IN front of a fieldstone cottage, on a crisp spring morning, Risse Leyeadote and her leggy, dark-eyed daughter, Faia, hugged each other goodbye.
Faia pulled away first and grinned. "I love you, Mama. I will see you soon."
"Such a hurry. My youngest daughter cannot wait to abandon me for the flocks and the fields."
"Oh, Mama—!"
Risse laughed, then held out a wrapped packet and a necklace. "Take these, Faiachin. I have more than enough jerky here to get you to the first of the stay-stations, and I have finished the work on a special amulet—added protection against wolves. And I am sending my love. You have your erda?"
Faia nodded.
"Wolfwards?"
Another nod.
"Knife? Herb bag? Matches? Needles?..."
Faia nodded at each item on her mother's list until finally she burst out laughing. "Mama! How many years have I been taking the flock upland? I have everything I need. I will be fine, the sheep will be fine, the dogs will be fine, and I will see you in late summer with a nice bunch of healthy lambs and fat ewes."
Her mother smiled wistfully. "I know, love. But it is a mother's job to worry. If I did not, who would? Besides, I miss you when you are not here."
Faia's face grew serious for a minute. "I always miss you, too, Mama—but it will not be forever."
Her mother nodded. "Have you said your goodbyes to Rorin or Baward yet?"
Faia caught the conspiratorial inflection and winked. "To Rorin, yes. Last night. Baward is going to meet me at the Haddar Pass pasture in about a month, and we are going to—ah, graze the flocks together for a few days."
"Are you, now?" Her mother smiled a bit wistfully, remembering long summers in her own youth spent "grazing the flocks" with one young shepherd or another. "Remember to use the alsinthe, then. Well, I'm glad you aren't going to be up there alone the whole time. Really, Faia, there seem more wolves than usual this year. Do not forget to set the wolfwards. Not even once. Remember, Faljon says, 'Wolves need not knock/at the door that's open.' "
Faia hugged her mother again, then whistled for the dogs. "I know, Mama. I know." She hung the brightly colored chain of the silver-and-wolf-tooth amulet around her neck and tucked the jerky into one of the pockets of her heavy green felt erda. "Love you, mama."
"Love you, too, Faiachin," she heard her mother call when she was halfway down the slope to the pasture.
Faiachin, Faia thought, and winced. Sometimes she still thinks I am five years old instead of nineteen.
Chirp and Huss, black-and-white streaks of barking energy, were under the fence and hard at work before she could even get across the stile. They needed little direction from her to pack the sheep into a nice tight bunch and get them moving to the gate. Diana, the old yellow-eyed lead goat, knew the routine too. She trotted up to Faia and stopped. Faia put the supply harness on her, and checked to make sure the bags on either side were securely attached. The bags held emergency rations for Faia and the dogs and coins for the stay-stations. They also made Faia's pack lighter, and she was grateful for that.
Faia scratched the goat behind the ears and tapped her once on the rump with her staff to hurry her to her place at the front of the flock. That done, the flock, the dogs, and she moved onto the narrow two-rut cart-path that would dwindle to a dent in the grass by the time they got to the highlands.
The sheep, their bellies already starting to swell with lambs, looked oddly naked after the shearing. They trotted after Diana while Chirp and Huss ran vigorously at their heels, nipping and barking and otherwise trying to demonstrate to Faia that they were the only reason the sheep were going anywhere. Faia suspected a fair amount of the show at this point was just because the dogs were so damned glad to be heading for the highlands again.
And as for her—
She started whistling. The tune was "Lady Send the Sunshine," but she thought up some words for the chorus, and switched abruptly from whistling to raucous singing.
"No damned shearing
No more carding,
No more spinning
And no dyeing!
No more weaving
And no sewing—
Flocks must to the uplands go."
She liked it enough that she trilled it a few more times, getting louder and louder with each rendition, until with her last chorus, she threw in some silly dance steps with her brass-tipped staff as her partner.
The trees that lined the lane arched over her head, blossoming or barely greening; spring smelled fresh and earthy and new; and, Lady, it is good to be on my way and free! was the thought foremost in her mind.
At the top of the first hill, the trees were cleared and she turned to look back at Bright nestled below her. At her own house, which lay nearest her point of view, a wisp of smoke rose from the chimney. Further back, the smith's forge was already going at full blast, and she could just catch the steady "clink, clink" of the smith's hammer on the anvil as it drifted across the distance. The littlest children played tag in the cobblestoned street; their older sibs helped mothers and fathers with the serious work of readying the plows and harnesses for ground-breaking and planting. She could see Nesta shoving round loaves of bread into the tall stacks of ovens—an older relative of those loaves rested in her pack, along with some cheese from Nesta's sister Gredla.
She smiled. Home, wonderful, home—where just at the moment, unfortunately, everybody was busy as birds with nestlings. Thank the Lady for giving her the gift of tending; if it were not for that, she'd be home doing the dull labor, like tilling or planting or pulling weeds, and some other lucky soul would be heading for the hills for the summer. For, thanks to her magic with flocks and dogs, ahead for her lay the upland pastures. There she could dally about and play her rede-flute and watch the stars and admire the newborn lambs when they came. And cloudgaze nearly to her heart's content.
The flock trotted onward, and she blew Bright a smug little kiss and hurried after them.
Risse watched her youngest child depart and felt a special pang of maternal longing. Nineteen years old, tall, strong, and beautiful, Faia was everything she could have hoped for in a daughter, and more. In spite of Faia's heated arguments to the contrary, Risse was sure there would be special young men soon; not the current casual lovers, but men Faia would want to have children with. And Faia's life would change, as she had to accept responsibility for babies. She would have less time to wander in the hills, less time to play with her dogs. Risse tired to imagine her daughter with children, and came up with a mental picture of Faia with beautiful babies swaddled on her back as she bounded across an upland pasture after her sheep. The older woman grinned. It was actually the only way she could imagine her youngest with children.
She will be such a boon to the village—when she grows up and gets her father's wayfaring ways out of her system.
There was more to Faia than stubbornness and independence and wanderlust, though, and Risse worried about that, too.
She has more of the Lady's power than I have ever sensed before—even if it has not surfaced yet. She's like a river—deep and quiet and unbelievably strong. I just wish she had more interest in exploring her talent—the Lady does not give gifts in order for them to be wasted.
Risse shrugged her anxieties off. She was having plain old mother-worries compounded by the fact that this was the last of her four children to grow up. Those worries, added to her "wolf-worries," were giving her the worst case of jitters she'd ever had. Still, life was dangerous. She carried memories of packs of wolves, sudden snow-squalls, avalanches, big mountain cats, and crumbling mountain paths from her own summers spent with the sheep. The highlands posed threats even to smart, cautious, experienced shepherds like her daughter. She hoped Faia did not run into more trouble than she could handle.
The amulet should help. I spent enough time and energy on it. If she finds out what it really does, though... Faia's mother shook her head ruefully. Faia's independence was legendary in Bright. Faia asked help from no one—never had, even as a tiny child, and, Risse figured, probably never would. So Risse had done a thing she considered slightly sneaky. She made a link between her and her daughter, which would let her know if Faia needed help without having to wait for Faia to ask.
The amulet would do exactly what she'd told her daughter it would do. It would ward off all but the boldest or most crazed of wolves, two- or four-legged. But it would also carry a distress message from Faia to her mother, who could then summon help. There's a chance Faia will sense the link, Risse thought. It wasn't likely. Faia rarely heard—or felt—anything that she didn't want to hear. Besides, it was a chance Risse had to take. Her nerves screamed with the possibilities of disaster—wolves, her dreams said—and the signs of wolves were heavier this year than they had been in a decade. She had an uneasy feeling about them.
Risse had learned to trust her feelings.
Half an hour's walking made Faia think that the jerky in her pocket might be getting lonely for the company of her stomach, so she pulled one of the leathery strips of meat out of her mother's packet and began to introduce them. Diana had taken goatish interest in the tender, juicy leaves on the trees and refused to lead the flock along the road, the sheep were already doing their mindless best to wander everywhere but where Faia wanted them, and the dogs acted as if they suddenly remembered that these trips to the uplands were not all play. Faia wanted to laugh, but Huss and Chirp would have thought that she was laughing at them, and they would have acted hurt and betrayed for the rest of the day.
Lady forbid! Faia thought. They try to make me feel guilty often enough without me giving them a reason. She decided to help them out a little. After all, Huss had just finished weaning a batch of puppies—Not a one that went for less than ten-and-a-half, Faia thought cheerfully—and the girl figured her dogs deserved a break.
She grounded herself and mentally reached into her center. Then she closed her eyes and visualized a tunnel with high, blank walls to either side and a huge pasture of deep, luxuriant clover straight ahead. She drew energy from the earth, and sent the verdant image to Diana and into the lentil-sized minds of the sheep. They abruptly left off their munching and moved down the road, their purpose in life—the filling of their insatiable bellies—given a new direction.
But in the time that her eyes had been closed, a stranger had appeared over the crest of the next hill, riding toward her. His beast was a solid-looking bay with an excellent gait, well-formed and beautiful, but white-footed. Faia spat surreptitiously to one side to avert the bad luck associated with white-footed horses and studied the strange rider from under the brim of her hat.
The ill-fortune was all with the horse, she decided when she got a closer look at the odd pair. That was the only way she could explain to her own satisfaction how such a scabby bit of human flesh could own such an otherwise excellent animal.
For the rider was no match for his horse. The man was pale as skimmed milk, with gaunt cheeks so pimpled Faia's face hurt in sympathy. His jerkin was well cut from expensive cloth, but flapped around his skinny frame as if it were dressing up a stick man.
The man and horse edged along one side of the flock while Faia kept to the other.
"Care you—" he began to shout, but was interrupted by a fit of coughing. When it passed, he tried again. "Care you to see the merchandise in my packs?"
Faia considered only an instant. His packs flapped almost as slackly as his jerkin—there was not likely to be much of interest in either. "Thanks, no."
"The village—?"
"You have almost arrived."
"My gratitude, then," he said as he drew even with her.
She stepped up the embankment to be out of the way of his horse, thinking uncharitably that such homeliness really ought to stay at home, where innocent bystanders wouldn't have to see it.
She was glad when the dull thudding of horse's hooves on packed dirt faded into the distance. She went back to her intervals of whistling and singing and jerky-munching.
Near twilight, she stopped again to water the flock and to rest and get a drink for herself. By her best guess, she still had a torchmark of hard pushing to get to the first of the stay-stations. She was tired, and sank gratefully to the grass by the side of the stream. Huss and Chirp, tongues lolling, flopped at her feet as the sheep and Diana lined the stream. Both dogs grinned up at her, grateful for the break. They trotted to her side and nuzzled her, and she split a piece of her jerky with them.
"We have gotten soft and lazy from too much sitting around the cottage during the winter, hey, kids?" she asked them.
Their eyes seemed to assure her that this was truth.
She knelt on the bank upstream from the flock and cupped her hands to draw out some of the icy water, when suddenly a low, mournful howl took up, echoed and reverberated down from higher ground. It was followed by another, and yet another.
Wolves! Faia froze and concentrated, trying to determine their number and location. Wolves should not be this close in, she worried.
They were not right around her, she decided after careful listening, but they were within half a daywalk—definitely too close for complacency. And there were a lot of them—maybe fifteen. The howls were not their hunting cry—at least, not for the time being. They were merely talking, entertaining themselves, engaging in evening wolfsong. That could easily change if they were hungry, and if they knew there was a flock of sheep within striking distance.
To Faia's animals, it did not matter whether the wolves were presently hunting or not. The sheep were already spooked, and the dogs stood rigid with hackles raised. Faia loosened her sling in her belt and made sure her special spiked shot was ready in its pouch, just in case. She admired wolves, and would not willingly harm one—but if it came to a contest between the wolves and her sheep or her dogs, she would do her best to make sure the wolves were the ones who got hurt.
Mama was right about wolves being plentiful this year, I guess.
It began to seem that the trip would be less cloudgazing and more work than she had hoped.
She whistled the dogs back to work. Making the fork as soon as possible had become suddenly not a matter of personal comfort but a matter of safety for herself and her beasts.
So much for making good time to the first stay-station, Faia grumped. What with the skittish sheep bolting off the main trail into the scrub with every branch-crack and owl-hoot, she and her flock had hiked long past the arrival of full dark before the familiar clearing finally appeared. Muscles whose existence she had forgotten throbbed, and a blister on her right heel reminded her that new boots were best saved for short trips. As she and the flock made their way toward the corral, she noted sadly that the windows of the stay-station were dark, which meant that she would have no human companionship that night—and also that no earlier arrival would have the wolfwards already set. She and Chirp and Huss struggled to get all the sheep packed into the grassy pen. Then, so bone-tired she wished she could drop on the stones to sleep, she began to set the wolfwards.
From her pack she pulled eight wooden circles—already glyph-marked with a drop of wolf urine painted with a wolf-hair brush—and laid these in a circle on the stone altar that sat just outside the fence on the north edge of the circular corral. She set her knife across them, and brought out the round, shallow stone bowl that was kept under the altar. She placed the bowl in the center of the circle, and crumbled a handful of kwilpie leaves and sweet-smelling ress powder into it, then grounded and centered herself, and visualized a circle of blazing blue that grew like a bubble from the altar. Her protective circle stretched to encompass the whole of the corral plus the stay-station that lay at the exact south point of the circle. She rested for a moment, gathering energy from the earth, then lit the leaves and powder with a quicklight. The incense blazed brilliant green.
Softly she chanted:
"Lady of the Beasts, Tide Mother Woman,
Lady of the Earth, Virgin, Mother, Crone.
Lady, loan to me your eyes;
Loan to me your faeriefires
To watch and ward us while we sleep,
That flock and folk will safely keep
Until the night is done."
Faia finished her chant, and touched the point of the knife to the green fire, then to each round circle in turn. As she did, there appeared above the circles small dots of green light, each no bigger than a robin's egg. They held position two fingers' breadth over the center of the disks.
When each wolfward held its beacon of faeriefire, she bowed her head for a moment.
"Lady, thanks," she said, and the fire in the bowl guttered out. She picked up the wards, and following the path of the Tide Mother around the corral, laid them out in the shape of the Lady's Wheel. Only when this was done did she gather her things and head gratefully for the stay-station. Hot tea, a soft bed, and a late rising; they all sounded awfully inviting.
She left the heavy wooden door unbarred. First, the wolfwards would warn her not only of wolves, but also of the arrival of any other danger. Second, if the wolves were desperate or brazen enough to challenge the wards, she would need to get through the door quickly. With that in mind, she also placed her sling, her staff, and her wolfshot on the stand beside the door.
Huss and Chirp settled themselves on the stone step outside. Faia dug through the stockroom, found the food kept there for shepherds' dogs, and put a bowl out for each of the two exhausted border collies. They grinned at her and wagged their tails and ate like they had never seen food before.
"Poor pups," she snorted. "Faljon says, 'Best is the meal/earned by the brow.' You two should be thankful for the hard work we did today."
Huss glanced up from the bowl and cocked an eyebrow with an expression that seemed to question the sanity of hard work, Faljon, and anyone who would quote such a ridiculous proverb.
Faia laughed and scratched her behind the ears. "Indeed. I wonder myself whether Faljon ever chased idiot sheep across the hills or fought off wolves and mountain lions or tromped for leagues with prickleburrs under his erda—or whether perhaps he just sat in his cottage and thought of ways to tell the rest of us how to do it."
"Still," she added, mostly to herself, "he is right about the food."
She rose and stretched and went back into the stay-station. From the storeroom, she took a packet of tea, a small box of soup powder, and two little potatoes. She put a single copper fourth-coin in the box on the storeroom door in exchange. When she had the fire in the fireplace going, and water heating for tea and soup, she sprawled across one of the station's narrow bedframes and stared at the ceiling.
It is good to be on my way again, she thought. Sore muscles and all. Away from Bright, out from under Mama's roof and Mama's worries, maybe I'll have a chance to think.
She had a lot to think about. Much as she loved her mother, her brothers and her sister, she had never been so glad to leave Bright as she was this spring. All winter long, her relatives had hinted to her mother that perhaps Risse would like to send her flock with one of their older children, since surely Faia would not be heading into the hills with the sheep again. When they asked, Risse had looked hopeful, and Faia sullenly defiant.
Risse alternated between moments of understanding her youngest child's yearning for freedom, and bouts of fury at what she perceived as lightmindedness. In the bad times, mother accused daughter of dithering with her life, of doing what amused her instead of planning for her future, for work that would be to the long-term good of the village. "You can't be a shepherd forever, Faia," she had said. You're a woman, full of woman's magic. You could become a healer, learn with me, and take over for me when I am too old and weak to continue. You could be better than I'll ever hope to be—"
Faia thought that she was quick enough with the healing lays, but she hated the idea of spending her time picking and drying herbs, mixing decoctions and elixirs, and running from house to house to deliver babies or tend the sick, dead, and dying.
Then there was Kasara, her sister, who, with a shuttle in her hand and her babes playing on sheepskin rugs on the packed dirt floor, had offered to apprentice her little sister, and give her a room out from under their mother's roof. But while Risse was gentle and thoughtful, Kasara was shrill and shrewish and wanted an apprentice, Faia suspected, to double her output without significantly increasing her costs. While Kasara had remarked that she liked the workmanship of Faia's keurn cloths, Faia doubted that once in her sister's employ she would ever be judged good enough to earn her own master's shuttles. Kasara would see to that.
The girls in Bright who were Faia's age now had babies and bondmates with whom they worked their dowry fields. And as for unbonded young men—well, there now remained only Rorin and Baward in her own age group. Either would be happy enough to form a public bond with her, but...
Faia rolled over on to her stomach and sighed. But what?
Faia did not want to be a weaver, nor a healer, nor a bondwife with babies.
When she closed her eyes, she could hear her father's voice as sharp and clear and wistful as the last time she had heard him, talking, as he had loved to do, about far-off places. "Faiachin, my little lambkin," he had said, "there is a world beyond these hills, flat as a table, full of odd folk with odd ways, and magic such as your mind cannot imagine. Flatters have not the need to chase sheep in the hills, so they spend their days playing at music and illusion and pretties for rich men and women." He had stared off toward the unseen wonderland, and sighed. "Someday, littlest, I will take you to the Flatters' lands."
He would have, Faia believed, had he lived long enough. But her mother had loved an old man, whose body wore out long before his spirit. He had given Faia his wanderlust, but had not survived to slake it.
Faia stared at the ceiling of the stay-station. She had no real wish to see the Flatterlands anymore, she admitted to herself. Her dogs were her friends; her flock, riches; and the wondrous wild beauty of the upland fells was the magic her father had spun for her in his tales of other lands. Her hills would satisfy her—if only she could stay in them.
Though Faia heard the wolfsongs nightly during the week's travel to the high country, she never saw the wolves. They were always a few valleys away, always hunting other game that did not carry the freight of a human guardian. She stayed cautious—but her caution began to seem more a formality than dire necessity.
In the highland pastures, spring flowers poked out of the edges of melting snowfields. The rocky hills were alive with the chirruping squeals of busybody conies; otherwise the meadowland pastures were idyllic. Faia kept the wolfwards replenished nightly, and spent a busy few days as the waxing of the Tide Mother brought the majority of the lambs in a rush. For a while, it seemed she was running from sheep to sheep, working tiny hooves free from a birth canal, calming a first-time mother, making sure that each ewe was willing to nurse her own lamb or lambs, and lastly watching for signs of sickness in mothers or newborns. Lambing went well. She lost only two newborns—and them to deformity—and one mother to old age; and she tricked the mother of the deformed lambs into thinking the dead ewe's baby was hers by rubbing both beasts down with skunkweed until they smelled to high heaven... except to each other.
After the peak of the full Tide Mother, the rhythms of her days settled down. She watched the clouds as she had hoped to, sent the eerie melodies of her rede-flute whistling down the valleys by the light of the stars, and danced in the high meadows for sheer love of the goodness of life. Her anguished arguments with her mother receded into her memory, leaving only ghostly tracks at odd moments—the highlands were their own balm. Mild weather and an abundance of small rodents kept the wolves politely at their distance, and kept her and Huss and Chirp supplied with the occasional fresh cony or rabbit to supplement their steady diet of jerky and shepherd's stew.
The Tide Mother, waxing when she left Bright, was waning when premonitions started.
From a sound sleep she woke, a scream caught in her throat.
Something is wrong!
Her heart pounded; she was drenched in sweat. She sat shivering in her bedroll in the gray light of pre-dawn. She grounded herself and reinforced her shields, then sent out searching tendrils.
There was nothing nearby. Nothing. But the terror was as palpable while she was awake as it had been in her dreams.
Where is this coming from?
Wolves howled in the distance, the echoes ringing up the valleys from far down into the lowerland.
Lowerland? Where the village is? Why?! In the winter, when they have no food, when the cold and ice force them out of the wilds toward the flocks, of course they migrate toward the village—but in the midst of the most abundant spring in years?
Something was wrong.
Faia shivered again.
Faljon says, "A goose on the grave/means that grain has grown there." That is all it is—bad dreams, the wolves hunting an animal that has fled downland, every bit of it is my nervousness.
Still, she pulled off the necklace that her mother had given her and slipped the wolf talisman off it. She ran the chain through her fingers. The chain was an old piece, a kordaus or scrying cord her mother had used for years, decorated with thirty-three round, incised beads of varying types of stone, bone, wood, and metal, no two alike. Faia could feel the reassuring tingle of power in it. She closed her eyes and calmed herself, while the beads slipped across her fingertips with soothing steadiness.
One caught, and the comforting rhythm ceased. She opened her eyes and looked at it.
Black iron. Disease.
She winced, then closed her eyes again, centered, breathed deeply, reached inside herself.
Click, click, tick, clack, stop.
Red-stained clay. Death.
Faia's hands began to tremble. One final time, she began her rounds of the beads, begging for the reversing bead, for some sign that things were as they should be.
Click, tick, click, click, tink, click... stop.
Polished white shell.
—Home!—
And the wolfsong echoed up from the lowerlands, foreboding, deadly.
Goddess of Life, what am I to do?! The lambs are too young to take all the way back to the village yet—and I could be reading this wrong, or it could mean nothing, even yet, except the reflections of my own fears. That I read disease and death at home could be meaningless. Sometimes, after all, the beads do not work—at least not for me.
Faia shivered, trying to decipher the import of the wolfsong in the valley. Knowing the languages of animals was not among her talents.
Then inspiration struck. Baward had planned to leave Bright a week after she left, moving his flock of goats along a harder, faster route to the Haddar Pass pasture so that they would meet there. She and her flock were only two days from Haddar Pass.
With Baward would come information—and, she hoped, peace of mind.
She held that thought close to her heart and tried to banish her anxieties.
He is three days late. That can only mean he is not coming.
She sat nestled between the two sheltering stones, her wide-brimmed hat covering her neck, her erda staked like a tent over her. Both dogs crowded in beside her, understanding that their duty was temporarily suspended. Diana and the sheep and their lambs huddled miserably, their backs to the wind and the blowing, chill rain that gusted and spattered in erratic torrents. As long as the weather held, they would not go anywhere by choice. A tattered gray cloak of mist hid them from view at intervals, then parted to reveal them still in the same stodgy clumps, commiserating with each other. When the fog hid them for too long, Faia Searched to check their positions, drawing the power of the earth into her and linking with the flock. With her eyes closed, she could see the bright glow of each sheep, a glow that meant life.
Faia peered through the early twilight, still praying to the Lady that Baward would arrive. But when she Searched for him and his flock, which should have made a huge glow to her mind's eye if he were anywhere near, there was nothing but darkness.
He has been detained by the birthing of his flocks, or some sickness among the beasts. A wolf attack. Nothing serious. Or he forgot the time we agreed upon.
The excuses didn't ring true.
Come morning, lambs or no lambs, I am going home.
Several lambs died in the forced march, and the ewes dropped weight, fretted, balked. A mountain lion attacked, and won a weary ewe from Faia, at the price of one of his eyes. Her body ached, the dogs complained—and the premonitions never left her.
But if the return trip was bad, her first sight of Bright was worse.
From the hilltop on which she had last stood long weeks ago, she saw the village frozen in the cool, brilliant sunshine—the dark, blank eyes of houses stared vacantly at each other from across lifeless streets. She heard the silence that told of a smithy stilled, children hushed, farmers leaving all the fields for fallow, the market closed.
No smoke, her nose told her. Not from the cottages, not from the baker's ovens, neither from the kilns nor the washers' fires nor the dyeing vats; not from cookfires. But the air was scented—the reek was heavy and cloying; sweet, putrid.
Deathstench.
And on the cobblestone streets and in the pastures, Faia's eyes registered still forms. Unrecognizable, they lay scattered in piles of red and gray, bloated, tattered, with gleams of white.
Then the sheep clustered together, bleating terror, and huge dark monsters shot from the edges of the forest, and for a while Faia could not ponder the meaning of the motionless village.
The attack was not wolf madness, but wolf boldness. They had come, had taken what they wanted without challenge, and they had grown confident. Now they wanted her sheep.
Now they wanted her.
The sheep—stupid sheep—scattered in a dozen directions. A few made it to the woods intact; more, as they broke from the flock, were hamstrung or gutted or had their throats ripped out. Diana, poor old goat, stood her ground, horns slashing, and cloven hooves flying, but she was overpowered, too. The dogs darted and blurred, flashes of black and white amid the bulk of gray—and first Faia saw Chirp die, with his neck crushed between one wolf's massive jaws, then Huss screamed, and Faia saw her, her teeth still latched to a big bitch's throat, with her belly opened and her guts dragging in the dirt.
The pack leader, silver-tipped-black and immense, faced Faia and strode stiff-legged forward; head down, ears flat back, pale, cold eyes gleaming. His lips drew back from yellowed teeth. He rumbled a warning growl as he advanced.
She clutched her staff, and her belly tightened with fear. There was no time to reach for the slingshot and the studded wolfshot. She made a quick thrust at the beast with her walking stick that caught him in the teeth. He danced back, and crouched for a leap, his eyes fixed on her throat.
Lady, help me!
Faia drew the earth's energy, thinking it into her staff, thinking, Give the staff strength!
And somehow, she was outside of herself, and staring down at the massive black wolf and the tall, rangy girl who faced him off with nothing but a brass-tipped walking stick.
At the same instant, she was inside herself, and the strength was there—earth-strength, Lady-strength, confidence. Faia, stilled inside, deadly calm, swung the staff up as the wolf lunged and caught him across the chest; the impact of his great weight flung her backward a staggered step. But light flowed from the staff around the wolf, blazing green fire. The wolf screamed, its voice for a moment disconcertingly human. Then he crumpled to the ground and was still—unmarked, stone dead.
At the scream, the other wolves vanished into the forest, disappearing like the memories of shadows.
And Faia was left with the remains of her flock—clumps of white and bloody red—and the mangled goat, and the dogs, two motionless bundles with ripped and dirty fur that blew in the chill wind. And below her lay the village.
Her feet moved slower and slower as she approached her cottage. The stench, which had only blown in suggestive eddies to the top of the hill, was inescapable in the sheltered valley. Faia took two of her scarves and wrapped them around her face. The wolves had been at the village. Carcasses of horses and cattle lay on the road and in the street, Baward's goats in their pen, all their bellies ripped and tattered, the entrails gone, decay well set in. All of them lay where they had fallen, while vultures glared at her as she passed and flapped their wings in threat. She abandoned the idea of making any attempt to clean the carcasses up. And as she drew closer, she could see things that had not shown up from the hill. Rats were everywhere. Doors hung partway open, and flies roiled out of them—the sound of the village was the sound of flies.
Faia's own door was closed, and that gave her hope. She opened it, and inside, things were in order. There were no flies; the deathstench was muted and obviously not coming from the house. Sunlight filtered through the oilskin windows onto the table where Mama's healing bag lay, empty of supplies. There was no fire in the fireplace, but the wood was laid by the side, ready to start. And Mama had some weaving spread out.
"Mama?" Faia called, walking across the main room toward the weaving. "Mama, are you here?"
Then Faia studied the weaving more closely, and bit back panic.
It is the same piece she was working on when I left, and there is almost nothing done!
And her eyes admitted to the other details she'd been denying. Dust coated the tables, the plates that lay out—every single surface in the two-room cottage.
Her throat ached, and her eyes began to burn.
"Mama?" she whispered, and walked into the bedroom.
Her mother's bed was neatly made, her clothes lay stacked in precisely squared piles on the rocking chair, where her mother never left clothes, and on the clothes pegs, everything was present except for her mother's red celebratory dress. Both her house shoes and her boots were stacked under the pegs.
What do you have on your feet, Mama?
Faia's pulse began to roar in her ears.
She turned and began running, screaming "MAMA!" as loudly as she could. She flew outside and around the house and down toward the shed and her mother's garden. She has to be in the shed, Faia told herself. Mama has to be in the shed.
But that was not where Faia found her mother.
The earth was still soft, still unsettled over the grave on the hillside, and garlands of flowers, now withered, lay in disarray. Faia studied the wood plaque with blurred eyes, fighting belief.
Those are her symbols. The healer's wand, the weaver's shuttle, the mother's circles.
And though Faia couldn't read the words painted underneath, she knew what they said.
Risse Leyeadote.
"Mama," Faia whispered, and knelt in the soft earth of the grave, and wrapped her arms around herself to fight back the tears. "Oh, Mama—I did not come back in time. I did not get back... Mama..." And then she collapsed, and lay stretched in the dirt on her mother's grave, as close as she would ever be to her mother again.
It was much later that she was able to pull herself away from the grave to walk through the village. The reek of decay was worse in some places—and finally, timidly, Faia entered her sister's home. The smell was horrible, and flies were so thick she hit scores of them every time she waved her hands to keep them out of her eyes. She pulled the scarves tighter around her nose and mouth.
Inside, the beds held the family—though Faia had a hard time recognizing them. A few days dead and badly bloated, with skin gray and edging into the bruised purple of decay, they bore the marks of agonizing disease. She could make out the mottling of pustules and open sores on each of them—Kasara; her bondmate Sjeffan; Liete, their oldest son; Vaurn, the toddler. The splashed brown of vomited blood stained the floor. All lay clutching their stomachs.
Plague!
Faia fled the cottage, bile burning in her throat. She pulled the scarves away from her mouth and vomited, then leaned weakly against the house. "Dead. All of them—Mama, Kasara, the kids, and surely my brothers, too, or these would have been buried...."
Unbidden, an image rose up in her mind—a pale, gaunt, coughing man with his face covered in red spots—Not pimples, but Plague!—the man she had passed the day she left Bright for the highlands.
He killed all of them, she realized, and knew then that her mother would have been one of the first to die. Mama would have tended to him, even once she knew he had Plague; would have tended to the rest of the village, too, as long as she could have. She probably could have isolated him, too, and prevented most of the deaths—except that the man was a trader, and the winter had been hard and boring and lonely for the villagers; and a little amusement, a little interest, a new face, must have exposed most of Bright to the stranger before it became apparent that he brought disease.
So Mama, exposed early and a lot, died early. At least she had a grave, Faia thought. At least she was spared the indignity of rotting in her bed, like the rest of my family.
Faia shuddered as the eyes of rats studied her with speculative hunger, calculating—waiting. She flinched at the hum and buzz of the flies, at the patient smiles of the vultures. She wanted out of Bright, to be well and far away. But hope had not entirely deserted her.
Has anyone survived? she wondered.
She closed her eyes and Searched, sending desperate tendrils to the farthest corners of the village. At first, she got nothing but the dim backglow that indicated the rats, insects, cats and birds who had inherited the village. But on the far side of Bright, past the baker's ovens, she finally picked up a solitary glow, unmoving but still blazing yellow with life. And she, who thought her heart had died from despair, felt a final surge of hope.
Do not die! she pleaded with the fragile light she Sensed. She raced through the streets, fighting back tears. Please, please by-the-Lady, do not die.
At the house of Sehpura Gennesdote, she stopped. The lifeforce was strongest inside. She shivered and sent a hasty prayer for protection to the Lady, tightened the mask back over her face, and hurried in before her courage could fail her. She knew she was going to see one last wasted, pocked human, dying horribly in bed, but she begged anyway that this would not be the case.
"Hello?" She called into the darkness and silence, and at first got no response. Her heart fell—this would be as bad as she had dreaded. But she called again anyway, noting with dismay the massed presence of flies, the deathstench, the lumps of unmoving shapes in the beds.
"Hello? Is anyone here?"
And a blurred shape suddenly charged her, and grabbed her by her waist, and buried its face in her breasts, sobbing. She hauled the terrified creature out of the house into sunlight, where she could identify—
A boy. Aldar Maylsonne. He was a few years younger than she—perhaps fourteen or fifteen—unmarked by Plague, so far untouched, though he had been curled up in a corner of his own house, with his dead family all around him.
For how long? Faia wondered.
"When did this happen, Aldar?"
"I don't know... I don't know... I came home today and j-j-j-just found them—"
Aldar clung to her, lost in wordless sobbing, and she held him, her own grief once again overwhelming.
But I will not be alone, she thought. If they were all dead when he found them, he has not been exposed. There was a little comfort in that thought.
"We have to leave." She whispered, and felt his head nod against her breast.
"I should bury them," Aldar told her. "Mama and Papa, my sibs—" His voice broke, and he started sobbing again.
"We cannot. There are too many, and only two of us."
He raised his head to stare into her eyes. "No one else is left? No one?!"
Faia's fingers clutched at the boy's narrow shoulders. "No one but us."
At last, he let go of her and wiped viciously at his eyes. "My pack is inside the house. It has all I will need."
"Go ahead and get it—and take something to keep the wolves at bay."
She watched him drawing himself together to go back into his family's house.
He is brave. I wish I could help him. Lady, I wish I could help me. We are all that is left of Bright, he and I. Where can we go? I have no one left in the world. Has he?
He stumbled out of the cottage, his pack on one arm, his walking stick in hand, with his erda held over his nose and mouth.
"Let's get out of here," he muttered.
They fled along the dirt road that led downward, toward the Flatterlands, hurrying as fast as they dared. When they came to the bend that would take them out of sight of Bright for the last time, Faia stopped. It was no good.
"Wait," she whispered. She gripped Aldar's shoulder, and turned to stare back at the village. Faia's thoughts kept returning to the bodies that lay unburied, to the rats and the flies and vultures—to Aldar's family and hers, who had not been returned to their Mother Earth. She kept thinking of how it would haunt them, knowing that the people they had known and loved lay crumbling in open air.
I cannot—will not—leave Bright this way. I have to do something. I have to cleanse it—for his memory and for mine.
Aldar's eyes questioned her.
"We cannot bury them, but there is something that I think I can do. Give me a minute." Her voice was terse. She was already beginning to draw in energy.
She had never done anything like this, but something inside of her assured her that she could. She planted her staff on the road and closed her eyes and saw herself drawing up the fire from earth's heart. She raised her left hand and pulled down the heat from the sun, and the deep red blaze of the Tide Mother. She brought them together, and with her eyes pressed tightly closed, she formed the spell that would cleanse Bright.
She felt enormous energy surge within her. She became a storm of fire, pulling and drawing until she could hold no more. Then with a convulsive shudder, she lifted her staff high over her head and swung it toward the little cluster of houses and shops, screaming—
"All death and decay,
All evil, all disease,
Begone!"
There was a tremendous clap of thunder, and green flame shot from the point of her staff. Bright glowed with a green light so brilliant the sun dimmed in comparison. The sky darkened as enraged vultures launched into the air, suddenly deprived of their meals; the ground ran black with fleeing rats.
You killed my mother! Faia raged, seeing the skinny specter of death on his unlucky white-footed horse. Tears streamed down her cheeks. You killed my family, and my lovers, and my friends, and my world. You took it all away from me. And I should have died, too, Faia thought bitterly. I wish I would have.
Her power grew with her grief and fury. A wind rose as the blazing village drew air to the flames, which leapt higher and brighter. The wind became a storm that gathered force as it moved and drew, until the fierce keening of its galewinds were so great Aldar flung himself on the ground and covered his ears. Clouds streamed from the four corners of the earth to the center of Faia's maelstrom, and the sky grew black and grim.
Still Faia fed her energy and her anger and her grief into the fire, until the winds began to pull leaves and branches off the trees and into the conflagration, and lightning darted from the towering clouds into the fireball.
"Stop it, Faia!" Aldar screamed above the roar.
She kept on, burning her emotions as she burned the city.
Aldar started pummeling her with his clenched fists, yelling, "Stop it, stop it, stop it!" until the terror in his voice broke through. Stunned and spent, she dropped her staff and crumpled to her knees.
The hellish green blaze dimmed and flickered and died, and Faia shivered. She stared at the place where the village had been. A cold wind blew up and the first fat drops of rain splattered against her cheeks to mix with the tears.
There is nothing left inside of me, she thought.
She pictured her mother, laughing and hugging her, with her beautiful face tipped up to catch the heat of the sun, and Faia felt—nothing. She could not cry for the loss of Chirp and Huss, for Diana, for her brothers and sister, for her nephews or nieces, for her mother's needless death, for her village, of which nothing remained but a blackened circle. She could not cry for Baward, who made her laugh, or for Rorin, who made her lust. She could feel no sympathy anymore for Aldar, who was staring at her as if she were the Goddess Kallee, the bringer of death.
I have become a shell, she thought. A husk doll with nothing inside but air and darkness. I am dead now. My body just has not realized it yet.
She sighed, and stared up at Aldar, who was flinching in the torrential rain and pounding wind. She pulled herself out of the mud that the road had suddenly become, and slung her pack across her shoulders. She didn't bother with her erda. She couldn't feel the rain any more than she could feel her soul. Besides, the erda was something a person wore if she cared what happened to her. Faia didn't care.
"We must go, Aldar," Faia said, voice flat.
He nodded mutely, stared at her with huge, horrified eyes, and fell into place a few steps behind her.
In Ariss, far from the conflagration in the tiny village of Bright, powerful mages and sajes were interrupted in their work, as the magic they were working with was drawn off and abruptly, simply gone. They were thrown to the ground by an overwhelming, unseen force, their bodies drained of energy by some monstrous magical entity, by a screaming psychic rush of pure grief and rage, and by an odd undercurrent of evil elation.
The universal reaction to this was a panicked thought thrown up to the gods and goddesses of the city: What in the hells was that?!