Wine of the Gods 08: Dark Lady (26 page)

Thursday, March 18, 3494

City of Arrival, Arrival

Kurt grew used to the daily boredom of laundry, especially when in the company of grimly determined students. And weekly visits to the man who had become "Uncle Charlie" long before the winter was over.

"Because Elsie and I never had children. Her sister Margaret's kids are who you're descended from. Heh. Not really a sister. We were manufactured, test runs so to speak. She was raised by a foster family, and Margaret was their biological kid, with some improvements. The Exile . . . we escaped, they were using us for their machines, and Elsie and I slipped off before they got to us. But Elsie'd been in communication with her family, and knew when they were reporting for emigration, and we joined them. Came here. We got a bunch of the other test kids away too. Hell, we were grown by then, not kids. Some of our friends didn't get away. That Wolfgang, for one. Rebeccah. Ah. Rebeccah."

He was looking much younger, fifty or sixty, and had put on weight. Sister Barbara was still avoiding him.

"Can't get her to try a glass of wine. Whoowee. I think this cure-all of yours really works. You need to get me some more."

Glass shattered in the next room.

"Guess she thought I'd calm back down." Charlie smirked, cocking his head to listen to rapidly retreating footsteps.

"You know, Uncle Charlie, if you want some advice, I'd say sell this land to the Church for a bundle of money, divorce the icicle, and marry some girl with some hot blood in her veins. Maybe come out west and live in this new town and territory I'm going to start if I ever get out of here."

"Humph. Give up? After a thousand years?"

"Hot blooded woman. Freedom. And hold them up for a good chunk of change."

"A million dollars?"

"Ten million. Maybe settle for five. That would give you an income, even after buying a house."

"Oh, Nephew! You would charge your old Uncle Charlie?"

"Not for land, but you're on your own as far as building a house on it."

Winter Solstice 1377 PE

Ash, Kingdom of the West

For the Winter Solstice Ceremony, the Witches of Ash didn't go any further than the hot springs.

Rustle was, by virtue of Xen's precocious magic, the sole Full Moon. But in her partially recovered condition she was happy to team up with Swish and Jasper to form a Half Moon Triad. She ignored a few smirks.
I must have been a bit of a snob, or bragged about being strong, or something.

But as the familiar songs, power gathering and spell casting rolled over her, she could feel herself relaxing and joining in. By dawn she was both exhausted and exalted, and carried Quail back to the winery in a pleasant blur. Wolf and Xen both joined them for breakfast, then Rustle abandoned all pretense of parenting and crawled into bed.

Some time in the afternoon she followed the faint thumping and banging and found a staircase had sprouted in the sitting room, and followed it up into an angular attic room.
Full of kids and dogs.

"
Hi Mom! Look, I'm going to have my own bedroom here." Xen cheerfully hauled her to the window to admire the view, then to the other half of the attic, which appeared to be having an attack of bubbles.

The Wolf laughed.
"If you can store half a town, surely I can store a very long lifetime of souvenirs. Actually I always have, it's just that I'd never actually inventoried what was here. Some of it's a bit . . . Okay, I can see me not being able to resist the boat. But why the colony of rats?"

"
Umm, perhaps you were experimenting on them? With genetic engineering, you'd want to see several generations, right?"

"
That's more Gisele's game, and yours. Do you remember your purple bunnies? And the men you turned into dragons?"

"
Dragons . . . " She had a vision of men rushing into a group of teenagers. "Why did I do that? They were attacking us, weren't they?"

"
Yes. Killers from the One World, with orders to wipe out the entire village. You only changed their essences, their genes. Physically they were still human. Tromp triggered the end of the spell that kept the dragon girls in human form. They morphed from human back to dragon, and they, umm." He stopped and frowned at Xen. "You are a little young to hear about this."

Xen blinked.
"Great Grand says the dragon girls kissed them and then beat them up. And then they flew away."

"
Yes, something like that."

Rustle followed her memories and shivered a bit.
"Well, that wasn't very nice, not that they deserved better." She heard the wind whistling a bit, up so close to the roof. "I think you're going to need some extra blankets tonight though. It sounds like a storm is blowing in. Maybe we'll finally get some snow."

"Lion, Blacky and Silky will keep me warm." All three large dogs wagged their tails.

"Indeed."

The winery made a snug little retreat all remote from everything else and her family all tucked around her. Quicksilver celebrated her first birthday by pulling up and standing in front of her beaming father. Rustle practiced her more domestic skills by sewing clothing for a rapidly growing pair of children and then thinking about spinning and weaving, and . . .

"You can buy anything you don't want to do yourself," the Auld Wulf pointed out. "You've got money, I've got money, your horse will be earning money come spring, and you always were very good at finding diamonds."

"
Diamonds?"

"
That's how most of the people in the valley make their serious money. It's easy for a witch or mage to see the dense diamonds in the loose sand. Wizards have a tougher time of it. I'll show you in the spring. Or Never will, or you could use relearning the knack to get together with some of the other witches."

She caught the flicker of worry in his eyes.
I've been back for eight months. I can shield, mostly, now. From everyday thoughts zinging around. I don't feel so raw, so, half healed. Maybe I could stand up to an assault. But I'm still not remembering. So I'm not as healed as I think I am.
Her eyes strayed to the bookshelves.
Or, like that psychology text suggested, do I
not want
to remember? What wouldn't I want to remember? The rape? Killing or injuring the men? Or could there be something worse, hiding back in my subconscious?

Is this just duty, and he wants
me healed and away?

Late
Winter 1377 PX

Ash, Kingdom of the West

A late season
storm dumped a picturesque two feet of snow on the village, and kept everyone close to home. Then Rustle spent a chilly night in the barn watching Junk deliver a big angular and very black filly. Phantom's little sister, instantly named Spooky. Rustle found a practical use for a physical shield as she cleared enough ground for the new foal to gambol about in the sunshine.

Quail Quicksilver tottered about, calling everything "Da!" before branching out
with "Mmmm!" and "En!" and finally a very clear and emphatic "Bad Dog!"

Rustle cleared the path down to the village, so Xen could return to school. And then she and Quicksilver explored the other corridors.

The Rip Crossing Inn was stuffed with old friends she barely remembered. The three resident witches dragged her off to their houses and private hotsprings.

"Not that everyone doesn't come and check them out, but we chuck everyone out when we have a ceremony to perform." Verse was a spectacular dark woman, a daughter of Harry's. She looked barely eighteen, but Rustle recalled her being one of the flood of children resulting from that wine intersecting a large party.
She's twenty-four, like me. So are Whoop and Ask.

"We ought to have dragged you out here, on the Solstice." Ask was a petite blonde.

Technically, Rustle's aunt, Never's half sister . . .
oh, that's why she looks so much like Xen. She's one of the Auld Wulf's children from that party, and Whoop's another. Xen's and Quicksilver's half sisters. My family is . . . not standard, at all.

The triad took her continued memory problems as a challenge. They hauled her out to their hotsprings for a full night of singing songs she remembered, half a beat after they sang them, and then they drilled her on the little charms, and how they built up into complex spells.

Ask sighed. "You learned half the complex stuff from the wizards, and then came and taught us how they worked, and why they worked. This is so strange."

They all went to a party at the Inn. It was so loud, mentally, that she fled back to Ash within minutes.

But in the quiet times,
Havi and the witches demonstrated building roads and enlarging barns. Rustle cautiously joined in. And found it easy.
I did things sort of like this in Jeramtown, without any problem.

Rustle bobbed back and forth between Ash and Rip Crossing and
the long winter gradually gave way to spring.

In the high mountain valley of Ash, spring came a bit late
r than in the New Lands.

Rustle sat on the
new spring grass and watched Quail climb all over Xen's dogs. Big friendly mutts. The smallest of them outweighed both children together, and they all played gently with the toddler. Pyrite galloped and played with the yearlings while Xen climbed the oak tree in the middle of the pasture.

Dydit and Nil were chatting with the Auld Wulf . . . Wolf? Why . . . oh, right fourteen centuries of linguistic drift, not to mention myths . . .

Dydit turned his back on the horses. "Rip Crossing would be extremely isolated, if not for the corridor. It should be easy enough to set up permanent corridors in between all the places we might need to go in a hurry, and it would be good for commerce as well."

The Auld Wulf nodded.
"We've got corridors to Karista. And Rustle put up one partway to the Crossroads, that I took all the way to Harry's. This end of it is on the side of the grange barn. Oh, Gemstone. That would be handy for the insane horse breeders."

Dydit grinned. "Insane? Arguably.
I'll bet Rufi will want corridors from Karista to Farofo. But until we're sure the gate situation is stable, safe, we'd best just do temporary corridors from Karista to the Crossroads. No need to give an invader a fast trip to the capital."

Nil was leaning on the fence rail, and frowning just a bit.
"That's all well and good, to see you finally being properly paranoid. But those can't actually be the foals we sold that smart-ass god."

The Auld Wolf looked around innocently.
"What's this? Didn't you
look
at them before you sold them? Or did you only see a bony old draft horse when you looked at his foals?" He chuckled wickedly. "Cast your mind back eight hundred years, Tyrant. You weren't in very good shape when you got here, but do you remember the old horse that pulled Harry's cart
then
?"

Nil narrowed his eyes and looked thoughtful.
"Big old dun, just like . . . Son-of-a-dog. Harry's
always
had an old dun gelding, and I never thought about it."

Dydit chewed a knuckle. Rustle had a sudden suspicion he was trying to not laugh.

"Yep. I figure he's another of the original god horses. He wandered in here nearly a century before you came. I'm delighted to see that the longevity genes were used on them. The thought of magic genes worries me a bit, though. Rustle says she used to read her lessons aloud to him."

"
I really don't think he could have understood them." Dydit protested. "He is a horse, after all."

"
A magically trained horse?" Nil snorted. "Don't scare me. I'm having enough trouble with the human wizards. Half of them went off to explore other worlds, and Vala's busy with twins and trying to make a living."

Dydit looked around with a grin. "And Xen scares him. He seems to think a wizard ought to be older before he's taught how to destroy the world."

Rustle sat up indignantly. "He's much too nice to do that, even if he could."

T
he Auld Wulf strolled out to the fence. "It's teenagers with all the tempers and, well, not hormones, with wizards, but . . . What are you teaching a seven year old, anyway? Should I worry?"

Nil raised an ey
ebrow and glanced her direction. "Just trying to get him past all the witch rhymes he's learned and into thinking of magic scientifically. His grasp of the basic spells is strong enough to be dangerous, but his touch is very delicate and . . . nuanced . . . for a seven year old."

Dydit beamed proudly. "The Tyrant Wizard of Scoone doesn't want to admit that my grandson is doing things most
twenty
-seven year olds make clumsy hashes out of."

They all glanced at the little boy in the tree.

Nil shrugged. "You can laugh now. But if anyone makes that nice boy really and genuinely
hate,
the results aren't going to be pretty. Your family is just too damned strong."

Rustle swallowed, a bit uncertain.
Strong? I wasn't strong compared to Arbolian priests and gods. Was that just because I wasn't recovered from the comet? More likely "strong" is not actually that much stronger than "average" or even "weak" here, with all these . . . interesting people. There's tons of stuff I can do. It's my shields, or lack thereof, that makes me look weak.

Quail Quicksilver
giggled as a dog nosed her and knocked her over.

And neither of my children are scary.