them. We ourselves are but a pitiful mirror of their image. We bring the winds that spread the grain pollen, we shepherd the rain clouds away from the ripe harvest standing in the field, we bring the wet winds in the drought years. Why? Because we are the Windsingers, and it is given to us to bring the weather that will make the earth fruitful for the tillers of the fields and the keepers of the flocks. Because of our great wisdom and goodness and fondness, we watch over the little folk. And because without our percentages extracted from them, our halls would be dreary places indeed. Why wear coarse cotton when the wind moves more sweetly against blue silk?' Rebeke caressed the loose folds of her robe.
'What will you do?' whispered Cerie.
'Do?' Rebeke gave a short bark of laughter. 'Nothing. Who can rebalance the worlds? It is too late to do anything. I will run away and live as a peasant in a little hut in the woods, with anemones under my window, and a wizard to warm my bed.' Rebeke's blue and white eyes had gone fey and wild. Cerie shrank from her strange words. 'That would be at least as useful as anything else I can do. Yoleth has unleashed it. All we can do is attempt to stand before a wind not of our singing. I shall do my best to be a guardian.' Rebeke's hand swished closed the curtain of the alcove.
'I fear I have come a long way, in what some would say was an act of treason, for very little good.' Cerie put her lightly scaled hands to her face and rubbed at where her temples had been.
'No journey that ends in the finding of a friend is without good.' Sanity and control had returned to Rebeke's voice. She came to Cerie and touched her cheek with a hand that asked forgiveness for her wild words. 'For myself, I shall be glad to know that I do not stand before the blast of the Gatherers alone. That is a comfort to me.'
'To me also. And there are others: Dorin and Kadra at least. The High Council guesses that you have our sympathies, and so they were elaborately careful to summon us late when you requested a Council hearing. They know what we feel; that while the Windsingers function best under a single authority, the High Council that exists now is not the only possible answer. Others might lean to us. Yoleth rules the hands of most of the Council, but she has no one's heart - unless, perhaps, Shiela's, if she has one.'
'It is good to know of your support.' Rebeke had calmed. She found her stool and perched on it to think. 'I lied to you, a moment ago. It is easier to say, I will do nothing, than to admit I do not know what I can do. But act I must. There are sources I can question to find out if there is a way to seal a Gate and hide this unbalancing of the worlds. Perhaps together we can forestall the storm of the Gatherers. Jojorum, you say? Yoleth would put her Gate in a pit of filth like that. I will go there, and gather knowledge of this Gate if nothing else.'
'There is yet the second thing,' Cerie began hesitantly. 'It cannot be worse, so tell me of it,' Rebeke said with a shade of humor.
'Better or worse, it made no sense to me, but it was clearly acknowledged between Shiela and Yoleth. Yoleth, at least, insisted on it when they spoke, and Shiela accepted her thoughts as true. She referred to Ki as a renegade Windsinger.'
Silence rose cold around them, drenching them.
Rebeke spoke at last with an effort. 'Those words make no sense together. And Ki is no Windsinger. You must have somehow taken separate thoughts out of context.'
'Not three times,' Cerie insisted, but quietly. 'It was quite plain that this is the root of Yoleth's hatred for her. The Romni song was a blind. She speaks of Ki as a dangerous traitor.'
'Impossible.'
'As impossible as rupturing the Gates between the worlds, or listening on another speaking egg.'
Rebeke's face rippled with conflicting emotions, anger the strongest. Then she smoothed it blank again. 'I will think no more on that, nor speak of it, until I have gathered facts. There is one, I think, who will know what basis there is for Yoleth's words. One who can be persuaded to talk to me.'
Cerie smiled at her. 'I marvel at you. You make me feel I can safely lay it all in your lap, and go back to sing my winds. You have gone far beyond us. What is it like, Rebeke? To be as close as you are to being fully a Windsinger.'
Rebeke chuckled in spite of herself. 'Ask a candle what it feels like to be nearly a bonfire. We can never attain it, Cerie. The more I grow, the more I know that is true. Yet what we will become will be enough for us; indeed, it will be all we are capable of holding. There is so much they left us, when they left us the knowledge of how to change. They knew they were dying, Cerie, vanishing forever. The Windsingers left us a legacy that is both a gift and a responsibility. We have fallen from their standards; our physical faults are the least of it. You will learn things beyond my words to tell you. They left messages for us written on the winds themselves. Each breeze has a name, given by them, which it comes most swiftly to. It will be as if I had called you Windsinger all my life and only today came to know you as Cerie. They knew every breeze as an individual.' Rebeke sighed, her own breath a small gust of wind. 'We have lost so much along the way. Thrown knowledge aside because we were more concerned about what percentage of crops we could ask from a given region, and too busy arguing over whether to threaten or punish when the farmers rebelled. We learned how to count our coins, and forgot how to read the winds.'
'Will we ever regain what we have lost?' Cerie asked in a small voice.
Rebeke smiled wearily. 'We may. If Yoleth and Shiela let us survive that long. We may.'
SEVEN
Ki's eyes had reopened of their own volition. She lay staring up into the dark and finally realized she was awake. She rolled her head to one side to stare at her companion. Hollyika slept peacefully on her side, slightly curled. The outlines of her features were shadowed by night and softened by a light overlay of downy fur. Ki examined her face with some curiosity. The dim but omnipresent light of this land divided her face into halves, one silvered and exposed, the other hidden by shadows. The exposed eye was as large as a horse's. A horizontal row of stubby lashes across the center of the eye marked the juncture of the two lids that hooded it. Her nose began, not between her eyes, but slightly lower than their inner corners. It was broader than a Human's nose, with the nostrils more clearly defined and useful. Even as she slept, they flared softly with each breath to bring her the olfactory news of the night air. Her short upper lip was split and rounded like a cat's. The mouth beneath it was extremely generous, the corners reaching nearly to her jaw hinges. Only the front portion of it was used for speaking. Ki estimated that if she opened her mouth to its widest capacity, she could easily engulf a rabbit's head. Ki gave an uneasy squirm as she recalled rumors that this was precisely how the Brurjans dispatched their meat.
Little hands were curled peacefully beneath the impressive jaw. For all Hollyika's height, her hands were no larger than Ki's. Her fingers were thicker, lightly furred on their backs with thick black nails that curved slightly over the tips. The plumpness of her fingers and their tininess in relation to the rest of her made her hands look soft and helpless. Ki would wager it was an illusion.
She looked again to her sleeping face, but Hollyika's eyelids had parted in the centre, to reveal a horizontal slit of eye. She focused on Ki and opened her eyelids fully. Then she sat up slowly, stretching and rolling her muscled shoulders. When she yawned wide, Ki stared in helpless fascination at the double rows of pointed teeth within that impressive maw. Hollyika surged up to her feet in one effortless movement.
'It's time to go,' she said softly. 'I can feel that it's time to move on again. Can't you?'
Ki nodded. She did feel it, an urging to rise and once more seek those distant glimmers that beckoned so temptingly. Peace was waiting for her at the end of this road; the very thought made Ki hungry for it. Rising she tossed her blanket into the back of the wagon. Hollyika dropped hers in as well, but when Ki turned to lift the team's harness, Hollyika put a restraining hand on her arm. 'How can you practice beast slavery in this place?' she asked accusingly.
Ki recoiled a little from her touch, but Hollyika remained as she was. She was not menacing or angry, Ki decided; only rebuking. 'All my life I have driven a wagon. It is what I am, a Romni teamster.'
Hollyika shook her head. 'That is as foolish as if I said that I have always been a warrior and a rider of horses. That is only true of my life on the other side of the Gate. These lands opened my eyes. Odd to think that in the darkness I finally saw. I must war no more, nor put a beast to my tasks. Nor must I partake of meat.'
