Fire in the Mist (2 page)

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.