Comet Fall (Wine of the Gods) (7 page)

She dressed, and didn't linger any longer.

Her footsteps steadied as she walked back down the ravine in the pre-dawn light. Pig-like grunting from ahead brought her to the alert, and she approached the end of the ravine carefully. A monstrous dark thing was looming over Junk, who squealed. Rustle stepped closer, and the dark mass resolved into a giant horse, grunting and nuzzling the mare. Its coat was so dark it looked more like a hole in the World than a real horse. Massive muscles rolled like the sea at midnight. It rose up and mounted the eager mare, practically engulfing her. The stallion flagged its blacker than black tail and dissolved into the dawn as if it hadn't ever really been there at all.

As the sky lightened, Rustle circled the oak tree.
Only Junk's hoof prints disturbed yesterday's thin fresh snow.

***

"Good grief, Rustle, why didn't you talk to me? Or to Gisele?"

"I
rode in to talk to Lady Gisele," Rustle shrugged. "As I figured, I'd be preggers no matter what I did. So I chose a different man to father my child."

Her mother had been wide awake and waiting for her when she rode in, barely in time to help feed the stock. Not that she'd been allowed to do the slightest bit of heavy work. Never shook her head, lips pressed together in disapproval. "Well, who did you seduce? Should we chec
k on them? Is he alive?" Her gaze veered toward the house, worried.

"Mother!
Havi's my brother. I wouldn't . . .  The man is fine, for heaven's sake."

"Oh," Never frowned. "I suppose, under the circumstances, I understand, but hopefully you won't take.
Then you can make a considered decision in a few years when you are fully grown."

"Mother.
I understand that you had to give me that wine. Now you need to understand that I can't dodge the consequences."

"Yes you can." Her father stomped in to join the argument.

"Don't make it any worse, Dad. I've already killed two people. They call witches like me Black Widows. I'll be lucky if I'm not ostracized all my life. I can minimize my internal guilt over those
stupid, vicious .
. .  But if I kill my own child, it will haunt me the rest of my life."

"You are just sixteen."

"None the less, you two had better get used to the idea of being grandparents." Rustle decided to leave it at that. She really didn't want to explain, didn't want her parents angry at the god. Damn it, witches chose their men and it was no one else's business. Even if they did usually verbally dissect the men in committee both before and after.

But in the mean time, she had new abilities to train up to.

Until she gave birth, she was still officially a Crescent, but Answer put her in a Triad with two Half Moons, Catti and Zamm. Their daughters were two years younger than Rustle, and hadn't yet grasped power. She gritted her teeth over their sympathy, and tendency to treat her like a child. She wasn't that much younger . . . They traded off occasionally with Mostly and Likely, her mother's age mates. Their daughters, Exchange and Free, hadn't grasped power, and if they failed this Summer, at the Solstice Ceremony, the girls would be expelled from the Pyramid. Four other girls, including her sister-aunt, Ask, were facing that deadline as well.

Being able to channel power in and out of Earth, she now found it easier to find the gemstones that were the Witches main source of income. There were semi-precious stones formed in the contact layer, where lava had pushed through sedimentary rock and heat, pressure and new mixes of chemicals under heat and pressure formed unusual crystals. Today though, she wanted to explore the stream beds. Diamonds were formed very deep down inside volcanoes, and carried to the surface in the lava. The old eroded volcanic plugs in the Gray Valley were an excellent source, and the easiest way to find diamonds was to check the sand and gravel bars of the streams in, and flowing out of, the valley.

She sliced off a big wedge of cheese and wrapped it in paper, a hard dried salami, bread. She'd take her bow and arrows, and when she ran out of food, she
'd come back. It was still cold; she rolled blankets in an oilskin and slung that over the top of her backpack. She really didn't need anything else. She grabbed a wrinkly apple and slipped it into the belt pouch. She walked out, and headed uphill.

There was still snow on the ground wherever it was shaded from the sun, and where the path was usually muddy, it tended toward frosted and stiff. She walked steadily, takin
g a break on the crest of Iron Ridge to eat her apple and admire the stark beauty of Gray Valley. It was like the Rip, all stone, but weathered and worn into fantastic shapes. The valley was old. The volcanic fires long dead, the edges of the stones worn into curves, the rock rotten and soft in places. Gray Valley was older than Mount Frost, older than the Long Fault, predated the disaster than had created the Rip and the New Lands and killed nine out of ten people alive back then.

A
thousand years ago the gods said a comet had fallen. Nearly everyone had died. They had dealt with this small one, barely. Rustle wondered how they would deal with another one.

A large one.

A huge one.

Six and a half years. I have a lot to learn.

1369 Spring

Foothills Province

Rustle spent most of the spring prowling the mountains. She was starting to show, and found the sidelong stares of the her fellow Sisters of the Crescent Moon difficult to handle. When she wasn't prowling, she read. Perhaps obsessively. Mostly about childbirth and the care of newborns. But she still read the science books and the history of Earth. She wondered if she should go back to the winery. Talk to him. But it wasn't
his
fault, wasn't his problem.

She knew her mother was worried. Rustle had always thought things out, made decisions. This one had been forced on her, and even though she'd twisted it to be less awful, s
he was still not handling it gracefully.

She was roasting a goose after a long day of diamond hunting when the Auld Wulf hailed her camp.

"Come in," she said automatically, surprised. "Like some goose?"

"I would love some goose," he folded down comfortably, flexible for all his size and bulk of muscle.

She studied him for a long moment. If she hadn't known him, she'd have guessed him to be in his mid-thirties. Maybe younger. The gray streaks in the short brown hair looked premature against the smooth tan face. "You look good, I was starting to get a bit worried."

"Because I slept for over a year?" He studied her. "And I'm worried about you. I heard about what happened. And Gisele said . . . "

"I'm sorry. You weren't in any shape to agree or disagree to anything so important. I used you. I needed . . . " She shook her head and tried to order her thoughts. "I needed to make the worst part not happen. To not bear a baby I would resent, and possibly hate." She watched him, worried. He had every right to hate how she'd used him.

"Hate
? Hardly."

She snorted.
Must watch my thoughts!

H
is lips quirked at that as he stared into the fire, red reflections from his eyes. "I had a dream. Actually rather a lot of them. I don't know which were real and which were not. You took a risk, with me so . . . out of touch. I don't know what I've done."

"You didn't hurt me. I, umm, it was a very pleasurable experience. Even my memory of those men is surprisingly faint. When I think of men, I think of you. But I am very sorry to have transgressed on you, to minimize my own problem."

"Are you all right, Rustle?"

"I'm not ready to be a mother,
for all I was tired of being treated like a child. I don't like not having been allowed to make that choice myself. I am a bit horrified by my situation, but I don't hate the baby. I can see how that would have been very easy to do, especially if she looked like one of them. That much I have managed to snatch, that however unready for her, I won't hate my baby."

He glanced around the fire lit trees. "You are accustomed to freedom."

She stared out into the night. "Yes, it's the loss of freedom that unsettles me the most. That for the sake of my child I must yoke myself to . . . I suppose it's just adulthood. Something we all must face, eventually."

"Rustle, you've always been responsible, reliable, and yet controlled by no one except yourself. When the baby makes you feel that you are losing that precious self, bring her to me, for as long as you need, even if that is forever. Don't let the best in yourself be ground down."

She blinked away tears, that he understood so well what she feared. She concentrated on carving a rather tough goose.

"In many ways, an early start on my advancement is good," she opined after a rather greasy interval. "I'll be out of the Crescent Moons and off by myself learning new things. I can
already do so many things I couldn't grasp at all, last year."

He relaxed against a tree, "You've always been academically talented, and your subconscious magic use drove your parents crazy. One more step and you'l
l most likely be traveling and building like your parents."

"Umm, but they can only do it together."

"Ha! Lazy. Your mother could learn to recognize locations, but she lets Dydit do it. He gets plenty of power from various sources, but it's so easy to let the witch collect it, balance it out, and push and pull as needed." The Auld Wulf snorted. "Bet you shock the hell out of them. The whole Pyramid, for that matter."

"I'm good at magically recognizing people, individuals. Hmm,
I never really considered locations." She flashed a grin at him. "I'll certainly try."

"Start with hot springs. They're the easiest." He jumped to his feet suddenly. "Damn those stupid Auralians." For a moment, in the moonlight he seemed to be wearing not his usual buckskin trousers and hairy wolf vest, but silver chain mail and black plate, and a moon shadow in the shape of an enormous horse loomed. Then it all disappeared, taking the man with it.

"So, somebody prayed to the God of War, did they?" She surveyed the empty night. "Huh. My turn to worry."
Silly to worry about the God of War.
She turned her mind away from the thought. "Traveling and building. I could travel? I could go explore the Old World all by myself. I could go everywhere, and learn everything."
He's fine, damn it.
"Hmm.
Recognize
locations."

Rustle leaned back and closed her eyes. This was a regular camping spot of hers, a little hill above Black Sand Lake. No brush, big trees, silence and solitude. She could feel the power flows, deep and sluggish, dim. "Definitely need to try the hot springs."

"Definitely going to surprise the Elder Sisters," the Auld Wulf's voice was warm, but with a bit of a gleeful note under it. The black horse shifted and snorted, barely sweaty. The god's sword was clean.

She slanted a grin up at him and rose. "Not much problem with the Auralians?"

"A small group of bandits attacked some miners that know to call on me, and there were also Travelers on the road that called on Harry. Harry was pissed; I hardly needed to show up. They ran at the first sign of serious resistance." The sword disappeared with a twist of his hand, and he swung off the big horse, the armor vanished. The horse disappeared last, and there was just her old hero standing there.

Rustle shook her head. "Is it hard to be
a god? Do you have to come whenever someone calls? What if there are two fights?"

"Depends on how much magic the caller possesses, and the degree of his control. This fellow is a wizard, or would have been one if he'd been castrated and all that mess. Even so, he's strong, and works very well
instinctively. I really
can't
ignore him. If I were stupid enough to have a Church, he'd be the Archpriest. Rufi's pretty loud too, but he hasn't got the wizard or witch genes, just a whole lot of the rest of them. Most people I don't hear at all, which is a good thing for my sanity."