Authors: Pamela Freeman
They won’t be long.
Wolves liked to hunt at dusk, not at midnight.
They’ll be here soon.
They were.
They came from all directions at once, even from above the fissure, leaping down to swirl and growl and snap at the horses’ hooves, trying to panic them into running. But the horses’ instinct to run was overcome by another instinct — to stand and fight. They struck out with hooves flailing, the three standing together, with Trine a little to the front. As their hooves landed, sparks flew from the rocks. The night was full of noise: snarling, neighing, the thud and crack of hooves meeting flesh and rock, and her own shouting. She stayed just to one side of the cleft, out of reach of their hooves, but one of the wolves — the leader, she realized — circled around toward her.
She turned to face it. Here was the image from so many stories: the evil wolf, the northern wolf, sharp teeth bared, claws clicking on the rock, prowling, measuring up its prey. Childhood terror rose up in her. She saw the wolf’s muscles tense, ready to spring.
She leaped forward and down a moment before it launched so that it passed just over her instead of reaching her throat. She thrust up with the knife at its belly and dragged the knife down. It felt like her shoulder was coming out of its socket, but she kept hold of the haft.
The wolf yowled in pain and twisted in midair, coming down heavily on its side. She jumped on it with both knees before it could rise. The sound of the air being forced out of its lungs was all she could hear.
And then the world went quiet.
The wolf writhed beneath her, impossibly strong. One claw ripped down her arm. She raised the knife in both hands and plunged it down as hard as she could. The wolf convulsed beneath her and then lay still.
For a moment, Bramble felt nothing but relief, as though it were all over. But noise crashed into the silence and she realized that the fight was still going on around her.
The big brown wolf leading the attack against the horses realized that its leader was down. It flung its head back and howled. Bramble stood up slowly, straddling the corpse, knife in hand, and snarled at the pack. She felt as rabid as she sounded. She would kill them all before she would let them hurt her horses.
There were only three of them left. It had seemed like dozens. One body was lying in front of Trine, smashed and bloody. The brown wolf — a female — stared at Bramble and snarled back. Bramble took a step forward, and the brown wolf broke. She yelped and turned and the other two followed her, only the whites on the undersides of their tails showing up in the almost dark as they ran.
Bramble checked the horses. They had got away with just a scratch or two, and none too deep. She cleaned out the wounds and then cleaned her own, a long ragged tear down her arm that would probably scar. She bound it up awkwardly with one of her shirts.
She dragged the two carcasses away from the fissure before she sat down. Once she sat she’d never be able to get up again, and there would be scavengers after the meat before dawn, and maybe other hunters, like bears. They would be satisfied with the wolf meat and not come looking for more.
Then she sat next to the fissure and let out her breath in a long
houf
. The horses were still fretting and were too frightened to wander off by themselves, and in a way she was relieved, because she didn’t have the energy to get their tethers out and find rocks big enough to secure them to.
“Well, cullies, we’re safe enough now,” she told them. “Settle down, now, settle down.”
They did settle down under the spell of her voice, and she even slept a little, sitting up against the hard rock, despite the pain in her arm. It seemed to throb and burn worse as the night went on, and she was afraid it was turning bad. She’d have to find a healer, but where?
In the morning the horses’ scratches looked clean and on the mend, but her bandage was showing blood and her arm was hot and red. She fed and watered the horses but there was no water left for her. She had trouble lifting the saddlebags back onto Mud’s back.
“Not good,” she said to Trine. She was light-headed and not up to jumping on as she usually did, so she led Trine to a rock and climbed on from there. It seemed the wolves had knocked some of the arrogance out of Trine, because she stood still and let Bramble mount her without any objection. She even nosed Bramble’s leg gently afterward.
They went as fast as they could on the rocky trail, with stones shifting under the horses’ hooves. Mud proved to be most sure-footed, so they followed him and, like Trine, he was unusually cooperative with her. She wondered if killing the lead wolf had cemented her position as head of the herd. It was possible; and possible, too, that this far from their normal life, the horses just wanted the reassurance of someone telling them what to do.
She could understand that.
Just after midday she neared the top of the ridge they had been making toward all morning. She was pretty sure that Golden Valley lay over it. Maybe there she could find a healer. Her arm was getting worse. The trail led to a pass through even higher peaks, sharp and treacherous, with snow on their tops. She threaded her way through a recent rockfall of giant boulders that almost blocked the trail.
She reached the other side and was sure it was Golden Valley before her. It had been named in autumn, her da had told her once, because of the yellow leaves of the poplar trees that grew there. The poplar leaves were a brighter yellow-green now, in early spring, but the valley below seemed lit up with them, glowing in the sunlight. They followed the courses of innumerable streams and circled around ponds. She could see farmhouses and fenced paddocks far below . . . and horses. She smiled.
She followed the trail with her eye as it zigzagged down the hillside, making a steep way around clumps of bushes and pine trees. They started down carefully.
Two bends down, Trine neighed loudly and was answered by another horse hidden by the curve in the track. Bramble wasn’t worried. Here in Golden Valley she was safe. She was just a . . . a horse trainer, looking for work on her way to the Well of Secrets. Plain and simple. The truth, in fact.
The riders below came around the bend. She was a moment slow in recognizing them. It was the two men Leof had talked to in the clearing — Horst and Sully, on their way back from the Last Domain. They stared at her in disbelief.
“Bramble!” Horst said. “It’s bloody Bramble!”
“We’re in Golden Valley,” Bramble said quickly. “A free valley.”
Horst looked up and down. There was no one in sight. “Aye,” he said slowly. “But no one knows you’re here, do they? I reckon we could have met you just the other side of the ridge.”
“You’ll be breaking the law.”
Sully grinned. “You think my lord Thegan will
care?
Horst, my old mate, he’s going to love us for this!”
“Don’t take me back to him,” Bramble said, her stomach turning over at asking a warlord’s man for anything. “You know what he’s like.”
Sully glanced at Horst. “Aye. He’s a coldhearted bastard who’d slit his own mother’s throat if it was useful to him. And that’s why we’re taking you back, lass. Can you imagine what he’d do to us if we didn’t?”
They were blocking the trail, but perhaps she had a chance of making it down the hillside to a lower part of the track. She had to try.
She made a feint to turn back up the trail, then, as they surged after her, she turned sideways and bolted across the hillside, dropping the leading reins and letting Cam and Mud follow as they could. She just hoped they wouldn’t get entangled in the reins and fall. Trine picked up her pace and slipped across the loose scree on the hill and then turned to slide, dance, and finally leap down to the firmer footing between the trees that masked the lower bend of the trail.
Horst and Sully came after her as fast as they dared, but they kept to the trail so they were a little way behind her. And now it was just a chase. Bramble let everything go out of her head except getting farther ahead. The world narrowed to the track ahead of her, the ground, the way down. She was good at this, better than the men following. She knew how to find shortcuts, how to take risks. Trine wasn’t the roan, but she was fast.
She was a fair way ahead of them at the bottom of the hill. The track branched and she swung left, farther into the valley, heading for houses and witnesses . . . and safety. But she felt increasingly light-headed and hot. Her arm seemed to swell even more, and her heart was skipping its beats.
The track curved back and up the hill, heading for another pass. She had chosen the wrong track. She knew she had to turn back and go down the hillside, but not on the track, that would just head her into their arms. She faltered and turned Trine, her head swimming, but Trine balked at the steep descent and rocky surface, and Bramble felt herself falling, although it seemed to be happening a long way away.
She had just enough energy left to roll as she hit the ground. She wanted to just lie there for a moment. Just a moment. But she forced herself to clamber up. If she could get back on Trine . . .
Horst caught her as she grasped Trine’s mane. He had leaped from his horse and grabbed her arms. She screamed with pain and he let her go in surprise. Trine swung around and bit him hard on the arm. He swore and drew his sword. Sully moved off to the side to stop her running back down the hill. He drew his sword as well.
“Give in, now, lass, give it over and come with us,” Horst said gently. “You know you can’t win.”
Bramble knew he was right. But the same refusal to be frightened that had stopped her running from the blond, back in Wooding, stopped her from giving in now.
“I’d rather die than be used by Thegan,” she said venomously. She drew her knife, and jumped toward Sully.
“Stupid Traveler bitch!” he yelled as he brought his sword down.
T
HEY’LL BE
meeting soon,” Safred said casually to her uncle. “The other three. But there’s no guarantee they’ll make it through that moment.”
“I’d spit for luck but my mouth’s too dry,” Cael said.
There was a distant commotion outside in the street. Cael raised an eyebrow. Safred’s eyes hazed for a moment, then cleared.
“A healing,” she said. “One of the pilgrims fell from the bridge.”
“Can you help him?”
“Her. No. But I can save the baby.”
And the family’ll ask why I didn’t foresee the accident and save them both,
Safred thought.
I’d ask the same. But the only answer is “because the gods didn’t will it” and what kind of answer is that?
“There’s one good thing,” she said as she prepared to open the door. “The fifth will be along tomorrow.”
“What fifth?” Cael looked at her. “What haven’t you been telling me?”
Safred smiled sadly. “Too much. Life and death and destruction and rebirth. Everything, really.”
She opened the door before they could knock on it. Three men rushed in carrying the injured woman and placed her on the bed where the Well of Secrets did her healing. She placed both hands on the woman’s belly and looked at Cael, noting the increase in gray hairs, the slight blurring of muscle by a thin film of fat: the signs of age approaching, even if it was a long way off yet.
He glared at her as he often did, to remind her that though she was the healing miracle worker to everyone else, to him she was still the child he had raised. And to part of her he was still almost-father, the strong arms that had protected her. But he couldn’t protect her from the gods.
She concentrated on the body beneath her hands and began to sing in horrible, grating tones that sounded like the voice of the dead, and the pain left the woman’s face.
Cael pushed his way outside through the crowd gathered at the door, watching, worshipping as the gods showed their power.
T
HERE WERE
fishers on the bank. When the boat came gliding down the stream toward them, a lantern at her prow and another at her stern, gleaming in the dusk, they thought it was a ghost ship, for surely no craft could navigate this high reach of the river, far above the falls.
There were rocks downstream and rocks upstream, white water churning endlessly, in and out of season. How could a ship come here?
So they ran, throwing down their rods and their gaffs, back to the village crying, “Death, disaster upon us!”
The ship rode the white water lightly, and survived the teeth of the rocks and the smiting of the stream. It smashed to pieces on the high falls — but by then it had served its purpose, and those on board were safe ashore.
I was one of those on board. So I, Cael, tell the tale as one who was there and who knows the truth.
When her time came upon the Lady and her pains drew close together, she called for me and entrusted the coming babe into my care.
“For,” she said formally, “though you and I have contested more than once, and more than bitterly, still I know you are honest, and I know you are true. Take the child, and guard her from her father. For I would not travail thus to see her taken and raised at court, a pawn for alliances and treaty making. Teach her the new ways and let her not be seduced into bondage to her father, or to any other.”
She did travail, indeed, and died therefrom. But the child survived.
I took her, and named her Safred, which means sorrow, for it was true her coming brought little joy. I found a wet nurse, and sent word to the warlord that the Lady and his daughter, both, were dead in the straw. He sent silver for their funeral, and an observer, and we sent two bodies to the burial caves, swathed tightly in the burial clothes, the Lady and a runt piglet.
We hid the child in a cave in the high woods, with the wet nurse and a guard. Later, when it was safe, we brought them back.
I raised the child with my own two. Perhaps I was not as kind to her. There are men who can love any child as though they were true sons or daughters; I am not one of them. When I looked at Safred, I saw her mother’s eyes, and though her mother and I had disagreed many times, the lack of her was hard. Sometimes when I looked at her, I saw her father’s very look and expression. Then I pushed her out of the house, because I did not like the fear that sprang in me at those times.
It might have been different if my Sage had not died of a fever when Safred was only two. She grieved for Sage a long time, as did my own girls. And I.
But overall she grew up happy enough, and never went in need. I myself taught her the contest, in words and in deeds, as I did my own girls. While March, my elder, took to the wordstriving as though born to argue, and while Nim was swift with hands or staff, Safred took no interest in either.
“Your mother was a great striver,” I told her often, “you must have something of her in you.”
She just looked at me sideways out of those green eyes. I am telling you, and I am telling you true. No matter what she became later, no matter what deeds of argument or arms she achieved, as a child she was slower than most.
Perhaps she practiced in secret; one cannot become a great striver without constant practice. She was secretive — well, all the world knows that. “The Well of Secrets” they called her in Parteg, and lined up halfway to Corpen to confess to her. But I am getting ahead of my story.
She learned quickly in other ways: learned to cipher and scribe, learned herbalry and leechcraft, husbandry and tillage, cooking and weaving. All the village taught her, as though they wished to make up for shunning her mother so when she first came home, big with child, and all knew the father’s name. Safred was quick to learn, except when I was teaching her. Yet I swear I taught her as I taught my own, as I taught other village children.
Well, time passes and does not ask our consent. Soon enough my March and my Nim were in their own houses, and Safred and I were left alone. I had more time for her then. I discovered, then, about the gods’ power.
At first it seemed no more than skill. When she tended an animal, say a milch cow with hard udders, the cow recovered quickly. So it might be with any skilled healer. The seeds she planted grew fast and strong; so it might be with any skilled tiller. The horses she gentled never kicked at her; so it might be with a beast handler of soft voice and quiet ways. Except that her voice was not quiet. Not usually.
Then Terin, the weaver’s son, broke his leg falling from the walnut tree, broke it so the bone was sharp through the skin. And all wailed, for such a wound meant he was almost certain sure to lose his life through bleeding and, if not his life, his leg.
I was nearest the boy when he fell, so it was I who carried him to the leech’s house, and Safred followed me. The healer, who must have known, I realized later, put water to boil and reached down the hanging herbs for a poultice, found wood for a splint, but left the tending of the boy to Safred.
That was the first time I heard her sing. Now singing is a bad word for it, as those who have heard it will tell you. For, and I tell you the truth, it sounded horrible. Like a bellows creaking with wind.
I would have stopped her, but the healer laid his hand on my arm and shook his head. Safred put her hands on the boy’s shoulders. She looked into his eyes, deep in, with that wide green gaze I remembered from her mother, and breathed these strange sounds. Terin’s eyes grew wide, wider, and his mouth dropped like one in sleep. Then she laid hands on his leg and brought the bone back into place as one might put back a hair comb that has fallen out of place — as simply as that. The boy made no noise, and no drop of blood left him.
In all my memory, that is the strangest time, despite all I saw later, and all I learned. The boy’s leg was lying broken and white on the covers, his bone showing through his skin like a rock breaking through grass, but no blood, as though he were dead already, though he sat there breathing before me. Lo, that was the strangest sight of my life, and I did not know how to speak to her after — when the leech had bound the leg and poulticed it, and she had stopped singing.
She sat, staring up at me, waiting for my judgment, half resigned to my disapproval, half fearful of it.
“Your grandmother was a woman who walked with the gods,” I said. “Your mother told me, once, that her mother was born an enchanter, but her father beat it out of her, for fear she should set a spell upon him or his beasts. For she did not love him, nor should she have.”
Safred stirred then, and stood up. She was short, you know, and had to look up into my eyes.
“I set no spells for harm,” she said.
“Nor did she,” I said. “What’s bred in the bone comes out in the flesh. Your mother would have been glad to see this, to see her own mother’s gift brought to use. To good use.”
She colored, for the first time I remember. After that, I think, we were better acquainted, and she kept fewer secrets from me. But secrets she had to have, no matter what. They were like meat and drink to her.
That was how she discovered the great power she carried with her. It started with a pedlar, a traveling man who had been in our village before: a dark man — not dark of countenance, but dark of spirit. He smiled, but under the smile was pain. Few could bear to talk with him for longer than it took to conclude their bargain, but still we bought from him because few others came our way, and perhaps out of pity.
When Safred was sixteen, the pedlar came to our house to show me new wool cloth from down valley. I was not home. I tell this part of the story as it was told to me by the pedlar. He came, he said, and called out, “Blessing on the house.” Safred came out to him, and gazed at him with the green eyes of healing.
“Come in,” she told him, and made him lay his pack aside and brewed him rosemary tea and talked with him. I think the man was starved for talk; perhaps that was all the healing he needed. But Safred said to him, “You carry a secret.”
That was true. Now, I tell you, I do not know what the secret was, any more than you, for Safred was the deepest pit there ever was for secrets, and after a secret was told to her, the teller did not need ever to tell it again. But tell her he did, and went away a different man. Maybe she laid some blessing on him. Maybe the simple telling was enough. Maybe she forgave him, who could not forgive himself. I never told Safred a secret, so I don’t know. I had no secret to tell her, for she had known me all her life. That, I regret — that I had no secrets then to give her.
After the pedlar, others came to her. At first they were just from our village, people who had known her all her life. Margery’s neck pains went away; Dalis’s breathing improved; but these were not the real miracles. It was the kindness that was true magic. Wherever a secret was washed by Safred’s green eyes, that household rejoiced — and was kinder thereafter.
Some people said she laid a geas on them, to tell the secret to the person it most concerned, or to make reparation where reparation was due. Whatever she said, it was done.
Soon people began to come from elsewhere. And sometimes, when pilgrims were in the house with Safred, and I kept guard outside, I heard her singing that harsh song. But I heard no words, ever, though pilgrims sometimes swore they had shouted out their pain.
It was foreordained that her father should hear of it.
Now, I do not know what you have heard of Masil, her father, the warlord. That he was brave and handsome? True. That he was violent? Most true. That he was barbaric, insane, wicked? Perhaps true. But no one ever said that he was stupid.
When he heard of the wonders coming from our village, he sent a messenger to discover the truth, for even then he suspected that this green-eyed enchanter was the daughter of another green-eyed woman, who had bewitched him out of things he had wanted to keep: his heart and his manhood and his children. For they say that after the Lady, Masil could lie with no other woman, and I believe it.
When the messenger came, I knew it was time. For no one has ever called me stupid, either, and I had been preparing for this since the first pilgrim came. The village helped. We showed him Tamany, who was green-eyed enough, but could not have been the child of either Lady or warlord in a year of blue moons. He went away, but it was time to leave.
Safred wanted to stay until she had spoken to all the pilgrims who were waiting to see her. I knew that the train of pilgrims would not end. We argued bitterly. That was the first I knew of her skill at wordstriving, and surprise silenced me. That was my great flaw. I should have overborne her. Everything then might have been different, and I might have children and grandchildren living still.
We stayed an extra week. On the last day, one of the goat-herds ran into the village, crying that the warlord was coming himself to see the witch. I called Safred out, but she would not leave her pilgrim, who was crying and wailing fit to die. So I dragged her out by her hair and shook sense back into her.
“Your mother died to give you freedom,” I said, in no mind to be gentle. “Will you throw her gift back in her face, will you spit on her grave? Do you want to be a warlord’s daughter, a pawn for alliances and treaty making?”
Perhaps part of her wanted to stay and set eyes on her father for the first time, but she came, half dazed, and I took her up the hill path, to the same cave where we had hidden her as a baby, where I had left our supplies. We were not quite fast enough. The scout from the warlord’s party saw us, and they followed fast enough.
But I had prepared for this day, too, and for this danger. So I led her into the labyrinth of the caves, which I had spent months learning, months when I could no longer enter my house for fear of hearing another’s secret, months when I imagined this day, over and over.
There were others in the village who knew the secrets of the caves. None would guide the warlord. So he put the village to the torch, and all the people in it, male and female, adult and child, and I lost my Nim and my March and their children, too, all three of them. I will never get them back. Nor cease to mourn them.
There is no darkness like the inner darkness of the earth. It lies solid on your eyelids. It is not cold there, nor ever hot, but it can be damp or dry, loud or silent, and all this depends on the waters that run through it. Our caves were formed by water, and water runs through them constantly, dripping, flowing, rushing, pounding. I navigated our way as much by sound as by sight or touch, following my ears as well as the marks I had laid down over many explorations.
There were wonders in that place I can never describe to you. It is one of the differences between Safred and me, that to her the caves were a place of horror and fear, while to me they were a miracle.
We made our way through the heavy dark with a small lantern, Safred whimpering all the way. And deep in the darkest cave, we met the delvers. I was there, and I tell you truth. They do exist, the dark people, the little people, the eaters of rock. Like boulders they seem at first, rounded and heavy. When they move it is slowly, far slower than you or I, yet nothing can stand in their way. They are blind, of course, though they smell their way, and their hearing is like a bat’s. They surrounded us before we were aware. A deep grumbling filled the cavern. It was like the harsh sound Safred made when she spelled, but this was a song of anger and distrust. Until she answered them.
All this way, I had been the strong one, unafraid of the dark. But now, when I trembled with fear, Safred stood tall and sang her song of gentleness, of kindness and healing.
It didn’t work very quickly. That was something I was to come to know — nothing worked quickly with the delvers. Oh, I spent a weary time there, listening to the two songs contest our safety. But she sang unwearied and finally, for a moment, they listened without singing back, and we were safe.
Or so we thought. In the village, Terin, afraid for his life and promised the lives of his mother and sister, agreed to guide the warlord through the caves. Even at that time, I could not blame him. If I had been faced with Nim and March, knife to throat, would I have had the loyalty to refuse Masil? I tell you the truth, and the truth is that I do not know.