Comet Fall (Wine of the Gods) (23 page)

No matter how often they found a stack of hay bales and sacks of grain in their path.

The slow trip gave Rustle
lots of time to practice. The first stack of supplies had included a note from her mother. Never told her that all the witches were practicing long distance levitation, with the eventual goal of being able to levitate rocks on the Moon. Rustle calculated quickly . . .
That will give us six hours to affect the Comet. Not that anyone has managed to reach the Moon yet. But we have over two years to learn. To develop the strength.

She started Xen on the charms again, but the burst of magic he'd shown when panicked didn't resurface.
He had kept up with Fermi's growth rate. The boys and Megan, now two years old, were nearly inseparable. She let him go. The magic would return in time.

As fall deepened, she watched the parade of the River Comets. They were too distant to pose a threat, too distant for her to touch, or even view magically. The Equinox passed, and the days shortened. She sat outside during the long nights,
and watched falling stars, tried to see them before they hit the atmosphere. No luck. They were so
fast
. She gave up and sought her bedroll.

She jolted awake in the pre-dawn
; someone had tried to talk to her. She reached a hand out to bare rock, to pull power, and opened her mind just a crack.

::  Mom! All the hors
es are having babies! ::

:: Xen!:: Rustle blinked and sank into a proper trance. Her
mind floated, or maybe inflated. :: Xen, I think four of them are going to have babies, soon. ::

::  Two of them are having babies
right now
. ::

She could feel his excitement and joy, and sent a wave of love back. She hadn't been able to hear her mother till she was six, and hadn't been able to talk back until after she had grasped power. "Oh. My. It is very definitely time to get home."

She grabbed a piece of paper and pen.
Our four year old son has informed me mentally, over a distance of about a hundred feet that some mares are foaling.
She charmed it, and put it in the pouch. She couldn't decide whether she hoped receiving messages woke gods, or not.

:: It's a girl! She's all black, with b
ig white socks and a blaze. :: The child's joy was incandescent and glowed in her mind. ::Bye Mom. I'm going to go pet her. :: Blank and empty. It didn't even trail off.

"Old Gods! I didn't expect that!"

::  He's sending already?:: the Auld Wulf warm voice echoed in her head.

::
Loudly. Clearly. :: she could read his delight, as clearly as she knew he could read hers.

H
e sent a mental . . . more than a kiss and less than sex, although not by much. And then he was gone too.

She smiled slowly. That hungry mental cuddle. Oh yes.
I have not ruined all possibilities of a future with him.

The waning crescent moon was high and she reached out and used up her elation making lunar dust twitch a
s she tried to spread and thin gravity that far away. The gravity she could do . . . but adding a push or pull . . . was going to take more work.

Then she got up and went to see the foals.

137
3 Late Summer

Rip Crossing

Rustle halted and eyed the riders coming from the north.

Faro got out his glass. "A man with black hair and beard . . . and three women?"

Rustle concentrated a moment, remember
ed an old spell that involved focusing light.

"Old Gods! Havi's grown a beard! And that's Ask!" She sent Phantom galloping forward.

They wound up in a big tangle of horse-back hugs.

Verse and Whoop hung back a bit, grinning.

"Hey Ask! Tell her she has to stick around long enough to train us!"

Ask laughed. "Yes. Whoop and I both grasped power, and told Answer to get lost. Honestly. She's just like all the wicked old witches from the storybooks!"

"So you guys are a triad, all by yourselves? And your own pyramid, for that matter."

Ask
beamed. "Yep. C'mon, two miles and we'll be at the Summer Camp."

"Come and meet my friends, the very large and growing Valasik clan."

Havi scooped up a delighted Xen, then shook hands all around. "Welcome to Rip Crossing. Any friend of the family and so on. Come and meet everyone." He did a double take at Thunder and Lightning. Mos and Seff bristled jealously.

"Yep. They're the Children of the Virgins of Love. Dad's kids. Our half sisters."

The Valasik's eyed Havi's black hair and golden eyed and nodded. "The Goat of Love must be a Traveler."

Havi just snickered.

Rip Crossing looked prosperous, for a settlement just two years old. The "Summer Camp" had a whole lot of solid walls, obviously new buildings, and a bunch of very young children.

They parked the wagons beside a corral and turned out the horses, with a bit of work to get all four
foals through the gate. Rustle eyed the fences. Posts and rails were a single piece of rock, anchored to the rock beneath the thin soil.

H
avi grinned. "Remember Mom and Dad's rock forming trick? Verse and I are pretty good at it, and since Whoop and Ask grasped power, we've been trading off, building things." He glanced over at the nearest house. Solid rock walls, the roof wood framed, shingled. "We can't do the kind of fancy work they do, though. And we wear out a heck of a lot faster."

"But it beats hauling rocks and making mortar and stuff." Cor beamed at her. "About time you showed up. We talk
ed about rescinding your membership as an honorary goat boy, but Havi threatened to beat us up."

The rest of the goat boys
(half female, despite the name) piled in to hug her and fuss over Xen.

"We decided we ought to just dive in and start a school for the kids." Kett dragged all the women over to show them. "All of ours are just over a year old
—we had a party to celebrate getting here, and, well. Nine months later, ten babies. And the few women who didn't have babies then, had them about six months ago. We all trade off so we can get some work done in the fields, or whatever. When they were babies, it wasn't so bad, but wow, once they're mobile they can really get into trouble fast!"

The school was empty now, the kids all in the process of being put to bed.

"You'll be needing slates and chalk, and the works, real soon," Marisha said. "We've got some, I think . . . "

The four brothers got into a deep discussion with the farmers and
maps were drawn and lists made. Rustle grinned, as she realized that Rip Crossing was in the process of creating a regular traders' route. Possibly multiple routes, as Gemstone came up in the conversation.

She
retreated to meditate and was close enough to feel her mother also meditating, at the witches' hot springs in Ash. Or perhaps it was an effect of Xen's grasping power consciously.
I'm a Full Moon witch, now.

Never
was relieved she'd gotten back to what passed for civilization in the New Lands.

:: Really dear, those Travelers. I worried about you. ::

:: Mother! They're friends. Anyway, please let Dad know that Xen and I are safely here. ::

::
We miss you. Can you be in the Rip in two days? Answer has had to admit that she needs to train you four. That she, we, will need you, when the comets come around. ::

Rustle winced.
:: No, there are some things I need to help Havi with. I'll be along in a few weeks. ::

:: You could come home for
the Fall Equinox. :: Never seemed wistful.

:: I'll come in two weeks.
No point in pushing the matter with Answer. :: She broke off the communications before her emotions broke through. She huffed out an angry breath.
If they still reject Xen, it'll be the last time I go there.

She spread the news at Summer Camp, and several more people decided to take a quick trip home. Havi hemmed and hawed and finally
decided to go.

"I
f someone will travel us back after about two weeks," Verse said. "The girls should know their grandmothers, but we won't stay there." She glanced over to where the two girls slept.

Grape and Hazel were just figuring out how to crawl. Xen and Fermi had called them grubs and run off to attend to "boy things."
Megan had played with the babies for a day, then returned to tagging after the boys.

Rustle nodded. "But before we go, us witches need to get in a bunch of practice, and I know just what we can do."

She spent three days drilling the witches on the basics of triad work and then building the basics into combinations. And then they went to work.

Building
more fences.

"For fences, we
simply cut out the shape we want and then stood it up. Then melded it to the ground underneath." Verse grinned.

"What shape do we want?"
Rustle asked. "Same as the corral?"

"Four foot tall," Ras was one of the powerless mage boys, raised to be a farmer
. "Post every ten feet, four rails six inches wide with eight inches in between. Bottom rail on the ground. We've got some pasture fenced off, but we need a lot more."

"Huh, that's boring and easy. Remember how Mother and Dad made things?
" Havi closed his eyes.

Rustle
could see the shape in his mind, see it in the ground, in the solid rock just six inches under the surface. She put her hand on his shoulder and poured energy into him. He pointed a finger and traced out the pattern Ras wanted, and they lifted it together and placed it on the ground. Bound it to the rock below.

"Hey!" Verse sounded indignant.
"You made it look easy! I
sweated
to do each section."

So Rustle had the three of them form a triad and make the next section.
Then she roped Cor in, and made him do some to give Havi a break.

With a little practice they were doing half a mile a day.
They kept at it until it was time to leave for the Rip.

The Winter camp consisted of several long buildings. Some for livestock, some for people.

"It's warm in the winter." Havi looked around and sighed. "Do you think you'll come back? We could try to make some better buildings. These are a bit . . . basic."

Then her parents showed up
, and there was a group hug. Xen held back, more wary than any four year old ought to be around his grandparents. Dydit scooped him up and hugged him anyway. Never forced a smile, and Xen wiggled away from her and hid behind Rustle. She picked him up and hugged him.

Rustle could have traveled quite a few of them herself, but let her parents do it.

They stepped through to the witches hot springs.

Unfortunately inhabited.

Rustle braced herself.

The older witches frowned at them.

"Humph." Glorious turned her back to them. "Still carting that retarded boy around. What a waste."

:: I don't like it here, Mom. Everyone is all ugly inside. ::

Heads turned. Answer stood up and climbed out of the pool. "I heard that. Four years old and he has grasped power already?"