The Witches of Wenshar

by Barbara Hambly

  “And the same for you, with board in the Hall and a room here for the pair of you—and the knowledge that you’ll be helping a man who’s worked hard and fought hard all his life sleep easier nights.”

  The boy’s got him worried, Sun Wolf thought, leaning back in the gilded-ebony chair and considering the big man before him, who pushed so impatiently at his bed-robe and blankets. As a battlefield physician himself, he was perfectly well aware that Osgard’s steady consumption of wine would drive his fever up by nightfall; but he’d learned long ago never to attempt to separate a half-drunk man from his cup. If Kaletha had the nerve to attempt to do so, he had to approve of her courage, if not her judgment.

  In many ways the King reminded Sun Wolf of his own father, though he was sandy instead of dark—a shaggy, roaring bear of a man, comfortable with the jostling give-and-take of casual friendship and unwilling to stir the mud at he bottom of his or anyone else’s soul. A man who could fight all day, drink all evening, and fornicate all night—or who would die in the attempt to seem to.

  A man, Sun Wolf thought, such as he himself had striven so hard to be, all those years.

  “I’ll talk to the Hawk,” he said, “and meet your boy and decide then.”

  “And you, Starhawk?” Kaletha set down the pottery mug of coffee and looked at Starhawk in the buttercup sunlight pouring through the long south-facing windows of the Hall. “Will you, too, join our company, to learn the ways of power?”

  Servants were moving back and forth from the service hatches to the trestle tables set up in the big room with its dark granite walls. There were few of them, as there were few guards—the underservants who ate at the lower end of the Hall fetched their own bread and butter and breakfast ale. Starhawk wondered a little about this. She could estimate within a silverpiece how much a place would yield in money and loot, and the fortress of Tandieras was undeniably rich. Ruling the largest chain of silver mines in the west of the world, they could scarcely be otherwise.

  After last night’s incidents, she was acutely aware that most of the underservants who brought grapes, coffee, and clotted kefir porridge to the small table which Kaletha had invited her to share were of the shirdar.

  If Kaletha had expected surprise from her, she must be disappointed. Away from the antagonism between her and the Wolf, Starhawk’s own reading of the woman’s character was that she preferred the company of women to that of men, though not necessarily in bed. In her way, Kaletha would have been pleased to show Sun Wolf up by taking from him his lover’s loyalty.

  Nevertheless she gave the matter some thought before replying. “I’m not mageborn.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” Kaletha leaned forward, her blue eyes intent. She was a beautiful woman whose beauty, Starhawk guessed, had kept men from taking her seriously—she wore her severeness like armor. But as she spoke, she lowered her shield to show the woman underneath. “Your Captain didn’t believe me, but it is true. I understand the secrets of power. I can raise that power, bring it out of the depths of the souls of even the non-mageborn. That is my destiny.”

  “It’s true,” Anshebbeth put in, hurrying over to them from across the Hall. She had entered some moments ago in dutiful attendance upon the Princess Taswind, her own habitual, severe black gown contrasting sharply with the girl’s casual attire of boy’s breeches, riding boots, and a faded pink shirt. They had been chatting comfortably, but, even at that distance, Starhawk had seen Anshebbeth’s eye rove quickly over the tables and find Kaletha at her table, a little apart from the other members of the Household. She had lost no time in breaking off the conversation, taking her plate from the High Table where Tazey seated herself alone, and hastening to Kaletha’s side.

  “Pradborn Dyer certainly isn’t mageborn—he’s one of our company, a youth from the town—but Kaletha has taught him, released the hidden strengths of his mind, and he has begun to have visions and dreams, which have come true. He can sometimes see things in the dark and is led to find objects which are lost. And I myself, though I’m not mageborn, I have been studying with Kaletha, absorbing her wisdom, learning the secrets of her arts, for almost a year now. It has helped me, helped me enormously...” She glanced quickly sidelong at Kaletha, as if for approval.

  If Kaletha was as annoyed as Starhawk at having her conversation intruded upon in this fashion, she didn’t show it. She preened herself a little under the praise and gave a tolerant smile, retreating behind her schoolmistress facade.

  Encouraged, Anshebbeth continued, “Do you know, it seemed that I knew for many years before the Wizard King’s death what Kaletha was, though she never told a soul. But her power always shone out of her—”

  “’Shebbeth—” Kaletha said, a little embarrassed now.

  “It’s true,” the governess insisted eagerly. “Even Tazey—Princess Taswind—felt it when she was a little child.” She looked back at Starhawk. “We’ve always been friends, Kaletha and I. She has virtually made me what I am today, has opened worlds to me I never dreamed of. Others felt it, too,” she added, her dark eyes suddenly smoldering with venom. “Like that dirty hag Nexué, the laundress, with her filthy mouth and her filthy mind.” She picked up a horn-handled tin knife to butter a roll, and her long fingers trembled a little with anger.

  “Impure fornicators,” responded Kaletha serenely, “see all things through the slime of their own impurity.” She glanced a little nervously at Starhawk. For an instant, the Hawk saw again the human side of the woman, which interested her far more than the wizard and teacher did. “You mustn’t be led to think...”

  Starhawk shrugged. “It isn’t any of my business.”

  Kaletha hesitated, not quite certain what to do with that answer. Anshebbeth, who had gone a little pink at the mention of impurity, was looking away. But, in fact, Starhawk had seen relationships like that of Kaletha and Anshebbeth before, among the nuns of the convent where she had grown up and, later, among the warrior women of Sun Wolf’s troop; she knew that, in spite of the witlessly smutty remarks of Nexué and her table-mates, the two women weren’t necessarily lovers. It was more than anything else a domination of the personality, based on Kaletha’s desire to have a slave as much as Anshebbeth’s need to be one.

  Across the Hall, Nanciormis had just entered, wearing the plain, dark-green uniform of the guards and flirting with the two servant women who’d immediately found reasons to take them to that side of the room. Anshebbeth forced her gaze back to Starhawk, her mouth bracketed suddenly in hard little lines, and a stain of color lingering on her pointy cheekbones.

  “It takes courage to follow Kaletha’s path, the path of purity, the path of the mind. But I can tell, looking at you, that you have that.”

  “Not necessarily.” Starhawk poured cream into her coffee and dabbed with her spoon at the swirls of dark and light.

  Nonplussed, Anshebbeth opened her mouth, then shut it again. The smug self-satisfaction that had glowed from Kaletha in her disciple’s presence faded, and her cinnamon brows puckered into a frown. “You’ve been a warrior a long time,” she said after a moment. “That tells me you don’t lack either physical bravery or the courage to go against what people expect of a woman. Do you have the courage to go against what he expects of his woman?”

  Starhawk’s attention remained on her cup. “It would depend on what was at stake.”

  “Freedom to do as you wish?” Kaletha pressed her. “To be first instead of second?”

  “That’s a tricky one.” Starhawk looked up. “The fact is, I am best as a second—a better lieutenant than I am a captain.”

  “Is that what you truly believe,” Kaletha asked, “or only what it is more convenient for him that you believe?”

  “Are you asking that out of genuine concern for me,” Starhawk returned, “or only to get back at him by having me leave him?”

  At this display of lèse-majesté, Anshebbeth almost dropped her spoon. But Kaletha held up a hand to silence her indignant indrawn breath; when her eyes me
t Starhawk’s, they were rueful with the first admission of wrong the Hawk had seen from her.

  At least, Starhawk thought, she doesn’t pretend she didn’t understand what I asked.

  After a long pause, Kaletha said, “I agree. We both asked each other unfair questions. And I think we’re each three-fourths sure we know the answers, both to our own and the other’s...but only three-fourths.” She looked down at the small plate of bread and kefir before her for a moment, then back at Starhawk, a spark of genuine warmth in her eyes. She held out her hand. “Will you join our company only for company, then? I, for one, would be pleased if you would.”

  The door on the dais that led through to the King’s solar opened abruptly, and Sun Wolf emerged, followed immediately by Osgard himself. The King’s face was mottled alcoholic red and pasty white, and he was limping heavily, but fended off Sun Wolf’s single offer of assistance. Kaletha’s brows snapped together; she got swiftly to her feet, black robe billowing as she strode towards him. “My Lord...”

  He waved her angrily away. “I don’t need your damned help, and I don’t need your damned advice, either!” he roared. “I’m not a weakling! Hell, back when we were fighting Shilmarne’s armies in the passes, I went through six hours of fighting with a shattered kneecap!”

  Her voice thin, Kaletha said, “You were thirty then, my Lord, not fifty, and you hadn’t been drinking.”

  “What’s my age got to do with it, woman?” he bellowed back. “Or what I drink or how much I drink, for that matter? Where’s that boy of mine?”

  Frostily, she said, “Your son, my Lord, is not my responsibility.”

  “Well, you’re supposed to be a damn wizard, you should know. Nanciormis...” He swung around in time to see the tall commander step easily up onto the dais. “You’re supposed to have him for sword practice now.”

  Nanciormis shrugged. “I presumed other duties called him, for he did not come.”

  Balked of that prey, Osgard looked around for other and lighted on his daughter Tazey, who was consuming the last of her bread and posset with the swift care of one who proposes to escape unnoticed. “Where’s your brother?” the King demanded, and Tazey, who had just taken a bite of bread, looked up at him, startled. “Hiding again, I daresay—in that damned library, most like. Send that...” He looked around again, and his eye lighted on Anshebbeth, down at Kaletha’s table. Anshebbeth quailed visibly, and her thin hand went to her throat as he roared, “Why the hell aren’t you up here with my daughter where you belong, woman? I don’t keep you in my household to gossip with your girlfriends.”

  Tazey rose quickly. “I’ll find Jeryn, Father.”

  “You’ll sit down, girl. ’Shebbeth’s your governess, and her duty is to keep beside you, not to go wandering off. Now go fetch him, woman!”

  For one instant Anshebbeth sat rigid, her lips flattened into a thin line of anger and humiliation; then she got quickly to her feet and disappeared through a narrow door into the turret stair. She wasn’t out of earshot when Osgard added to Sun Wolf, “Twitter-witted old virgin’s enough to give any man the fidgets.”

  Starhawk buttered another hunk of bread as Kaletha came back to her, her blue eyes calm and contemptuous. “The man is a lout,” the Witch of Wenshar said, “and is raising his son to be a lout as well. I had hoped that, along with weaponry, Nanciormis could teach him graciousness and polish, but I see he’s taken the first opportunity to put a stop to that.” She seated herself in a swish of heavy black skirts. On the bench at Starhawk’s side again she said, “I hope you’ll forgive my speaking honestly, but I scarcely find it likely that our future King will learn anything from that barbarian save the breaking of heads.”

  Starhawk shrugged. “Your opinion of the Chief has nothing to do with me.”

  “It’s obvious that a man like that seeks out teaching in the ways of power simply to aid him in the killing of other men. The rest he disregards. He understands nothing about purity, nothing about the powers of the mind, from which all magic springs.”

  Starhawk dipped her bread in her coffee and took a soggy bite, far more amused than indignant. “And I’m sure you’ll forgive my honest speaking when I say that you have a rather short acquaintance on which to judge him in such detail.”

  “I have eyes,” Kaletha returned bitterly. In her glance, quickly averted, Starhawk read the contempt for Sun Wolf for having a mistress and at herself for being one. Curious, she leaned her bony elbow among the half-cleared breakfast dishes and waited. On the dais, Osgard was breathing stertorously; Sun Wolf, his massive, gold-furred arms folded, wore a closed expression of guarded annoyance. After a moment, Kaletha’s stiff back relaxed. She turned back to the Hawk.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, the words sticking in her throat. “I’ve judged you, and I shouldn’t have. Among people like yourselves, fornication is a matter of course, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, thanks!” Starhawk grinned, more amused than offended at the assumption of complete promiscuity—and indeed, she thought to herself, there was nothing to indicate to Kaletha that Sun Wolf hadn’t lost his eye in a pothouse difference of opinion over some woman’s favors, instead of a duel to the death with the greatest wizard in the world.

  “About time,” Osgard grunted, on the dais, as Anshebbeth came flustering back through the narrow door, which led to an inside stair. “Captain Sun Wolf—my son, Jeryn. Stand up straight, damn you, boy.”

  If Tazey, seated in apprehensive silence at the High Table behind them, was clearly her father’s daughter, with the King’s height, his athletic grace, his streaky blond hair, and absinthe-green eyes, then Jeryn was just as clearly a shirdar woman’s child. He had the thin, hawklike features, though his unwashed, black curls were cut short and his olive skin was paste-pale from staying indoors. At this distance, Starhawk couldn’t see the color of his eyes, for they were downcast, sullen, and shifty, guarding secrets and resentments under puffy lids. He dressed in the formal clothes of court, short trunks and hose, which bagged around his skinny knees; he wore them without pride and looked shabby and unkempt, an orphan who has dressed himself from a prince’s ragbag.

  “What do you think, Captain?” Osgard’s tone had turned bullying. “You figure you can do anything with this boy?”

  Jeryn said nothing, just held himself braced in a way that spoke worlds about the kind of treatment he expected from his father. And it was hardly, Starhawk thought impersonally, a fair question. There were enough people left in the Hall that Sun Wolf’s refusal would be widely interpreted as an admission that he couldn’t make a warrior of the boy, either through his own fault or through Jeryn’s. Osgard had undoubtedly meant the scene to hinge on Sun Wolf’s pride in his ability to teach. Though the Hawk knew this would not have applied, she also knew that putting Sun Wolf to the choice now, in public, would work because he would not openly reject the boy.

  After a long moment, Sun Wolf said, “I said I’d have to talk to my partner.”

  It was a way out, but Osgard wasn’t about to give it to him. “Well, hell,” he said genially, “there’s no trouble about that, is there?” He turned, and held out his hand to Starhawk. “You got no objections to a post in the guards, have you, Warlady? A silver eagle every fortnight, board and bed? Pardle Sho may not have the fancies you’ll find north of the mountains, but there’s money aplenty here and places to spend it, if you’re not too finicky in your tastes. It may not pay like the mines do, but there’s more honor to it and less labor. How can you say no to that?”

  Sun Wolf’s eye had the angry smolder of a man who has been gotten around in a way that he could not fight without looking like a boor. Starhawk, aware that Sun Wolf had no objections to looking like a boor and was on the verge of making an issue of it, rose, hooked her hands into her sword belt, and said casually, “I can’t say no till I’ve tried it for a week.”

  It was something the Wolf had taught her—when in doubt, play for time.

  In a week, she reasoned, anything could happen
.

  And, in point of fact, it did.

  Starhawk wasn’t sure just what woke her. A dream, she thought—a dream of three women in a candlelit room, their shadows moving over the painted walls, giving the grotesque images there a terrible life of their own. She could not hear their words, but they sat close together around the candles, combing their hair and whispering. The room had no windows, but somehow Starhawk knew that it was late at night. The scene was an ordinary enough one, yet something about it—the way the shadows flickered over those frescoes whose designs and motives she could not quite make out, the way the candlelight glowed in the dark, liquid eyes—frightened her. She had the feeling of being a child, listening to an adult discussion of smiling hate, a sense of something hideously wrong whose form and nature she could not understand. Though the wavering light penetrated to all corners of the little bedchamber, with its curtained bed and its delicate, jointed shirdar furnishings—though that nervous illumination showed nothing but the three women, with their long black hair and robes of white gauze—she knew they were not there alone.

  She woke up sweating, knowing there was something with her in the room.

  The moon outside was full. By the angle of the bars of silken light streaming in through the window, she knew it was late in the night. A band of it lay across the bed, palpable as a gauze scarf; she felt that, had she dared move, she could reach across and pluck it up. Beside her, the bed was empty. Sun Wolf would still be with Nanciormis and the King, nursing his beer and telling war lies. She herself had been less interested in getting to know them than she was in going alert on morning duty.

  She did not move, but, from where she lay, she could see almost the whole room under the brilliance of the inpouring desert moonlight.

  It was empty.

  There was something there.

  Her eyes touched every black pocket of shadow, every angle of that ghostly radiance, from the spread of the cracks of the floor—like an arcane pattern of unreadable runes—to the hard spark of the buckles on her doublet and jacket, which lay thrown over the room’s single chair. The night cold was icy on her face, the smell of the dry mountains filled her nostrils with a clarity too vivid for dreaming.