Mother of Winter (8 page)

As Rudy suspected, Graw’s urgent demand that something be done about slunch meant that patches of it had developed in his fields and pastures—which happened to lie on the best and most fertile ground in that section of the Arrow River bottomlands. Though the sun had long since vanished behind the Hammerking’s tall head when the little party reached its goal—what had once been a medium-sized villa, patched and expanded with log-and-mud additions and surrounded by what Rudy still thought of as a Wild West–style wooden palisade—Graw insisted that Rudy make a preliminary investigation of the problem.

The villa and fort were Graw’s homestead, and everyone in them a member of the red-haired man’s family, an outright servant, or a smallholder who had pledged fealty in exchange for protection. Three of the nobles who had made the journey to the Keep from Gae had established such settlements as well, populated both by retainers and men-at-arms who had served them before the rising of the Dark, and by those farmers who sought their protection or owed them money.

Even had Gil not filled Rudy in on their own world’s Dark Ages, he’d have been able to see where that practice was leading. It was one reason he’d acceded to Minalde’s pleading, in spite of his own unwillingness to leave the Keep with the gaboogoo question unanswered. That, and the white look around her mouth when she’d said, “It’s only a day’s journey.” The livestock at the Keep would need hay from the river-bottoms to survive the winter. Not all the broken remnants of
the great Houses were particularly mindful of their vows to Alde as the Lady of the Keep.

She didn’t need more problems than the ones she already had.

“Now, when you folk up there started putting all kinds of rules on us instead of letting us go our own way,” Graw groused in his grating, self-pitying caw, “I had my doubts, but I was willing to give Lady Alde consideration. I mean, she’d been queen all her life and was used to it, and I thought maybe she did know more about this than me.” He shoved big rufous hands into the leather of his belt as he strode along the edge of the fields, Rudy trailing at his heels. The split rails of the fences had been reinforced with stout earth banks and a chevaux-de-frise of sharpened stakes, heavier even than the ones around the Keep wheat fields that discouraged moose and the great northern elk. This looked designed to keep out mammoths.

“I did ask why we were supposed to send back part of our harvest, and everybody said, ‘Oh, shut up, Graw, it’s because the Keep is the repository of all True Laws and wonderful knowledge and everything that makes civilization—’ ”

“I thought the vote went that way because you were taking Keep seed, Keep axes and plows, and Keep stock,” Rudy said, cutting off the heavy-handed sarcasm, vaulting over the fence in his host’s wake.

Graw’s face reddened still further in the orange sunset light. “Any organism that doesn’t have the courage to grow will die!” he bellowed. “The same applies to human societies. Those who try to hang on to all the old ways, to haggle as if the votes of ten yapping cowards are somehow more significant than a true man of the land who’s willing to go out and do something—”

“When did this stuff start to grow here?” Rudy had had about enough of the Man of the Land. He halted among the rustling, leathery cornstalks, just where the plants began to droop lifeless. They lay limp and brown in a band a yard or so wide, and beyond that he could see the fat white fingers of the slunch.

“Just after the first stalks started to come up.” Graw glared at
him as if he’d sneaked down from the Vale in the middle of the night and planted the slunch himself. “You don’t think we’d have wasted the seed in a field where the stuff was already growing, do you?”

Rudy shook his head, though he privately considered Graw the sort of man who’d do precisely that rather than waste what he wanted to consider good acreage, particularly if that acreage was his.
Silly git probably told himself the situation wouldn’t get any worse
. “So it’s gone from nothing to—what? About twelve feet by eighteen?—in four weeks? Have the other patches been growing this fast?”

“How the hell should I know?” Graw yelled. “We’ve got better things to do than run around with measuring tapes! What I want to know is what you plan to do about it!”

“Well, you know,” Rudy said conversationally, turning back toward the fence, “even though I’ve known the secret of getting rid of this stuff for the past three years, I’ve kept it to myself and just let it grow all over the fields around the Keep. But I tell you what: I’ll tell you.”

“Don’t you get impertinent with me, boy!”

“Then don’t assume I’m not doing my job to the best of my ability,” Rudy snapped. “I’ll come out here in the morning to take a good look at this stuff, but—”

Voices halooed in the woods beyond the field, and there was a great crashing in the thickets of maple and hackberry along the dense green verge of the trees. Someone yelled, “Whoa, there she goes!” and another cried, “Oh, mine, mine!”

There was laughter, like the clanging of iron pots.

Rudy ran to the fence, swung himself up on the rails between two of the stakes in time to see a dark figure break from the thickets, running along the waste-ground near the fence for the shelter of the rocks by the stream. Two of Graw’s hunters pelted out of the woods, young ruffians in deer leather dyed brown and green, arrows nocked, and Graw called out, exasperated but tolerant, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s only a damn dooic!”

It was a female—mares, some people called them, or hinnies—with one baby clutched up against the fur of her belly
and another, larger infant clinging hard around her neck, its toes clutching at the longer fur of her back. She ran with arms swinging, bandy legs pumping hard, dugs flapping as she zigzagged toward the tangle of boulders and willow, but Rudy could see she wasn’t going to make it. One hunter let fly with an arrow, which the hinny dodged, stumbling. The smaller pup jarred loose as she scrambled up, and the other hunter, a snaggle-haired girl, laughed and called out, “Hey, you dropped one, Princess!”

The bowman fired again as the hinny wheeled, diving for the silent pup in the short, weedy grass.

The hinny jerked back from the arrow that seemed to appear by magic in the earth inches from her face. For an instant she stared, transfixed, at the red-feathered shaft, at the man who had fired and the wriggling black shape of the pup: huge brown eyes under the heavy pinkish shelf of brow, lips pressed forward like pale velvet from the longer fur around them in an expression of panic, trying to think.

Graw muttered, “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” and whipped an arrow from the quiver at his belt. He carried his bow strung, on his back, as most of the men in the Settlements did; nocking and firing was a single move.

Rudy reached with his thought and swatted Graw’s arrow as if it had been a stinging fly. At the same moment he spoke a word in the silence of his mind, and the bowstring of the male hunter snapped, the weapon leaping out of his hands and the nocked arrow, drawn back for another shot, jerking wild. The man cursed—seventy-five pounds of tension breaking does damage—and the hinny, gauging her chance, slipped forward, grabbed the pup by one foot, and flung herself in a long rolling dive for the rocks.

“You watch what you’re goddamn doing!” Graw bellowed, snatching Rudy by the shoulder and throwing him backward from the fence. As he hit the ground, Rudy could hear the girl hunter screaming and the retreating, furious rustle of the streamside laurels as the hinny made good her escape. Breath knocked out of him, he rolled, in case Graw were moved to kick him, and got back to his feet, panting, his long
reddish-black hair hanging in his eyes. Graw was standing foursquare in front of him, braced as for a fight: “Go on, use your magic against me!” he yelled, slapping his chest. “I’m unarmed! I’m helpless! I’m just trying to protect our fields from those stinking vermin!”

Rudy felt his whole body heat with a blister of shame.

Ingold had taught him what he had to do next, and his soul cringed from it as his hand would have cringed from open flame. The man was hurt, and Rudy was a healer.

Turning his back on Graw, he slipped through the stakes in the fence and strode up the broken slope toward the hunter who lay among the weeds. The buckskin-clad girl knelt over him, her wadded kerchief held to his broken nose. Both raised their heads as Rudy approached through the tangle of hackberry and fern, hatred and terror in their eyes; before he got within ten yards of them the girl had pulled the hunter to his feet, and snatching up their bows, both of them fled into the green shadows of the pines.

The shame was like being rolled in hot coals. He had used magic against a man who had none and who was not expecting an attack. He had, he realized, damaged the position of wizards and wizardry more by that single impulsive act than he could have by a year of scheming for actual power.

Ingold would have something to say to him. He didn’t even want to think about what that would be.

He stood still, feeling suffocated, hearing behind him Graw’s bellowing voice without distinguishing words beyond, “I shoulda known a goddamn wizard would …”

Rudy didn’t stay to hear what Graw knew about goddamn wizards. Silently he turned and made his way down the rough, sloping ground to the fence, and along it toward the fort as the half-grown children of the settlement were driving in the cattle and sheep from the fields. The long spring evening was finally darkening toward actual night, the tiger-lily brilliance of reds and golds above the mountains rusting to cinnabar as indigo swallowed the east. Crickets skreeked in the weeds along the fencerow, and by the stream Rudy could hear the peeping
of frogs, an orchestral counterpoint to Graw’s bellowed commentary.

Well
, he thought tiredly,
so much for supper
.

He was not refused food when the extended household set planks on trestles in the main hall to eat. What he was offered was some of the best in the household. But it was offered in silence, and there was a wariness in the eyes of everyone who looked at him and then looked away. The bowman whose nose he’d broken sat at the other end of the table from him, bruises darkening horribly; he was, Rudy gathered, an extremely popular man. Rudy recalled what Ingold had told him about wizards being poisoned, or slipped drugs like yellow jessamine or passion-flower elixirs that would dull their magic so they could be dealt with, and found himself without much appetite for dinner. The huntress’ eyes were on him from the start of the meal to its finish, cold and hostile, and he heard her whispering behind his back whenever he wasn’t looking.

After the meal was over, no one, not even those who were clearly sick, came to speak to him.

Great
, Rudy thought, settling himself under a smoky pine torch at the far end of the hall and pulling his mantle and bison-hide vest more closely around him. The women grouped by the fire to spin and sew had started to gather up their things to leave when he approached, so he left them to work in the warmth, and contented himself with the cold of the far end of the hall.
I guess this is why Ingold makes himself so damn invisible all the time
. It didn’t take a genius to realize that from fear like this it was only a short step to bitter resentment.
Especially with little Miss Buckskin helping things along with her mouth
.

Ingold—and Minalde—would have to put in weeks of P.R. and cleanup over this one.

From a pocket of the vest he took his scrying stone, an amethyst crystal twice the width of his thumb and nearly as long as his palm, and tilted its facets toward the light.

And there she was. Alde, cutting out a new tunic for herself by the light of three glowstones, working carefully
around the unaccustomed bulk of her belly—smiling a little and reaching up to adjust the gold pins in her hair, final jeweled relics of the wealth of the High King’s realm. Tir and Geppy Nool and a little girl named Thya made cat’s cradles of the wool from the knitting basket, and Thya’s mother, Linnet—a slim brown woman of thirty or so who was Alde’s maid and good friend—knitted and talked. The black walls of the chamber were bright with familiar hangings; Alde’s cat Archbishop stalked a trailing end of yarn, dignified lunacy in his golden eyes.

Uneasy, Rudy tilted the crystal, calling to being in it the corridors of the fourth level, and the fifth; picturing in his mind the chalky little gremlin he had seen.

But there was nothing. No sign of the creature anywhere in the Keep. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. The Dead Cells in the Church territory and some of the royal prisons were proof against Rudy’s scrying—there were other cells as well from which he could not summon an image.

But it was hard to believe that the eyeless critter, whatever it was, knew where those were.

Whatever it was …

On impulse he cleared his mind and summoned to his thoughts the image of Thoth Serpentmage, Recorder of Quo: shaven-headed, yellow-eyed, hawk-nosed, brooding over broken fragments of pottery and scrolls in the patched, eroded Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand, the scribe of the wizards of the West.

But no image came. Nothing showed in the crystal, where a moment ago he’d seen the distant reflection of Minalde and Tir and the room he knew so well. No wizard could be seen without that wizard’s consent, of course, but a wizard would know, would feel, the scrying crystal calling to him. And Rudy felt only a kind of blankness, like a darkness; and below that a curious deep sense of something … some power, like the great heavy pull of a tidal force.

He shook his head to clear it. “What the hell …?”

After a moment’s consideration he called in his mind the image of the mage Kara of Black Rock, wife to its lord,
Tomec Tirkenson. But only that same deep darkness met his quest, the same sense of … of what? he wondered. Foreboding. Power, spells … a breathlessness fraught with a sensation of crushing, a sensation of movement, a sensation of anger. Anger? Like a river under the earth, the thought came to him …

And yet there was something about it that was familiar to him, that he almost knew.