Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses) (22 page)

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Authors: Sharon Shinn

BOOK: Mystic and Rider (Twelve Houses)
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He had just lifted his hand to signal a halt when Cammon spoke up, his voice shaky and breathless. “What’s that? To the left? Is that a building?”
Tayse strained his eyes but could make out nothing except the white haze of snow and the occasional desperate limb of a buried tree, waving as if to call for help. “I can’t see anything,” he said. The others murmured their agreement.
“There is,” Cammon said stubbornly. “It’s a building. I can tell it’s there.”
Senneth had turned to look at him. “Are there people in it?” she asked gently. “I didn’t think you could sense
things.
”
He shook his head. “I don’t—no, I don’t think so. Maybe there used to be people there.” He glanced around the group, his eyes lingering on Tayse’s frown. “You don’t believe me.”
Tayse transferred his gaze to Senneth, willing her to make the call. This was her recruit; she must judge how far to trust him. She met his eyes thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.
“Let’s see,” she said. “Can you lead us there?”
Not really, no, because of the rope, but his soft, uncertain voice gave Tayse directions. Straight left—no, a little to the right of that—yes, past these two trees—even farther—right over that hill—
And there, the Mother be damned, stood a small, dilapidated building of stone and wood. The door was rotted half through, but the walls and roof were mostly intact, and the windows had been boarded up long ago. They spurred their horses forward, calling out phrases of encouragement to each other, words of praise to Cammon. It was still something of a fight to get the horses through the last few snowdrifts to the broken door, but here they were, shelter at hand at last.
Tayse pulled up hard on the reins and unknotted the rope around his waist. “Justin,” he said, but Justin had already freed himself and was on the ground, dagger out, hand on the door.
“What do you—” Kirra started, but Tayse interrupted.
“No telling who or what might be in there,” he said. “The two of us are going in first. Don’t follow until I call you.”
She rolled her eyes but settled back in her saddle. The others did not seem disposed to protest. He pulled his own weapon, then nodded at Justin, and the two of them burst simultaneously through the door.
They were instantly in a single dim room, maybe twenty feet by thirty, that smelled of disuse and dust and cold snow. It was hard to see anything in the overcast light through shuttered windows, but there seemed to be nothing in here but afternoon shadows and a few odd pieces of furniture. Nonetheless, Tayse jerked his head at Justin. He went one direction, the younger Rider went the other, feeling their way around the circumference of the room. The wall felt like broken plaster beneath his gloved fingers. The floor had once been very fine, planed wood with perfectly mortised joints. Here there was an overturned chair, ornately carved and large enough to serve as a throne. Against this wall, a cabinet with one door hanging open. Tayse glanced inside just to make sure nothing dangerous lurked behind the door. He thought he heard a mouse squealing, but nothing more menacing appeared.
“Empty,” Justin said, meeting him in the middle of the room along the far wall. “What a stroke of luck to find this place.”
Tayse grunted. “Luck or magic,” he said. “We seem to be having the good kind and the bad kind of both.”
He called to the others, and they tumbled in, bringing snow and shadows with them. Within minutes, someone had lighted torches, and they could see what they were doing as they tried to assess their find. Justin took charge of the horses and herded them all toward the back of the room, where they might or might not stay bunched up for the evening. Cammon and Kirra and Donnal strolled around the perimeter of the room, looking at hieroglyphics on the walls that were revealed by the influx of firelight.
Senneth stood by the door, waiting, until the raelynx sauntered in.
Tayse watched for a moment, his breath caught; he had actually, during the battle with the snow, forgotten about the raelynx for the afternoon. The creature looked like wildness personified, like death and beauty and remorselessness in one lithe package. It sank to its haunches just inside the door and regarded the lot of them with a close and personal attention.
Tayse made his way cautiously to Senneth’s side. “Is it safe to bring that animal in with us?” he asked in a low voice. Not low enough, apparently. The raelynx turned its dark eyes his way and considered him as if for his tastiness.
“Safe as it was having him slink beside us all morning,” she said, almost smiling, “and sleep not far from us last night. He is no more dangerous now than then.”
“Not entirely comforting,” he said. “But I trust you to know the limits of your magic.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad there is something about me you trust.”
He tilted his head back. She was a tall woman, and it pleased him that he could still look down at her from a somewhat more lofty height. “And your headache?” he asked.
“Completely gone, thank you,” she said. “I am feeling quite good, actually.”
Justin crossed the room to join them, giving the raelynx one quick, disapproving glance. “I don’t know if I can find any dry wood,” he said. “But we’re going to have to try a fire.”
Senneth turned her smile on him. “Justin,” she said in a mocking voice, “haven’t you paid attention to
anything
that’s happened since we’ve been on the road together?”
And, while Tayse watched her and Justin frowned at her, she stepped to the middle of the room and seemed to stop and consider. She didn’t raise her hands in any kind of dramatic gesture, or move her lips to speak an incantation, and the expression on her face was simply thoughtful. If this was magic, it came without visible effort. But rapidly and thoroughly, the room temperature began to rise. In a few moments, they did not merely cease to be cold; they started to feel truly, blissfully warm.
Tayse reached up to unbutton his coat. “Well,” he said to Justin, “I guess we don’t need a fire.”
“What if we want to cook a meal or boil a pot of water?” Justin grumbled. Tayse flicked him a look that said, clear as words,
Don’t be ungrateful.
Senneth, apparently, had overheard Justin. “Fire you shall have, then, since you are set on fire.” She glanced around, picked her spot, and knelt on the dusty wood floor. More as a visual marker than as a source of fuel, Tayse thought, she swept a few twigs and dried leaves into a small pile and touched them with her finger. Instantly, a bright gold flame sprang to life and danced through the gathered debris. “Cook over it, warm your fingers, merely watch it burn,” she said, coming to her feet. “It will last all night.”
Justin merely scowled, since it wasn’t in him to be gracious. Tayse was grinning, but before he had a chance to say anything, Kirra called out.
“Sen. Come look at this.” She and the others were still standing against one of the side walls, examining marks left in the plaster.
“What is it?” Senneth asked.
“I don’t have any idea.”
Tayse joined Senneth as she crossed the room, and together the five of them inspected what was left of the pictures on the wall. The circles and lines meant nothing to Tayse, and he could not make out any kind of pattern in the colors, faint but still discernible in the crumbling plaster. But he could tell they meant something to Senneth. She put her fingers out almost reverently to trace a circular design that rose over a low horizon of darker figures.
“Ah,” she said, and then stepped back and glanced around at the rest of the small hall, as if looking for confirmation.
“What?” Kirra demanded. “What is it?”
Senneth was nodding, and she looked strangely pleased. “I think what we’ve stumbled on is an old, old temple dedicated to the Bright Mother,” she said.
“The Bright Mother?” Cammon repeated.
“The sun goddess,” Senneth explained. “No one talks about her—or the other gods—very much these days, but a long time ago, she was worshiped much more fervently than the Pale Mother is today. Well, perhaps that’s not entirely true. In Brassenthwaite and Tilt and Kianlever, you can still find some of the Bright Mother’s shrines. I’m not sure if the religion ever caught on this far south.” She touched the wall again, still looking happy. “Though apparently there were a few believers, even in the southern Houses.”
“There’s a temple not far from my father’s house,” Kirra said. “I’ve been there a few times because—” She made a face. “Because my father, of course, believes everyone should have
every
experience available to him. But it’s in much better shape than this.”
“Yes—well, as I said, the religion fell out of a favor a long time ago,” Senneth said. “Now, those who worship at all worship the Pale Mother, the moon goddess. They’ve forgotten all the other gods entirely.”
“You haven’t,” Justin said. He had drifted over casually, as if pretending he wasn’t really interested. “You swear by the Bright Mother all the time.”
She gave him a quick smile. “I do. My grandmother was from Kianlever. She loved the sun goddess and taught me to honor her.” She tugged her circular gold pendant out from under the collar of her shirt. “See that? The filigree all around the disk? It’s a sun charm. The Bright Mother protects me wherever I go.”
“Well, she’s certainly found a way to protect us all tonight,” Tayse said practically. He didn’t have much more patience with gods than he did with mystics. “We need to eat before we all drop from exhaustion.”
They melted snow over Senneth’s bewitched fire and made hot tea, which they sipped while they cooked their dinner. Something about the difficult travel or the unexpected refuge or the very presence of the snow itself had given them all a strange shift of mood; the entire meal had a festival air. The women laughed—Kirra flirted—taciturn Donnal made jokes—even Justin was smiling. Tayse himself felt curiously relaxed and amused, ever so slightly intoxicated with the sense of camaraderie. So he had felt sometimes after a hard campaign with trusted Riders. But only one of his companions tonight was a Rider, and the rest he did not trust.
He stayed mostly silent as, one by one, the others began telling stories around the fey and joyous fire.
“My dad was a wanderer,” Donnal said. Tayse had missed the question, but he assumed someone had asked one. “He didn’t own a thing in the world except two shirts and two pairs of trousers. He spent one summer working for my uncle—tenant farmer on the Danalustrous lands, a man who was never going to own more than a few changes of clothing himself. When he left, my mother was pregnant. I was her third child. None of the men in her life stayed longer than a few months.”
He paused to sip at his tea. Donnal didn’t talk much, but it was clear, when he felt like it, he could transform himself into a storyteller.
“I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t change shapes,” Donnal continued. “I must have done it in the cradle—imagine that, the first time you’ve come in to check on the sleeping baby, and you find a cat or a rabbit or a bird in the crib. By the time I was old enough to know what a strange skill it was, the rest of my family had grown quite comfortable with my ability. My uncle even used to send me out sometimes as a mole to check the water levels under the soil—or as a hawk to see if it was safe to go poaching off Danalustrous land.”
He smiled at Kirra, who shook her head and smiled back. “But I didn’t think about it much,” he said. “What it meant or what I might do with such a skill. It just was. It was part of my life. Till the day the young woman came riding up to my uncle’s house and demanded I be sent outside so she could see me.
“Well, that caused quite a commotion, as you might imagine. My mother and I were inside, peering out the dirty windows, wondering if I was about to be taken into custody or burned for a mystic. Not that such things happened on Danalustrous land, mind you, but my father wasn’t the only traveler who had happened upon my uncle’s farm. We knew stories of the way the rest of the world was run. It was not always an acceptable thing to have magical powers.
“My uncle stood out front, arguing with the woman—who was clearly an aristocrat, with her fine clothes and her haughty way of speaking. My mother and brothers and cousins and I cowered inside, trying to decide if I should change to a mouse right then and disappear out the back and never return to my uncle’s farm. But we finally decided that such a cowardly action might bring even more harm to my family, if harm was to come. So I stood up bravely and tugged my shirt down and went out the front door to stand at my uncle’s side.”
Donnal paused to take another swallow. Tayse was irritated to find himself interested in the story, all because of the man’s easy voice and calculated pauses. “I was surprised to find, when I was actually face-to-face with our noble caller, that she was only a year or two older than I was—but still just as haughty as she’d seemed from inside. ‘I’m the one who can change himself to animals, ’ I said to her. ‘Take me, then, and let my family be.’
“Well, she slid off her horse and put her hands on her hips, and she said, ‘How do I know you’re telling me the truth? Change yourself into something. Let’s see you turn yourself into a dog.’ I had been pretty afraid when she first rode up, but that made me mad, so to scare her I turned into a wolf. Big one, too, with a black face and evil eyes. She jumped back, and the guards with her raised their crossbows. I probably came as close to being killed at that moment as I ever have in my life. Well, until I joined this lot,” he added, and a soft laugh went around the circle of listeners.

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