The Wind-Witch (35 page)

“But if the raiders—”

“The only raiders I’ll fret over are those coming
here
, and I don’t need any bowl of water to spot them.” His mouth was straighter than any furrow he’d ever achieved with the plow. “And don’t be trying to trick me into it, or wheedling, either.”

“Why?” Druyan laughed bitterly. “Do you think I’m apt to go riding out of here like
this
?” She lifted her bandaged hand an inch and gasped. Valadan’s head came up.

The notion fetched a wintry smile. “This horse would refuse to carry you, were you so foolish.” Kellis reached out to pat Valadan’s shoulder. The stallion snorted and returned to grazing the clover. “What’s the point of seeking news of raids you can’t do anything about? The visions have not been asking me to look at them, and I am not calling them, either. Let it lie.”

“But if we get word to the post riders, it helps
them
!” Druyan protested. Was he deliberately being dense?

Kellis smiled again. “I’m none so sure about that—but assuming sending your Riders hopelessly outnumbered into danger
is
a good idea, how would I be getting word to them?”

“I could have told you the routes!” Druyan snapped. “You’ve followed me all over Esdragon, you know the country by now!”

Valadan snorted a grasshopper out of his next mouthful.

Kellis only raised an eyebrow. “And of course your brother—who’s promised faithfully to see me dead—will listen to me if I go to him with a message?”

There was a silence, broken only by the sounds of the horse grazing, the breeze riffling apricot leaves. Druyan admitted defeat. “I suppose you have a point. And I should not be taking you to task, the first moment I lay eyes on you. I owe you too much for that. Enna told me you stayed by me all night when I came back hurt, never left me. Thank you.”

Kellis shifted the post again, as if its weight was beginning to trouble him. “When I was hurt, you watched after me. No thanks is needed, Lady.”

“I don’t remember very much,” Druyan went on, searching out the words. “Just dreaming about moonlight, and wolves running on the moors. But I’m glad you were with me, Kellis. Enna wouldn’t have known how to help. I was so lost, so afraid—”

“Don’t speak of it. It’s over. Why bring it back?”

Druyan shook her head and let her eyes fill with the green orchard once more, instead of far-reaching blackness. The apricots were yellow and waxing fat. The apple fruits were starting to show touches of color. There would be, ere long, some harvesting to be done at Splaine Garth, and how that necessity was to be managed
this
year, she had no notion. She knew as well as Kellis did that he had no reason to care how much work it was to make linen cloth. He’d be long gone ere ’twas done.

Druyan called for combed wool and her pearwood spindle the next week and sat by the kitchen door beginning to teach the three remaining fingers on her right hand—which had always done most of the work anyway—to get along without the company of their lost mates. The wound was healing—she could tell that by the healthy itch, even before Enna took off the dressings to exchange them for a lighter wrapping of fresh linen that left her fingers free—and careful exercise would prevent the hand’s going stiff and weak on her. Moving it pained her now, but it would hurt whenever she began, and likely worse later. She set herself to bear the discomfort, and found ’twas not so bad as she dreaded.

Her work was predictably clumsy—the thread came off the spindle thick and uneven, fit only for weaving a coarse rug to be flung over the puddle that tended to appear by the kitchen doorway, just by where she sat. That was fine—Druyan had asked for belly wool to begin with, not caring to waste better fleece while she was still stiff and unproductive.

She lamented her loss most when it came time to wind the wretched yam off the spindle and into a ball. The ball kept escaping her grasp, and she’d have to reel it in, unwinding a deal of yarn in the process. The third time she dropped it, the by-then dirty ball went bounding clean across the yard, trailing thread, and Druyan let it keep going. The sun’s warmth was agreeable, there were wild doves cooing from their nest in the roof thatch above her head, and ’twas pleasant to stop struggling with the spindle, just to sit idle for a while. She was weary, sleepy, and cross. When she’d napped a bit, she’d be ready to work again, and she could fetch the recalcitrant ball of yarn first thing, to stretch her legs.

Druyan did not suppose she had actually been asleep, but then she surely must have been—dreaming unawares of the very sort of day that was actually lapping round her—for she never even heard the horse trot up to her gate and cross the kitchen yard to the water trough. She opened her eyes when the ball of spun thread was laid gently in her lap, and blinked first at it and then at Yvain, who stood grinning at her, handsome in his post rider’s blue and gray.

“I think such an occupation would have sent me to sleep, too, Lady! If ’twere left to me, there’d not be thread enough in all of Esdragon to weave a single cloak.”

“I know I’ve lost track of the days,” Druyan said stupidly, “but you shouldn’t be anywhere near here, should you?” Too late she realized how ungracious her words sounded.

Yvain laughed. His teeth were astonishingly white, like the edges of clouds. She had never noticed that before. “You’ve lost track of nothing, Lady Druyan. By the official schedule, I should be riding above Glasgerion by now, but I exchanged routes so that I might come this way the sooner. You look well.’

Druyan felt her face color—as best it could. She had very little blood to spare for blushes. “Flattery on that scale has to be bred in,” she said. “There must be bards in your family.”

“Dozens,” Yvain agreed cheerfully. “But I was never one of them. I am glad to see you, Lady, all flattery aside.”

“That’s a new horse, isn’t it?” Its blood-bay coat closely matched Yvain’s own hair. Siarl had done the Rider proud with the remount. “Why not put him in the barn, out of this hot sun? If Dalkin’s in there, he’ll fetch you some hay—”

“I’m sure the horse will think ill of me, but I cannot tarry so long, and I’ve not had him long enough for him to expect better.” The captain hesitated. “I’ve grave tidings.”

Druyan’s eyes jerked toward Yvain’s face. She marked the unhappy set of his mouth, masked only a trifle by the pleasantries exchanged a moment earlier. “
Not Robart
—”

“No!” Yvain said hastily, and breathed a curse upon his clumsiness. “Your brother’s hale, Lady, last I saw of him, and none of us was dungeoned for treason, either, though
that
was a near thing.” He swallowed. “We’ve lost Kernan.”

“
Lost?
What happened?” Her heart began its too-familiar racing, and Druyan was glad she was not standing.

“It was . . . just after you were wounded. He and his partner were headed back to their regular route when they chanced on a party of raiders. Kernan sent his second for aid and went on himself to raise the town, alone. He was killed.”

Druyan’s eyes brimmed. Yvain went on, playing with the wave badge at his throat.

“The wonder is we’ve lost no Riders ere this—and lost them in places we can’t explain away, places they shouldn’t have been. Had Kernan been ten leagues off his route instead of merely two—” He sighed. “I don’t suppose any of us thought we’d have to play this game so long, dodging our own duke to protect his lands—it’s true, you know, about the army. Most of the men have been sent to fell timber, and they’re a good month’s march away. Brioc expects to have his fleet ready come spring.”

“Will any of us be left by then?” Druyan asked bitterly. “There’s plenty of good sailing weather still to come.” Seeing the sun made the farmer part of her rejoice, but the rest of her quailed.

“Keverne will stand,” Yvain said, shrugging. “There’s a small garrison posted there. The coastal settlements are left to fend for themselves, despite the increase in raids upon them this summer. The larger towns have watches or garrisons of their own, lesser places may be assumed not to require protection. That’s what I was told.”

“My uncle is a fool,” Druyan said harshly.

Yvain patted her left hand. “Well, don’t let the defect run in the family! Don’t come chasing after us again, Lady, well or not.”

“But—”

“The Riders will still keep watch and aid one another when the word is passed. But the raids come too thick now, Lady. Being there to meet them isn’t serving so well anymore. We tried, but we’re done. We are messengers, not warriors.” He still had hold of her hand. “May I pay my respects to your husband, before I depart?’

Never saw that coming
, Druyan thought, reeling still from his tidings. She could only flush and stammer a stupid excuse that she thought Yvain did not for one instant believe, as he lifted her suddenly cold left hand to his chiseled lips. He was smiling—Yvain was always smiling—as he released her hand back to her.
He knows
, Druyan thought miserably. But what use would the captain make of his knowledge?

Kellis watched the birds. Easy to do—they were everywhere, filling the air wherever he chanced to be working. Most eggs had hatched out, and there were fledglins to be fed, so the parents were busy and always on the wing. He studied ascents, descents, takeoffs, and landings, soarings upon updrafts of warm air. He paid close heed to the swallows in the barn, the larks above the barley fields, the blackbirds that filled the marsh with song. He took note of hawks, herons, and crows.

It had come to him, as the raids from the sea increased, that the attacks were too numerous, too closely spaced, for each one to be originating on the far shore of the Great Sea. It just could not be, not from what he had seen of the Eral. Their captains threw together expeditions too haphazardly, every arrogant one of them obeying no will but his own. Coordination could not be coincidence.

Kellis remembered how it had been for his own homeland—a raid or two a year—then all at once a dreadful spate of them, unrelenting. Eventually it was learned that the Eral had established a foothold on a peninsula, a base from which they could launch forays in hours rather than days. He thought much the same thing must be happening in Esdragon. He trusted his nose more than his eyes, and he had smelled the same man-scents in more than one raided place. It was not chance.

So each night a wolf ranged out from Splaine Garth, once the Lady Druyan was out of obvious danger. Kellis trotted upcoast and down, putting his long wolf’s nose into every secluded cove and inlet, stalking to the top of every spit of rock and sand, no matter how insignificant. Settlements he steered well clear of, not so much out of fear of discovery as because he had no need to inspect such places. Inhabited spots offered no concealment. And the Eral had a fondness for garlic in their cookery. He could detect a lack of the herb a long distance off.

He had worn his pads so thin that he limped even as a man, with his broken boots packed full of soft wool plucked on the sly from the new lambs. But Kellis found no sign of the raiders save their customary destruction. This was not a waste of effort—it told Kellis that the base, wherever it was, was likely not on the coast itself, but just off it. Easily reached by the Erals’ sea-snake ships. An island or a peninsula that was an island at all save neap-tide times. Wherefore he turned to studying the birds, which could readily go where a wolf could not. Kellis could swim as a wolf, but not for long in Esdragon’s pounding, shifty surf.

Some few of his people had the knack of shifting to more than one form. It was tricky work—the natural leaning tended toward the animal the Clan had long ago taken as its totem—wolf, or deer, or marten. There was a Hawk Clan, but they were very few, even before the Eral raids began to thin out or wipe out the Clans. Kellis had never encountered one of the Hawk shape-shifters.

To shift to anything other than wolf—which felt so natural, its long-furred pelt by long practice his second skin—required meticulous observation and careful concentration. And even then he could hold the form only for a moment, because it felt so unwolf that he kept startling out of it. Kellis worked at it for a week before he could hold feathered form reliably.

He discovered next that he loathed heights, a nasty liability he had likely gained from his dealings with the kitchen roof. And there was a further handicap—he didn’t in his heart
believe
that he could fly. And that was the whole point to his being a bird, besides flight being the very essence of the shape-shifted creature.

Without belief, action came very hard. Kellis climbed a tree, finally. and shifted there to his new-learned shape. That way he
had
to fly, however poorly. There was no chance for second thoughts about it, nothing to permit failure. He gilded down, terrified, tumbling the last hit of the way till the ground caught him, but doing himself no lasting damage.

The next stage involved a seaside cliff, and Kellis got his shifted wings spread wide just as waves were about to claim him—and went skimming off above the water, master of the air at last. Beats of his wings gained him altitude, and when he reached the clifftops he swung inland and landed by crashing into a gorse bush.

He switched to daylight flights at that point, ready to commence his search. At first he was disoriented whenever he ventured out of sight of the farm buildings. He was used to orienting by scent, and as a bird his sense of smell was poor. But better vision compensated—Kellis methodically learned landmarks along the coast from his new perspective and went skimming from one to the next, surely the most timid crow in all of Esdragon. Each flight took him farther ere he was lost, and the practice made him a marginally better flier.

In the end, it wasn’t all that much of a flight, once he got past the point of needing to hug the coastline closely to know where he was. Kellis flew high over the boar spine of the Promontoiy and saw the object of his quest lying below him—a jumble of stone with one rock bigger than the rest, a tiny island with its cliffs on the one side battered down by the surf so that there was room for a score of ships to be safely beached. It couldn’t be seen from the shore—the rough anchorage faced the open sea. Only a bird could spy the black ships, the activity all along the islet’s perimeter. There was no smoke. Somehow the Era] had agreed among themselves to forgo cooking fires that might have given the secret away.