came to nothing more than ashes on the wind, a score of wounded prisoners marched to Falkerry’s dungeon.

  Druyan rode homeward more slowly than she had come. There were still five ships to harry Darlith’s coast, but with every farm forewarned against the raiders, there was nothing more she could think to do. There was no way she could guess—on her own—where any of those ships would choose to land, whether they would stay together or separate. Her task was done.

  She had been up all night and longed to drowse in her saddle. Indeed, she thought of halting to snatch a few hours of rest in the heather. The stems would be soft, so early in the year. . .

  Valadan had other ideas. When she drew back on the reins, he bent hard against the bit, bowing his neck, and actually went faster for all her attempts to slow him. Rain, came the terse explanation into her head, and looking seaward, Druyan beheld a dark line of squalls sweeping in.

  “That ought to give those raiders second thoughts,” she said, pleased by Esdragon’s own defenses. Maybe the storm would pound those five ships to pieces against the tall cliffs.

  Hold tightly, Valadan requested. I will run now.

  And the earth blurred away once again. Druyan, weary and sore, leaned forward and wound her big hands tight into the long black mane. She was too tired to watch sharp for obstacles, and doubted she was all that much help to the stallion anyway, at such a pace. The rushing of the ground made her head reel, so Druyan trustingly shut her eyes and rocked with Valadan’s stride as his speed blended them into one being. It felt like being aboard a vessel carrying full sail, mmiing before the wind, swept along with the spray sparkling behind, the seabirds falling back, unable to keep pace. . .

  When she opened her eyes once more, her own mended gate was barring their way.

  I would have jumped, but you might have fallen, Valadan said gently, apologetically.

  Druyan slowly unwound his mane from her lingers and slid down over his left shoulder. The soft ground of the lane stung the soles of her feet like a blow, she had been in the saddle so long. Her knees ached. The first raindrops were just pocking the dirt as they reached the door of the barn.

  An ordinary courser would have been furnace-hot after running so long—would have been dead at half the distance, like as not, Druyan amended. She fussed over Valadan for the best part of the next hour, rubbing his legs with cloths, massaging his back, currying him all over before finally admitting what she knew in her heart already. The stallion ran like the wind he’d been sired by and took no more harm from such running than that wind did of blowing, though he found her attentions pleasant. She fed him his supper. She could have done it the moment they entered the barn and done him no harm, though such idiotkindness would have killed any mortal horse. She left him munching hay and staggered through the rain to the kitchen. Her hips were aching, too.

  First step inside, she stubbed a toe against the wooden washtub, which was pressed into service intercepting a stream of water falling from somewhere above. Enna, positioning a pail under another drip, looked around and exclaimed at her.

  “Lady! You’re home! And half drowned—not that you’ll fare better in your own kitchen.” She poked a finger at the ceiling. “That good-for-nothing thief Kellis has mn off, the chuming’s not done, there’s not a stick of firewood left, and this roof’s leaking like a tea strainer!”

  Druyan aimed herself at a bench, where she tried to sit without collapsing. “Falkerry’s safe,” she croaked.

  “And look at you!” Enna ran on, unheeding of the good news—which after all did not concern Splaine Garth. “Were you off that horse for one minute?” Another puddle began forming by noisy spatters on the hearthstone—Enna went at it with a scream and a crockery bowl.

  “There’s not that much in here to take harm from the wet,” Druyan protested. And the bustle was disconcerting, besides being useless. “Just let the roof drip, Enna. We’ll mop it up tomorrow, after Kellis has the roof patched.”

  Enna narrowed her eyes. “I’ve seen neither front nor back of him since you rode out, Lady,” she said, almost sounding pleased. “If he’s within ten leagues of Splaine Garth this minute, I’ll stand amazed.”

  “He’s gone?” Druyan whispered, stunned. Somewhere she could hear another leak coming to ground—or onto a metal pot. It seemed loud as thunder.

  “What did you expect? I’m only surprised the villain didn’t manage it before this.” Enna flung a rug over the flour bin, though it didn’t appear to be in immediate peril of flood. “You let him have free run of the place. He’s got two good legs under him, and no morals to speak of.”

  “Did he say anything?” It didn’t seem the time to spring to Kellis’ defense, but she didn’t find a prisoner’s escaping all that immoral. Just . . . inexplicable. “Take anything with him?”

  “Nothing from the kitchen—he wouldn’t have dared, I’ve knives in here!” Enna sai
d with fierce joy. “I imagine if we count the chickens tomorrow, we’ll be one or two shy. There’s no iron round the henhouse.”

  Diuyan stared about the dim kitchen, which was commencing to spin, ever so slightly. That new drip was sounding like a gong, or an alarm bell. “Why?” she whispered, not to Enna.

  “We’re well rid of him, Lady,” Enna answered cheerfully, bespoken or not, then helped her mistress to bed.

  Druyan was up—aches and all—at first light, to be sure the stock in the barn got fed and turned out. How she would manage beyond that, she did not know, and refused to think upon. She brought Valadan his breakfast while Dalkin guided the two cows and their calves toward their day’s pasture. She stirred a treat of honey into the oats, and looked up at a noise from the doorway. Sometimes a cow escaped Dalkin’s herding skills, though they seldom preferred barn to green pasture. . .

  Kellis was standing there, the bright light at his back eating away at the edges of him.

  Druyan gave the oats another stir round. “Enna said you’d left.” Her heart banged against the cage of her ribs, denying her outward calm.

  Kellis took a couple of steps into the barn. His clothes were soaking wet, covered with bits of heather twig and grass. His face was stubbled, his eyes red-rimmed. “Is the roof leaking?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Yes, but I think she noticed before the rain started. Where were you?”

  “With the sheep,” he said inadequately. She could not let the lie pass, it was too obvious.

  “That’s Pru’s job, and Lyn’s. And they have the two dogs to help them. Who said you had to go, too?”

  “I—” He struggled for something plausible to offer her, but came up empty. “It was because of me that you went. I decided it was better if Enna wasn’t reminded of that every time she saw me.”

  “You didn’t have to stay out in the rain all night to accomplish that. She can’t climb up the ladder to the haymow.” He was lying. Druyan knew it, and could see that he was well aware that she knew. But there would be no getting the truth out of him. It was plain as the crooked nose on his weathered face. Druyan finally stopped fruitlessly struggling to think of ways to do it. Kellis hadn’t asked after Falkerry’s fate, either, and Druyan was at an even greater loss to account for that disinterest.

  Well, you don’t know him, do you? Not at all, she coldly admonished her foolish self.

  The Black Bowl

  Patching the roof failed to insinuate Kellis back into Enna’s good graces, though he did a fine job of it—at least in the short run. He churned till the dasher seemed worn away—Enna pronounced the butter spoiled and fed it to the pigs. Kellis chopped firewood and split kindling till there was half a winter’s worth stacked outside the kitchen—it made no difference, her hostility was unabated. The next rain could find no path through the thatch and had to be content with trickling down the chimney to make the flames hiss and jump, but Enna did not rejoice, or take it as anything out of the way. The roof had never leaked till Kellis went up there in the first place, and never mind why he’d done it. The various pots and bowls and pails that had caught the drips were all stowed in their usual storage places as a vote of confidence she loudly refused to share.

  Druyan laid claim to a little basin of black-glazed clay as the other bowls went into the cupboards one by one. It was round and shallow, with a handle set on either side, and once it might have boasted a lid, she thought, though she had never seen it. The bowl had been at Splaine Garth, lidless, when she arrived there as T1avic’s bride. It was too fine for a cat’s dish, too small to hold anything other than one drip too many for the other containers. She cradled it in her aims and took it to the kitchen garden, where Kellis was doggedly hoeing weeds into oblivion.

  “You didn’t ask,” she said without preamble. “Falkerry beat off the raiders. They might have managed it anyway, butl saw the difference a warning made.”

  He eyed the bowl like a horse watching a grass fire. “So you want me to do it again.”

  “You’re going to see things anyway. You said it worked that way. Why not do something about what you see?”

  Kellis chopped viciously at a deep-rooted thistle. The garden tools were bronze-bladed, safe for him. “Lady, I would rather clean out your pigpen.”

  “This doesn’t need to interfere with the regular chores. I want the flax seed sown this week, too,” Druyan answered lightly, supposing that he jested with her.

  “You think all I have to do is look in the bowl, and I’ll see whatever helps you!” No, Kellis wasn’t jesting. He had gone quite white, and his breathing was ragged. “It isn’t like that! Most times there’s nothing to see. And even when there is—the first time you go riding off to save some settlement that’s already cold ashes, you’ll hate me for not being able to tell yesterday from tomorrow. Let be, Lady. There are watches set all along your coast—they know the danger. You’ve done all you can.”

  “It’s not enough,” Druyan protested, shocked at his refusal. “No one can watch every harbor, every river mouth, every minute. And no matter how closely they watch, the raids are too quick. Half an hour’s notice isn’t enough.”

  “I can’t give you better! You’ll think I can, you’ll rely on me doing it, and I’ll fail you!” He went at a patch of bindweed, perilously close to the row of carrots he was safeguarding. The bronze blade rose and fell, as if he were trying to be no more than that, have no existence beyond the task.

  “You didn’t fail Falkerry,” Druyan pointed out.

  “A vision that demands to be seen is a different animal from one I deliberately go hunting, Lady.” He kept chopping. “One’s luck. The other flees and will not be taken without a chase.”

  “So chase it. A few minutes in the morning, before you start chores,” Druyan offered reasonably. “Or whatever other time of day you choose. I trust you not to take advantage and only pretend to look, and I’ll tell Enna so—”

  The hoe rang against a stone, and stilled. “You’ll trust me. Lady, I have been trusted ere this.” His face was nearly as white as his hair, immobile as a stone mask except for his darting eyes. “My family’s dead. My entire Clan has ceased to exist because they trusted me to see clear enough to protect them from danger. And I saw everything peaceful and hadn’t the wit to know I was seeing back instead of ahead. They didn’t get a warning. That’s what comes of trusting me.

  If he’d leapt up and struck her, the message couldn’t have come plainer to Druyan—she knew nothing of this man before her. Not his past, not his likely reaction to anything she might say to him—nothing at all. He was unknown and exactly as dangerous as Enna held, and naught but sheerest luck had kept her safe thus far. And luck could run out . . . She took a step back.

  “I liked being the prophet,” Kellis said harshly, staring at her. “Looking into the mirror of the water, singing the vision into being—not everyone could do that. Knowing every eye in the clan was on me while I did it. I liked the status—after the chief, they looked to me. I liked the attention. I could reassure the old people that all would be well, and the women would smile at me. The girls would be so grateful. . .

  “But I never learned how to give them anything real. I never took the trouble to learn how to look, how to see past the surface and whatever would give itself to me easily. Our shaman was dead, there was no one to take me to task for it, no one even to know the difference—but I knew, knew I was only playing at it, for what I could get out of it. Respect, and fine goods, and women. I suppose I knew in my heart that I’d have to pay for that ease, one day what I didn’t know was, it wasn’t me who’d be asked for the payment. I just had to watch.”

  Druyan wanted to break and run, from him and from his confession, to put a safe distance between them. But that was showing weakness, and once she began, where would she stop? At the kitchen door? The twice-mended gate? The edge of the sea? She dared not run, and she would not.

  “All right,” Splaine Garth’s lady whispered, her voice dry as sand. �
�I won’t trust you. I’ll weigh every word you tell me, and doubt it twice before I ride out. Will that satisfy you?”

  That flying brow came down, level as a line squall over the waves. “We had a bargain, Lady. And none of this was in it, that I recall.”

  “I didn’t know about any of this!” Druyan shouted, outraged.

  “Now you do, and you think you can just add it in with the rest? Plow a field, fix a roof, shear a sheep, and order up a vision so you’ll know where the raiders will strike next?”

  “I don’t expect it matters to you, if they do to Esdragon what they did to your people,” Druyan accused. “It’s not your home or your problem. You’re only here till you can get to somewhere else. Well, I hope for your sake that the city you saw is real, that it’s being built now, that it isn’t so far in days to come that you’ll never live to see it.”

  “It wasn’t one of my visions,” Kellis answered sharply. “I wouldn’t have trusted anything I saw all the way across the Great Sea!”

  “Probably you wouldn’t,” Druyan agreed. She set the bowl down at the edge of the garden. “You can have this for a shaving basin. I suppose if you happen to see raiders coming here again, you’ll mention it? That’s far enough in your own interest?”

  He looked stricken. “I’m refusing for your good, not mine, Lady.”

  “Of course you are,” Druyan said, and turned away, swirling her skirts about in a tiny, angry wind.

  The flax field greened up rapidly under the light daily rains. They didn’t grow a great deal of the fiber, but Druyan liked to have the wherewithal to make her own household linen. Wool was warm and shed the rain wonderfully, but for comfort she wanted a soft sark beneath it, next to her skin.

  Once fields were plowed and planted, the early season of the year held fewer urgent tasks than the harvesttime pressed with. Druyan took the winter’s worth of saved wood ashes and rendered pig fat, and spent a week making soap, scented with a tisane brewed of last year’s dried lavender blossoms. She worked daily with the three new foals, seeing to it that they learned to lead while they were still small enough to muscle if they proved reluctant, knowing they needed to learn early to do as humans told them if the habit was to hold when they were grown. Same for the new calves, though not to quite the same extent, as leading would be all they were expected to do. Playing with the lambs was a temptation she struggled to resist—’twas foolish to make pets of creatures you expected to eat. She felt a little safer about the orphan lamb—it had particularly silky wool and would be kept for its fleece.