Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 7

  “It would be good to have them as allies,” she agreed.

  “Is Charlie a CUT magus? If not, was he truly victimized by them?” He paced the small wigwam. “To leave him here, if he wasn’t an innocent target of opportunity . . . he’s placed himself in the heart of their elite squad of warriors.”

  “I would remain as hostage,” Finch said in a rush. “If it would get him away.”

  “You’re in my care,” Huon said.

  She stood as tall as she could—which wasn’t very—and trying not to look all the things she was: young, fine-boned, vulnerable.

  “I have duties, too. There are things here for the Eyes to study.”

  Like Raki. Which was foolish, a thought of the body. There was no guarantee, if she stayed, that she would ride with the Doubledoubles.

  “It’s a generous offer,” he said, and the mask he wore among the Cree was entirely gone: she could see the gratitude, the respect for her and all his vassals that made him such a good leader. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  Next day, at dawn, the Kip Kelly Rodeo arrived.

  They were a band of fifty, riding light and armed with whips, lassos, and tomahawks. They came over the eastern fringe of the lake, backlit by bloodred sun, yowling like a wolf pack as they galloped out of the brightness. They wore fringed leather pants and jackets, and their hats were wide-brimmed. Their boots had hard pointed toes and were stitched in intricate patterns that rose to midcalf.

  The princess rode at their head. Her skin was the gold-tinged red of cedar and her hair was caught in a hundred small braids, each a finger’s length and tipped by turquoise beads. She wore a crown of curved ram’s horns and the cuffs of her sleeves were wound with vicious spikes of rusted wire, but the show wasn’t necessary; merely the look on her face was enough to show she was spoiling for a fight.

  Among her wranglers were six warriors with their faces painted white—the clowns Lester had mentioned—capable-looking warriors, dangerous men. The baker was in their midst, under guard. He looked beaten down, unhappy, trapped.

  The clowns and the Baron’s men-at-arms exchanged glances pregnant with professional implications, weighing one another.

  The princess rode to the Twelvestepper wigwam—everyone, from every camp, had found a reason to be out and watching, and when Lester opened his mouth in greeting, she said, “Do not greet me, Uncle.”

  He spread his arms, shook out his black-and-white cloak, and stood his ground. “I have sponsored these people. They are my guests.”

  She said, “I’ll never give Charlie up, do you understand? Would you waste the Council’s time trying to change the length of the day, or the angle of the sun? Return to your easy summer home and forget him.”

  Huon faced her steadily. “If your baker is a magus of the CUT, he will poison all you love, in time.”

  She leaped from her mount, giving up the advantage of height, and stepped in close. She was smaller than Huon, and the furs hid her body; she might have been soft as an overfed puppy in there.

  Finch doubted she was soft. It took an effort to keep her hand from her own knife. Huon’s hand flickered out, reassuring his party: all is well.

  The trick of seeming fearless; another skill that was hard to capture in a badge.

  Her words carried across the camp. “Charlie has ridden our mean bull, roped a calf, and trained a pony. He’s one of us.”

  “One of you now. What about his past? Guards, loyal to the Queen, died in the attack.”

  To the rear, surrounded by clowns, the subject of this discussion slumped lower in his saddle.

  “Your war dead are nothing to me,” Allie said. “I would not let him go if he’d gutted that baby himself.”

  A hiss and crackling of ice punctuated this, a rattle from the frozen surface of the lake that penetrated the still beating drums. Cawing rose from the trees, then silenced.

  What would it be like, Finch wondered, to love someone that much?

  “Has this Council meeting already started?” Huon said.

  Allie’s eyes narrowed. “You think twelve hours will change my mind?”

  “I will make my petition to your people,” Huon said. “It’s your law, and Montival respects it.”

  She hissed before remounting, then galloped west, leading her troop to a bare patch of ground. Throwing down her hat, she marked the place where they would camp. The rodeo dismounted, their show of threat dissolving into the dull work of building shelters from the weather. Few approached them.

  Finch went back into the wigwam herself, while the encounter was fresh in her mind, drawing Allie’s portrait, the image of her nose to nose with Huon. She drew the traitor, Charles Frayne, attempting to capture his misery.

  He feels the wrong he has done, she thought.

  Huon put his head inside. “Where’s Lester?”

  “I didn’t see him leave,” she said. “What will you do?”

  “Ask the Council for Charlie,” he said.

  “They’ll refuse.”

  “I can hope to get close enough to . . . measure him.”

  To assess whether he was under CUT influence, Huon meant.

  “And if he is?”

  “I don’t know.” A strained edge of a smile. “At worst, send someone next year.”

  “Allie would ask, I think, if we believed another year would change her mind.”

  “Yes, she would. What would you say to that?”

  She pondered. “That a diplomat is patient?”

  “Just so. A lot can change in a year, Finch.”

  She tried to conceive of the Rodeo Princess’ white-hot love for the baker burning down to embers.

  I’ll never feel that much for Bright, she realized. Was it wrong that failing to feel caused a sort of heartbreak, too?

  “In any case,” the Baron said, drawing her back to the question at hand, “there’s worth in knowing these people.”

  The day, for all that it was short, passed slowly. She made an attempt to capture Lester on paper, but he was quicksilver: draw his age, and she lost the vitality. She spent an hour working to sketch the sharpness in his eyes, and came away with mere calculation.

  The sky clouded to a low gray and ice gritted down, filling the grooves in the lake surface, dulling the colors of the flags and totems, dusting the horses into charcoal shadows.

  Near sunset, the drums intensified. There must have been over a hundred of them now, pounding as if to shatter the lake’s icy floor. Raki appeared at the wigwam entrance and said to Huon, “My mother asks, Baron, if you will go with her to the Grand Winter Council of Fort Solitude.”

  Huon looked surprised; Lester hadn’t returned.

  “Just you,” Raki amplified.

  Huon gathered his cloak, took a breath, and headed out, leaving the two of them together.

  “They’ll talk half the night away,” Raki said, as she packed away her sketches.

  Mind and body in agreement: she smoothed a cowhide that had rucked up on the wigwam floor, running a hand over the place beside her. Raki slipped inside the shelter, bringing one last gust of cold air with him.

  He was young and strong, beautiful too, and he wanted only one thing. He would not try to hold her.

  “You miss your tribe?”

  “My pack,” she agreed, kissing his tattooed brow and then sliding her hand into his shirt, where the skin was smooth and warm as the limestone walls of her favorite hot spring.

  * * *

  Well before morning, the drums stopped.

  “They’re done,” Raki said, shifting within the nest they’d made—the dog had come to sleep between them, a belated chaperone. “I’ve got to go help Ma and the other Doubledoubles—we cater the farewell breakfast.”

  “Now?”

  “No, but soon.”

  She shoved the
dog aside, then kept him so long he had to bolt—vanishing into another gust of cold when his people began shouting for him.

  After he went, Finch washed and dressed, listening to the sounds of the camp: purposeful calls, the occasional sound of a hatchet working to break the ice on ropes or other shelters. She packed her belongings. Her touch lingered on the snow snake.

  When the Change came, she would tell her people, the world had become smaller. Now, in peace, it was growing again. So, by necessity, must the Morrowland Pack.

  They had been children, lost in the forest, but wanting changed nothing. There would be need for diplomacy badges, for espionage, for masks.

  She wondered if the Baron, too, had reached a decision.

  Just then he appeared, as promptly as if she’d sought him. “Pack up. We haven’t quite outstayed our welcome, but we’re getting there.”

  “It didn’t go well?”

  “There was never much chance, was there?” he said.

  “Did you get near him?”

  “No.” He didn’t know if Charlie was safe, then, or a danger to the tribes.

  Cries—alarms, from the sentries—brought them outside:

  There was a new party at the entrance to the lakeside camp, a great gathering of horses and riders, shrouded against the weather, and heavily armored.

  The Cree were moving, suddenly, as one. Some of the braves melted into the wood; others stepped up to defend the camp—spearmen ahead, archers behind. The rodeo clowns rode to form a front line. Teens too young to fight drew the children toward the Fortress.

  “My King,” Huon said in obvious surprise.

  He was right: as the curtain of snow parted she saw it was Artos himself. Standing at the head of the party, cloak whipping, he raised the Sword of the Lady.

  Had he followed the Baron? Was that possible? She supposed that, when someone tried to kill your cub . . .

  Could it be he didn’t trust Huon to bring Charlie back?

  A gust threw ice into her eyes. When her vision cleared, she saw the baker.

  He had bolted past his guard of rodeo clowns, and was running toward Artos, hands outstretched, feet kicking as he waded through deep snow.

  “Charlie,” the Rodeo princess, Allie, shouted. She started forward.

  Suddenly Lester was there, catching at her horse’s reins. She raised an arm, as if to strike the old man.

  “You believe in your man or don’t you?” he demanded.

  Bending, she raised Lester up and tossed him away, on his backside, so he fell harmlessly into the snow.

  Finch blinked. Were those feathers, black-and-white ones, falling from the hand that had grabbed him?

  By now the baker, Charlie, was almost to Artos. As he ran he was stooping, stumbling, showing his neck. He still had his hands out.

  One of the Baron’s men had an arrow drawn. “He rushes the King,” he murmured. “We’d be justified.”

  “If the King felt threatened by such as him, we’d have greater worries in Montival than a runaway maker of croissants,” Huon replied. “Hold.”

  Artos and his men waited, untroubled. The cook clearly wanted to touch the Sword.

  He wanted the truth known.

  Flesh met blade; the flat of Chuckwagon Charlie’s bare palms slapped down on the metal with an audible thump, like fish on a grill, as he knelt. He said something, his voice low. Begging forgiveness? The words were shredded by the wind, but they carried the flavor of a sob.

  “Come.” Huon began striding across the ice to join his King.

  Now Charlie was wriggling, strangely, writhing and jerking as if he was caught in a dog’s teeth. Guilty after all?

  Instead of screaming, or attacking Artos as a magus of the CUT would, he yelled. “Goddammit, Magpie!”

  His hands appear to be stuck to the sword.

  Jerking, undignified, Charlie put his boot on the tip of the Lady’s blade. He gave a mighty yank, and went toppling into the drift, taking half the sword blade and Artos’ arm with him.

  The party from Montival gasped.

  It was a fake, a colored statue. It wasn’t the High King at all.

  Allie ran to her baker’s side, striking the remnant blade with her tomahawk. The King’s false arm broke into shards. Beneath the ice, Charlie’s hands were frozen to a foot-long length of old steel pole.

  She whirled, facing the Baron.

  “He reached for your truth-stick!” she said. “He put himself freely to the test.”

  A false test, Finch thought. “He might have known.”

  “Did any of us?” She waved a hand, indicating the assembled throngs and their drawn weapons. “Did you doubt this was your precious king?”

  Charlie didn’t say anything in his own defense. He wrenched himself free of the pole, and dusted snow off his leather pants with the backs of his ice-burned hands.

  Up close, the illusion didn’t hold. The horses, Finch saw, were mounts borrowed from all around the camp. The host of Montival soldiers was nothing more than snowmen, already slumping and sliding off the saddles.

  Charlie said, “I’ll go south with them, Allie. Reconcile myself with Artos.”

  “They might execute you.”

  “Right or wrong, I let those soldiers into Todenangst.”

  “It won’t be necessary,” Baron said.

  The hubbub quieted.

  “Charles Frayne,” Huon said, “as vassal to King Artos and his voice in this matter, I release you from the burden of the crime. You were compelled; you bear no responsibility.”

  The baker staggered against the horse. “I . . . I should—”

  The princess steadied him. Then she reached out, taking the Baron’s hand and shaking it. Walking past him, she crossed the drift to lift Lester out of the snow.

  “It’s like a winter miracle, ain’t it?”

  “Shut your chatter, Magpie,” she said, but there was no heat in it now.

  He shook his cloak, and for a moment there was a creak in his movements: he seemed old, achy, and tired, worthy of every line on his ancient face. Then his eyes gleamed, like those of his totems, bright as hungry birds.

  “Well! Allie! You oughta take your new pal here to meet those Wheat Pool bastards. They hate my guts, Huon, or I’da done yesterday. And there’s a helluva dance at the end of this thing, if you change your mind about going early.”

  The Baron looked to the princess.

  “You shouldn’t miss the Doubledouble breakfast,” she said, leading him off into the crowd even as it dispersed.

  Finch stayed where she was, searching the trampled ground for black-and-white feathers.

  Lester interrupted her search. “Guess you know your business,” he said, tapping the satchel where the book of sketches was nestled. “Good portrait.”

  “I’d—” She nudged a piece of ice, the false king’s illusory crown, with her toe. “I would like to be worthy of this badge.”

  “Sculpture, you mean, or trickery?”

  “I wish to learn,” she said. “I am the Eyes of the Morrowlanders and your skills would benefit my people.”

  “Come back next winter,” he said, “if your boss agrees. In the meantime, our friend Charlie makes an incredible crab-apple turnover. Can you smell it?”

  She turned into the wind and it was there: fruit, an unknown spice, fresh flour, and a hint of meat. “Is that real, or is it merely that you suggested it?”

  “Should a Scout be so philosophical, little bird?” Lester asked, leaning on her arm for a moment before springing lightly atop a shelf of ice and, from there, to a felled tree trunk. “Seems a little impractical for such hands-on folk.”

  “I’m beginning to think ‘should’ is a useless word,” she said, hopping up after him, two bird-named people of the forest, balancing on a downed spruce.

 
“Don’t knock ‘should.’ She’s a tyrant, but she’s got her uses. Don’t ever trump what is, though.”

  “Says the illusionist,” Finch said, and she raised her nose to the freezing air and the cooking crab apple wafting on it, and spread her arms like wings before jumping down to the ice and sliding, twirling like a child, laughing as she cut through the eye-opening bite of the northern wind.

  Tight Spot

  by Kier Salmon

  Kier Salmon

  I’m Kier Salmon, jack of many trades, master at a few. A list of many of the things I’ve done includes sales clerk, teacher, secretary, executive assistant, programmer, mental health worker, interpreter, copy editor, and first reader.

  I have been honing and working on my writing skills in the midst of doing other things like earning a living, being a good witch and community member, and raising my adopted daughter.

  My first story, written when I was fifteen, was in Spanish, because I was living in Mexico—I was there between my ninth and twenty-seventh years. I am still fully bilingual.

  My first commercial publishing was in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress VI and under my previous last name of Neustaedter. Then things like real life got in the way and I dropped the idea of writing professionally and focused on earning a living. I’m fairly sure that was the wrong decision. Since 2003 (Beltane) I’ve been working as S. M. Stirling’s first reader, and I’ve been editing and running his fan-fiction Web site since 2005.

  A number of other stories are yammering to be told and between his blunt pointers and the work I do telling people “No, no, no! You can’t do that!” I have seen my skill level rise. I’m pleased to present a post-Change story in this anthology.

  “You’re such a fool!”

  Colin laughed and juggled the rocks higher and higher, dancing and turning on the narrow path, his great kilt folds swirling around his knobby knees, his dark blond ponytail jouncing on his shoulder blades. One by one he slapped the rocks out of sequence, each one flying over the steep drop-off to the north. He caught the last one neatly and began to toss it, up and up and up, snatching it out of the air as it plummeted down and tossing it again.