Weatherwitch: Book Three of The Crowthistle Chronicles (32 page)

As they walked side by side out of the drill-hall, William asked, “It perplexes me why you train at swordsmanship, for I know it is not in you to cause harm to living things. I would have imagined that hitting and hurting were foreign to your nature.”

“To my mind, it is admissible to fight an opponent who is on an equal footing and who has freely agreed to the contest,” she replied, “or to wage battle in self-defense. There is justice in those circumstances. On the other hand there is no justice in slaughtering creatures that have been born in captivity, with no chance to flee or fight back, or hunting wild beasts that have no weapons other than their four legs to make them fleet, or their own teeth and claws to defend themselves at close quarters. But you ask me why I practice with the sword. It is because I desire ardently to make myself worthy of wielding Fallowblade; employing him as he is intended to be employed, according to my birthright.” There was a catch in her voice as she added, “My father would have wielded Fallowblade, were he still amongst us.”

“To what purpose? No one would threaten war against the weather-masters!”

“Aye, and no one marches against Narngalis, either, yet your father keeps his defense forces in trim. Besides, Fallowblade deserves to be taken seriously as a weapon, and not treated as merely a mantelshelf ornament.”

“Have you brought the Golden Sword with you?”

“No. He remains, as ever, in my grandfather’s house.” Catching a glimmer of mirth in William’s eye, she laughed, admitting, “As a mantelshelf ornament.”

William said, “Since you have no swordmaster in your new household, you are welcome to employ the services of one of ours whenever you wish to practice.”

“Gramercie, sir,” the damsel said, giving him a quick smile. “That is well. Methinks I shall take the tutor out into the field. I have promised myself to rehearse my lessons on rough terrain, as I am too much accustomed to the level floors of armories and drill halls and the smooth flags of training yards.”

“A first-rate notion.”

Shortly thereafter, Asrathiel removed to her lodgings in Lime Grove. It was early in Otember, the middle month of Autumn, and the time of the Lord Mayor’s Show, a popular annual spectacle in the city. Crowds of Narngalish citizens milled throughout King’s Winterbourne’s labyrinth of meandering streets and lanes. Amonst them mingled flamboyant Ashqalêthans, their clothes dyed in soft citrus colors, muffled beneath the layers of furs in which they swaddled themselves against the northern cold; blunt sea-merchants from Grïmnørsland, their faces chafed by wind and weather; crimson-clad aristocrats of Slievmordhu decked with bronze ornaments; peasants and craftsmen from all over Tir, clad in nondescript outfits of drab homespun; knights in their tabards, druids in their robes, and carlins with woad-blue discs painted on their brows.

The majority of houses and inns in the city were half-timbered, or wattle and daub, whitewashed with lime, roofed with slate. The Laurels was no exception. Behind the high walls of the estate, the house was triple-storeyed and spacious, containing rooms more numerous than Asrathiel and her retinue would ever need. Protocol, however, demanded impressive lodgings for the representative of High Darioneth. The premises suited Asrathiel’s requirements. There was no incumbent brownie, but that was not extraordinary. Brownies were an uncommon luxury. Most households relied on human domestic servants to perform the chores.

Mistress Draycott Parslow proved to be an accommodating landlady,
benign and somewhat eccentric. She was fond of recounting the story of how she had obtained her wealth, for she had not always been well off. She used to dwell alone in a remote house on a hilltop in one of the mining districts. Her husband had been killed by the collapse of a shaft, in one of the old “coffens,” or mine-workings, in the hill. Conceivably attracted by the widow’s seclusion, the local spriggans used to gather in her cottage almost every night to apportion their plunder. Small in stature, with upstanding and pointed ears, wide mouths and broad noses, these eldritch incarnations would creep in, accompanied by a strong odor of leaf-mold. In return for the use of Mistress Draycott Parslow’s premises, they would leave a small coin by her bedside. The money, meager though it was, helped to make the dame’s life a little more comfortable. Yet she was not content; from beneath the bedcovers of a night, she would secretly peer out at the wights and long to possess their treasure. There was silver plate, and gold, and jewels—all real, she had no doubt; perhaps unearthed from ancient barrows.

Eventually, one night, when they had snared more than the usual amount of loot, the spriggans began to dispute angrily about the distribution of it. There were seven wights but only five gold cups—as well as plenty of other wealth—and all the spriggans wanted to own a cup. They dickered and debated, disagreeing on the value of the vessels, and who should have one, and how the rest of the goods ought to be shared in compensation. Their slits of eyes glittered with malice, while their barbed, whipcord tails switched angrily back and forth.

Mistress Draycott Parslow, spying from under her blankets and pretending to be asleep, seized her opportunity. Surreptitiously, beneath the bedcovers, she doffed her shift, turned it inside out and put it on again. Turning one’s clothes was, of course, an authenticated ward against minor wights such as spriggans. When she had protected herself against their powers, she reached out and grabbed a gold cup, boldly crying, “You shan’t have a single one of them!”

The startled spriggans fled, but the last one, as he departed, swept his bony hand over the old woman’s shift.

The wights abandoned all the treasure and failed to come back on the following nights. To the astonishment of the local inhabitants, Mistress Draycott Parslow became a rich woman. Gnawed by a niggling fear that the spriggans might eventually return seeking revenge, she soon left the cottage and went to live in King’s Winterbourne, where she purchased The Laurels
and settled down in the cottage in the grounds, which was far more sumptuous than her old abode. When asked why she dared to tell the story, when everyone knew that if you revealed you had obtained wealth from wights that wealth would disappear, she would explain, “Well, I have spended all the treasure already, so if I ain’t got it, it cannot banish. Besides, it were real bullions and jools; it were not just some wafty glamor cast over a pile of hay-corns and leaves.”

And she always added this coda: she was unable ever again to wear the shift that had brought her good fortune, without suffering intense torment. “Nobody knows how it can be, that putting on a shift can bring me such agrimonies,” she would say wisely. “But I knows. ‘Tis the work of the spriggans!”

Privately, Asrathiel wondered why the old woman did not simply throw out the threadbare shift. Perhaps she kept it for luck.

Once the weathermage had settled in to her new home, her work proceeded uneventfully. It was second nature for her to forecast the weather; no difficulty was involved. Each day she would send a messenger to the castle with her latest predictions. Sometimes she walked to the royal residence herself to deliver the news, for it was less than half a mile away, and while visiting she would avail herself of the king’s private library, or practice swordplay with one of the weaponmasters. It was not until the middle of Otember, on a King’s Day, when her bri-senses detected the approach of a violent electrical storm, that she was asked to actually intervene. She had become aware that a weak cold front, associated with severe thunderstorm activity, would clear from the east that night. A high pressure ridge would extend across Tir the following day, with a center strengthening to the east of the Four Kingdoms on Love’s Day, bringing fine weather.

When this was reported to King Warwick he called for the young weathermaster and asked her for assistance. “The apples hang ripening on the trees,” he said, “almost ready for the harvest. If strong winds and rain should batter the orchards of Narngalis at this season, the fruit crop will be in danger of failing. Pray avert this storm, Lady Maelstronnar.”

Thus it was that Asrathiel went straightway and climbed a spiral stair that led to the rooftop of the tallest turret of the castle. At the king’s command, nobody came near to distract her from her task. She gazed towards the east, and reached out her faculties like invisible tendrils on the wind, feeling her way through the pressure fluctuations, the differences in humidity and temperature, the flows and eddies of atmospheric rivers, until
Cecilia Dart/Thornton

she discovered the core elements of this pattern, the essential forces brewing the storm.

Distant air currents, like gossamer streamers, rustled through the awareness of the weathermage, coiling in cyclones and anticyclones. Alive with boundless energy, sometimes they smelled of electricity, sometimes of salt, and sometimes they were tinged with the fragrance of new-mown hay. Always the currents smacked of freedom and excitement. As Asrathiel breathed, she could scarcely tell where her own exhalations ended and where the gusts began. She knew faraway clouds, pouring like cream, and comprehended the flux of humidity like fine-grained banners of hyaline tissue, smoother than silk. Vapors sighed in her ears, tasting of purity and distilled freshness, scented with tranquillity. Perspiring with exhilaration, the girl on the turret could scarcely differentiate her sweat from raindrops, her heartbeat from thunder, her own voice from the cries and whispers of the wind.

Heat and cold undulated through the troposphere, driving forces invisible to the human eye. Hot winds like tatters of crimson velvet, raw as liquor and roaring; cold tides, piquant as green apples, chiming or piping thinly; the butter-mellow tepidness of hot and cold colliding in transition. The damsel on the roof perceived the remote workings of temperature, and it seemed hard to distinguish between her own pulsing blood-heat and the energies unleashed by the furnace of the sun. Her mind grasped faraway ligatures of lightning, and she did not know whether the high-powered levin bolts were discharging between the heavens and the ground, or in the snap-ping synapses of her own nerves.

Above Asrathiel the atmosphere churned. Updraughts caught her hair in billowing strands, threading them along their paths. Her eyes, shining, reflected the streaming clouds, so that they seemed no longer eyes at all but long oval windows opening onto the roiling skies behind her head. Winglike, her sleeves and mantle flared from her shoulders. Standing on that height Asrathiel spoke the words and performed the gestures, working with air and water and fire in far-off places; summoning, deflecting, coordinating; diluting the ferocity of the elements, turning them away from the cultivated lands of the north to expend the remnants of their rage on the mountains.

When at length her work was finished, she descended the stair, a little weary, perhaps, but not visibly exhausted, considering she had single-handedly thwarted a portion of the atmosphere’s might. In fact, as always after she had weather-worked, she felt profoundly at peace.

Throughout that night the people of Narngalis had watched the lightning
flicker and blaze on the heights of the Northern Ramparts, hearkening to the crash of airs riven asunder, the howl and boom of thunder rocketing from rock-face to chasm. The tumult seemed to split the very foundations of the world. And they knew, then, what a great weathermage they had in their midst, who could protect their kingdom from something so unimaginably puissant. On her own the Lady Maelstronnar had achieved a task that commonly demanded the united skills of many brí-wielders.

Everybody was grateful to Asrathiel; nonetheless their gratitude came from a distance, as though they revered her as someone not quite human. Indeed, at times she herself wondered whether her essential character had lost some qualities of humanity. She only ceased to feel hurt by the silence of those who entered her presence when she came to understand that it was not indifference or animosity that made them tongue-tied, but awe. Even William now seemed reserved in her proximity, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his wonder at her deeds. More than ever, she felt alienated and alone.

It was with relief, therefore, that she received an invitation to attend the celebrations for the official betrothal of Uabhar’s eldest son, Kieran, to King Thorgild’s daughter Solveig. Her fellow weathermasters had also been invited, and this was a welcome opportunity to enjoy their company again. In the month of Ninember, accompanied by her crew, she piloted
Light-fast
from King’s Winterbourne to Slievmordhu. There she rendezvoused with Dristan, Albiona, her aunt Galiene and Ryence Darglistel at the city mansion of Calogrenant Lumenspar, Ambassador for High Darioneth in Cathair Rua.

Great rejoicing took place at that reunion, and much animated discussion. Asrathiel learned that for several weeks past, aircrews on weather missions over Ashqalêth had been sighting columns of King Chohrab’s soldiers marching eastwards, while in Slievmordhu, King Uabhar’s troops had been involved in an unusual number of regimental reviews and training exercises. When asked about their intentions, spokesmen for both realms had stated that their armed forces had joined in alliance to combat the Marauders when they reemerged from their lairs in the warmer months. With this explanation the weathermasters had to be satisfied. Their curiosity, however, was aroused; and they felt the first twinges of apprehension about this unwonted buildup of military strength in peacetime. Long had they watched Uabhar with a wary eye, but now it seemed they must also be cautious of Chohrab, who had hitherto appeared to be a mild-mannered monarch possessing no exceptional wit or ambition. At length, putting aside their disquiet, they
spoke of matters to hand. After consultation with Asrathiel, the Councilors of Ellenhall decided to take advantage of this festive occasion to officially hand over the Sylvan Comb as a gift to appease the jealousy of King Uabhar. No notice was given—it was to be a pleasant surprise.