Barbara Hambly - Icefalcon’s Quest

The brilliant eyes narrowed. “You hunt this Wise One? I thought you had returned to find Gsi Kethko.”

“Gsi Kethko?” The name had two meanings. In the tongue of the Salt People it signified the hallucinogenic pods of the wild morning glory, but in the more melodic (and altogether more perfect) language of the Talking Stars People it meant the Antlered Spider, one of the fifteen Dream Things that sometimes carried messages from the Watchers Behind the Stars.

“The Wise One,” Loses His Way amplified.

“He was a member of Plum’s family,” remembered the Icefalcon, not sure why the warchief thought he should be interested. “A little man so high who dressed his hair with elm twigs. He stayed with us when we camped on the Night River just before the Summer Moot, the year that I departed. I don’t think he was a very good Wise One. We nearly starved to death waiting for him to charm antelope, and his information about the salt grass along the Cruel River left a great deal to be desired. Why would I seek out the Antlered Spider?”

“I thought he might have spoken to someone else concerning the spells he laid on the dreamvine that your old chief Noon took, at the Summer Moot in the Year of the White Foxes, the year that you left.” Loses His Way turned the end of one of his mustache braids around his finger, but his eyes did not leave the Icefalcon’s face in the piebald shadows of the thicket. The Icefalcon felt a coldness inside him, as if he already knew what else his enemy was going to say.

“The draft is prepared on the night the chief takes it,” the Icefalcon said, his soft, husky voice suddenly flat. “He himself gathers the dreamvine before he goes up to the mountain. There can be no spells laid on it since no one else touches the pods.”

“According to Antlered Spider, Noon always gathered the pods in the same place,” the warchief replied. “Along Pretty Water Creek, between the white rock shaped like a tortoise and the three straight cottonwoods.”

The place flashed at once to the Icefalcon’s mind, and he realized that what Loses His Way said was true. Noon had taken him there a hundred times in his childhood and told him of the properties of the low-growing, innocuous-looking vine: how it was prepared by the warchief on the mountain and what it did.

“The Antlered Spider said that Blue Child took powdered elf-root and had him lay words on it, so that when the powder was mixed with water and painted on the pods of the vine, the face that Noon would see in his vision at the Summer Moot would be yours. And it was your face that Noon saw, wasn’t it?”

“How do you know this?” The cold in him deepened, a dream remembered and repressed – the old man’s face impassive, eyes dead, empty with grief. The Icefalcon, and his cousin Red Fox, and their friends Stays Up All Night and Fifty Lovers, sitting by the Moot Fire, the talk soft and nervous as it always was at such times. Then Noon walked out of the night into the red world of the firelight, the white shell held out stiffly in his hand and death in his eyes.

Always just stepping into the firelight. Always just holding out his hand.

“My son …”

My son.

But he had known almost before Noon spoke what he was going to say. They had all looked at him, his kindred. Looked at him, and moved away.

The cold crystallized within him to a core of ice, as the cold had then.

“Why did he tell you this?” It astonished him how normal his voice sounded. But he was the Icefalcon, and it behooved him not to show his feelings, particularly not to one of the Empty Lakes People.

“He was dying,” said Loses His Way. “Fever Lady had kissed him at the winter horse camp. The snow was deep outside, and I could not leave.”

“What was he doing in your horse camp?” The Icefalcon drew a deep breath. Far off over the badlands, thunder rolled, soft with distance. The scent of the storm came rushing at them on the blue-black cloak of the wind.

“He wasn’t really one of Plum’s family.” Loses His Way shrugged. “He was the son of my maternal aunt’s husband’s stepbrother. The Empty Lakes People drove him out in the Year of the Crows for putting a barren spell on his sister because she had more horses than he did. No one liked him. Blue Child took him in.”

“Blue Child took in a Wise One of your people?” The Icefalcon was shocked to the marrow of his bones. “Took him in and had him put a spell on the chief of her own people ?”

Loses His Way nodded. The Icefalcon was silent. Winter-night silence. Death silence. The silence in the eyes of an old man who has just been told by his Ancestors that the boy he has raised from childhood, the young man he looked upon as his successor, is the one They want, the one They have chosen to bring a message to them written in the crimson extremities of pain.

The torture sacrifice, the Long Sacrifice of summer, that the people may live through the winter to come.

Lightning flared, purple-white against the nigrous mountains of cloud. Gray rain stood in slanted columns over distant hills. The wind veered: Bektis, at a guess, witching the weather to turn the storm away. Shamans of the Talking Stars People generally didn’t care if they got wet.

The Icefalcon observed it all, staring into distance, feeling nothing.

“I don’t know whether Gsi Kethko told anyone else of this,” said Loses His Way, after a time, stroking his long mustache. “But for two years now I have been watching for you, waiting to see if you will return to your people and claim your due.”

“Are you all right, honey?”

Tir sat back on his heels, trembling, small hands propped on his thighs. Hethya ran a competent palm over his clammy forehead, then helped him to his feet and led him away from the little puddle of vomit among the ferns at the base of the big cottonwood tree. Some distance off she knelt down again and took the boy in her arms.

She was a big woman, like the farmwives and blacksmiths in the Keep. Her arms were strong around him and the quilting of her coat smooth and cold under his face, and her thick braids, tickling his chin, smelled good. Tir rested his head against her shoulder and tried not to feel ashamed of himself for getting sick.

It was weak, like the little kids. He was seven and a half. With the deaths of Geppy and Thya and Brit and all the other older children in the Summerless Year, he had stepped into a position of semicommand in the games of the younger.

Tears stung his eyes, remembering his friends. Remembering Rudy.

“There’s no shame in it, being afraid.” Hethya’s big fingers toyed gently with his hair, separating it into locks on his forehead, as his mother sometimes still did. “Even great kings and heroes get afraid. And sometimes that happens, after you’ve been real afraid.”

Tir was silent, trying to sort out what he had felt clinging to the limb of the tree. He was still sweating, though under his furry jacket he felt icy cold, and his stillness alternated with waves of shivering that he could not control.

“You did well,” she said.

In fact, when Bektis had spun around and cried out “Raiders!” and the three Akulae whipped their curved southern swords from their sheaths, from those dark hollows in his mind Tir heard someone else’s voice, one of those other people, say as if thinking it to himself, Get out of everybody’s way.

Lying on the branch of the tree, he had felt curiously little fear. Too many memories of killing men himself – of those other boys killing men – lay too near the surface. Memories of terror in battle, memories of grief and remorse, memories of the grim rush of heat that drove in the knife, the spear, the sword. Watching Hethya, watching the Akulae, cutting and hacking at the men and women who ran stumbling from Bektis’ unseen illusions filled him with emotion that he could not name, closer to sadness and horror than fear. But strong. Horrifyingly strong.