Snow spun lazily. I ventured out the compound gate and stood against a wall, staring toward the structure at the center of the village, with its thatched roof and a railing built around under the eaves. Smoke eked from stone chimneys and heat radiated from the open doorways. Inside flashed movement; drums beat, accompanied by the stamp of feet and calls of encouragement. Drums have their own magic. My toes twitched, and my feet shifted as my shoulders hitched a little back and forth.
'Catherine?' Kayleigh stood at the compound gate, looking around without seeing me where I stood not ten paces from her.
I said nothing, and when she walked away, I hurried the other way. It was easy enough to remain unseen when it seemed the entire village had crammed into the festival house. Night is a friend to cats on the prowl. At the inner gate, I became air and walked right past the two young guardsmen; not so difficult in any case because they were diverted by the sounds of the celebration they were missing.
'Did you hear Vai? Says he'll still outlast us tonight.'
'You'd think if them at the House treat him so poorly he'd have been humbled, but he's the same as he ever was.'
They laughed as I passed out of range. Three older men stood vigil at the gate of the outer stockade. Outside the stockade, a bonfire blew heat into the cold night. In the farthest aura of its light, just beyond visual range, pairs of eyes glimmered and four-legged shapes moved, prowling the perimeter. Waiting.
I stopped short. I took in a few breaths to steady my pulse as the sound of drums rolled like a shield around the village. Then I turned around and crept back past the inner gate, against the wall. A burst of laughter surprised me. Andevai strode among his age-mates up to the inner gate to fetch their friends; several older men had come to take their place at guard. The young men jostled and talked in a rapid release of insults and jokes as they coursed away back toward the celebration. Andevai walked as easily among them as he had, I now realized, moved uneasily within the House. He looked much less affected in the homespun clothing worn by country folk. He and his friends looked like the kind of young men a young woman might happily flirt
with. Laughing, they pushed into the festival house while I remained alone in the dark.
Everyone had either gone into the festival house or bided behind closed doors in their compounds. They had a place to be, while I…
I became aware of a shadowy figure spinning and hopping into the open ground, its movements woven in with the rhythm of the drums. I held still, willing myself to become the stockade behind me, nothing more than poles of wood tied tightly together. Nothing to see. Nothing to take notice of. I could see in the dark that it was no man who approached me. It was a tall creature with horns and feathers and a mantle shimmering over its massive form. It spun and spun, the mantle flaring around it like sparks spinning in a vortex of wind. But there was no wind. And the mantle was not woven of cloth; it was woven out of threads of magic. The air had become deadened, and my ears grew as full as if stuffed with cotton until I could not hear the drums except as vibrations trembling up through the soles of my feet.
Although I had drawn a cawl of concealment over me, the creature spun closer and closer until it became clear it knew I was there. That it saw me. That it meant to investigate me as a guard investigates a suspicious noise and a movement where there ought to be stillness.
Like a cornered rat, I tensed with a hand on the hilt of my sword, ready to draw and fight my way free.
Yet I saw as with fractured vision: The creature was not a single entity but three. It was a mask, a big puppet built over a simple framework of wood. I could see right through the feathers and fabric and frame to the inside. A man, an ordinary man, carried this armature across his shoulders. His skin was painted with clay, thick strokes forming symbols I did not recognize. The clay glimmered as if smoldering with heal. As he spun, his
gaze slid right over me once, a second time, and yet again, but he did not see me.
But the third entity saw me. Horned and feathered, it loomed above me like a twirling giant limned with silken threads of white fire, its trailing cloak like luminescent^mist. It had eyes darker than the night and infinitely deep, and with these eyes it stared into my heart, and I knew it could devour me and that it would devour me if it decided I was a danger to the village on a night when perilous spirits might try to invade.
Some throat-catching instinct made me release the hilt of my sword.
Do spirits blink?
It spun away into the night, vanishing down one of the narrow streets and leaving me untouched.
My breath came in painful gulps. Shuddering, I chafed my gloved hands, but that did not warm them. I clawed at my frantic, muddled, matted thoughts as I fought to find a calm thread of reason: It had turned away. It had chosen not to harm me. It had recognized I held no animus toward Haranwy Village.
'There you are, Catherine!'
Perhaps I shrieked.
Kayleigh laughed as if I had made a joke, and rested a hand on my arm in a companionable, sisterly way. 'Grandmother sent me. Did you get lost?'
Maybe the village's guardian spirit had let me go, but forgetting that Andevai had been commanded to kill me would be fatal.
'I need to… relieve myself. There is perhaps a… uh… dung-house?'
Kayleigh snickered. 'Your pardon. That's not the word we use. We have a place, but it will be cold this time of year. If you don't mind, my mother has a pot in her house you can use.'
She led me again into the compound of Andevai's family and to a door no larger than the others. Inside, past a small, square entryway, stood a different room entirely. Hung with lace curtains and furnished with a circulating stove built into the hearth, a fine four-poster bed, a small elegant table supporting a wicker sewing basket, and a beautifully carved wardrobe that shone with the luster of rosewood, it might have passed for a city merchant's bedroom. The main room boasted a plank floor instead of the packed dirt of the entryway. These accoutrements looked so out of place that I forgot my manners and stared until Kay-leigh reminded me to take off my boots and step inside.
Two girls slept curled up on a cot. In the bed lay a woman whose face was so wasted and sunken, her complexion such an ashy, unhealthy gray, that it was impossible to discern any relationship. Heat soaked me. I took off my cloak and draped it over my arm, then wiped my brow.
'Here,' whispered Kayleigh, drawing me aside and behind a screen.
She offered me a covered chamber pot and left me alone behind the screen with the pot, a bench, and a smaller wardrobe with one of its sliding doors open. A man's expensive and fashionable dash jacket had been folded on a shelf; it was the jacket Andevai had been wearing earlier. A glimmer teased my eye, and I pushed aside a pair of polished boots to see a sheathed sword, tall and slim like my own, propped in the wardrobe's corner. I tasted the metal's sharp flavor in the stifling air. Andevai carried cold steel, the better to kill me with.
But not tonight. Tonight he would laugh and dance with his companions. Fury scalded me. But I did actually badly have to use the chamber pot. I did my business, and afterward Kayleigh offered me warm water to wash and a comb to tidy my hair.
'I've never seen hair like yours,' she said, untwisting a black strand from the comb and pulling a finger down its length. She touched her head, her hair confined beneath a tightly wrapped
scarf. 'It's so thick and straight, and as black as night. Your eyes, too, they're such a beautiful color, like amber.'
I did not know what to say, so I busied myself braiding my hair. 'You have so many fine things. Were these wardrobes made in the village?'
She regarded the larger one with pride. 'The rosewood came all the way from Havery. Andevai had it brought in for Mama. He stints on nothing for her.' She bit her lip as her gaze flashed to the sword I held close.
'Is there something else you want to say?' I asked, more brusquely than I intended.
'There's nothing else.'
I wasn't sure I could enter a conversation with a girl whose brother had been ordered to kill me and whose grandmother and uncle had convinced the village elders to spare my life, at least until I left their village.
'Do you want to sleep?' she asked. 'No one will come in here until dawn.'
'No,' I murmured, thinking of the guardian's depthless eyes, and yet as the word emerged, a yawn cracked my jaw. 'But maybe I could just sit down one moment.'
Weariness chose for me. I slept.
I woke with the taste of smoke on my tongue and the whisper of flames dying within the closed stove.
