The Wind-Witch (21 page)

Druyan was half through a charm for fair skies when she sensed she was no longer alone. The far side of the orchard had seemed private enough—the cows and their calves paid her no heed—but Druyan felt eyes at her back and turned to see Kellis standing by one of the gnarled apple trunks. She arose, leaving behind on the ground a little blue bowl. She had just poured water from it, wiped it carefully dry with a linen cloth, then breathed upon the grass gently, to simulate drying that, as well. It was too soon to tell whether the tiny mummery would have the desired effect on the greater stage of Splaine Garth, but she thought the sky was lightening.

“Is this how your people witch weather?” she asked Kellis, curious about her homespun technique. If there was a surer way to obtain her ends. . .

Kellis shrugged. The day’s-end light filled his eyes, making them shine silver as his hair. “Hard to say. We’re mostly concerned with having the rains come on time, so the pastures don’t burn up. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone trying to
stop
rainfall.”

“I can’t stop it, either,” Druyan admitted. “Just hold it off for a bit, or chivvy it on its way. Steer it around us. Not much. Of course, the weather’s generally a bit drier this time of year. That helps.”

“You don’t want much more magic than that, Lady. It’s no use, and a lot of trouble.” His tone, like his expression, was bleak.

“You mean not to be able to touch iron?”

Kellis didn’t answer. His eyes were empty, his thoughts and meaning impossible to guess.

“They say my grandmother Kessallia was a great witch,” Druyan mused. “No one could keep anything at all from her. Every secret, hidden thing was open to her. But she didn’t pass the witchblood on—they say she examined every child, every grandchild, and never found a trace. It must have been bred out of us.” To her lady mother’s relief, probably. But Druyan’s own regret shaded her voice.

“Or she was looking too soon.” Kellis’ attention came back, if it had ever been absent. “You can’t judge witchblood in a baby—they’re too busy with everything else, walking, talking. Teething. The power crops out later, when childhood’s being left behind.”

An old man points a finger at you, picks you out of a crowd, and nothing’s ever right after that—only you don’t know it
, he thought. Aloud, he tried to reassure her.

“If it’s weak, and you pay it no heed, that power might even damp off, like a seed that sprouts but doesn’t grow. Or it might curse every part of your life.” Because maybe she shouldn’t regret her lack as she seemed to.

Druyan blinked at the sudden shift in the wind. “Then perhaps I’m glad I don’t have it,” she said.

“If we get fair weather tomorrow, will it be an accident, then?” Kellis raised a brow at her. “There are plenty of weather charms, because no one can escape wanting weather that favors what he’s doing. Most of them don’t work. Yours do.”

“It’s a good thing,” Druyan answered tartly, looking at the brown cow and her calf, grazing nearby. “We need a deal of hay out of this summer—that’s a fine heifer there, and if I keep her to milk, we’ll be making cheese enough to take to market in a couple of years. But if I can’t feed her, I’ll have to salt her down or sell her. The moors don’t offer pasture enough for the horses and the cattle. Easier some ways when the year’s calves are all bullocks.”

“You could pasture year-round on that marsh,” Kellis said, born of a herding people and knowing good pasture just by the feel of it under his boots.

“The winter storms take too much of a toll. When there’s a storm tide, we don’t dare let even the sheep into the marsh.”

Kellis nodded, pulling a stem of hay out of his sleeve. “I see your point. I’m supposed to be telling you that Enna has your supper ready.”

Druyan bent to gather up the bowl. There was a little breeze teasing at the ends of her yellow-red hair, where it was slipping free of its braid. Aloft, the winds would be greater yet. The clouds would break up, and they’d delight in clear weather for perhaps as much as a week. The hay would be made—and she’d probably manage to add another milking cow to the herd. The coursers who had gone with Travic’s men were eating elsewhere. . .

The bowl in her hands brought another bowl to mind she hadn’t seen it since she abandoned it in the garden next to a row of carrots, but it had often been in her thoughts.

When he slept, Kellis dreamed of his homeland, the purple grassland of Vossli. At first all he saw were wind ripples that brushed the land’s surface into waves like the sea’s. And his heart lifted with a ridiculous joy, that all his troubles had been no more than a night of evil dreams, that his home was still there when he opened his eyes to the dawn.

But as he gazed with his wolf-eyes, he saw the black smoke, and the acrid tang of buming tingled in his nostrils. It was no natural fire—there had been no lightning storm to kindle a blaze of renewal. And there were the tall shapes of men behind the flames.

In an instant more, the charred land was being ripped open by iron-bladed plows. Kellis sobbed low in his throat, feeling the land’s pain as if the rent flesh had been his own. Crushed by the weight of the stone houses that sprang forth behind the new-plowed lands, the lines of stone walls that divided one bit from another, like unweaned pups tom from their mother’s belly. Flinching from the tread of the strange feet that tracked the dust where once purple-tipped grasses had grown. . .

Kellis opened his eyes to the darkness. His cheeks were wet, and his throat ached as if it held fire-coals. There was no stench of burning, except in his heart.

But I have driven a plow
, he thought.
It was hard work, but not a calamity Not a desecration
. . .

Not for Esdragon, no. The invading Eral had made Vossli cease to exist in a generation. They could not wreak that upon Esdragon simply by farming—but they could do worse. And they would.

Unless they were stopped.

“
I can’t stop them
,” Kellis whimpered. “My clan is gone from every memory save mine—”

A snort came from the adjoining stall.

“I
can’t
—” Kellis insisted. And glanced with a shudder toward the corner where the hidden bowl lay.

More salt hay was spread on the pasture, and Dalkin was set to making sure the sheep and the coneys left it alone. Druyan oversaw the planting of the ttunips, the onions, and the leeks, a whole new patch of carrots in a sandy spot discovered accidentally. In the hedgerows, roses and blackberries and raspberries were shedding their white petals and begimiing to set fruit on their long canes.

The sun lifted his shining face over the moors a heartbeat earlier every day and tarried a moment or two longer each evening before dipping into the water of the marsh. Druyan started Kellis digging peat—it was none too early to think of winter’s fuel, as they had thought of the fodder. The turves needed a considerable drying time at the edge of the marsh, ere they could be carted in to stack and store—ready to supplement precious wood in the winter tires.

Kellis fed the stock and then went straight off to his digging unless she instructed him beforehand to tend to some other chore. So Druyan was startled, while she sat coaxing milk from the brown cow with her big, gentle but not a gentlewoman’s hands, to see him appear at the cowshed door. The calf bawled at him, wanting to be loosed so it could go to its mother.

“You can keep digging,” Druyan said, pressing her head lightly against the cow’s soft flank, inhaling her warm animal scent. “You’ll be long gone before any of that peat goes on the fire, but we’ll bless your name, every fire we sit by, come winter.”

“Lady—”

“What?” More milk swished into the pail, in time with her moving hands.

“This is . . . good sailing weather.”

“We don’t have a boat, Kellis. I suppose we could float the peat up the river if we made a raft, but the wagon works as well. If we pick dry weather—”

“The wind’s from the sea.”

“It always is, this season.” She tugged gently, easing out the last of the milk. “The sunfall winds. Every tree on the Darlith coast will tell you that—they all lean inland.” The cow lowed softly, and her calf, tethered so it would not impede the milking, answered her with another bawl. Druyan stood, set the pail safely out of the cow’s way, and made ready to drive her to her day’s grazing. Not the orchard again, she thought. That grass was thin, lush enough but easy to overgraze.

Kellis was still in the doorway, though he stepped back out of the cow’s path. Something in his expression—which was unhappy, to say the least—caught Druyan’s full attention. “
Are they coming again?
” she whispered. Her hands went cold. She forgot the cow.

For answer, Kellis walked slowly to the well and hauled the bucket up, hand over hand, not troubling with the slower winch. The black bowl sat waiting on the well coping; he poured into it from the bucket until it was brim full.

The water was clear, but within the bowl it looked like a puddle of tar. Kellis leaned forward and blew one breath across it. Ripples spread, then stilled once more. Druyan could see the bottom of the bowl then, the faint ridges the potter’s fingers had left, their circles growing ever smaller as they spiraled in to the exact center of the bowl. Remembering the last time Kellis had shared a vision with her, she reached to take his left hand. His fingers were cold as dewsoaked grass, and near as damp.

He would need to woo this vision—though his dreams had been tangled and vivid for far too many nights, those had been memories, never prophecies. No insistent visions were battering at the barrier behind Kellis’ eyes—the well had not been emptied, but enough had been released that the visions no longer spilled out unstoppably. It was his normal state, when he could choose not to see, not to risk pain and confusion, failure and embarrassment—it had been a fatally easy choice for him to make, once before.

Kellis crooned the summoning so softly that he could not hear the sound with his own ears. His throat was tight with fear, he had to force the sound through, and it was far louder in his mind than in the air. One could entreat the visions, but they did not respect whining—they wanted a submission that came of respect, not fear.
Concentrate. Focus. Believe the foreseeing would come
. . .

Pain stabbed his temples. Vthth better practice, he could have ignored it for the trifle it was. He must pay it no heed, must certainly not dread that the pain would increase if he persisted. If he flinched, it would only be worse.

You have to want to do it worse than you don ’t want to do it
.

Wisir hadn’t been much of a teacher. He hadn’t been much of a student. And they hadn’t spent time enough together for their mutual dislike to be refmed into a useful I’ll-show-him hatred.

Be a channel for the vision to flow through
.

His stomach twisted, counterpoint to the throbbing behind his eyes. It wasn’t going to work. . .

Kellis felt a reassuring pressure, other fingers intertwined with his own. The contact was so startling, so unexpected that for a moment Kellis forgot his dread in wonderment.

Light flashed across the surface of the water. It was white wave-foam, breaking over a shingle beach. Cliffs rose up almost at once. Druyan looked harder and saw ships rounding a rock the height of the duke’s castle at Keverne, entering a harbor that much resembled a keyhole—narrow at the entrance, widening out inside to a safe, sheltered anchorage. There were a lot of buildings clustered behind its stone quays, rising up the sides of the hills as if they’d been pushed there by the crush at the harborside.

“Do you know it?” Kellis asked harshly, his pupils pinpricks in his silvery eyes.

“That’s Porlark,” she answered, unhesitating. “Fishermen call it the Mousehole, because of that harbor. But that harbor’s a trap, you can hold its entrance with half a dozen men—”

Kellis tore his hand free and rose abruptly. The images in the bowl slopped over the edge and vanished. He dumped the remaining water unceremoniously onto the ground, the stream wavering with his trembling.

“It’s not as far as Falkerry,” Druyan said, feeling in consternation at her muddied skirts.

“Aye, you’ll weigh every word I tell you, twice and thrice,” Kellis said bitterly. “You won’t trust me.” He backed a step away.

“There’s no harm to ride that way—if the raiders have been there already . . .” Druyan gave her head a shake to chase that fell thought. She faced him. “Suppose they haven’t? Should I
not
warn the folk of the Mousehole? I couldn’t live with myself, if I knew and said nothing.”

But he would not look at her. And she did not know what was amiss, that he should out of nowhere offer his help, then complain because she believed his warnings. When she went to saddle Valadan there was no sign of Kellis, nor when she rode out to cry her warning to the folk who lived behind the Mousehole.

To the natural blessing of their harbor’s narrow approach, the citizens of Porlark had added a great bronze chain, which lay at the bottom of the channel, running from far side to near. They kept a sharp watch, too, and when Druyan gave them her warning, that chain was winched up till it rode just below the surface of the waves, ready to rip the keel out of any ship that dared the passage without the watch captain’s leave.

Simple defense, but scarcely an instant one—the winching required a full hour, and a dozen men working each capstan. Signal flags had to be unfurled, to warn off Porlark’s fishermen and to alert incoming trade ships that they must choose other ports. Druyan watched uneasily all that while from Valadan’s back. Her word of seeing ships upcoast had been believed—but if the ships did not come? If Kellis’ vision failed, no one would listen to a second warning from her—she hadn’t said how she knew, she’d said she’d
seen
, and failure would brand her a liar.

The flags warned off Por1ark’s ships. But what wamed nearby villages and settlements? Anything upriver from Porlark was safe, but what of up- and downcoast? Druyan had asked and did not care for the answers she was given along with thanks for her warning. She could see no reason why the raiders, refused Porlark, should not simply nose into another harbor or river mouth, a place unwamed and unprepared.