Barbara Hambly - 04 Mother Of Winter

The villa and fort were Graw's homestead, and everyone in them a member of the red-haired man's family, an outright servant, or a smallholder who had pledged fealty in exchange for protection.

Three of the nobles who had made the journey to the Keep from Gae had established such settlements as well, populated both by retainers and men-at-arms who had served them before the rising of the Dark, and by those farmers who sought their protection or owed them money.

Even had Gil not filled Rudy in on their own world's Dark Ages, he'd have been able to see where that practice was leading. It was one reason he'd acceded to Minalde's pleading, in spite of his own unwillingness to leave the Keep with the gaboogoo question unanswered.

That, and the white look around her mouth when she'd said, "It's only a day's journey." The livestock at the Keep would need hay from the riverbottoms to survive the winter. Not all the broken remnants of the great Houses were particularly mindful of their vows to Alde as the Lady of the Keep.

She didn't need more problems than the ones she already had.

"Now, when you folk up there started putting all kinds of rules on us instead of letting us go our own way," Graw groused in his grating, self-pitying caw, "I had my doubts, but I was willing to give Lady Alde consideration. I mean, she'd been queen all her life and was used to it, and I thought maybe she did know more about this than me."

He shoved big rufous hands into the leather of his belt as he strode along the edge of the fields, Rudy trailing at his heels. The split rails of the fences had been reinforced with stout earth banks and a chevauxde-frise of sharpened stakes, heavier even than the ones around the Keep wheat fields that discouraged moose and the great northern elk. This looked designed to keep out mammoths.

"I did ask why we were supposed to send back part of our harvest, and everybody said, 'Oh, shut up, Graw, it's because the Keep is the repository of all True Laws and wonderful knowledge and everything that makes civilization-' "

"I thought the vote went that way because you were taking Keep seed, Keep axes and plows, and Keep stock," Rudy said, cutting off the heavy-handed sarcasm, vaulting over the fence in his host's wake.

Graw's face reddened still further in the orange sunset light. "Any organism that doesn't have the courage to grow will die!" he bellowed. "The same applies to human societies. Those who try to hang on to all the old ways, to haggle as if the votes of ten yapping cowards are somehow more significant than a true man of the land who's willing to go out and do something-"

"When did this stuff start to grow here?" Rudy had had about enough of the Man of the Land. He halted among the rustling, leathery cornstalks, just where the plants began to droop lifeless. They lay limp and brown in a band a yard or so wide, and beyond that he could see the fat white fingers of the slunch.

"Just after the first stalks started to come up." Graw glared at him as if he'd sneaked down from the Vale in the middle of the night and planted the slunch himself. "You don't think we'd have wasted the seed in a field where the stuff was already growing, do you?"

Rudy shook his head, though he privately considered Graw the sort of man who'd do precisely that rather than waste what he wanted to consider good acreage, particularly if that acreage was his. Silly git probably told himself the situation wouldn't get any worse.

"So it's gone from nothing to-what? About twelve feet by eighteen?-in four weeks? Have the other patches been growing this fast?"

"How the hell should I know?" Graw yelled. "We've got better things to do than run around with measuring tapes! What I want to know is what you plan to do about it!"

"Well, you know," Rudy said conversationally, turning back toward the fence, "even though I've known the secret of getting rid of this stuff for the past three years, I've kept it to myself and just let it grow all over the fields around the Keep. But I tell you what: I'll tell you."

"Don't you get impertinent with me, boy!"

"Then don't assume I'm not doing my job to the best of my ability," Rudy snapped. "I'll come out here in the morning to take a good look at this stuff, but-" Voices halooed in the woods beyond the field, and there was a great crashing in the thickets of maple and hackberry along the dense green verge of the trees. Someone yelled, "Whoa, there she goes!" and another cried, "Oh, mine, mine!" There was laughter, like the clanging of iron pots.

Rudy ran to the fence, swung himself up on the rails between two of the stakes in time to see a dark figure break from the thickets, running along the waste-ground near the fence for the shelter of the rocks by the stream.

Two of Graw's hunters pelted out of the woods, young ruffians in deer leather dyed brown and green, arrows nocked, and Graw called out, exasperated but tolerant, "Oh, for heaven's sake, it's only a damn dooic!"

It was a female-mares, some people called them, or hinnies-with one baby clutched up against the fur of her belly and another, larger infant clinging hard around her neck, its toes clutching at the longer fur of her back. She ran with arms swinging, bandy legs pumping hard, dugs flapping as she zigzagged toward the tangle of boulders and willow, but Rudy could see she wasn't going to make it. One hunter let fly with an arrow, which the hinny dodged, stumbling. The smaller pup jarred loose as she scrambled up, and the other hunter, a snaggle-haired girl, laughed and called out, "Hey, you dropped one, Princess!" The bowman fired again as the hinny wheeled, diving for the silent pup in the short, weedy grass.

The hinny jerked back from the arrow that seemed to appear by magic in the earth inches from her face. For an instant she stared, transfixed, at the red-feathered shaft, at the man who had fired and the wriggling black shape of the pup: huge brown eyes under the heavy pinkish shelf of brow, lips pressed forward like pale velvet from the longer fur around them in an expression of panic, trying to think. Graw muttered, "Oh, for heaven's sake," and whipped an arrow from the quiver at his belt. He carried his bow strung, on his back, as most of the men in the Settlements did; nocking and firing was a single move.

Rudy reached with his thought and swatted Graw's arrow as if it had been a stinging fly. At the same moment he spoke a word in the silence of his mind, and the bowstring of the male hunter snapped, the weapon leaping out of his hands and the nocked arrow, drawn back for another shot, jerking wild.

The man cursed-seventy-five pounds of tension breaking does damage-and the hinny, gauging her chance, slipped forward, grabbed the pup by one foot, and flung herself in a long rolling dive for the rocks.

"You watch what you're goddamn doing!" Graw bellowed, snatching Rudy by the shoulder and throwing him backward from the fence.

As he hit the ground, Rudy could hear the girl hunter screaming and the retreating, furious rustle of the streamside laurels as the hinny made good her escape. Breath knocked out of him, he rolled, in case Graw were moved to kick him, and got back to his feet, panting, his long reddish-black hair hanging in his eyes. Graw was standing foursquare in front of him, braced as for a fight: "Go on, use your magic against me!" he yelled, slapping his chest. "I'm unarmed! I'm helpless! I'm just trying to protect our fields from those stinking vermin!"

Rudy felt his whole body heat with a blister of shame. Ingold had taught him what he had to do next, and his soul cringed from it as his hand would have cringed from open flame. The man was hurt, and Rudy was a healer.

Turning his back on Graw, he slipped through the stakes in the fence and strode up the broken slope toward the hunter who lay among the weeds. The buckskin-clad girl