Frostflower and Windbourne (Frostflower & Thorn)

by Phyllis Ann Karr

  “I served as acolyte in the Grove often enough for our father and always for my husband. Oh, yes, Rondasu, I know the ceremonies of the Truth Grove, if it should come to that, which I think we’ve determined it cannot. And I was the only one of us who dared touch the sorceress to find her token.”

  Rondasu paused. Shara was pressing his arm. He exchanged a glance with her, turned back to Eleva, and smiled. “Master Youngwise can witness that the more I try to persuade you to prudence, the harder your willfulness grows. Do you intend taking her back to your own farm, or judging her here?”

  “In that the offense was committed in our street, Reverence,” said Youngwise, “it was committed partly against the town.”

  Eleva nodded. “I’d meant to visit Crinkpetal again within a few days. I’ll finish this matter tonight and arrange my business with the flowerbreeder in the morning.”

  Shara spoke. “We’ll see that the town alcoves are clean to receive you tonight, then, sister, and light candles to the gods for your safety before we go. Which alcove do you prefer?”

  “The far southeastern one with the pear tree beside the window. Best not linger too long, and carry along a few lighted candles for your own safety, Shara. And you might wear copper belts.”

  “And you, Eleva,” said Rondasu. “Though any precaution may come too late, now. The gods preserve us all!”

  “The gods will preserve the most loyal first,” said Shara.

  Eaglesight grunted—it might have sounded irreverent, but at the same moment she stood up straight and touched fist to lips. “Whistlepoint, Splathandle, escort their Reverences, then return to barracks. I think I can handle this one as safely alone as with any four or five of you.”

  The gatewarriors saluted and followed the priest and priestess out. They seemed relieved—at getting away from the sorceress, or at being held blameless by their wallkeeper and townmaster?

  “I would like to hear that ballad in its entirety,” said Eleva.

  “That could best be done by purchasing it from the ballad singers, Lady,” said Youngwise. “I fear it’s neither my business nor my wallkeeper’s to remember ballads verse by verse.”

  “I might be able to whistle you the tune, Lady Reverence,” said Eaglesight, “with a jog to remind me which tune it was. I remember it was one of the common ones.”

  Eleva slapped the wall. “I’ve had music enough for one day. It’s the ballad’s story I want to hear.”

  “And I would prefer to hear the true tale, now we have its sorceress,” remarked the townmaster.

  “I’d like to hear both.” Eleva gave her lamp to Youngwise, bent, and fumbled with Frostflower’s chain. Her efforts resulted in a slight pinching of links around the flesh. “Cows’ breath!” said Eleva. “Wallkeeper, this is your equipment—you unhook her.”

  As Eaglesight crossed the chamber, almost dark now except for lamp and constant-wick, Eleva found another bench, drew it near Frostflower’s, and sat. Youngwise kindled a few wall-niche candles, placed the lamps on stands, and followed Eleva’s example. Eaglesight finished unhooking the chain-and-tube device, removed it completely from Frostflower’s wrists, then brought dried fruit and four cups of water from the stone cupboard. Last, she filled a bowl of water for Dowl, moved the lampstand into the circle of benches, and squatted between Youngwise and the sorceress.

  “Now,” said Eleva, “Frostflower, let us hear your story.”

  The sorceress hesitated, rubbing her wrists and transferring her weight to a more comfortable position on the bench. “Lady Reverence, I would prefer to be judged first and told my punishment.”

  Eleva chuckled. The townmaster glanced at her and chuckled likewise. Dowl looked at them and wagged his tail.

  “She’s spent an afternoon chained here,” said Youngwise, “and I call that punishment enough for crossing a yard and sitting on the pavement. Her punishment for angering priests and thus discontenting the gods—that I must put into your hands, Lady Reverence.”

  The priestess slapped her palms together. “I think it far from likely that the gods are angered by everything that angers his Reverence Rondasu and the pious Lady Shara. What punishment should I give to a sorceress who had the audacity to find our hymns beautiful for their music? Had I known of this at once when it happened, I would have made her sit outside the holy halls all afternoon and see whether that did not cure her of sharing what we hope to be the gods’ taste in music. As it is…I think I must be content to subject her tonight to the smell of burning incense—pine for stringency, followed by lavender for obliteration, then a cup of honey-wine for deep sleep, followed by a splashing with rose-water for renewed innocence—if a sorceron may ever be called innocent, of course. Well, Frostflower, will you submit to all that, or will you wither me and escape?”

  “Lady Reverence?” said Frostflower, caught between hope and bafflement. “Is this not incredibly mild?”

  “In my own opinion,” said Eleva, “it’s a rather complicated purification for a singular lack of offense, but I must keep you overnight and do something to you, or his Reverence Rondasu, if he musters the courage to touch you, will do worse.”

  “And you will exaggerate its stringency when you tell him of it? Lady Eleva, I feel as if I were a ball that you and his Reverence…and perhaps Master Youngwise also…were throwing about among yourselves, each hoping the other would drop me.”

  Eaglesight put back her head and laughed. “Child, take off your black robe and become somebody’s wisewoman—you might be a townmistress yourself by the time you’re as old as I am now!”

  Eleva frowned, but not as if displeased with anyone present. “And you feel like that with good cause, sorceress. Perhaps, if you had not pleased me by displeasing my brother, I would incline to greater harshness. Perhaps I am kind for no better reason than the wish to be unlike him. Have you guessed why we sit here so long? My sibs, I don’t doubt, are up there pretending to search for dust in the priestly alcoves in hopes of seeing us come up, and I’ve carelessly trapped myself. If they see me take you into the Truth Grove at once, with only Master Youngwise and his wallkeeper for acolytes, they’ll have fuel for a charge of heresy, or at least ritual levity. If they see us go into the Grove alone, you and I, or even come into the alcove-hall in friendly manner, they’ll have fuel to charge me as a sorceri-lover, or careless in my responsibilities. So we sit here to outwait them.”

  “But they know we must take one or another of these courses, even though they do not see it?” said Frostflower.

  Eleva shook her head. “No. If I keep you long enough, I’ll be able to…Sorceress, did your question show concern for me?”

  Frostflower gazed downward. “Lady, your dilemma touches my fate. Or at least my immediate comfort.”

  “Well. Five Roads has enough folk who can be consecreated as temporary acolytes—virgins, especially virginal warriors when they can be found—” (Eaglesight gave a kind of laughing bark and fed Dowl a prune when he thrust his nose into her hand.) “—parents of three children, grandparents of seven…and I need never say whom I chose of all these townsfolk. Rondasu cannot Grove me. Not without dragging me to Center-of-Everywhere. Give me enough time, secrecy, and shadow, and I can clothe such a scarecrow as to tell my brother to his face that I gave you whatever purification he chooses to imagine.”

  “Lady Reverence,” Frostflower said softly, “I cannot lie.”

  “Yes, yes,” Eleva replied, “we’ve heard that before. You must say it, of course—”

  “It is true, Lady. We can remain silent, unless…forced to speak; we can…twist the truth to a certain extent; but we may not lie.”

  “Gods!” said Eleva, annoyed. “Then remain silent. Do you think we make a practice of lying without good cause? As for being forced to speak, if Rondasu tried that, he’d keep on until you said what he wished. In any case, now y
ou’ve heard this much, my plans would be as damning as my actions.”

  “Eaglesight and I could play witnesses, if not acolytes,” Youngwise suggested. “With ruling priestess, first townmaster, and first wallkeeper all telling the same tale, who would believe a different one from the mouth of a sorceress?”

  Eleva nodded. “So, Frostflower, you will be our guest for a while. Now tell us your story while we outwait my sibs.”

  Frostflower drank half a cup of water but ate nothing. She told last summer’s events very simply, omitting much. She did not tell how Starwind was born, for that would be to confess to illegal sorcering; nor did she identify his mother with the swordswoman of the ballad. Fortunately, the ballad—at least the version she had heard—was vague enough on that point that she could say simply, “The babe was given to me by a mother who did not want him, but the priests could not believe this.”

  The townmaster and wallkeeper, having heard the ballad before, listened to Frostflower’s story with no perceptible change of attitude toward her. The priestess, however, trembled slightly and moved farther from the sorceress.

  “So you can blast your enemies,” said Eleva. “With age, with lightning, or with…”

  “We can, Lady. But we prefer not to. It costs us a very great price. I did not guide that bolt to the priest.”

  “And who were they?” asked Youngwise. “The priests, the warriors, the merchant—who were they all, eh?”

  “It is not always pleasant to be known as a person in a ballad,” the sorceress replied. “Without their own assurances otherwise, I must assume that if they have not already revealed themselves, they prefer not to be known.”

  Eleva moved back to her old position on the bench. “We’ll respect that. It argues well for your predisposal to keep our secret here. Wallkeeper, can you go up and see whether his Reverence and his priestesses have gone yet?”

  Eaglesight saluted, gave Dowl a last pat, and left.

  “If they are still watching, Lady Eleva,” said Youngwise, “I suggest we remove the sorceress to one of the upper rooms in this building and seek our own houses. It grows late, and dried apricots and prunes make a poor supper after a day of snatching cold capon and wine between ceremonies. And we all need rest.”

  “Do you have an upper room more strongly enclosed than the one in which you kept the sorcerer last winter?” Eleva bit into an apricot.

  The townmaster took a drink of water before replying. “How will you guard her, Lady Reverence? Will you stay awake all night?”

  “I can put a barrier of incantations and incense around her alcove, Townmaster.”

  There had been no open mockery in his tone, nor any open sarcasm in hers. Nevertheless, their words seemed to crystallize what Frostflower had already sensed: despite their alliance against Rondasu, all was not perfect harmony and trust between townmaster and ruling priestess. Was there also a subtle disharmony between Youngwise and Eaglesight? And were these serious, or mere evidences of the fact that no two persons could ever share exactly the same opinions on all points—the fact that kept every person separate and alone even with the closest friends and most beloved siblings?

  The bad feeling between Youngwise and Rondasu needed no particular explanation; such feeling was widespread between those townmasters who hoped to see their domains as independent as possible of priestly influence and those priests who demanded to exercise power in the neighboring towns as well as in their own farms. Sorceri had watched such developments through the generations, discussing them thoroughly and keeping careful records, to the best of their observations. As a group, they had much the same motive for studying the history and conditions of the other Tanglelands folk as Frostflower had for studying the currents and power-plays of this small area: self-preservation.

  The bad feeling between Eleva, Rondasu, and Shara was more baffling. Frostflower was aware that the opposite of friendship sometimes existed among sibs, but her only personal experience was of deep mutual love and trust with her brother Puffball—still, in many ways, her closest confidant. Also, a deep sense of the loss of her other sibs still occasionally twitched her mind, accompanied by the certitude that, whenever she should visit Mildrock Retreat, her emotion and Cloudbird’s would immediately flow into the friendship of siblings even though they had been raised so far apart.

  The alliance between Eleva and Youngwise was atypical of what Frostflower’s people had observed of farmers and townmasters. Eleva’s motives might be connected with her effort to retain rule of her farm. Rondasu seemed to be using three weapons: his sister’s alleged heresy, her inexperience and youth (though he could not be more than a few years her senior), and her sex. Among priests, according to their curious attitude toward gender, males generally held rule, females only when they had been widowed while their oldest sons were still children, or when a priest produced only daughters, which was rare because most priests took more than one wife. (A very few ruling priestesses had taken two husbands at once, but this was rare indeed.) Such a situation could only rise from a theory that men were better fitted to rule, as women were better fitted to fight—Thorn said men never became warriors because they were too important to risk their lives, but Frostflower thought the ancient reasoning must have been that women were better suited to battle.

  Sorceri neither fought nor wielded rule in the same way farmers’ folk wielded it, and the only distinction they made between a sorcerer’s studies and work and those of a sorceress were that, when two sorceri did marry, the woman bore the children and was usually more successful in suckling them. So her own experience hindered Frostflower’s efforts to understand the situation here. But perhaps Rondasu was insisting on his superior qualifications for rule as a male, and Eleva was attempting to shore up her power by attaching the nearest male ruler as her ally, even though he was a townmaster, even though their closeness might throw more doubt on her orthodoxy.

  But townmasters shared priestly theories of sex and rule. Why, then, should Youngwise ally himself with Eleva? Congeniality of character? Or did he fear that if the two large farms to the north were combined, the single ruling priest would gain enough power to threaten some of the town’s independence, and was he therefore allying himself with the ruler who seemed to him the weaker? Or did Youngwise and Eleva share some secret?

  Eleva might have poisoned her husband as the only way she could gain rule of his farm, or Rondasu might have poisoned him as a step toward joining the farms. Youngwise might have learned this or guessed it, and allied himself with Eleva either because he disliked Rondasu as a murderer or because he was able to hold Eleva to his will with his knowledge as with a chain. Perhaps he had even aided one or the other of them in the poisoning.

  As far as Thorn knew, the command to find a sorceron as blame-catch had come from Deveron’s Farm, presumably from Eleva, on the night of Deveron’s death. Rondasu, unless he had been visiting his sister and her husband at the time, would have had no part in commanding the original search. Had Eleva used the ever-convenient excuse of sorcerous evil to cover her own guilt, or had she sincerely believed a sorceron was responsible? If the latter, what had happened in the intervening days and nights to change her opinion?…If it was changed. If her seeming kindness was not trickery or, at best, a refusal to hold all sorceri responsible without examination for the crime that one alone had committed.

  Or might Rondasu have arranged Deveron’s poisoning through another? Might he have conspired with the townmaster, and might Eleva be holding Youngwise with her knowledge of his guilt, rather than the other way around? Yet how could that be, since Youngwise had definitely been in his own house in Five Roads that night? An especially slow-acting poison? Or might the silent, silvery-haired Intassa have administered it? Had she not been Deveron’s second wife, and was she not now already Rondasu’s first? Might Intassa have been married to Deveron without caring for him? Might she have com
e to hate him, or might she have felt so indifferent to him that his life seemed less to her than a place as another farmer’s first wife?

  But Intassa had seemed hardly aware of her own dignity, overshadowed by her husband’s sister—indeed, if they had not called the tall, golden-haired priestess “sister,” and if there had not been a certain facial resemblance, a stranger might have mistaken Shara for Rondasu’s wife and Intassa for the unwed sister. Intassa might be as innocent and unoffending as she appeared, or she might be weighed down by guilt.

  Eaglesight returned at last. “They took their time, Master and Lady. They even saw to supper for you. The tables are laden and waiting in the alcoves. But they’re gone now. They should be passing the north holy hall by the time we get outside.” Eaglesight put away the remaining water and dried fruit. “The door’s hung on the alcove for the sorceress. Will you want a few warriors to guard it? I’d recommend myself, Splathandle, Firethrust, and Cleanedge.”

  “No one,” the priestess replied.

  “You’ll spend the night alone in the same house with a sorceress, no one to guard her even while you sleep?” Youngwise clucked. “Lady Reverence Eleva, you are brave.”

  “If she’s gently inclined as she seems,” said Eleva, “I can keep her very well alone. If she’s malicious after all, she’s more likely to kill your warriors or corrupt them as that other sorceron did Thorn than they are to control her. I am merely realistic and practical.”

  “Well, and is that not the base of bravery?” said the townmaster.

  Eaglesight made no comment except to grunt and give the copper chain-and-tube device a rattle, as if to ask whether the priestess wanted it back on Frostflower. Eleva paid no attention.

  Youngwise led the way up, Eleva following, Frostflower coming next, with Dowl beside or trailing her as the passage allowed, and Eaglesight behind. All but the sorceress and the dog carried lamps. They emerged at a side door, probably the same by which the wallkeeper had brought the sorceress down that morning, though in the lamplight it was difficult to be sure. Once outside, Youngwise bade them goodnight and turned toward his own dwelling, while Eaglesight escorted Eleva and Frostflower across the open yard to the priestly lodging.