The Windsingers Series: The Complete 4-Book Collection

Ki read the stars that sprinkled the night sky. They had fallen far from where Ki had begun her climb, and farther still from where Ki had left her wagon and team concealed. She took her bearings, brushed hair and dried blood from her eyes, and limped off through the forest.

Gray daylight had begun to stain the sky and return color to the leaves when Ki heard the welcoming snorts of her team. They had scented her. She wanted to call out to them, but her throat was too dry. She limped toward the sounds.

The wagon stood in a small clearing. The unhobbled team raised their heads to gaze at her curiously. Sigurd snorted suspiciously at the smell of Harpy and moved beyond the range of Ki’s touch. Docile Sigmund watched her limping approach calmly. Ki stumbled past him, watching him shy suddenly as he caught the smell of blood on her. She went to the water cask strapped to the side of her wagon. She let the spigot of the cask run wastefully as she wet her hands, her face, and head, then drank in greedy gasps. The coolness of the water awoke her shoulder, and it began to beat in throbs of hot red. Ki forced herself to reach up and turn the spigot off. She sat limply in the muddy place it had made beside the wagon.

Her shoulder had begun to swell; her jerkin was tight against it. She would have to find help while she was still capable. She climbed painfully up the tall yellow wheel of the wagon onto the plank seat. Behind the seat rose the small enclosed cuddy that made up the wagon’s living quarters. She tugged loose a little wooden peg from its leather loop and slid the small door open. She clambered in, careful not to let her shoulder brush against the narrow door frame. She could not muster the energy to hop up onto the high sleeping platform. The folded blankets stacked on the straw-stuffed mattress beckoned to her, but she could not rest yet. The walls of the cramped cuddy were dominated by cupboards and shelves, hooks and pegs. Ki tugged open a drawer and drew out the ragged remains of an old skirt. With her good hand and her teeth she ripped loose a piece and fastened a support for her arm. Then she snagged a sausage from a string that swung from a hook on the low ceiling. Her teeth sank into the tough, spicy meat. Her stomach awoke, growling, to remind her that a full day and night had passed since last she ate. Her jaws and bruised face ached as she chewed. She remembered again the Harpy’s claws down the side of her face. Ki swallowed, and took another bite.

A small window in the cuddy let in the gray morning light, but Ki did not need the light to see. She knew the details of the wagon by heart. Sven’s extra tunic still dangled from its peg. The painted wooden puppet, strings tangled by Lars’s awkward young fingers, sprawled upon a shelf. A toy horse, only half-emerged from the coarse block of wood, rested on another shelf, Sven’s carving tools beside it. He would never shape legs for it now. Unbidden, Ki’s mind went to Sven by the fire, his large hands working delicately to bring the horse out of the wood. Little Rissa would be crouched beside him, her blond curly head pressing against his side, her small nose almost under the cautiously moving knife blade.

Ki climbed out of the cuddy, grunting as she lowered her body to the ground. She picked up the thick harness in one hand, jangling it lightly. The huge gray horses came obediently, puzzled at her croaking voice, and she moved them into their places with soft pushes and begging commands. She arranged each strap and buckle awkwardly with one hand and her teeth. No one worked the other side of the team; she had to move around it to tighten the straps herself.

She climbed to the seat and gathered up the reins. One foot kicked the brake free. No one scrambled up the wheel to hastily settle beside her. The morning air touched her coldly where a small body might have pressed against her. Ki gave a final weary glance at the sky. Clear and blue. She had freed the sky of wings. She shrugged and shook the reins. Muscles tensed, the grays leaned into the harness. Ki rode alone.

TWO (#ulink_38e624a1-a6e3-5b1e-ba9a-23541471568a)

The wind carried to Ki’s ears the sounds of laughter, a snatch of one of the old songs. She grinned in spite of herself. Her horses pricked up their ears, moved their ponderous hooves a little faster. Ahead, they knew, would be bright firelight, cool water, and fresh green grass. There would be other wagons, children with small lightly patting hands, and other horses freed of their harnesses for the night. Ki marked their sudden freshening and felt rebuked by it. She would not pull Sigurd and Sigmund into a ring of Romni wagons tonight. She did not know when, if ever again, she would rejoin their crowded campsites and noisy convivial evenings. Perhaps never. The ghosts that rode in her wagon seemed to crowd forward, to peer with her through the trees at the flickering camp fires that dotted the area.

Ki neared the turnoff where a narrow wagon trail left the main road to seek out a stump-dotted clearing. There Romni might camp unmolested for a night. The grays slowed, tried to turn. Ki tugged their heads back to her chosen path, tried not to hear the welcoming nickers of the camped horses calling to her team. She heard a rise in the tide of Romni voices by the fires. They would know she had passed. Some would be wondering who it was, and others would be telling in hushed voices. If she kept to her solitary ways, she might become a legend for them. Ki, the lone rider with her wagon full of ghosts. She smiled sourly. Ki, who had chosen to be alone over the customs of her adopted people.

The year had turned twice since Ki made her choice. Children were learning to speak that had been but belly bulges the night she had ridden, swaying, into a bright circle of firelight and wagons …

Big Oscar came at a run to catch her as she sagged off the wagon seat. Rifa took Ki’s light body from his arms and put her on soft skins by a small fire. With a jerk and a twist, Rifa brought Ki’s arm back to painful life; she adjusted the crude sling and gave Ki a hot spicy tea to drink, with herbs of healing steeped into it. Limp on the skins by the fire, Ki watched the big burly Romni men unharness and lead off her team. Children ran to do what they knew was needed: to refill the drained water casks, to bring out onto the grassy sward Ki’s own sleeping-skins and weavings. They let her sleep a full night. She spent the next day watching the large women in their bright flowing skirts and loose blouses, the dark, bird-eyed children in their bits and rags of clothing as they ran and shrieked at play. Among all the peoples of the world, here Ki felt most at home.

There were seven wagons at this encampment, a large group of Romni. The women were large, dark, heavy-breasted creatures. The beauty of their size and strength reminded Ki of their teams – tall, heavy horses with thick falling manes and bobbed tails. The men were thick, age making them burly as old tree stumps. The children played the ageless games of childhood, rolling and tumbling on the moss under the trees. People moved among the wagons, spreading bedding to air on the clean moss, putting flat slabs of dough to rise and bake on hot stones by the fire embers. A young couple entered the clearing from the trees, a brace of fat rabbits swinging from the woman’s belt, the basket of wild plums they had gathered filling the man’s arms. Oscar’s hands were black with the gooey mix he was spreading on a beast’s split hoof. Rifa was ever busy, oiling harness, nursing her latest baby, patching a worn coverlet, but somehow never far from Ki. She brought Ki tea and food before she could think to ask for it, smoothed a cool salve into the ragged gashes on Ki’s face. No questions were asked of her. To the Romni, it was an old story. The man and the children missing, the woman battered and bruised. The Romni were not a people that shared and savored their hurts. They were a folk that lived their lives around the bad times, cauterizing their wounds with silence.

Night fell softly around them, the fires blossoming higher in the darkness. The dark of the trees became soft black walls enclosing an airy room roofed by the star-sprinkled sky. There was a coziness to children curling up on blankets by fires. A peace as palpable as the warm night air pressed down on the gathering. Slowly the adults began to gather at Oscar and Rifa’s fire, drifting over to it after children were settled in sleepy rows on bedding by their own fires. The adults all brought firewood, piling it up on Rifa’s fire until it became a blaze too hot to be enjoyed. Ki sat slightly apart from them all, one of her own sleeping furs slung across her shoulders. Her arm ached with a dull, unceasing pain. She could not blink an eye or move her mouth without the scabs on her face pulling at her skin. But the physical pains were only the shadow of the emptiness inside her and the knowledge that tonight her disjointed life would take another turn for the worse.

They spoke no word to her. She knew the custom they waited for her to follow. They expected her to go to her wagon, to bring out from it everything that had belonged to Sven and the children. The possessions of the dead must not be kept by the mourner. They must be gifted out among friends so that the spirits of the dead could be free of them. Things too personal for Ki to give away she would place on the blaze for the fire to consume. And when the wagon was empty of all save Ki’s own possessions, the women would help her unbind her hair from the knots and weavings that proclaimed her mourning. The time of grief would be over. Little mention of the dead would ever be made again, lest it trouble their spirits in the world they had passed on to.

Ki watched the tall flames of the fire reaching. The tips of the flames seemed to rip free of the fire, to blink into nothingness in the dark above the flames. Ki did not move. The Romni waited.

Rifa it was who took her courage in her hands and approached Ki. ‘It is time, sister,’ she said firmly. ‘You know how it must be done. When Aethan, your father, went on before you, you did not shrink from what you had to do. Come, Ki. It is time. Let the grieving be over.’

‘No.’ Ki breathed the word. Then she rose, to stand beside Rifa, facing the other Romni who stood waiting by the fire. She let the fur drop from her shoulders. The cool of the night prodded her injured shoulder, making it leap to fresh complaints. As she spoke, she felt the drag and pull of the dried cuts on her face.

‘No.’ She said it clearly, loud enough to carry to all ears. ‘I am not yet ready to do this thing, my friends. My grieving is not yet over. I respect your ways. I have made them my own since I was a tiny child, playmate to many of you. But I must respect my heart’s counsel as well. And I am not ready, yet, to bid them farewell. I am not ready.’

The dark eyes stared at her, returning her look steadily. She knew there would be no rebuke, no anger, no raised voices. There was among them only regret for her. They would speak of it quietly among themselves, sad that she insisted on clinging to her grief, on linking her life to the deaths of her family. To Ki they would say nothing. They would speak no words to her, make no sign. She would be as a ghost among them, a person who had set herself apart. They could not have anything more to do with her, lest they and their families should also become contaminated with her longings for things dead. Ki knew the words they would say: ‘With one butt you cannot sit on two horses.’ She must choose between the living and the dead.

Ki watched them disperse from the fire, drifting away like swirls of smoke back to their own small campfires, their sleeping children, and their gaudy wagons. Theirs were the full wagons of the Romni, who live on the road by their wits and their love of the lands. Ki looked at her own wagon. Two thirds of it was empty and flat, left bare to carry cargo or items she would buy in one place to sell in another. She had never surrendered herself to trusting the road to support her. She had never fully given herself over to the Romni way.

‘I am not a Romni.’ She said it aloud to herself, to hear the way the words sounded in her ears.

‘Then what are you?’ Ki’s body jerked in surprise. She had not noticed that Rifa still stood in the shadows beside her, had not drifted off with the others. Ki’s green eyes met Rifa’s. The woman’s broad face was in shadow, only her eyes speaking her feelings to Ki. Ki pondered the question. Her mind ranged over the lists of all the peoples she had ever seen, past all the settlements and towns she had ever trundled through on a wagon. No culture came to her mind, no set of customs to claim as her own. She thought of Sven’s people, tall blond farming folk far to the north. She would have to seek them out soon with the news of his death. Were they her people now, whose customs she should share? Her heart shied away from the prospect. No, she had not taken on Sven’s ways when they came to their agreement. Rather Sven had built a wagon, chosen a team, and taken on her own ways. He had lived like Romni, and now he was dead, and his children with him. But Ki did not mourn him as a Romni woman would mourn her man. Because she was not Romni. The question came back to her. Then what was she?

‘I am Ki,’ she said. The words came out clearly, with a certainty Ki had not known she possessed. Rifa received her words in the darkness. Her black eyes shone brighter for a moment, and then she cast them down.

‘So you are. Return to us when you can, Ki. You will be missed among us.’

Ki had left the campsite early the next day, before morning had even begun to gray the sky. No one had bid her farewell. No one had watched her leave or seemed to hear the creak and rattle of her wagon as it moved off. Now as she moved down this road in darkness, leaving another camp of the Romni farther and farther behind her, she wondered if there had been any there that knew her. With a wry smile, she revised the question. Were there any Romni anywhere that would know her anymore?

The night was too dark to travel further. The team was plodding on listlessly, their hearts not in their pulling. Ki chose a place where the road widened. Off to one side was a trampled area, muddy in the rainy season, no doubt, but dried now into hard ridges. Beyond, the ground fell away to a dried-up marsh of coarse, hummocky grass and Harp tree scrub. There was no fresh water for the team, but Ki had let them pause to drink from a stream earlier in the day and the dew these nights was heavy on the grass. They would manage.

She climbed down from the seat to free them of their harness. She ran a cursory rag over their hides, talking low to them as she did so, rubbing hard where the harness had rested on their sweating bodies. She did not hobble or picket them, but turned them free to get what grass they could. Their huge bodies demanded a tremendous amount of fodder. Ki worried almost constantly about it. She listened to them rip and chew the rough grasses as she searched around the base of the Harp trees for dead wood. The breeze strummed them lightly.

Ki made her small fire in the shelter of the wagon, away from the road. She drew water into a kettle from her water cask and put it on to boil. From the cuddy, she brought brewing herbs for tea, strips of dried meat and shriveled roots, chunks of hard hearth bread, and three withered apples. She poured off some of the hot water into a pot, adding the brewing herbs. To the rest of the water in the kettle she added the dried meat and roots, chopped into chunks. She hunkered down to wait for her tea to brew, her back against the knobby support of one wagon wheel, and bit into one of the withered apples. Each huge horse drifted over, shuffling and nudging, to claim an apple. ‘Spoiled ones,’ Ki chided them, watching the immense muzzles lip the apple from her hand. They chomped them wetly, then returned to their grass. Ki wiped her hands down her trousers and rose to get a mug from her dish chest.

The chest was strapped to the side of the wagon beside the water cask. Sven had decided to mount it there to save himself the trouble of ducking in and out of the cramped cuddy. He had hated to eat inside the closed cuddy, preferring the roadside as a setting for meals. Ki had not cared. She opened the carved lid of the chest. From it she took a single mug, one shallow wooden bowl, and a single wooden spoon. The lid fell over the rest of the dishes.

She drank her dark tea silently, considering her path tomorrow as the stew simmered the meat to tenderness. She did not like what she had gotten into this time. She did not like her cargo, her client, or the prospect of taking the wagon over an unfamiliar trail at a bad time of year. Here summer was failing, but Ki’s trail would take her up the hills to where it was already fall and into the mountains where winter never totally surrendered to the other seasons. She frowned, wishing that she had not by chance encountered Rhesus, that he had offered her less money, wishing even that he had been unwilling to grant her as much time as she wanted. A week’s travel to the south would bring her to gentler Carrier’s Pass. Ki believed that, even with the greater distance involved, it would be the swifter way to go. But Rhesus insisted that such an obvious route would be watched. He wanted her to use the Pass of the Sisters. He had paid her well for his whim. So well that Ki had let her own common sense be bypassed. Tomorrow she would be among the foothills. By evening, she hoped to be on the doorstep of the pass. She sighed as she raised her eyes to the range that loomed ahead of them. It was a dark shadow that blocked out the stars.

She ate the stew rapidly before it could cool in her bowl. Bowl and kettle she wiped clean with bread and devoured that also. She finished her tea and dashed the dregs onto the fire. With a neatness born of long habit, she stowed all her belongings. She walked once around her wagon, checking wheels and gear. The back of the wagon was filled with coarse sacks of salt. A little of the pink stuff leaked from a battered top sack. A brief check of the team and then she climbed up the wagon and into her cuddy. The candle she carried drove the shadows in the cuddy under the bed. She slid the small door closed behind her. The single window faced away from the road, framing a patch of night sky. Ki sat on the floor. Wearily, she tugged off her scratched leather boots. She rubbed her hands over her eyes, scratching the back of her neck under her mourner’s knots. She pushed her finger into an unobtrusive crack in the cuddy wall and coaxed out a small peg. Its catch released, a small concealed door swung open. Ki took out her cargo.

The little leather sack weighed light on her hand. The contents rattled within as she hefted it lovingly. She tugged the throat of the bag open, shook its contents out upon her palm. Bits of fire – three blue, a red, and two large white ones rolled into her hand. These were what Rhesus had paid so dearly for …

‘Too many know of my purchases here!’ Rhesus confided to Ki. His eyes danced over the walls of his small inn room. His shaking hand slopped her wineglass overfull. ‘I know I am watched. I hear them outside my door at night. I push the table against the door, and still I do not sleep. They will cut my throat! They will rob me! What will be thought of me if I return home with no goods to show from my travels and tradings? I should never have bought those cursed jewels! But the price was too good, the gems too fair to turn them down! Never have I possessed such perfect stones – and the prices I can demand for them in Diblun!’

‘Only if you get the stones there first,’ Ki observed. She was not interested in his flutterings. She wished he would talk business or let her go seek a commission elsewhere. But Rhesus had been so pathetically glad to see a familiar face in the Vermintown street.

‘I have devised a plan!’ He smiled proudly and leaned across the small table, lowering his voice to a whisper. ‘From here to Diblun I shall send three swift couriers, youngsters on fast horses, traveling light and armed. And you. But you shall not leave until they have been gone several days, and you will leave only after we have quarreled loudly at dinner below … Ah, you see how my plan goes?’

Ki nodded slowly, her brows gathering over her wary green eyes. ‘And these young riders of yours? Have you warned them that they may pay with their lives for this little ruse of yours?’

‘Why even divulge my ruse to them?’ Rhesus shrugged eloquently. ‘They shall be given lesser goods to carry. And if a man is careful he can find riders to whom such danger would be a spice. I shall have no problems with that, and they will be paid for their hazard. But you, Ki, shall be the real courier that takes my prizes across the pass. Who would look for such a tiny cargo in such an immense vehicle – especially when you are loaded with sacks of salt to trade on the other side of the mountains?’

Ki sat looking into his small, closely set blue eyes. Round like a pig’s, she thought to herself, and buried above an expanse of pale cheek. All the man’s weight was in his tub of a body, supported by implausibly skinny legs. Yet he persisted in emulating the foppish and elaborate dress of the young men of this town. His short, scarlet cloak matched his tight leggings. His straining doublet was richly striped in gaudy colors. Ki turned her eyes down to the scarred table between them. Could she trust a man that dressed like that to have good judgment in his business affairs? A smile twisted her lips. Had she not been carrying freight for Rhesus for as many years as she had had a wagon, and Aethan before her? He was not her favorite client. He dealt too often in contraband and was grudging of paying what was due. He often cursed her when she insisted he fulfill his contract. But when he needed a trusted carrier again, he forgot their differences. It was a little late to fret about his good sense, or lack of it.

She took half of a generous payment, the rest to be paid on delivery of the goods. Had she been another teamster he might have worried about his jewels’ safety. But he had dealt with Ki too long to doubt her honesty.

She remained in Vermintown for some few days, seeing Rhesus intermittently and restocking her wagon a little at a time. She and Rhesus appeared to be the best of friends, and the host and customers of the inn were shocked one evening when a quiet conversation between the two slowly began to rise in volume, and then became vitriolic. Ki climaxed the quarrel by calling him a pig in rooster feathers. Rhesus responded by slinging in her face the contents of his glass: the palate-stinging brandy of Vermintown. Then Ki left abruptly, upsetting the table and costly dinner over Rhesus as she did so.

Ki grinned hard as she returned the jewels to their hiding place. She was sure he would have words for her about that when she rejoined him in Diblun. She might call him whatever names she liked, but the wasting of good food was a sin he would not easily forgive.

She blew out her candle. In the dark she stripped off her dusty trousers and tunic and burrowed under the blankets on her sleeping platform. She spread her limbs wide on the empty bed, and tumbled into sleep.

THREE (#ulink_5d73e661-4717-538d-9260-7a87598551de)

The Inn of the Sisters was on a small plateau at a place where the foothills began to seriously consider becoming mountains. Trees grew about it, but they had the stunted, wind-twisted look of trees that have survived constant hardships. The inn itself, a gray weathered wood, also gave the impression of tenacious survival. All its windows were tightly shuttered. Long and low, the building crouched beneath the lash of the ever shifting wind. The faded inn sign leaned as the wind pushed it on its chains. It was a picture of two Human women locked in a fierce embrace. Ki eyed it critically. The artist had demonstrated his lack of knowledge of Human body structure. Ki wondered what race owned the inn. The yard was no clue. Two open wagons and three riding beasts were pulled up to hitching rails. Ki glimpsed what might be a stable to the rear of the inn.

Ki let the grays come to a stop. The team was grateful. Since they began this morning, the wagon trail had become a combination of hard-packed earth and mountain gravel. The climb was not a steep one to this point, but the uphill grade was constant. Ki wrapped the reins loosely about the brake handle and hopped down from the wagon. She had heard nothing of this inn, either good or bad. She had spent her coppers already. Would she be wise to show a minted silver in such a place as this? As she considered, she ran her hands gently under the horses’ collars and harness, lifting and resettling the leather. Sigmund rubbed his massive head against her. The wind tugged at her hood.

Ki turned to the creak and slam of the wooden door. The innmaster. He leaned toward Ki, seeming to take in her slender figure, booted and clad in brown leather shirt and leggings. She stared back at him, widening her green eyes. He quailed before her look, as Ki had expected him to. Few could abide the stare of shiny, wet Human eyes.

The Dene slid slowly down the porch ramp and across the inn yard to Ki’s side.

‘One Human alone?’ he asked her, slurring his Common.

Ki nodded gravely, then remembered the gesture had no meaning for the Dene. ‘One alone, and a team of two horses.’ It was worth a try.