Kethry heard a strangled croak, and turned to see Keyjon clutching her throat and turning scarlet with the effort of trying to speak. Stormwing watched her from where he sprawled; his finger traced a little arc, and her arms snapped out in front of her, wrists together, fingers interlaced.
Only then did he rise, with a curious, boneless grace, and pace slowly to where the woman stood, a captive and victim of her own greed.
Kethry got up off the ground, wincing as she felt sore places that would likely turn into a spectacular set of bruises. Tarma climbed down out of the cage, favoring her right leg.
"What happened with the fool sword?" Tarma asked, in a low voice.
Kethry shrugged. "I guess when she couldn't identify him as positively male or female, she decided to act first and figure it out later."
Stormwing looked up as they reached his side, but said nothing. "What are we going to do with her?" Kethry asked.
He ran a hand through his hair. "I do not know," he confessed. "I have a feeling that if I tried to harm her, that blade at your side would turn against me."
"Probably," Tarma said, in disgust. "But she's killed at least one person that we know of. A shaman of the Clans, at that, and sacred. Blood requires payment-"
"Would you accept a punishment that left her alive?" the Hawkbrother asked unexpectedly.
Tarma hesitated a moment, then replied with caution. "Maybe, if she couldn't get free to try this again. If she couldn't even leave here -- and if it was a living hell for her. My Lady favors vengeance, my friend."
He nodded. "My thought as well. Lady, would you be content also?"
Kethry only nodded; she felt power building, coming from some source she didn't recognize, but akin to the pool of energy available to all White Winds Adepts. She hadn't realized he was an Adept before-
He raised his hands. "All your life, you have sought to be the power in the center of all, to be the manipulator of the fabric of the world around you," he said to Keyjon, solemnly. "So, I give you that; your greatest desire. Control of all you can see, manipulator of the web-"
He pointed; there was a ripple of the very fabric of the place-and a distortion that made Kethry's stomach roil and eyes water.
Then when she looked again, Keyjon was gone. Instead, hanging from a web that spanned a corner between the hedges, was an enormous gray spider, hanging fat and heavy in the center of the pattern.
"Spiders are notoriously short-sighted," Stormwing said, as if to himself. "Now I shall have to see to it that nothing comes here but noxious things, that deserve to be eaten-and old or diseased things, that deserve a painless death."
He looked back at Kethry, and in that moment she knew that not only was he enormously more powerful than she had guessed, he was also older. Much, much older.
"Here is a guide," he said, producing another ball of witch-light. "I have much to do here, and this will take you back to your horses before dawn." Now he smiled, and Kethry felt as if all her weariness and aches had been cured. "I could not have been freed without your aid. Thank you, sisters-in-power. Thank you."
"You're-welcome," Kethry said. She wanted to say more, but the witch-light was sailing off into the darkness, and Tarma was tugging her arm. She followed the Shin'a'in into the maze, quickly losing track of where she was, but torn apart by conflicting emotions. There was so much she wanted to learn from him, so many things he must know-
What have I done with my life? All I have built is one White Winds school. With power like his, I could-
I could make a mess of things, that's what I could do, meddling where I didn't belong. No, I guess that power isn't such a temptation. What would it earn me, anyway, besides envy and suspicion?
If she had Stormwing's kind of power, it would make her a target for those such as Keyjon. Was the knowledge worth the risk?
Risk not only to her, but to Tarma, to the children, to Jadrek?
No, she decided. And after all, we were the ones who rescued him. Knowledge isn't everything. Sometimes it just takes common sense, good planning-
A chorus of joyful cries arose behind them; she and Tarma turned as one to see the firebirds rising into the air above the hedge, alight with their own flame. They circled, and dove, and sang; everlasting fireworks that made their own music to dance by. She felt her eyes brimming with tears, and beside her, Tarma gasped with surprise.
The firebirds circled a moment longer, then rose into the tree canopy, still calling in ecstasy to each other. They penetrated the branches, making them glow emerald for a moment, as if each tree harbored a tiny sun of its own.
Then they were gone. And in the light from the witch-ball, Tarma's face was wet with tears. So was hers. She understood, now, the other reason why two brave men had been willing to die to save them from enslavement.
She caught Tarma's shoulders, and held her for a moment.
And this is what's worth having; freedom, and friends, and the ability to see a thing of beauty and not want it all for myself, or because of the power it represents.
Then Kethry let her sworn sister go, as Stonnwing had set the birds free.
"Come on, partner, let's go home," she said. "We have a tale to tell."
SPRING PLOWING AT FORST REACH
This is a new short story suggested by Ten Lee of Firebird Arts and Music, who pointed out that on a working farm, such as Forst Reach, most horses would be put into harness in times of heavy workload like planting and harvest. And she noted that, given the temperament of the famous Gray Stud of Vanyel's time (an alleged Shin'a'in warsteed) it was quite reasonable to assume that plowing time (with frisky, hormonal horses) would be rather exciting. She also told me the story of an Amish farmer and his two mares, and his very unique technique for bringing misbehaving horses to see sense.
As for the Shin'a'in technique of taming (or rather, gentling) horses, it is based entirely on fact, and the techniques of a remarkable man named Monty Roberts, who without any form of coercion whatsoever, can take a green, untrained, skittish horse, and have it accepting bridle, saddle, and rider in thirty minutes. His technique is based soundly on understanding equine body language and "speaking" to the horse with his own body language, and results in a cooperative partner. His book, The Man Who Listens to Horses, is one every horse lover and owner should read.
There was no light but that of the hearty fire in the Lord's Study at Ashkevron Manor, but neither of the two inhabitants of the study needed any other illumination. It was clearly a "man's room," comfortably crowded with furniture that the Lady of the manor deemed too shabby to be seen elsewhere, but too good to be relegated to the rubbish room. Distantly related if one looked back far enough, Lord Kemoc Ashkevron and Bard Lauren would seem unlikely companions to an outsider, and sometimes even seemed so to those who knew them both, but the improbable friendship had prospered for many years and showed no sign of changing. The bard played a soft melody on his gittern as Lord Kemoc seemed to doze, the golden firelight flickering over both of them.
Kemoc opened his eyes and roused, cocked his shaggy-haired head to one side and frowned at something he'd heard that wasn't music. Bard Lauren stopped playing immediately; he'd been trying to soothe Kemoc's aching joints with his Healing-music, and had thought he'd been succeeding. With every passing year, Lord Kemoc's joints hurt more when the cold wind out of the north swept down over Forst Reach at winter's beginning. Even here, in this comfortable wood-paneled room, deep within the belly of the manor, Lord Kemoc could not escape the aching of his bones.