Fire in the Mist (6 page)

Her stomach churned.

I just wish I had someplace to wash up before I walked into that big, fancy town. What will they think of me? I am covered in mud and soaking wet and my clothes reek from six straight days of wearing—
She clenched her fists until the nails bit into her palms, then squared her shoulders and took a deep breath.
They will just have to understand, I suppose. I have been doing the best I can.

She gave Aldar another brief hug, then smiled uncertainly. "I am ready," she said.

Aldar became more animated with every step toward Willowlake. Now that it was in sight, he chattered on, all about the wonders in the massive town of five hundred—the elegant horse-drawn carriage he had seen, the fountain that one woman had in her front yard, the stall in the market where a traveling vendor sold animals as pets. Not practical animals like the kittens of good mousers or dogs for herding sheep or guarding property, he remarked—but
pets
. Birds that sang, or talked; gaudy fish that were no good for eating, but that simply swam around in glass bowls to be looked at; even a miniature horse that, as far as Aldar could tell, was no good for anything.

Faia listened with half her attention. The other half was concentrated on the covered bridge, where, she became more and more certain, something was wrong.

Something was wrong—and the prickling hairs on the back of her neck insisted that it concerned her and Aldar.

As they drew closer, she could make out shapes standing under the covering on the bridge, out of the rain. There appeared to be more than a dozen people—and she could feel their eyes on her and Aldar.

"—and Sarral does not cook on a rack in the fireplace. She has a stove—" Aldar was saying.

Faia cut him off. "Are there always that many people waiting on the bridge?"

Aldar peered into the gloom of the covered bridge, and noticed what she was talking about. "Usually there is only the toll-taker." He looked puzzled for a minute, then he smiled. "I guess not everyone wants to walk in the rain like us."

Faia was neither convinced nor reassured. "It has been raining for days without a break, Aldar. They would not all just stay under that bridge, waiting."

She noticed movement from the crowd, as the people who had been standing in the front moved aside to let several others through. Faia was close enough now that she could make out details.

The ones who had come through the crowd to stand in front were two men and two women dressed unlike any she had seen in her entire life. The men wore gaudy gold-and-green robes that swept in smooth lines to the ground, and rich carmine hoods that fell away from their faces in gracious draping curves. Their hair was long, pulled back and braided, and their beards were worn long, also braided, and adorned with heavy gold rings and wires. The women had their hair cut straight off at their shoulders and worn loose—in fact, had it not been for the revealing tightness of their clothes, she would have thought them to be men as well. They wore leather pants and matching leather jackets—the tall, dark brunette wore red, the tiny redhead, pale blue. Both sported soft, loose black boots that bagged around their calves, and heavy silver rings at neck and wrist and ankle over the boots.

The two men were standing close together, conferring; they were obviously maintaining as much distance from the two women as they could without going out and standing in the muddy, swollen river.

"Lady bless," Aldar whispered. "I have never seen anything like
them
before."

Wonderful.
Faia shivered in the cold rain and worried.
There is something off kilter about that mob on the bridge, and about their interest in us—

"Aldar, stay here," she hissed. "I do not like this, and I do not want you to get hurt. I will go up and talk with them and find out what is going on."

"But what about you?" Aldar worried.

Faia thought of what she had done to the village of Bright, and shook her head grimly. "I can take care of myself if I have to. I want to know that you are safely out of harm's way first, though."

Apparently Aldar was remembering the village, too, because his eyes grew round again. He gripped her hand. "Be careful, sis'ling," he said, using that childish term of endearment for the first time.

She bit her lip. "Just stay put."

She and Aldar had paused several stones' throws from the entryway to the bridge. It was trouble that was waiting for her, and no doubt of it. She took a firmer grip on her staff, and even though she had not intended to, she pulled the energy of earth and sky like a cloak around her and Aldar. Then she strode forward to meet and challenge whatever Fate had in store.

It had been a long and weary wait. The Sensings of the magic that had first been felt when it blasted Bright came at odd intervals. Those Sensings were almost always in the dark of night or the very early morning. They were random fluctuations, undirected—unlike that first horrifying burst that had destroyed the entire village to such a degree that only the etchings of foundation marks melted into the native bedrock remained to show that the village had been there. And though the random power only reappeared in brief, untraceable, and apparently harmless bursts, the talent behind it was still so awesomely strong that Frelle Medwind Song broke out in a nervous sweat just thinking about it. The surges couldn't be pinpointed, but the general areas of their occurrence could be mapped—and whatever was making them, it had been heading directly from Bright to Willowlake.

Medwind and her colleague, sitting in their shared office in Mage-Ariss had figured direction and speed and had determined that whatever it was that was causing the disturbances—and whatever it was that had, not incidentally, leveled Bright—would be arriving in Willowlake fairly early on Terradae morning.

Apparently, in Saje-Ariss, the same calculations had been made and the same conclusions drawn, for along with Medwind and her colleague, Frelle Jann Raxesmotte, there were two sajes on the bridge in the pale, cold, rainy morning, as tense and drawn and worried as the two women.

And now, at just the appropriate time, we have a man and a boy coming down the road, and though both of them appear to be peasants, well—appearances can surely be deceiving.

Medwind leaned over and whispered to Jann, "If either of these is the one we've been waiting for, at least it's going to be their problem, not ours." She indicated the two pale, nervous sajes in their glorious, overdone robes.

Jann nodded slowly. "We could actually leave now, and let them deal with it."

"I know. But suppose Bright's destroyer decides
we
are a problem for
him
, even though we are from the mage side of the city. Suppose he attacks."

Medwind didn't miss the fact that, when the man and the boy stopped to confer about fifty yards off, the two sajes grew even paler and more anxious. She felt a great deal of sympathy for them.

After all, if either of those two had been female, I'd be in the boiling pot now, instead of them.

Suddenly there was an enormous surge of magic, so overwhelming that Medwind felt light-headed. "Bitch-Goddess," she swore, "what in the saje-hells is that?!"

Jann had been watching with Sight, her eyes pressed tightly closed. "The tall one," she whispered from a throat gone suddenly dry and tight. "All of that energy swarmed to the tall one. It doesn't feel male, but it doesn't feel female either. The magic has no gender signatures on it at all. It is drawing from the earth-lines and the sky-lines."

Oh, no, no—I don't want to think about the implications of that. What could possibly use the magic of ground and sky together? How could anyone do that?

"Wild talent?"
Medwind got very scared, very fast. "Could there be a wild talent that powerful?"

"By bloody Horned Adar, what if you're right?"

The two frelles stared at each other, eyes wide with speculation. "Could what happened in Bright have been an accident?" Medwind croaked.

Stiffly, as paralyzed by the approaching apparition as songbirds transfixed by a deadly snake, the two women watched the tall peasant stalk up to the bridge. Behind her, Medwind was conscious of the villagers, packed together like sheep tucked behind the shepherd when the wolf approaches.

If only they knew how scared their shepherds were, I don't wonder but that they'd be running for the hills right now.

Medwind tried to read the approaching peasant's intent, to no avail. "I can't pull anything through those shields at all. I feel like I'm attacking a seamless stone wall with a thread."

Jann said, "If he goes on the attack, it is going to take all four of us just to contain him."

Medwind gave her a sideways glance. "Tell me something, Jann. Even pooling our strength, do you think the four of us could level a village the way Bright was leveled? Down to a puddle of glass and slag? Hmmm?"

Jann shivered and shook her head slowly.

Medwind nodded, her black hair bobbing. "Right. So what, exactly, do you propose we do if this saje-peasant does attack? Aside from dying bravely, I mean?" The woman in red glanced down at her feet, then tipped her head at an angle. "The only thing we'll be able to accomplish if he attacks is to make enough noise when we die to alert Ariss."

Jann paled and wrapped thin hands around her torso.

The peasant stopped a few paces away from the waiting crowd. He sniffled, and Medwind noticed that he was young, and that he was suffering from a bad cold, and that he looked like he hadn't had enough rest or food in a long time. He was a tall boy, dirty, covered from neck to knee by the heavy shapeless
erda
the peasants all admired so greatly and used for so many things, and wearing a big, hideous, broad-brimmed leather hat that hid his eyes and bulky, mud-covered peasant boots that went at least to the knee, and perhaps higher.

He braced his feet apart and planted his staff vertically in front of him. He sneezed once, then settled into a waiting attitude.

The four magicians looked anxiously at each other. No one, it was obvious, wanted to make the first move.

It isn't actually my problem... but thrice returns the good as well as the bad. So I don't suppose it would hurt if I got things rolling....
Medwind cleared her throat, hoping against hope that her voice would not crack from nervousness. "Greetings. From where do you hail, stranger?"

The stranger angled his head to one side in a birdlike gesture, seeming to think about the answer. "I was from Bright—but Bright is no more."

Medwind felt icy rain racing down her spine, even though she was under the shelter of the bridge, and dry. "We had heard rumors of Bright. Do you know what happened there?"

She felt, even through the shields, an enveloping wave of grief. "I do."

She waited with the others on the bridge, but the stranger was not forthcoming with any more information.

One of the sajes asked, "What did happen to Bright?"

The stranger ignored the question. "What are all of you people waiting for?"

Medwind closed her eyes and took a deep breath and centered herself, trying to prepare herself for the attack that her response was likely to bring. "Something terrible happened in Bright, and we are waiting for the person who can tell us what something that was."

"Plague." The stranger's response was terse, but Medwind thought that she could hear a sob clipped short in that answer.

One of the sajes was braver than he looked. "I know of no Plague that makes even the stones disappear," he ventured.

"Oh... that.
I
did that. It was an accident."

Medwind and Jann and the two sajes threw frantic looks back and forth at each other.

It
was
an accident? An
accident
! By the gods, what sort of a rutting "accident" could someone have that would do melt the very stones?!
Medwind wondered wildly.

"Wh-what kind of accident?" she asked, voice shaking.

The stranger hung his head. "Aldar was here in Willowlake, and I was in the hills with my flock when Plague struck Bright. He and I returned to find no one alive in the village. We both lost everyone. Most were—most were... were dead in their beds when we found them." He stopped speaking, and Medwind could see his shoulders shaking.

He's crying.

She felt pity for this poor young man, even through her fear.

The peasant resumed his story. "We could not bury them all. Not just the two of us. And the rats and wolves and flies and vultures—"

As his voice ground to a halt, Medwind shuddered at the picture her mind painted.

The boy resumed talking. "Aldar and I left Bright. We were going to leave it just as we had found it—but they were our families. They deserved better burial than the open air and the rats. I can call the faeriefires. Before we were too far out of Bright, I called them, and set them to clean Bright. I did not know that... that..."

Emotion,
Medwind realized.
Emotion channeled through someone with enormous potential, and sent completely out of control—and, gods, think of the amount of power it took to annihilate a village with peasant magic and—and bloody rutting faeriefires.

"I did not know it would do that...."

The sajes seemed about as reassured by this tale as she was—perhaps less.

The two sajes conferred for a moment. "We're s-s-sorry about your village," one of the men finally stammered. "But we have a new home for you now. We hope you'll let us give you room and board, and some teaching. We'll take you to Ariss, lad, to get training for your talent, before you have an—" He swallowed, and winced. "—An
accident
that involves the living."

The young man glanced behind him at the boy. "Thank you, but no. I will be doing nothing else with the Lady's Gift."

His lips twitched at the corners. It was the first glimpse of something other than pain that Medwind had seen written on that young face. "And I'm no lad," the peasant continued.

One of the sajes shrugged. "Young man, then."

"Not that, either."