Faith Hunter - Host

“Plagues and blood! No!” I exploded. I stood again and walked to the kitchen, to make a second pot of tea, to busy my hands. “Sit around all day in meetings and listen to self-important mages and humans conduct trade negotiations? Set policy for the Enclaves? Keep a circle open just so communication is available? Have to ride to the nearest human town to make a simple phone call or check the Internet? Mate where and when they tell me to? Spend all my time building political power? No way, Audric.”

I heard him release a pent-up breath. “But you will have to return to Enclave someday. And now you will be forced to either make obeisance to Élan or fight her.”

I put the kettle on the stove, braced my elbows, and hung my head. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“It is time to begin protocol lessons. We will begin with dance. Come here.”

I raised my head. “The town is sealed off from outside help. The Dragon is free, or almost free. I may have no choice but to call mage in dire again, and risk killing every human in town, and you want me to dance?”

“When emissaries reenter Enclave from the outside world, they are expected to enter correctly. Do you know the routine? Do you know the steps to properly approach the council? To approach the priestess? Can you perform a full court curtsy, head to the floor, hands up and out to the sides like wings, knees close together, body bent tight? And rise without aide? In a dress? You have declared war. I intend to give you the weapons.” He stood and rolled the rug back from the living space. When he straightened, he said, “Come here.”

I cursed. Audric laughed. And then he made me dance. For an hour he worked on foot placement, which, oddly enough, was a lot like the foot placement in fighting stances. He made me do hip slides and circles and a rhombus circle, which was a highly sexual move with a little belly cant and thrust, as if I was throwing a coin out of my belly button. He made me do camel hips, which was a joke, skinny as I am. He made me watch in mirrors as I did chest slides, and I looked like a monkey hit by a Tazer. The chest thrusts I tried were pitiful, as I had no boobs, and my chest circles were even worse. I couldn’t do snake arms worth spit. But when the lesson was over, I felt looser and calmer and I could think better, my mind no longer fuzzy and mushy. As punishments for shooting off my mouth went, it was relatively painless. I thought I had gotten off well. Until Audric informed me I had to appear before the town fathers to plan for the defense of Mineral City. I had been summoned, and he hadn’t bothered to tell me. Now I was late. Cheeky mule.

With my champard’s help, I dressed in full battle dobok, all my weapons and amulets in place. When I let my neomage attributes blaze freely, Audric asked, “Are you sure you want to do that?”

“Yeah,” I said, looking at myself in the mirrors of the armoires. “I’m tired of hiding my light under a bushel.”

Snorting with amusement at the New Testament reference, Audric followed me down the stairs and across the street. The sun was setting, a bright red orb low in the sky, tinting the clouds pink and gold and fuchsia. The eastern sky was plum-colored, and long shadows striped the ground. The snow picked up the reds in the sky, and the town was rosy with reflected light. But my breath puffed, and even through my gloves, my fingers felt the cold. My feet, still tender, ached with every step on the icy street.

“Watch your big mouth in here,” Audric said as he opened the door.

The smells of yeast, sugar, cinnamon, and fresh bread hit me in the face with a mingled scent that smelled like peace and calm and home. Not war. My mouth watered. Four elders—Shamus and Ernest Waldroup, Culpepper, and Jasper—were sitting at a table in the back corner of the bakery, drinking from chunky mugs. A loaf of bread rested on a bread tray with a serrated knife. A tub of butter sat to one side.

The most senior fathers were dressed in casual clothes, gray and black tunics and leggings, their brown robes of office thrown over the chair backs. Two of the men wore visible bandages. Shamus, a thick slice of bread in one bony paw, waved me over. Ignoring Culpepper’s annoyed look, Audric took up a place near the front windows, his back to the side wall so he could see both the table and the street.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I said as I hooked a foot around a chair leg, pulled it from beneath the table and sat, “but I’ll help any way I can.”

Without preamble, Shamus set aside his bread and began clearing the table. He said, “As the sun sets, fires’ll be lit at every street corner. We’ll have patrols on snow-el-mobiles making circuits through the streets.” He unrolled a map in the cleared place and put their coffee cups on the edges to hold it flat. “The fire truck’s goin’ here.” He pointed to an intersection at the top of a hill. “Every family with a wood roof has been moved to the meetinghouse. The slate roof and stone walls will provide fire protection. We got plenty of ammunition. It came on the train with your mage friend, and the EIH is busy loading a store of rounds with Dead Sea salt. Double-aught buckshot and salt.” At my raised brows, he said, “We have a common goal. Survival. The kirk has agreed to work with the heretics until this crisis is over.”

“Then you’ll go back to hunting them down and branding them on the cheeks?” I asked. So much for watching my big mouth.

Culpepper reared back in his chair, disgust on his face. “I told you she would be impossible to work with.”

“She has a point,” Ernest said. “And our hypocrisy and lack of compassion for others’ views will be addressed when this is over, if we survive it. For now, let’s look at the placement of snipers and sentries with radios. If anything untoward is sighted, word will be passed via radio and the kirk bell will be rung as an alarm. No one will leave his post to investigate; instead, men will come from the meetinghouse to survey the problem. Jasper?”

The young elder supported himself on one elbow and pointed to buildings on the map, indicating porches and second-story roofs, detailing where everyone was positioned. It all seemed pretty straightforward but I still didn’t know why they needed to talk to me. When I said so, the men looked back and forth between themselves. After the silent decision, Jasper took the lead. “We know about the ward on your home. Can you, maybe with the help of that new mage, make one big enough to cover the town?”

“And how much would it cost?” Culpepper said scornfully.

I’d had enough scorn for one day. I boosted my attributes higher, making my skin glow with a fierce light. My voice cold as an ice cap, I said, “If I could protect the town I would have. For free, Elder Culpepper.” The older man looked away, frowning. “But I can’t. That kind of incantation takes a number of mages with synergistic and related gifts, or littermates who have found ways to meld their disparate gifts into a single function.” I could tell they weren’t understanding. “It takes more than two mages. Maybe seven or twelve working for several days. Cheran and I don’t have gifts that would mesh or meld for any kind of working. But I do have these.”

I pulled a dozen polished quartz stone rings off my necklace, each circular with a central hole. “I filled some illumination amulets. You can give these out to the sentries. I’ve charged them to activate at onset of full night. Have the guards tie them to long strings and hide them in a pocket so their night vision isn’t compromised. If they need to see something at a distance, they can toss the amulet to the limits of the string and pull it back after.”

I added twelve additional amulets to the pile, these made of various different stones, but none of them quartz, so that even the least familiar with minerals could tell them apart. “Healing amulets. You can give these to the fire and medic brigade.”