Orson Card - Wyrms

"I take my people with me," she said. "When Angel is strong enough, we'll take him in the carriage. If we can find horses to buy."

Reck shrugged. "Buy? Ruin can find your horses tomorrow. He can find anything in the woods."

"Not to pull the carriage, though," he said. "We'd spend all our time dragging it out of mudholes. We'll go to the next human town and sell it and by a boat. The wind is out of the west, and Cranwater is wide and flat.

The roads are the worst way to Cranning."

So it was agreed. The only argument came later, in the darkness, when Ruin lay beside his sister and she told him she meant to bring Will along.

"What is he to you?" asked Ruin for the thousandth time. "Is he your lover, now? Do you want to bear his little monsters?"

She never answered such accusations. She only said, "He is my friend, and if I go, he goes too."

"So the giant comes with us. We'd better buy a large boat. There are too many of us already. And too many humans altogether." Then he fell to making obscene suggestions about what Will and Reck did whenever Ruin was away. She didn't answer, and he only stopped when her breathing told him that she had fallen asleep. It was hardly worth trying to make her angry anymore.

THEY WERE NOT THE HAPPIEST PARTY EVER TO SET OUT FOR Cranning. Angel was too weak from hunger and loss of blood to do more than endure the jolting of the road.

Though he could, painfully, drink milk from the farmhouses they passed, it would take time for him to come back up to strength, and even when he was conscious, he listened to the conversations of the others and almost never tried to speak. When they stopped at inns along the way. Patience fed him gruel in his room while the others ate at the common table. And the geblings slept in his room through the night, taking turns watching over him when, asleep, he clawed at the pain in his throat.

If Angel was silent, then Sken seemed never to stop speaking. She gRuinbled about everything that went wrong, and though she never said a word to or about the geblings if she could help it, she made it plain that she loathed them. She had a way of sniffing the air when Ruin was near. And whenever Patience and the geblings spoke "that jabbering noise," she grew sullen and threw nutshells at the horses' backs with particular vehemence.

Not Sken's surliness, not even Angel's misery ever engaged Patience's attention for long, however. She was caught up in other concerns. The Cranning call grew stronger in her every day, often distracting her from whatever she was doing or thinking. And the call was changing form as well. It was no longer just an urgency in her mind. Now it was a hunger in her body.

Night, in an inn not far from the river Cranwater. She dreamed a deep and powerful and terrifying and beautiful dream.

"Patience," whispered Sken.

Sken was shaking her. It was still dark. Was there some danger? Patience reached for the loop in her hair.

"No!" Sken tried to push her back down onto her mat.

Sken's push, the physical restraint, gave Patience a new fear, that Sken herself meant her harm. Patience was trained to protect herself against just such an attempt at murder in the night. For a moment, because she was not yet fully awake, her reflexes controlled her, and she lashed out; then she came to herself and stopped, her fingers already hooking behind Sken's ears, her thumbs poised to gouge out the riverwoman's eyes.

"Sweet lass," said Sken. "Just what your mother hoped you'd grow up to be, I bet."

The condemnation in Sken's words, the residue of momentary terror in her voice, the loathing revealed by the scant light that crossed the woman's face-this is how they see me, thought Patience. The common people, the people who play with their children, dance at the festival until they're drenched with sweat, scream and whine and accuse each other in the market. To them, a child my age should be a virgin at heart. If I were wise in the ways of love, that would sadden them, yes, as it does all adults when a child's body comes awake. But to see a child so young already ripe in violence and murder-I am a monstrous thing to Sken, like the deformed babies who are strangled and burned by the midwives.

Almost she said this: I was trained to be what I am, and I'm the best at what I do.

Then Sken would accuse her: This is the second time you tried to kill me. Or perhaps ask a bitter question: Do you murder even in your sleep?

Then Patience would say: How do you think a king keeps the peace, if not with tools like me?

But she would not defend herself. She might sometimes wish that she were not her father's daughter, but wishing wouldn't change the past. She had no more need to defend what she was than a mountain had to defend itself for being tall and craggy, or worn down and knobby, or whatever other shape it might have. What I am is what was done to me, not what I chose.

So instead of answering Sken's ironic words. Patience lived up to her name, and quietly asked, "Why did you wake me?"

"You were crying out in your sleep."

"I don't do that," said Patience. Hadn't Angel schooled her to be utterly silent in her sleep? She remembered all too well the cold water dashed in her face to wake her each time she made a sound, until she learned habits of sleep that kept her still.

"Then it's a miracle, a voice coming out of the air above your bed, and sounding just like you."

"What did I say?"

"From your cries, girl, I could think only one thing.

That a lover was prying at you as vigorous as a fanner rooting out a stump in a field."

Only then did the memory of her dream come back to her, and with it the Cranning call. "He does it to me," she whispered. "He sends me dreams. Waking, sleeping-"

Sken nodded knowingly. "You dream until your whole body's ready for him, but he never comes to you."

"I have to go to him."

"The curse of women," said Sken. "We know how they mean to use our love for them, we know the whole price of it is ours to pay, but still we go, and still we stay."

"This one's no ordinary lover," said Patience. Sken patted her head. "Oh, true. True, the one you love is never ordinary."

"What, did she really think Patience was lovesick like some village maiden, pining for the handsome farmboy? Because Patience had never had such a girlish feeling, she wondered for a moment if Sken might not be right.

But that was absurd. Patience had seen young girls in many noble houses, had heard them gossip about their real and would-be lovers. Unwyrm's relentless calling was far stronger. Even now it stirred within her; it took effort not to get up from her mat, leave the shabby inn, and walk, run, ride, or swim to Cranning. Still, Sken's ignorant assumptions were harmless enough. In other times, Patience would have seemed to accept Sken's attempt at consolation. But she was too weary, too edgy from the Cranning call to care to play the diplomat. So she answered with the nastiness she felt.

"And if I wait long enough, will I get over it?"

Sken, of course, had no diplomatic instincts. "You are a little bitch. A body tries to be nice-"

Patience answered, as if to explain everything about herself, "I've faced death more times this month than you have in your life."

Sken was still a moment, then smiled. "But you don't know boats like I do."

"We're not on the water now," said Patience.

"Nor are we assassinating anybody," Sken answered, Patience lay back on the mat and smiled icily. Sken had made her point. "Death and the river, we each know our trade," said Patience.

"This lover who makes you sweat and cry out in your sleep-"

"Not my lover," said Patience.

"He wants you, doesn't he? And you want him?"

"He wants me like a jackal hungers for a lamb. And I want him like-"