The Wind-Witch (11 page)

“Kellis, come over here.” He looked startled, probably because her tone made it as much an invitation as an order, but he stepped through the doorway after only the barest hesitation.

The slippery grain stalks were tricky footing, but he managed, frowning at the effort it cost him. “Lady?” he asked, arriving at her side a little out of breath.

“Climb on. Better sit down,” Druyan recommended, amused by his perplexed expression. Maybe he was expecting her to order him out of the barn, off the farm before she had to feed him another meal. When he had settled, she started around in another circle, fairly slowly. His added weight helped, she could tell by the way the sledge rode.

“What does this do?” he asked after their third circuit, bracing against the bouncing, then yielding to it as he realized his stiffness let the motion jar him.

The query was startling—hadn’t he been watching, and hadn’t they been threshing right under his crooked nose? Had he never seen such work before? He seemed serious. He was watching intently, waiting for her answer.

“There are rollers under the sledge,” Druyan finally explained. “Dragging them over the barley loosens the seed heads, beats them off the stalks. The more weight on the sledge, the better it works.”

He digested that gravely, shifting again to a more secure position. Hard when you couldn’t use your hands, Druyan supposed. He was trying to hold on, also trying not to hurt himself.

“Don’t your people farm?” she asked, wondering how they threshed their grain, assuming they grew any. By beating it with flails, by hand? That would be even more tedious than sledging.

A startled, wide-open gray glance. “No.”

Small wonder he’d had to be shown how to use the sickle. “City-born?” Druyan guessed.

“No, Lady.”

There’d been much speculation about where the raiders hailed from but precious few firm answers. Captured men had proved reluctant to talk. The bandits came, stole, and vanished, leaving only destruction and anger behind. Druyan wondered if this man might tell her now, not realizing what he did. Worth a try. “Where am you from?” Clever of her, if she could find out.

“Vossli.” His answer was muffled, as if he were struggling not to put feeling into the name.

“Where’s that?” Druyan asked, genuinely interested. “I never heard of it.” Certainly it wasn’t a place anyone had guessed, gossiping.

“Across the sea.” He inhaled sharply, let the breath out slowly. “It isn’t called that anymore. The name means ‘the purple grassland’ ” His gray eyes slipped out of focus, as if he looked over a far distance, rolling waves of lavender and green.

Over the sea
. That meant none of his people would be back till the next spring, Druyan realized. They were entering into the season of storms, out upon the Great Sea. Even Esdiagon’s bold coastal iishers stayed in sight of land during those foul months, and no ships crossed the sea roads. Kellis had been left behind, abandoned, and must know that. It was too late for him to get home. He was still every bit a prisoner, whether of hers or merely of sea reach and weather.

“Kellis—” She put a hand out, almost touched his shoulder. “Come sailing weather, you can send word. Your family will ransom you.”

He turned his head away, rather than shaking it. “I have no family,” he said softly. “There’s no one to pay to have me back. And if there were, they wouldn’t do it,” he added bitterly. “The sea raiders swept over my people long before they found yours. I am not one of the Eral, and when I joined them I made myself an outcast from my own clans.” He rubbed at his forehead with the side of his hand. “I don’t want to go back.”

The sledge bumped and boimced. “There are probably better ways of winning a welcome in Esdragon than scouting for a band of murdering pirates,” Druyan observed wryly.

He shot her a look, out the tail of his eye. “They have all the ships. I needed to get across the Great Sea.”

“Why?”

She could tell he wasn’t going to answer. He’d said more in the last circle over the grain than he had the whole while he’d been with them. After a moment she observed: “Your hands are better.”

He could not deny that, she’d seen him using them to hold onto the sledge, however gingerly. “Yes, Lady. Thank you for the aloe—there’s nothing I know of that could have done more to heal them.” He flexed his left hand—she could tell he didn’t have the full range of its motion back, but it was coming, and obviously using it hurt him less than it had a few days earlier.

“Last time I saw a hand swell like that, it was snake-bit,” Druyan said. “And it had to be taken off, in the end. You’re lucky—but then it wasn’t a snake that bit
you
.”

She was begirming to suspect that he wanted to get off the sledge, away from her interrogation. Druyan deliberately drove a little faster when she saw Kellis shift, so he’d have to think harder about jumping. Finally he nearly fell off, and she took pity and halted. She turned toward him, so he could not as easily look away from the confrontation.

“I asked you flat out whether you were a wizard. You said rw with your lips, but every other part of you screamed yes, loud enough to wake the stones. They say wizard-folk can’t handle cold iron, and you don’t seem to be able to touch it without some cost. Am I wrong about that?”

He still looked trapped, although the sledge no longer moved. He looked a touch green, as well. He might not feel able to stand, Druyan supposed. She pressed on, undeterred by mercy.

“Look, if I haven’t killed you yet for a murdering scoundrel, what’s to fear? If I wanted you dead, don’t you think I had chances enough while you were sick? I told Enna it would be too much trouble to bury you, but it really wouldn’t have been that bad. I could have fed you to the pigs.”

He took what she meant for a jest as literal truth, and went as pale as he could. His dark brows looked as if they’d been painted on with lampblack. The gray-gold eyes went dark as wet slate.

“Don’t faint on me,” Druyan ordered stemly. “I need you to help fork this straw out of the way and spread more sheaves. Can you do that?”

He flexed his hands again, then nodded reluctantly.

“If you have to be sick, try not to do it in the grain. The fork’s wooden, it won’t poison you.” She pointed at the pitchfork, leaning among the waiting sheaves. “You want to eat, you work. Got that?

He nodded again, looking confused. He got off the sledge, took two steps, stopped, and turned back to face her. Druyan unhitched Valadan. She’d let the horse go out into the open air awhile and have some grass while they did work he wasn’t needed for. It was raining again, but he’d never mind that. The horse had been foaled in Esdragon, rained on every day of his life.

“Lady?”

Beneath her hand, Valadan’s shoulder quivered. His sharp ears flicked back. Druyan froze. She was afraid to look—a pitchfork made a weapon, even if unskillfully held in crippled hands.
What have I done?

“You guess rightly about my people—cold iron is a poison to us,” Kellis said. He wasn’t moving, she could tell by the distance his voice carried. Druyan relaxed as she felt Valadan settle under her fingers.

“When the Eral came at us, we tried to fight them. We even learned to band together, all the clans—though that is far from our nature and was a great wonder—but we found we could not stand against their iron swords and axes. We would have yielded them the cropland, we are not truly a farming folk. We had no fixed homes to defend. We were used to moving with the flocks, the herds. Summer after summer we did that. But we would come to our summer pastures, and there were strangers camped there. The Eral. There were more and more of them. And then they began to drive us away. They hunted us like deer, slaughtered us without mercy.”

“So you came here, with your enemies?” That didn’t follow. Druyan turned and arched a brow at him. “That’s a very odd thing to do, you’ll agree.”

Kellis looked unhappy—a different shade of a continual misery. “I am not what you call a wizard. I know herbcraft and a scattering of charms—such as I have seen you use yourself, Lady.” The challenge was plain. Was she witchbred? “Beyond that . . .” He shook his head. “I can foresee, a little. Nothing very useful. And that’s all. But long ago my people learned that even so little is enough to get a man killed. Yes, I lied to you—I was afraid. I didn’t want to die here, especially not the way some folk kill witches.”

She knew what he meant. Fire and cold iron weapons.

Valadan stretched his nose toward Kellis, snorting gently. The man regarded him nervously, as if expecting to be bitten. He held very still.

“Some time after . . . when I had been alone for a while, I heard a tale, of a place where other people like me were banding together. Wizards and charmers and healers, protecting one another, studying, learning, sharing their knowledge out with one another.” He shrugged. “My people don’t do that. I was apprentice to our shaman, but really we have each of us just whatever we’re born with—no more. We don’t take from one another or build on what someone else has learned. I would never have gone seeking such a place, I would never have thought I wanted it—but I had no clan. They were all dead, and I was alone. . .

Valadan was nuzzling his fingers. Kellis looked at the horse as he spoke, as if that made the words come easier. His fingers began to scratch under the horse’s mane, then beneath the harness, where sticky sweat had dried. “I sold my services to an Eral captain gathering a raiding party for the sailing season—it was the only way I knew to get to this side of the Great Sea. I told him I could foresee, that I would warn him if there’d be resistance, tell him ahead which places weren’t prepared for an attack, where the plunder would be rich. The Eral may despise us, but they’l1 use us if they see an advantage. You can imagine for yourself what my folk think of such transactions? Valadan was leaning into the scratching now, since he could not roll to ease himself while he still wore collar and hamess. “I am an outcast. I sold myself, to come here.”

“Something went wrong,” Druyan said dryly.

She saw Kellis’ mouth twitch slightly, while his fingers worked beneath the headstall. “I was lucky, at first. Or as clever as I thought I was. The captain had no idea that most times the divining bowl doesn’t show me`much of anything. I didn’t have to do it all that often, mostly just say whether there’d be fog in the morning—and I could guess that without the bowl.” He rubbed behind the stallion’s ears. Valadan tilted his head a little toward him. “Then he split off from his partners. I was just about ready to slip off when that happened, and I got trapped into predicting for real. I looked in the bowl, I saw your farm, all peaceful and quiet. I swore to the captain that there’d be no trouble.” Valadan sighed as Kellis scratched the top edge of his cheekbones.

Druyan remembered the doughty resistance Travic had put up to being robbed. “You’re right, you’re not very good at foreseeing.”

Kellis nodded, taking no offense. “The trouble is, when I look in the water, I may know what, but I don’t know when I’m seeing. It’s seldom more than a day, but which? It matters. Tomorrow? Yesterday? I don’t always have a point of reference. So I flat-out guessed.” He adjusted a buckle that seemed too tight against Valadan’s hide. The hair was rubbed a bit, the skin beneath untouched.

“And guessed wrong?” Druyan asked.

“I must have been seeing the past day, the day before we’d landed. When all those armed men met us at the gate, the captain was .. . displeased.” Kellis touched his bandaged hand to his forehead. “He gave me this personally. You might have thought he was yelling war cries—that was about my people, about shifty treachery being bred into our bones. The last thing I remember of that night is seeing that iron blade coming at my head.”

“And that’s why they left you.” It made absolute sense, finally.

“They could have done worse,” Kellis said pragmatically. “They probably would have, if they hadn’t been able to get out right away.” He gave Valadan a last pat and went slowly to the pitchfork. “Where do you want the straw?”

Druyan gestured at the golden pile. “Over there, for now. This place you heard about—where was it? Did the stories name it?”

“It is called Kovelir.” Valadan had followed Kellis, butting his head against his back, so that he staggered and used the fork for a crutch. “And it’s on the bank of a very big river.” He put an ann over the stallion’s neck and stayed upright. “You’re supposed to be outside, I think.” He steered the horse toward the door with a nudge or two and urged him through it. Valadan went to the trough, sipped a few sips, then blew across the water playfully.

“If you mean the Est, and I think you do, that’s a long way from here,” Druyan said. “All the way across Esdragon. Your raider didn’t take you far enough.”

“I can walk. It’s not the same as the sea. It’s just land. I can get across it.” Kellis began forking straw aside, bending his fingers carefully about the fork’s handle.

“You’ll be very well advised not to try it in the winter. It rains twice as much then, it’s cold, and the roads are hipdeep in mud.” Druyan fetched a second fork and set to work alongside him.

“I’m a good walker.” Kellis stated it seriously, though they both of them knew that at present it was hard work for him to stand, and she was shifting twice the straw that he was.

He was an honest worker, though. Even half sick as he was, he didn’t quit and he didn’t complain. Druyan glanced around the barn, contemplating running the farm with the hands she had at her command—her own, and Enna’s swollen ones, which did not yield to aloe. Lyn’s. Pru’s. Dalkin’s. Most times she could not imagine succeeding, and so she tried not to look ahead much beyond the next day. It made her nervous. One barley harvest was not a year-and-a-day success. If the duke didn’t release her farmhands, possibly she could hire others—assuming she could find any. But surely that would call attention to her precarious position, might even cost her any hope of secrecy and success. Too much to risk.

Kellis was something of a risk, too, but a lesser one, a private one. “I am freeholding this farm,” she told him carefully, throwing down fresh sheaves of grain in front of the sledge and feeling she threw all caution to the wind with them. “If I do it for a year and a day, it’s mine—so long as no one catches me at it before the time’s out and forces me to remarry and leave. I have the apple crop still to get in, cider to press, plowing come the spring, planting, and all the work with the animals. My husband died iighting the sea raiders, and I am owed a blood debt for that.” She threw another forkful. Kellis was too winded to copy her. But she had his attention. His brows were knitted into one.