The Wind-Witch (12 page)

“I’ll admit, you had nothing
personally
to do with Travic’s death-but you’re the only raider around for me to collect the debt from. If I wanted to be sticky about it, only a life can pay for a life, but you’re no use to me dead. I made you a promise—work the harvest, for your freedom—but that was when I thought there were four of you. Now I want to propose a new bargain, one that suits the realities for both of us.”

The dark brows knit again. He said nothing, though.

“You can try walking all winter, to a place that might not even exist. You can starve, you can freeze, and every sword edge out there will have your name on it. Or—” She leaned on the fork.

She couldn’t tell if she was scaring him. She didn’t much think so—he was used to worse. Valadan strolled back into the barn, nosing at the straw. “Or you can work for me till the farm’s mine. When that day comes, I’ll give you a horse, and you can make your way to this dream city of yours easily, before another winter catches you. If the city’s there naw, it’ll be there then, and you’ll stand a chance of reaching it.”

She could see him weighing his chances. And trying to stay on his feet.

“Well? Don’t keep me waiting. I’m risking just as much as you are, and this may start to seem like a bad idea to me again in a minute. Better grab it while you can.”

“
Why would you trust me?
”

There was no good reason. Not desperation, certainly. Not a mad hunch. Never that something in him seemed to call to something in her, the way a distant storm did. Best bury that fancy deeper than the sea’s bottom. “My horse approves of you,” Druyan said, and stroked Valadan’s neck, while the stallion nudged her new farmhand halfway out of his cracked boots.

Kellis lay on his back, staring toward the underside of the barn roof. Somewhere beyond that, Valint the Wolfstar coursed the moon-deer. He couldn’t see the hunt, of course. If not the roof, then there’d have been clouds to hide the familiar night scene from his eyes. It was always raining.

He might never see it again.

What have I done?
he asked himself, shifting on the pile of straw. He’d had the chance to go, to get on with his chosen journey—instead he had agreed to stay, in this place he had passed through only by sheerest chance. Why? He was well enough to travel—barely, but he knew he could manage, this way and that.

Because one place is just like another
, his sick heart whispered darkly, the answer echoing inside his head as if he were nothing more than an empty vault of bone. Or a tomb.
And for all you know, the Wizards’ City of Kovelir is no more than a fever dream. Stay or go—it’s all one
.

“I don’t think I care to have that in my kitchen.”

“I don’t recall asking whether you did, Enna,” Druyan observed, placidly threading another warp through the second heddle of her great loom. “Surely you don’t expect Kellis to chop the vegetables in the barn and then carry them back over here so you can start the stew?” She was pleased with the pale-blue thread in her hands—privet berries stewed for hours to make the dyebath, from her own recipe. The color was mild as the inside of a mussel shell, but once dried it faded no further, come sun or years. It was a flattering shade, too, light yet not showing dirt readily, and cloth woven of it would sell swiftly.

“And to give him a knife—Lady, he could do for us both and no one the wiser till Dalkin missed his supper and thought to wonder about it. He—”

“It’s just a little brass blade. He can’t very well chop carrots and turnips with his teeth, Enna. And you can’t chop them when your hands are bad.” Druyan counted carefully, chose another hole to thread. “You keep telling me it’s not my place to be cooking”

“And it is not! If my lord looked back and saw—”

“I’d like to think Travic would be proud of us, Enna,” Druyan said. “We paid the tithes. We even managed to get some of the cider laid down for brandy. The root cellar’s bursting with potatoes and turnips, the smokehouse is sniffed with hams and bacon. Considering that Duke Brioc decided that his summer army ought to spend the winter building a seawall and never sent our men home, I think we’ve done wonderfully well.”

Enna’s eyes flashed. “So well that I’ve got to have a murderer holding a knife right in my own kitchen?”

Druyan threaded another heddle. “Surely you aren’t afraid of him, Enna? Not with that iron horseshoe sewn into the hem of your skirt?” she added slyly.

“My lady, you’d do better to copy me than to mock me for that.”

Druyan shook her head. “I don’t think I could stand bruising my shins on it all day.”

“Make fun! But he’s not sick and hurt now. He’s dangerous, Lady, that’s the plain truth!”

“You think I trust him too much, too soon.” She’d heard the accusation a dozen different ways, most of them unsubtle in the extreme. “Should I trust Kellis less than he’s earned? He didn’t have to work so hard to bring the barley in, Enna. Or do all the slaughtering and butchering. Dig turnips till his hands bled. He could have quit. He didn’t. He’s never given us less than a full day’s work.”

Enna had the grace to fall silent—many a day her swollen fingers prevented her doing much in the way of work. Druyah inspected a snarl in the thread, hoping to avoid a weak spot apt to break halfway through the weaving, at great inconvenience. Someone had been careless in carding the wool—there was a bit of burr spun into the core of the yam, making the bump. She discarded the offending length and put in another. “I feel quite safe enough with a nail in my pocket.” Truth to tell, she’d have felt safe enough without that tiny bit of cold iron. If Kellis did no harm, ’twas hardly because everyone at Splaine Garth carried some object made of iron to ensure his behavior. She’d set him to gathering apples, digging turnips, spreading manure on the fallow fields, tending the pigs and butchering those they’d salted down for winter. He’d never once tried to run away—not that there was anywhere for him to run to. And she had trusted him with all sorts of tools, most of them lethal if he’d wanted them to be. He was unfamiliar and unskilled with some, but never dangerous to anyone other than himself. She didn’t fear a kitchen knife in his hands, whatever Enna said.

They both heard the door close.

“Where’s he gone?” Enna asked, voice too shrill.

“I asked him to bring in a bucket of water when he’d done with the vegetables,” Druyan said patiently. “He can put the kettle over the fire for you—it’s heavy when it’s full. Then ask him to come to me here—I need someone to hold the warp ends while I wind the back beam.”

Enna’s sharp intake of breath spoke volumes. The corner of the hall, where Druyan’s loom stood, was farther into the house than Kellis had yet been permitted. “M’lady, let me.”

Druyan shook her head firmly. “You have the cooking to see to, and it’s too chill for you in here, even with_ the fire lit. Kellis needs to be in here anyway—I’m going to have him card wool. There’s still most of the spring shearing to be dealt with, and it’s not that long till next shearing, when you think about it. It’s past time that fleece was spun and dyed. I’ve got the dyestuffs, it’s only waiting on the spinning—and that waits on the carding.”

“Dalkin—”

“Dalkin leaves too many stems and burrs in the wool.” Druyan forestalled the next argument. “Pru has no interest in wool once it’s off her sheep’s backs. Lyn never did decent carding. The truth is, they’re not children any longer.” Carding was children’s work, while those children were young enough to think of teasing and combing the raw fleece with the teasel carding combs as a sport or at least one of the more desirable of winter chores. Its delights palled as one grew older—Druyan herself preferred spinning the combed wool into yarn, she could not deny that. And she liked dyeing and weaving still better. The best carders were those too young to rebel. Or those like Kellis, who’d do whatever he was asked, and not protest that the task wasn’t properly his.

She looked up a few moments later to see him standing in the doorway, as if uncertain about his orders, his right to venture farther into the room. Probably Enna had blistered his ears with a description of the fate he’d earn if he overstepped the letter of Druyan’s instmctions. His hands were red from a long bout of scrubbing, peeling, and chopping vegetables for the stewpot. Druyan motioned him closer and thrust a bunch of warp ends into each fist.

“Just hold these firm. Don’t pull on them, just hold on. I need to keep an even tension while I wind on, but that’s my worry.

“You’re a weaver,” he said, as if surprised.

It had not, Druyan supposed, been much in evidence ere then. The busy weeks of the harvest, the necessity of undertaking tasks she’d had only a touching knowledge of in other years—she’d had no leisure for her usual work. And she’d not have been doing it where he’d have seen. “Yes. Most of the cloth for the household, and some to sell at the market fair. Good thing wool keeps—I’m behind, this year.” She cranked the broad back beam slowly, taking up the slack in the warps, ensuring that all ran straight with her free hand. “You can step closer to the loom when that gets tight.” He nodded his understanding. “Do your folk weave?” Surely they must—he wore cloth, not tanned skins. She’d never heard tell of a folk who didn’t make some cloth.

“Our looms are smaller,” Kellis explained. “Not in a great frame like this—and upright. Our weavers hang the beam from a tree, tie rocks to the warp ends to keep the tension.”

“You’d need a very tall tree to get much length,” Druyan observed.

He nodded. “They don’t weave beltrans unless they’re near the forest. The loom’s easy to transport, though—and it needs to be. We move with the flocks, follow the herds whenever the grass fades. A loom must travel easily, because it’s often.”

“So you know how to card wool, then?” Druyan asked craftily. She’d wound on all the way, and now she took the ends from him, deftly tying them in little bunches to the clothbeam, one after another. Kellis glanced about the room—shadowy the farther one ventured from the one unshuttered window. He could not help but see the sacks of rolled fleeces, a half score of them, waiting. He shut his eyes.

“Yes,” he said wearily. “I’m afraid I do know how to comb wool.”

“Good,” Druyan answered brightly. He didn’t bother with the stupid things some men would have said. He didn’t plead that he was a warrior, that the task was beneath him. She approved of that. “You can start anywhere.”

She watched out the corner of her eye as he walked to the sacks. A set of combs lay atop the nearest, and a sheaf of dry teasels stood ready to hand, to refresh the combs as need be. Kellis untied one sack, unrolled the fleeces within, and inspected the creamy wool, sinking his fingers deep to gauge the length of staple.

“Lady, do you want me to sort as I go, or should I card the tops first and leave the coarse stuff for later?”

The question fairly stunned her. Dalkin would have carded all the wool together, the choice and the so-dirty-’twas-next-to-useless, Druyan thought—at least till she’d caught him at it. She considered how she’d want the job done, not merely how she was likely to get it. “There’s plenty of room in here,” she finally decided. “Why don’t you sort today while the light’s good? Chuck all the belly wool in that far corner—if we have enough of the better fleece, then perhaps I won’t spin that at all. Just boil it clean and use it to restuff a few of the bed pallets.”

Kellis nodded agreement and set to work, opening sacks and picking through the fleeces within. Druyan took up her shuttle and wove a few inches of plain weave to settle the warp threads, beat fimily till she had a solid edge against the clothbearn. When she looked up again, she was startled to behold half a dozen fluffy white piles, growing in a ragged circle about the sacks and Kellis.

He must actually know what he’s doing
, she marveled. Most folk—even many spinners—sorted f`leeces crudely, into clean-enough and not-clean-enough to spin. If Kellis was making more than two piles, then he must be aware of such subtle nuances as length of staple, texture, the abundance or lack of crimps along the locks of wool. And when he began carding, he therefore wou1dn’t be mingling fibers fine enough for the lightest of summer gowns with those better suited to being woven into a hearth rug. While her mind chewed that over—beyond amazement, almost dazed by such good fortune—her shuttle flew back and forth like a barn swallow with chicks to tend. Thread by thread, she began to create the pattern of the weave.

She wasn’t using a second color in this cloth, so Druyan had threaded three harnesses when she set the warp, to weave an intricate texture, subtle as the shadows of grass blades in a held. She lost herself in the work for a long while, and by the time Enna disturbed her the light was going and her shoulders were aching. She had, however, done better than a cubit of fine cloth, and set the shed patterns into her head so firmly that it would be second nature to her for so long as she required it to be.

“Lady, the bread’s just out of the oven, and the meat’s resting, ready to carve. Will you leave this awhile?”

Druyan straightened, putting a nursing hand to the cramp in the small of her back. “Before I starve or go blind?” she teased. She could hear voices in the kitchen; they’d all be waiting to hear whether they could eat yet. “Yes, Enna. The light’s faded, we’d better leave off for today.”

Enna nodded and retreated to her domain. A couple of sharp cornrnands preceded her into the kitchen proper, and there was a sudden clatter of crockery.

Kellis got to his feet and laid down the combs atop one of the sacks. “Lady? Shall I feed the horses?”

He had made good progress carding, Druyan saw—there was a great heap of rolags lying ready for her spindle. After supper, she thought, by the kitchen fire’s warmth and light. He’d been so silent, she’d forgotten his task while she was busy at her own—never noticed him sitting down to it, in fact, once he’d done sorting.

“Dalkin can help you,” she said, giving her loom a last glance, trying not to be tempted back to it. “Get him out from under Enna’s feet while she sets the meal out, he’ll live longer.” She smiled. “Mind he doesn’t slip extra corn to that pony of his—we’re eating hams from pigs that weren’t half so well fattened.”