The Wind-Witch (43 page)

“Harvest’s a fortnight off, at the best,” Kellis reported dutifully. “And lucky to get it, the grain’s nowhere near as flattened as it could have been. Your men might have had to reap it on hands and knees.”

“My men?” she asked stupidly. Nothing made sense to her, nothing. He might have been speaking in the Eral tongue, in place of hers.

“There’s two of them back,” Kellis explained, patient. “Wat and Drustan. They seem to think there’s others headed home, too, maybe held up by the storm.” He shrugged. “Either one will likely cut twice the barley I did, and not take sick from the tools after. You won’t miss me, Lady.” He tried to smile.

Her heart misgave her, seeing that, but all that crossed Druyan’s lips by way of protest was his name, the pair of syllables sounding more angry than entreating. “Kellis—”

He set his mouth. “You promised me my freedom, with time to travel before winter. Didn’t you?”

Panic welled up, black as a squall line, but Druyan refused to let him see it. “You still think Kovelir is your answer?” She was amazed she could speak—something was lodged in her throat, thick as wet wool.

“I don’t know, Lady,” he answered gravely, wearing that open, devastatingly honest look. “I wouldn’t expect any vision
I
summoned to reach that far. I will have to go there myself to find out—and best I do it soon. It’s been a long journey, full of delays.”

She stared at the pack as he shouldered it. He couldn’t have told Enna he was going—she’d have loaded him down like a market-bound wagon, just for joy at seeing the back of him. All he seemed to be carrying was a blanket and an impossibly small bundle of provisions.
Oh, why did I think the only choice to be made was mine?

Kellis inclined his head to her. “Be well, Lady.”

Never again in this life
, she wished to say, but the rising blackness had closed her throat tight. She looked mutely into his eyes, watched the colors going from silver to gold and back again as the wind shifted the dapples of sunlight on his face. Wolf’s eyes. Pleading with her to do the sensible thing now and bid him the gods’ speed on his journey, to thank him for a year of good service if she must, but most of all just to let him go. . .

He had his hand on the gate latch, and then he was closing it carefully behind him. He’d been born into an unfenced world, but Kellis knew to shut gates behind him now—she’d come that close to making a farmer out of him.

His boots made no sound in the lane—the storm-torn leaves plastering the dirt were rain—damp, wonderfully silent footing. Or she’d gone deaf from grief, Druyan thought. The breeze roved through the orchard, and a last few raindrops pattered down, like tears.

Don’t look back
. No, for his very soul, and for her sake, just as surely, Set one foot ahead of the other—easy, he’d been doing it much of his life. You can be a long way gone by sunfall, and no need to stop then, the moon’s only starting to slide off of full. The trick to walking is, every step throws you off balance, so you have to take the next step to get it back, and then the next, on and on. Simplest thing there could ever be. You’re doing fine, fool, considering you should have done this hours earlier, when you could just have
gone
, with no one ever the wiser. . .

His ears caught a soft
woof
Kellis lifted his gaze, despite intentions not to. Rook slipped nimbly under the fence and marched stiff-legged into the lane. Meddy came bouncing behind her, tail waving high, and slid to a startled halt when she saw Kellis.

“Step aside, little sister,” Kellis entreated.

Rook’s brown gaze never wavered.

Do sheepdogs understand when part of their flock is sold or traded?
Kellis wondered.
Do they just keep stealing them back?
He took a step and saw Rook’s hackles rise, till all the hair on her back stood tall, neck to tail. Meddy whimpered.

Kellis drew in a deep breath. “We’ll see who can stare longest, little sister. I am not straying now.”

A year and a day. She had her freehold, and Kellis had his freedom. He was right about that.
And I have spent my We doing what others said was right
, Druyan thought as her tears joined the raindrops.
Bending to every least pressure, pliant as a grainstalk in the breeze . . . I ’ve been what I was told to be, done what I was told I must do. Given up whatsoever I was asked to, no matter how it cost. Letting him go isn’t half so hard as sending him away would be. He’s doing what he wants to do, and I am letting him. Doing what anyone would agree is right, certainly.

Warm breath on her cheek. Druyan flung her arms about Valadan’s neck and pressed as close to the horse as the fence between them would allow. The contact helped, but still she could feel her heart tearing like rotten cloth, on and endlessly on, as one thread after another parted. She could see, dim and far off, a pair of wolves mnning beneath the moon and the windswept sky—and then there was only a single creature, howling without the least hope of an answering voice. Only the wind, the empty wind, sobbing.

Obedience cost too dear. She could not bend again. Instead, Druyan knew, she would break, shatter, and there would be no one there to gather the pieces save Yvain—who would cheerfully put them back together into another sort of woman entirely, a woman who wore her face over a yawning emptiness where her heart used to be. A woman who would never weep, who might summon a smile when it was seemly, but would never know laughter. Who would certainly never whistle the wind.

Druyan set her boot onto the second fence rail. It stayed firm—the posts the rail ran between were neither of them among those Kellis had replaced. Valadan sidled close, and she climbed to the top of the fence, then slipped down onto his bare back.

He has not gone far
. The eye turned back to her sparkled as if full of fireflies.

No. But being Kellis, and stubborn, he might not stop walking at her bidding. Knowing himself unable to outwalk Valadan, he would be forced to halt sooner or later, and she’d have the advantage of easy breath for conversation till he did. Druyan sent the stallion trotting along the fence line, and he turned and sailed over it at the first convenient spot, arching up like a trout after a fly.

Kellis hadn’t made it away beyond the lane’s end. He stood by the lightning-blasted tree, facing the dogs. Rook was crouched, staring her best stare, and Meddy was trying to back her comrade up, though her whines said all too plainly how uneasy she was about the business.

“Call them off,” Kellis said, when he heard the four-beat of walking hooves behind him.

He sounded angry, but Druyan didn’t fear he’d shift to wolf right in front of her—he never had, whether from shyness or some more dire reason—and there was no other way he’d get past Rook.

“Tell me again why you’re going,” she said, scarcely able to hear her own voice over the hammering of her heart. If he’d been looking at her, she might not have been able to squeeze out a single word. Luckily, he was still trying to stare Rook down.

He pivoted to face her, a line between his brows. “You know why, Lady. Because there might be a place for me, in the Wizards’ City.”

“Or not,” Druyan said heartlessly.

“Or not. As it always has been.” Of course. He had accepted that possibility, and still sold his honor for his passage price across the sea. “No difference.”

“There might be a place for you
here
,” Druyan suggested. “Spare yourself a long walk. I can`t imagine you aren’t footsore.”

The line deepened. “You have a good heart, Lady, but your kindness is misguided. M’lord Yvain won’t especially want me here.”

Druyan could only stare at him. What did he know about that? How. . .”

Valadan snorted and pawed vigorously at a puddle that lay before his hooves. The splashing hint was plain. Druyan felt her face go hot. Whatever Kellis must have seen had been either too little or too much, depending on how one considered it, but the conclusion it had led him to was suddenly obvious. Perversely, it gave her hope, the tiniest stirring breeze of it. She lifted her chin, watching him between Valadan’s black ears.

“As it happens, Yvain of Tolasta has no say about who does or does not stay on my farm, Kellis!”

His expression remained polite, but skeptical.

“You doubt me? The same year and a day that lets you walk away from here now means the time’s past when I’d have been forced to wed any man my family or Travic’s told me to.”

His right brow gave a twitch, then settled level again. “Men of Yvain’s sort don’t need force, Lady, not in this world.”

Kellis was trying to sound as if it didn’t matter, but his eyes gave his hean away. He looked at her the way Rook sometimes did. Meddy, now, might entreat with her blue eyes and every inch of her pied body, shamelessly, but if Rook fancied a taste of the food you had on you, the dog would never beg for it. No, she’d only
look
, with just such a wanting, a hopeless hope fit to shred the hardest heart. Such a look faced her now, whether Kellis was aware of it or thought he hid it.
I’m right!
Druyan exulted, and the breeze freshened.

“Yvain said he intended to ask Brioc for me. He never asked
me
, or I’d have told him
no
to his face, instead of letting him figure it out for himself.”

That took him by surprise, very plainly. “Why would you do that, Lady?”

Druyan laughed. “I’m sure Yvain asks the same!” She scissored her right leg over Valadan’s back and slid down his side, dismounting lightly as one only could from an unsaddled horse. She kept her arm over the stallion’s neck for a comforting instant, then stepped toward Kellis. Meddy gave her tail a happy wag, and Rook reproved her sister, by no means sure they were relieved of their duty.

Druyan pulled the glove from her right hand and rested her shortened palm on her belly. Nothing there yet for the eye, but she could sense the gentle swelling to come, could feel a stirring through the layers of cloth. It might be her imagination, so early. It might not, given the blood she carried, given the father’s. The heartbeat was surely slighter than a breeze, but she knew ’twas there—in the wind, if nowhere else. “I’m not free to wed Yvain,” she said. “I owe a life debt.”

He misunderstood her and denied her claim. “There’s no life debt,” Kellis said hastily, stepping back as if she frightened him. Rook growled, and he spared her a glare. “You’re not the only one with teeth!” He snapped out, then turned back to Druyan. “Don’t go on about my saving your life! You might not have died, you probably wouldn’t have—”

“lt wouldn’t have been for lack of trying,” Druyan said soberly, letting herself remember. It seemed safe at such a distance, though it made the bright day dim in her eyes. She remembered the wolves, the courage they carried. “My head thought I should die, Kellis, and so I nearly did. But you taught me to listen to my heart, and I lived.” She swallowed hard, and wished she could hold onto Valadan’s mane for comfort. But she had left him behind. “So I ask you now—do you want in your heart to leave, Kellis? Or only with your head? You’re free—but free to leave is free to stay, too.”

She was cutting his heart clean out of him, to ask him that, to offer him that choice. That was what she was doing. Kellis wished desperately that he had been wise enough to slip away before ever she rode homeward. He didn’t entirely believe her about Yvain—or trust that the truth of the moment would hold, once the captain began to press his suit once more.

“I said from the first, it was better if I went. And I was right. It would have been, and sick or not, I should have gone—”

“You can give me a dozen reasons why you should go,” she said, eyes bright as raindrops. “Give me a thousand—none of them will make me glad of it, Kellis! And I’ll never be sorry you stayed.”

Kellis flinched, Rook bristled again at his movement, and while his attention was on the dog, Druyan stepped close and wrapped her three fingers about his right wrist. He could have broken her grip by taking half a step or a deep breath, but she knew he would reject that advantage.

“Have you no mercy?” he asked her, motionless and looking miserable.

“If I thought you’d be hurt by it . . . Kellis, all the times you spoke of going to Kovelir, you never once said you wanted to
be
there. And you don’t, do you?”

He shook his head, and then gave her that same look of helpless anger he’d been favoring Rook with. Druyan refused to wither. She moved her left hand over her belly, as if she gentled a restive horse.

“People want . . . so many things. When Travic died, all I dared hope was to keep this farm, somehow. How could I long for more, or other? I never knew to want it, much less expect—but the weaver can only set the warp, fate weaves in the weft, no matter what you do, or think you’re doing. And warp and weft must cross, or there’s no cloth. Even you can see only a little way ahead, Kellis.” She looked down at the ground. Three fat dewdrops lay along a grass blade, like silver peas in a pod. Like a sign, and she took courage from their gleam. “The pattern’s not the least what I thought it would be, when I began. It’s all wolves, and moonlight?”

“Dreams,” Kellis whispered.

“Then stay and dream with me. With us.”

“Lady, I cannot—don’t ask this of me—” A twitch betrayed his longing to run.

“The indebtedness isn’t for the life you saved—though I do thank you for it. My debt is for the new life we made between us, that night.” She trailed her hand across the cloth again. “And for that child, our child, I’m asking whether you could bear to give up Kovelir, and stay here awhile longer?”

Silver eyes went wide as twin moons, and his right brow disappeared under silver hair. The left almost managed to do likewise. “
Child?
” He shaped the word as if he had never heard it.

“About lambing time, I’m very much afraid,” Druyan confessed. “I really do need you to stay—we’ll be short-handed even if all the men come back, and I won’t be able to do much by then. I promise you won’t have to card wool all winter, or sleep in the barn—”