Comet Fall (Wine of the Gods) (12 page)

Except that they knew her.

She got up and moved to the mirror. Her big green eyes looked back. They'd been a muddy hazel two years ago. And squinty. Mother hadn't even noticed the slow change. She'd lightened her hair back to her childhood blonde. If she waited until they all left. If she slowly did more changes. If she . . .

She'd need money. Well
, some of the soldiers who came into the village  offered money, high time someone took them up on it. She'd leave her hair light until she left, then darken it . . . use some dye and then make it grow in the same color . . . She smiled at the mirror. "Oh yes. By the time I catch up with that little eunuch, he'll never recognize me."

She need to figure out how and where to find men with money, travelers tended to use the Old Road now . . . and it was just a half day away, she could circle the Fort, go a
ways up the mountain . . .

Footsteps approached
her door and she hastily sat down on the floor and closed her eyes.

"How are you doing, dear?"

"Much better, Mother. Do you think I should go up to the hot springs to meditate and fast?"
Har har
.

They fell for it, of course. After all, what worse trouble could she get into?

It only took an hour to catch an officer traveling alone. And not a lot of fun, either. She hadn't even needed to use her wine. He'd just hopped off his horse, dropped his pants and taken her, and ridden off. He tossed a couple of coppers her way. Pence. Son-of-goat had better not let her catch him again. She was sure she could do something nasty with this channeling trick.

She stared at the old man walking up the road. Ordinarily she would have ignored him, but her teachers kept telling her to experiment . . .

She pretended she hadn't seen him, and sat down to dig into her backpack. She pulled out the wine, and a glass.

"Now that's a sight to see." The creaky old voice said. "Pretty girl and a bottle of wine. Pity I'm too old to take advantage of the girl." He leered through brown teeth.

Yuck!
She pulled the cork and filled the glass. Took a sip.
Yow! That spell!

"Well, have a glass of wine with me," Tromp forced herself to smile. "And maybe you'll change your mind." She winked and held out the glass.

He cackled, and dropped his pack. Tossed back the wine like it was a shot of whiskey. His eyes widened, and he looked at her. His expression hungry.

Sh
e dropped her eyes demurely and slipped off her cape.

At that point she lost control of the proceedings.

***

"Well, that was fun,
I like it rough and . . ." she wrinkled her brow. "Damn it, I didn't say a thing about money, did I?"

She got to her feet and grabbed some leaves to wipe herself with.
Ouch, ouch . . . that was even better than Havi. Weird, how the pain suddenly flipped into pleasure.
"You'd better at least have some money, eh?" She looked around for her clothes and dressed quickly. "Well?"

No answer. She leaned over him, then recoiled. He was dead.

"I killed him," she clapped her hands over her mouth and looked around hastily. The Old Road was empty.

She grabbed the old man's pack, and then her own and took them deeper into the forest. Then she grabbed his clothes and pulled the body a little away and definitely out of sight.

What was she to do?

"Bury him and shut up," she muttered. She reached for power, and shakily gathered enough to peel back the
old pine needles and some dirt of the forest floor and hold it long enough to roll him into the shallow dip. Well, he wasn't very buried, but better than nothing.

Then she searched his pack.

It was not at all what she expected. It was orderly and neat. With lots of note books, most written in, a few empty. Money? It was everywhere. Two little sacks with common coinage, then gold and silver wafers in hidden pockets all over the pack. No wonder it was so heavy. And last, she pulled out a leather case that had been sewn into the leather bottom of the pack. Wax. A brass seal. She stared at the symbol blankly. Some sort of strange horse with a horn, rearing up. "Who is this guy. Was. Some fancy pants accountant?" She frowned as an old memory surfaced. A uni-horn. No, corn. The Auld Wulf had called it a unicorn and the men who attacked them years ago had been from another World. "He was a spy." She couldn't read the printing around the edge, it was all backwards. She shoved it back into the case, and put the case back where it was hidden. Where could she hide all this money? If someone noticed the smell, they might dig up the body. Her eyes slid over to that slight hump in the pine needles. It stirred a little, and she leaped away in terror.

It was coming for her!

She snarled and mentally slapped herself. "He's not
a monster, he's just not actually dead. But I'll bet he's pissed." She was half relieved, and half . . .
He's a spy.
"If he's a spy, I can keep this. Yeah, he's a bad guy." She hefted the pack and staggered uphill. Then she reached back and pulled away the ground and the pine needles, shoved—the body thumped down with a groan, and she fled. She knew the perfect spot to hide the loot. There was a little fumarole on the side of the mountain . . .

13
70 Late Fall

Ash

Rustle brought the wagon back home with the first c
old weather and set herself to study the hot springs.

The little fumarole by
the house that they called the teakettle was clear and easy to recognize, and the Witches' hot springs likewise. So. She needed the spell.

"Dad, I need something from you."

"Yes, sweetie, what may I fetch my lovely daughter?"

"I would like to see your
traveling spell," she told him.

"Rustle, wizards
travel. Witches . . . your mother does the power part, just like when we build."

She just waited.

He crossed his arms and frowned. "Am I going to regret this?" But he tapped his forehead and mimed opening a box.

And there it was, a glittering construct that connected one
recognized location to another. It had elements of speed and direction, orientation, momentum changes, power gain and bleed all in an intricate cascade, carefully controlled.

"Thank you, Dad." She retreated to consider it, and reconstruct it, bit by bit.

Nil arrived the next afternoon. "Hey Rustle. You will be careful if you play around with that, won't you?"

"I will," she
checked automatically for Xen—crawling away from the house with Never pacing after him—then brought out her cascade to show him.

Nil
caught his breath. "If I could get your father to analyze and rebuild spells like that . . . " He brought out his own and they went over them link by link. "Likely dump you on your head, rotating that direction."

"Oops!"

Xen giggled behind her. "Oops!"

Never
scooped the boy up and retreated a bit. Sneaking looks back at them every few minutes.

"So what you need now, is
recognized points," Nil told Rustle.

She brought out
her mental concepts of the teakettle and the witches' hot springs. The mountain.

"Right. I'd recommend against trying to go as far as
Mt. Frost until you've had a lot of practice hopping between these the two hotsprings."

"Nil!" her mother hissed. "She's a witch, not a wizard. She can't
travel."

The Sheep Man snorted. "How much do you want to bet?"

Rustle stepped closer to the teakettle, let its physical presence fill her senses. Then she remembered the witches' hot springs, recognized their unique flavor and feel, and holding them both, opened the traveling spell and stepped forward. Into the hot pond. She tottered, and sat down with a splash.

"Rustle, what
are you doing here?" Answer was sitting up straight, and the other four Dark Crescents were there too. Frowning at her.

"Oh! Sorry, I didn't realize there was a meeting.
" She scrambled out of the water.

"
If
you lived in the village like a proper witch, you would know that we are talking about out how to train the younger witches in physical spells much earlier than usual, because of the comet in five years. Do not interrupt us. Do not spy on us. And do not bother coming for lessons. You've already missed so many you are behind in everything." The five old women turned their backs on her.

Rustl
e blinked back tears. Then walled off her emotions and filled her mind with both locations and opened the spell again. Stepped on the fumarole and burned her foot.

"Oww! Damn!
Okay, next lesson is how to keep a safe distance from dangerous recognition points while traveling."
And now I can cry without anyone wondering about it.

Nil chuckled wickedly. "Something to keep in mind, when you pick an exact point to travel too. Focus more carefully. And take the rest of the day off. You're about to have whopper of a headache."

Xen speed crawled over to climb on her and hug her. "Mum. Owwie! Damn!"

"Yeah." Rustle hobbled back to the porch
. She felt a lot more shaky and weak than a burned foot . . . oh. Right energy drain. She let her mother fuss over her, and gently take away the pain and speed the healing of the burn.
It doesn't hurt nearly as much as the rejection. The utter . . . they didn't even notice how I came and went.

Nil worked with her for the next week, not just on
traveling, but looking at her reconstruction of her father's goat spell, the human spell Nil had placed on the dragons, and the genetic transformation to a dragon she had constructed years ago. And her purple rabbit spell.

"Five years ago you were inventing things like this? Girl, you may source from Earth, but you really should attend some Wizard classes.
Now. Let me show you a spell of containment. Picture it as a box. It will keep your spells nice and tidy, and you can be sure that you are triggering only one at a time, and not accidentally also invoking something else that shares a lot of overlapping basics."

The boxes helped enormously in keeping things straight.

Then he examined what she'd done to Phantom and Havi and his half wizard friends. He went away thoughtfully, and two days later Aunt Question brought a very apprehensive Jek with her. At ten, Jek was both protective of his male parts and aggressively wanting to be a wizard like both of his parents and his grandfather. After some examination of Phantom, he apprehensively gave her permission to close the door on his puberty. She hugged him, remembering Havi at that age, and the agonizing teasing he'd gotten from both boys and girls. The sneers, contempt and pity of adults. "I hope this works. It is a whole lot better than the alternatives." She looked inside him, and saw the same small child at the stairs she'd seen with Phantom, and built the doorway and closed it. "There. All done," she told him. Much easier than the goat boys. She'd had to wrestle their inner teenagers back up the stairs they were halfway down, and
then
close and lock the door.

"That was . . . very interesting." Never was frowning. "Nothing I'd ever thought of."

Question shrugged, as Jek slipped away, no doubt to check the integrity of his parts. "You never needed anything like it. We've been arguing about this, or really, hiding from it, for
years,
literally. Lefty was beside himself when the Sheep Man brought it up, the last time he was here. Old Gods, I hope this works!" She glanced guiltily in Jek's direction. "And that you can reverse it."