“Cut it.”
She split the deck into two.
“Now choose which half is your future, Stavia.”
Still angrily, she tapped the left-hand stack. Tonia picked it up, turning it in her hands.
“How old were you when your trouble began?”
“What trouble?!” Stavia demanded, now really angry.
“Oh shhh,” urged Septemius. “Let us have no hypocrisy. You are in some difficulty, Stavia, or you would not be asking our help. How old were you when it began?”
“Ten,” she said sulkily. “I was ten.”
Tonia counted cards onto the bench, turning the tenth one faceup. A black-cloaked woman spread her cape across the chill stars on a field of snow. “The Winter Queen,” she said. “Lady of Darkness. Bringer of cold. Nothing will grow begun under this sign, Stavia. How old were you when he sent you away?”
“How did you know he sent me away?”
“We know things. How old?”
“Thirteen.”
Tonia counted three more cards, turning the third one faceup. A man in motley leaned against a tree, his head turned to one side. On the back of his head, he wore a mask so that a face looked in each direction. One side of the tree was alight with blossoms. On the other, snow covered the branches. “The Spring Magician,” she said. “The two-faced one. Who says yes and means no, or t’other way round. How old are you now, Stavia?”
“Twenty-two.”
Nine more cards. And the one turned faceup was of a warrior standing over his recumbent foe, leaning on the sword that had killed him. “The Autumn Warrior,” Kostia said. “Death, Stavia. Not for you, though. For someone else.”
“What are you telling me?” she demanded.
It was Septemius who answered. “This journey will not profit you, Stavia. It will be full of lies or misdirection. And it may be full of death, as well.”
“But not mine?”
“Not necessarily. Someone’s.”
“You’re refusing to do me the favor I’ve asked?”
He shook his head, sighing. “No. Why should I? What business is it of mine? Are we family that I should thrust unwanted advice upon you? Are we friends? I am only an itinerant performer, an oldish sort of man, with an ancient father and two weird nieces, four donkeys, and five dancing dogs. If I am reluctant, it is only out of memory of my sister. She, also, heard the blandishments of a warrior….”
“She went with him,” said Kostia.
“She got pregnant with us,” said Tonia.
“He was typical of his class. He wanted sons. And then, when he saw we were girls, he left her,” said Kostia.
“And she died,” said Septemius. “I always thought it was from a broken heart, though the midwife said not.”
“Unlikely,” Stavia commented, dryly. “Broken hearts are more common in romances than in life.” She had told herself this for several years and had not yet had any evidence to the contrary.
“And yet you are listening to the blandishments of a warrior….”
“Not exactly,” she said, trying for the hundredth time to explain herself to herself. “And not blandishments. I made someone unhappy, without meaning to. Perhaps I tried to buy his affection by doing something I knew was wrong. Even if I was not wholly responsible for his un-happiness, I still contributed to his misery. It’s my responsibility. I must do whatever I can to set it right. Perhaps to give him something else in place of what I cannot give him. Even though it may cost me a great deal.”
Septemius said nothing more, although he shook his head at intervals all through the evening and spent the night turning restlessly upon his bed.
STAVIA SLEPT SOUNDLY, though not so soundly she did not hear her door open in the night and the voice that spoke her name.
“What is it?” she asked him, not yet quite awake.
“A dream I had,” Corrig said, sounding disturbed. “A dream I had, Stavia.”
“Is it part of normal servitor’s behavior, Corrig, to walk about the house involving the women of it in his dreams?”
“It was about you. No, it was partly about you.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t do it. Whatever it is you plan, don’t do it. There’s trouble there. Danger and pain. I’ve seen it.”
“You sound like Kostia and Tonia, Corrig! Do you see the Winter Queen in my future? Or the Spring Magician or the Autumn Warrior?”
“I see pain.”
“Again, I ask, is this normal servitor behavior?” She was awake enough now to be slightly angry, though she was more interested than annoyed.
“It is… it is servitor behavior to see things, Stavia. I have seen, and I’ve told you. Don’t do it.” He turned and left the room.
She lay back on her pillow, thinking she might have dreamed the exchange. She didn’t believe him, any more than she had believed the twins. Perhaps it was better not to believe.
“Perhaps it’s better not, if all you see is blood and splintered bone,” she quoted to herself, her mind running on among the lines of the old play.
How strange of him to have come to her in that way. Evidently he shared Joshua’s strange gift. “It is servitor behavior to see things.” To see what things, in what way? Was he claiming some extrasensory ability? Clairvoyance, perhaps?
She snorted. It was a subject for fairy tales. Still, he had sounded very sure.
Suddenly she remembered the trip made years ago with Morgot and Joshua. Joshua, too, had been very sure. Afterward, Stavia had wondered who he was, what he was.
Now she wondered about Corrig, again taking a line from the play to ask herself, “But if they do not hear him when he speaks… then who is he?”
FROM THE DEEP-WELL, WHICH WAS AT THE BEND OFthe valley, Thirdwife Susannah Brome could look both south, to the slope where Elder Jepson had established his family manor, and northeast, to the grassy hill where Elder Brome’s wife-houses surrounded the Father-house in a similar clutter of sun-faded wood. Susannah’s own house was there, a small, peak-roofed cottage half hidden behind the hay barn. The dozen or so other elders were established farther south or over the passes in the adjacent valleys of
