Vonda McIntyre - Dreamsnake

“Is that what happened with you?”

He hesitated but finally answered. “Not many know I used to be bound. I was one of the first to be freed. After one year he tore up my bonding papers. They were still valid for twenty years, and I’d already served five. Until then I wasn’t sure I could trust him — or anyone. But I could.” He shrugged. “I stayed on afterward.”

“I understand why you feel grateful toward him,” Snake said. “But it still doesn’t give him the right to order you around twenty-four hours a day.”

“I slept last night.”

“In a chair?”

Brian smiled.

“Get someone else to watch him for a while,” Snake said. “You come with me.”

“Do you need help, healer?”

“No, I’m going down to the stables. But you can nap while I’m gone, at least.”

“Thank you, healer. I’d rather stay here.”

“Whatever you say.”

She left the residence and crossed the courtyard. It felt good to walk in the cool morning, even down the steep hairpin turns of the cliff trail. The mayor’s pastures spread out below her. The gray mare was alone in a green field, galloping back and forth with her head and tail high, bouncing stiff-legged to a halt at the fence, snorting, then wheeling to run in the opposite direction. If she had decided to keep on running, she could have cleared the chest-high fence and hardly noticed it, but she was running for no other reason then play.

Snake walked along the path to the barn. As she neared it she heard a slap and a cry, then a loud and furious voice.

“Get on with your work!”

Snake ran the last few steps to the stable and pulled open its doors. The inside was nearly dark. She blinked. She heard the rustling of straw and smelled the pleasant heavy odor of a clean horsebarn. After a moment her eyes became more accustomed to the dimness and she could see the wide straw-carpeted passageway, the two rows of box stalls, and the stablemaster turning toward her.

“Good morning, healer.” The stablemaster was a tremendous man, at least two meters tall, and heavily built. His curly hair was bright red and his beard was blond.

Snake looked up at him. “What was that noise?”

“Noise? I don’t — Oh, I was just countering the pleasures of laziness.”

His remedy must have been effective, for whoever had been lazy had disappeared very quickly.

“At this hour of the morning laziness sounds like a good idea,” Snake said.

“Well, we get started early.” The stablemaster led her farther into the barn. “I stabled your mounts down here. The mare’s out for a run, but I’ve kept the pony in.”

“Good,” Snake said. “He needs to be shod as soon as possible.”

“I’ve sent for the blacksmith to come this afternoon.”

“That’s fine.” She went inside Squirrel’s stall. He nuzzled her and ate the piece of bread she had brought him. His coat shone, his mane and tail were combed, and his hooves were even oiled. “Someone’s taken very good care of him.”

“We try to please the mayor and his guest,” the big man said. He stayed nearby, solicitously, until she left the stable to bring the mare inside. Swift and Squirrel had to be reintroduced to pasture slowly, after so long in the desert, or the rich grass would make them sick.

When she returned, riding Swift bareback and guiding her with her knees, the stablemaster was busy in another part of the building. Snake slid off the mare’s back and led her into her stall.

“It was me, mistress, not him.”

Startled, Snake turned, but whoever had whispered to her was not in the stall, nor in the passageway outside.

“Who’s that?” Snake said. “Where are you?” Back in the stall she looked up and saw the hole in the ceiling where fodder was thrown down. She jumped on the manger, grabbed the edge of the hole, and chinned herself up so she could see into the loft. A small figure jumped back in fright and hid behind a bale of hay.

“Come out,” Snake said. “I won’t hurt you.” She was in a ridiculous position, hanging down in the middle of the stall with Swift nibbling her boot, without the proper leverage to climb the rest of the way into the loft. “Come on down,” she said, and let herself drop back to the ground.

She could see the form of the person in the hayloft, but not the features.

It’s a child, she thought. Just a little kid.

“It’s nothing, mistress,” the child said. “It’s just he always pretends he does all the work and there’s others do too, is all. Never mind.”

“Please come down,” Snake said again. “You did a very nice job on Swift and Squirrel and I’d like to thank you.”

“That’s thanks enough, mistress.”

“Don’t call me that. My name’s Snake. What’s yours?”

But the child was gone.

People from town, both patients and messengers, already waited to see her when she reached the top of the cliff, leading Swift. She would get no leisurely breakfast today.

She saw a good deal of Mountainside before evening. For a few hours at a stretch she worked hard, busy and hurried but content, and then as she finished with one patient and went to hear about the next, apprehension swept over her and she thought that this time she might be asked to help someone who was dying, someone like Jesse whom she could not help at all.

Today, that did not happen.

In the evening she rode Swift north along the river, passing the town on her left, as the glow of the sun sank past the clouds and touched the west mountain peaks. The long shadows crept toward her as she reached the mayor’s pasture and stables. Seeing no one around, she took Swift into the barn herself, unsaddled her, and began to brush her smooth dappled coat. She was not particularly anxious to return to the mayor’s residence and its atmosphere of dogged loyalty and pain.

“Mistress, that’s not for you to do. Let me. You go on up the hill.”

“No, you come on down,” Snake said to the disembodied whispery voice. “You can help. And don’t call me mistress.”

“Go on, now, mistress, please.”

Snake brushed Swift’s shoulder and did not answer. When nothing happened she thought the child had gone; then she heard a rustling in the hay above her. On impulse she stroked the brush backwards across Swift’s flank. An instant later the child was beside her, taking the brush gently from her hand.

“You see, mistress—”

“ ‘Snake.’”

“ — This is no job for you. You know healing, I know horse-brushing.”

Snake smiled.

The little girl was only nine or ten, small and spare. She had not looked up at Snake; now she brushed Swift’s ruffled hair straight again, her face turned down and close to the mare’s side. She had bright red hair, and dirty, chewed fingernails.

“You’re right,” Snake said. “You are better at that than I am.”

The child was silent for a moment. “You fooled me,” she said sullenly, without turning around.

“A little,” Snake admitted. “But I had to or you wouldn’t let me thank you face to face.”

The child spun around, glaring up. “Then thank me!” she cried.

The left side of her face was twisted with a terrible scar.

Third-degree burns, Snake thought. The poor child — ! And then she thought: If a healer had been near, the scar would not have been so bad.

But at the same time she noticed the bruise along the right side of the little girl’s face. Snake knelt and the child shrank back from any contact, turning so the scar would be less visible. Snake touched the bruise gently.

“I heard the stablemaster yelling at someone this morning,” Snake said. “It was you, wasn’t it? He hit you.”

The child turned back and stared at her, her right eye wide, the left held partly closed by scar tissue.