The Wind-Witch (10 page)

Thunder jarred the ground under her feet as Druyan dashed across the yard, head ducked out of the wind and the fat drops it was slinging. Safe in the doorway, she halted, letting the cool wind brush her hot face before she pulled the portal closed after her. Rain or no, it was refreshing, a delicious feeling after the long run of stifling days and ovenish nights. The storm was fiercely welcome. Enna was abed, almost pain-free thanks to ale and cider, and her mistress felt free to roam her own farm, to enjoy the cool wind and get her feet wet if she chose.

She’d just been to the orchard—the wool-wrapped ball had tumbled from the tree fork and was nowhere to be found. The basket had blown away from the little clump of barley plants, and she had found it only when it bumped h er ankles, like a friendly cat.

After the rush of the wind, the barn’s stillness was striking—the thunder was muffled by the roof and the haymow overhead. Druyan could hear horses munching hay , the milch cow stamping at a fly. Chickens fussed sleepily from their roosts among the roof beams above

. Druyan lit the lantem that hung by the door and walked with it to the box stalls. Mostly she saw the bay and chestnut rumps of drowsy horses, but Valadan left his hay and came to gaze and blow a soft greeting at her. She fed him an early apple, letting his lips brush her palm, knowing her fingers safe from teeth if not from tickling.

He has waked
.

Druyan peered through the bars into the next box, while Valadan licked her now-empty palm, his whiskers teasing her skin again. She could see the man lying much as she’d left him on the bed of hay. “Are you sure?” she whispered. “I brought some food—”

There came a rustling from the pallet. Slight—he might only have turned his head. She hadn’t seen movement. It might as easily have been a mouse, running through the bedding. Druyan hesitated, then lifted the bar and went in careful to leave the door standing wide, and Valadan’s, as well. That way she had both an escape route and a rescuer ready to hand. She did not expect she would need either.

“Are you awake?” Druyan knelt and began to open her bundle, folding the napkin back from about a wooden bowl full of scraps of chicken and bread soaked in gravy. Straw whispered once again—the prisoner had turned his head toward her. His eyes were open.

The last thing Kellis expected to wake to was amber lamplight and the comforting smell of food. He blinked slowly, his eyelids heavy as if they had been weighted with coins for his burial. He found himself in a little room, a most curious room, and he was lying on the floor. He had no idea why. After a while he recognized the snort of a horse feeding close by and decided that the inexplicable thing he could see partway up one wall must be a manger. He was in a stall, then, lying on soft straw or hay rather than the damp earth of the cellar, with what looked like a vast space above him—the lamplight did not pierce it well, but he could see that there was room for him to stand without bumping his head against the roof.

He could remember—assuming he hadn’t dreamed it—that the barley was all cut, every stem of it in every field. Therefore, thereby, he was free, though that didn’t explain why he was in what must be a barn or byre.

Free—and crippled, thanks to the cold iron sickle. Kellis did not have to glance at his hands to know that. He did not need the confirmation of his eyes, when every beat of his heart sent a throb of pain through his hands, lightning flashes into all ten of his fingers. The rest of him ached, from work and possibly from being dragged to wherever he was from wherever he had been, and even as he lay quite still his half-seen surroundings seemed to move gently to and fro, like weeds underwater. A fever sensation, probably, very like the aftermath of dream trance, unpleasant but not lasting. The hands could be another matter; there was no knowing.

Kellis was afraid to look, terrified of what he might see, so he watched the woman instead, as she fussed with the food she’d brought for him. He had no appetite for it, but as she moved the lamplight gleamed on her hair, and he could watch that, trying not to think of anything else save the play of gold on that red-gold. . .

It was hard to remember to be properly wary of the raider—he looked so afraid of
her
, and so ill on top of it. Druyan felt pity, whether dangerous or not. “I’ve brought you some supper, and some aloe for your hands,” she said. Wind lashed the barn wall, little cold rivers of air raised dust whorls inside, made the lantem light flare and waver before the gusts got smothered in her skirts. Druyan considered whether she’d need to feed the man. He hadn’t reached for the food, and she doubted he could grasp it, now that she got a better look at his hands.

He let her lift his head and give him a sip of water. “You fainted,” Druyan told him, though he hadn’t asked what had befallen him, or where he was. Perhaps he wasn’t well enough to question good fortune or to know he wasn’t back in the cellar and out of his head with fever. He didn’t look very well, and her fingers’ brief contact judged his sldn as too warm for the shift in the weather. Gone dry, too, which was fever, or too much work in the heat, or both together.

He couldn’t swallow well enough, lying flat, to quench his thirst. After a moment he struggled to hitch himself into a sitting position, and Druyan let him, offering the cup again when he could drink more easily. He shook his head weakly at the food, so she set it aside for the moment and turned to the cloths and salve she had brought.

She stroked aloe sap onto his appalling hands and wrapped them all round with clean rags to hold the healing juice in place longer. The treatment must have hurt him, but the man gave no sign beyond a single flinch when the sap first touched his darkened skin. The swelling was so bad, Druyan couldn’t feel his knucklebones, and she was glad when the bandages hid the worst of it from her sight. Some part of her dinner wasn’t lying easily in her stomach. She wished she knew healing charms as well as she did those for weather.

He had handled cold iron, and his hands had puffed up after, like a cow dying with the bloat. What did that mean? That question had brought Druyan out, into the night, as much as any love of the weather or concern for a sick man. What else
could
it mean, but what she suspected? Druyan offered more water, and he drank with his eyes shut, carefully‘not looking at her.

“What was your job, in the raiding?” she asked him when the cup was empty.

“I was the scout, Lady,” he confessed reluctantly, watching her warily now.

“Hard to scout a place you’ve never seen.” Druyan swallowed, then risked, “Does being a wizard help with that?”

There was real fear in his eyes, instantly. Panic, even, as if she’d shown him a weapon. He tried to scramble back from her and to stand as he did it. He collided with the wall before he’d gone ten inches and sat helpless on the pile of hay and sacking, his breath coming hard and fast, his swaddled hands fumbling to either side of him. “I’m no wizard,” Kellis said unconvincingly.

Druyan shook her head. “Of course not. What happened to your hands?”

“I’m not—” He seemed to think hard about that, as if his life depended on his answer. Maybe he thought it did. “I’m not used to the work,” he settled.

“Neither am I.” Druyan looked him straight in the eye, then lifted her two hands as evidence. “All I got was a broken blister and a few cuts from a fresh edge.”

“Lady, you said I could go when the harvest was in He spoke desperately, reminding her of their bargain, buying time to gather himself for another attempt at rising. His skin had gone the color of brown eggshells, the only blood in it around that nasty cut on his forehead. His eyes looked dark as stones, unfocused. “You said I’d be free.”

“That’s so.” Druyan cocked her head at the persistent drum of rain on the slate roof above the mow. “You might want to wait for daylight. The rain will_ probably have stopped by then. You might even want to wait till your hands heal. You’ve worked hard. I’ll feed you till you’re well enough to go. Seeing as how you aren’t a wizard,” she added.

“I should go now, Lady.”
Better for both af us
, his gray eyes suggested.

She couldn’t sanely dispute that. This was a stranger, come to steal and do murder-that was what she knew of him. Dangerous. If he was willing to go, that was surely a fine thing. It did away with a lot of problems. Anyone would agree with that—the storm must be warping her judgment, making her wild and foolish enough to suggest that he stay. She’d had too much cider, toasting to the barley maid.

Druyan numbly watched the man get his legs under hirn and struggle to his feet, watching him pressing a shoulder against the wall till he found his balance and could step away, cradling one hand with the other. She knelt frozen and watched him walk to the door. She’d never have wagered that he’d achieve three steps in a row, but he did. Over the partition, Valadan’s sparkling eyes likewise observed.

Thunder cracked just overhead. With every window close-shuttered to keep out the rain, there wasn’t the usual warning of a flash. Just the appalling noise, as if the sky li spt, the earth cracked. Druyan saw the man startle at the explosion of sound, miss his unsteady footing entirely, and try frantically to get his balance back. He couldn’t do itKellis went sprawling headlong, landing helplessly on his outflung hands. Druyan thought he screamed, but more thunder drowned lesser sounds and shook the rafters.

He didn’t try to get up again. He didn’t make another sound, just lay there like a discarded doll wearing odd white mittens. Hail began to hammer the roof. After a moment it was plain enough that he had fainted, and that he would be going nowhere anytime soon, whether he should or not, no matter what was best. Druyan dragged him back to the pile of hay, rolled him onto it, and fetched a blanket to throw over her uninvited guest.

Kellis had taken a fever, whatever else ailed him, whatever he was or was not. His forehead was blistering hot when Druyan took a few moments after breakfast to check on him, and he would not open his eyes, though he mumbled and turned away from her touch. It was difficult to get food into him—he spent most of the next three days drifting in and out of wakefulness, quite uninterested in his surroundings. Druyan brewed every tisane she knew in an attempt to bring his temperature down again—feverfew blossoms and willow bark, comfrey leaves—but no remedy seemed to work. He had no spots, no cough or other sign of plague. The fever might have to burn itself out, Druyan thought. She hoped he would survive the conflagration. She salved his hands each day with fresh aloe and wrapped them with comfrey leaves and clean linen, but there was little improvement to be seen. Mostly the man slept, as if waking or dying were equally too much trouble to bear.

Enna upbraided her mistress for wasting time and energy nursing a wretch she should have been thankful to see dead, but Druyan ignored the criticism. More work to bury him than to nurse him, she said wryly, and put an end to the discussion. No one else took sick, depriving Enna of an argument; and before she could try out others, there was a change at last. The third night, the fever broke, for no cause Druyan could fathom and no credit at all to her herb lore.

Had he been sufficiently aware, Kellis would have willed himself to die—it seemed the only escape left open to him. But he lay adrift on a sea of heat and pain, prey to unpleasant dreams that robbed his sleep of any true rest, unable to think with clarity enough to put an end to his misery.

He knew, of old, that courting death hardly guaranteed achieving it. It was monstrously unfair, but true. His spirit was firmly bound to his body, and he was too confused by illness to remember how to sever the link deliberately. The irony of that made his cracked lips twitch into a smile—he knew so many who had found their way along the trails to the afterlife so easily, without any effort on their parts at all. His family, for instance. His clan. In his buming dreams they all lived again, all died once more, and he was helpless again, unable to follow his people on their final migration, abandoned and cast out and alone. He howled as he had then, screaming his grief to the darkness that surrounded him—and woke drenched in sweat, still tasting bitter medicines on his lips.

He wept scalding tears till sleep swept him up once more.

No one in Esdragon had an outdoor threshing floor. Some farmers built special barns for the purpose of processing grain—Splaine Garth used the large floor space of the main barn, where the cattle were penned during the worst winter weather. There was room to drive the threshing sledge around in a tight circle atop the spread barley, its ih wegt beating the ripe grains loose from the straw. Usually one of the draft horses provided the power, but Valadan’s nimbleness made him apt to the work, too—his strong legs stood up to the constant circling with none of the strain and swelling the more massive drafters suffered betimes.

The sledge bumped merrily over the fanned-out sheaves, weighted with as many bodies as would climb atop it. This was great fun—at the outset. After a couple of days every soul on the farm was heartily sick of the process. The girls complained that Meddy was letting the sheep stray and Rook was not preventing her; Dalkin was eager to begin winnowing the threshed grain once the rain had stopped, while the wind held strong. Myriad farm tasks pressed, offering opportunities of escape and respite.

Druyan was as bored as any of them. She had never threshed before, only seen it done, but it wasn’t hard work for the driver, and it wasn’t enthralling. It just went on , endlessly, numbingly. Sensing impending mutiny, she released her crew to other tasks and wondered what she might use to weight the sledge in their place. Rocks would do, of course, or barrels, but something that could get itself on and off the sledge bed under its own power would be nicer. Enna was enduring a bad spell thanks to the wet weather, and the bouncing would be sheer agony for her. One sheep didn’t weigh enough to help and more would be impossible to manage. A pig was unlikely to cooperate.

Druyan felt eyes watching her, and saw them, in the open doorway of the box stall. She’d been leaving it unbarred—what use locking up a man too sick to stand? A notion teased at her. Kellis was just well enough to navigate from one side of the stall to the other—the fever had left him wobbly as a wormy kitten. But he could sit—and he was close by. She halted Valadan—and the sledge—with a quiet word, a twitch of the reins.