no less than theirs, and I must agree it
The next day, however, the gusting came again, and the sky was a warmer blue, the sun golden, and the air warm enough I shed my scarf. By noon, I rode without my cloak. By dusk, my mare’s hooves left deep prints in which water puddled, and when I halted at a shepherd’s cottage, I must walk her awhile to cool her. That night I threw off my blanket.
As I readied for departure the shepherd, whose name was Tarys, gave me warning.
“You ride for Tarvyn, no?” he said, and when I confirmed this: “Then best ride careful, Daviot. ’Tween here and the keep, the way’s all valleys and ravines, and does spring come on us swift as this God-cursed winter, there’ll be flooding with the melt.”
He stabbed a thumb skyward in emphasis. I looked up and saw a spring sky; the air was balmy, and I suspected he might well be correct. I thanked him, and he ducked his white head, declaring that he’d not see a Storyman drowned. I mounted my mare and turned her east, thinking that he gave me sound advice: I came to accept the winter fled.
Clear of the high country, the slopes were forested, and all that day water dripped relentlessly from the branches overhead, and the snow beneath my mare’s hooves grew soft, rivulets forming to trickle downslope. For all I sweated under it, I donned my cloak. I studied the valley bottoms and ravines carefully and saw the streams there swollen, no longer iced, but running swifter and gray with snowmelt. In the afternoon, as I crossed a valley, I heard a rumbling from the far slope and saw a great mass of snow break loose, trees and boulders tossing in its passage, leaving behind a scar of muddy brown earth. I began to worry again.
I found no shelter that night, for I was forced to detour from my route by three more avalanches. I made camp atop a ridge spread with looming cedars that no longer dripped, which in itself was disturbing, for they should not have dried so soon. Neither should the ground there have been visible yet. It was as though the seasons accelerated, winter fleeing before onrushing spring in a matter of days. I wondered what manner of summer might follow.
Whatever it should be, I did not think I should need wait long to find out. Day by steady day, the temperature rose. I could no longer follow my chosen path, for I must all the time ride around landslips or find some way over streams become rivers, rivers swollen to torrents. Valleys lay waterlogged, bridges were washed away, and fords become impassable. Pastureland was rendered quagmire, swaths cut through timber. I saw animals-sheep and cattle and horses, deer and wild pigs, twice bears-washed drowned and bloated past me. Sometimes I saw human bodies, tumbled by so swift, I could not tell whether they were Truemen or Changed. When I found the road, it was awash with mud and ofttimes blocked by the detritus of landslides. Farms and villages stood wet and miserable, and everywhere folk told sad tales of ruined planting, of fields lost to the excessive melt, of deaths by drowning or landslide. They forecast a poor harvest, if any harvest at all might be reaped. And all the while the heat increased, until all the snow was gone and it seemed Kellambek was become a land of swamps and lakes. It seethed under the sun, vapors rising thick as mist from ground that dried as rapidly as it had flooded. Save our world was somehow drawn closer into the sun’s orbit, there could no longer be any doubt that frightening magic was brought against us.
By the time I reached Tarvyn, the floods were gone and the earth baked as if midsummer were come. Rivers that had run in spate were now thin streams, streams were dry gutters. Trees that had been denied the chance to bud stood withered, what grass had not been washed away lay sere. There were fires in the hills and dread throughout the land.
Tarvyn Keep stood beside the sea, where the southern ocean met the Fend. The sun sparkled off slow waves and the still air was heavy with the odor of rotting seaweed. Boats stood along the beach with tar oozing melted from their caulking, their crews lounging idle, paying me only the slightest attention, as if the heat leached out their curiosity. I rode in shirt-sleeves, a cloth wound around my forehead to hold off the sweat that would otherwise blind me. My gray mare had long since lost her springtime friskiness and walked sullen, her head low, panting in the excessive heat. She seemed not even to have the vitality of her usual ill temper. Nor was I in much better fettle. This heat-and belief in its origin-drained hope as surely as it leached energy. I thought it must be very hard to fight in such weather.
We plodded slowly to the keep’s entrance, and I announced myself to gatemen whose look reminded me of boiled lobsters. They waved me by as if that effort cost them dear. As I crossed the yard, I saw folk all languid in the heat, stripped to decency’s minimum of clothing. There was no breeze, for all the sea was but a stone’s throw distant, and the aeldor’s banners hung limp from the tower. I dismounted, shirt and breeks clinging wet to my body, and walked my horse into the stable. It was thankfully a little cooler there, but not much, and the Changed ostlers who came to offer help plodded like their equine forebears. I gave them the warning that had become my custom and saw to the mare myself. She made no protest as I removed her tack and rubbed her down, not even her habitual attempt to bite me. I thought I had rather suffer her temper than see her thus.
I gave her oats and water and went to find Madrys, whose holding this was.
He was in the hall, a thin young man whose red hair was plastered slick to his skull. He rose to greet me, and when I made my excuses for this late arrival, he waved a weary hand and told me he knew of the road’s difficulties. He introduced me to his wife, Rynne, whose pale yellow gown was patched dark at breast and armpits. She held a baby that mewled, his tiny face bright red; for him and all the children, I felt most sorry. There was an air of lassitude in this hall; only the commur-magus Tyrral seeming unaffected by the heat. I was invited to take ale chilled in the well and sat sipping as Changed servants fanned us. Their efforts seemed only to stir the overheated air that had succeeded in pervading even the cool stone of the keep.
I gave brief report of my journey from Amsbry and had back the news that Tarvyn had not long since seen two of the Sky Lords’ little craft, as if they came to check their occult handiwork. Madrys appeared resigned or drained of optimism, though he assured me his warband stood ready to fight. Tyrral was more sanguine. Indeed, he treated his aeldor brusquely, as if the younger man’s apathetic mood irritated him. As soon as was polite, I asked if I might bathe and change-and was shocked to be told fresh water was in short supply. I had thought the snowmelt must fill the aquifers.
I remained only a few days in Tarvyn. I gave them my best stories, tales of glorious victories and great battles, but received only a lackluster response. For all Tyrral put on a brave face, there was a feeling of despair about the keep, as if aeldor and warband had already given up. It saddened me, but also it threatened to affect my own spirits.
Also, I was now close enough to Whitefish village I thought of reunions, of seeing again my kinfolk and childhood friends, and that spurred me to impatience. So, pleading an urgency imposed by my delayed arrival, I made my excuses soon as was decent and left that sad keep behind me.
Within seven days I saw the boundary stones that marked the limit of Madrys’s holding and the commencement of Cambar land. Within seven more I came home.
It is a strange experience to go home after years away in a wider world. I had left Whitefish village an innocent, eager to experience the marvels of Durbrecht and all that lay beyond. Even then, I had had that double- edged gift of memory, and it fixed my home in my mind as it had been and was that day I departed. The village and its folk had been all my world, and I could yet conjure clear those impressions of my youth, so that-for all I knew I had changed-still I perceived my home immutable, preserved thus in my mind as the lapidaries set insects or flowers in glass. But places and people, both, shrink as we grow. Things change, and yesterday is a country of the memory that is no longer quite what you recall; even for a Mnemonikos.
I came north up the inland road, turning to the coast along the track that crested the pine-clad cliffs of my infancy to run down to Whitefish village. The meadowland there was parched, the grass sere, the soil cracked as an ancient face. The trees stood desiccated, needles fallen too soon crackling under my gray mare’s hooves. I halted atop the bluff, suddenly nervous. Below me stood a huddle of rude cottages such as should barely fill one of Durbrecht’s plazas. Along the beach stood fishing boats, beyond them the Fend, brilliant under the remorseless sun. There was no breeze-I had not felt a breeze in days-and the village baked. It seemed to me a poor, rough place, and I felt ashamed to think it so: I heeled my mare and took her down the slope.
I felt an odd admixture of anticipated pleasure and wariness as I reined in outside my parents’ cottage (I
