Seasons, page 28
“I’d better find someone to heal soon, or all this food is going to stay on my hips,” Vixen groaned. “What was in that pie?”
“Simple recipe. Butter, sugar, nut-flour, and whole nuts,” Matya said complacently.
“That good?” asked what looked like a knitted hassock beside the fire.
“Very good, Harmony,” Vixen replied. “Much, much too good. So good I’m afraid it might be illegal.”
The hassock giggled, stuck out eight spindly, stocking-covered legs, rotated, and looked up at Vixen from four jewel-like eyes peeking out from among the knitting. “Vixen happy!”
“When you talk to someone, Harmony, you say you instead of their name,” Matya chided mildly.
“All right,” said the sweater-encased spiderling. “You are happy, Vixen!”
“Yes, Harmony, I am,” Vixen said, reaching out lazily to pat the spiderling’s knitwear-shrouded abdomen.
As promised, last spring, Vixen and Vanyel had made a point to be at Kettleford when the giant Pelagiris spider, Melody, had come out of the cave she had been hibernating in. But she hadn’t been alone. It seemed that her last, huge meal—a monster that had attacked the entire village—had triggered something in her, and she had laid eggs before she slept. They’d incubated all winter long, and in the spring eight spiderlings had trailed their mother out into the strange, bright world.
Vanyel had immediately given them voices too, but at first what they produced had been little more than baby-babble, as one might expect. But it was sweet and tuneful baby-babble, so eventually the villagers had given them all musical names. Harmony, Rhapsody, Madrigal, Allegra, Celesta, Lyra, Nocturne, and Vespers. Like their mother, they were all female. Like their mother, they went to work freeing the village of pests, pretty much eliminating all the mice, rats, and rabbits that tried to feast on the gardens or anything else outside. They were hunting spiders rather than web-spinners, after all, and they could move very quickly indeed on those eight little black legs. Anything trying to poach from the gardens hadn’t stood a chance.
By the time Melody and six of her offspring went out, caught and ate huge meals, and squeezed themselves back into the cave to sleep, it was almost time for the first snow. But two of the spiderlings, Harmony and Rhapsody, had elected to spend the winter with their humans. Melody had assured the villagers that the spiderlings would be all right as long as they stayed warm, and the village had set straightway to knitting round covers for their round bodies and stockings to attach to the covers to keep their legs warm. Each cover had a pocket on the back that a flat, warmed stone could be slipped into.
Because the knitted “garments” were made from unraveled sweaters with too many holes in them to mend, they were not patterned so much as composed of unmatched stripes and blobs of shades of brown, gray, a little cream, and black. And when the spiderlings hunkered down by the fire and pulled all their legs in, they looked almost exactly like hassocks. Fortunately, everyone knew not to sit on them.
And the spiderlings made themselves very useful to the hunters of the village by eating the animals that had been trapped for fur rather than fur and food. Like their mother, they would inject their prey with venom from their fangs. In a candlemark or two, every bit of flesh, fat and organ inside the skin would be liquid. The spiderling would suck it out, leaving only the valuable fur and bones without all the mess and labor of skinning the beast. This made everyone in the village very happy.
Another accommodation that had been made for them were passageways that extended between the upper windows of all the houses, so the spiderlings could travel from house to house without having to move on the ground and wait, chilling, for people to answer the door. The household cats had also discovered these, and they apparently regarded this as a long-needed solution to treating the entire village as one, single, cat-feeding entity. Some of them had grown rather plump as a consequence.
On the other hand, midnight romps were now generally confided to these passages, so only the people sleeping in lofts—usually children—were the victims of hurtling cat-balls in the night. And Harmony and Rhapsody were very good about helping with that problem; if someone really did not want to be pounced on during the night, one of them would weave a non-sticky net over the entrance to the passage. The cats did not like the feeling of these nets and would retreat.
The spiderlings might be hunters, but the webbing they produced was also proving very useful. The hunters used it to affix heads to arrows and spears, preliminary to more permanent attachment like metal bands or glue. Someone discovered that the spiderlings could produce tiny, sticky dots of the stuff that held seams and hems together much better than pins. There were a dozen other similar applications of the stuff, and the spiderlings loved participating in human doings.
“It must be close to midnight,” Vixen said lazily, and was about to add, “I think I’m going to bed,” when Vanyel interrupted her with an upraised hand.
“There’s someone out there!” he hissed.
:Yfandes!: she Mindspoke, because Van would be too busy counting noses out there to warn her. :Get out of the shed now!: Only then did she ask, “How many?”
“Two dozen,” he said grimly. “Too many for us to take with everyone scattered among the houses and half of us a bit the worse for drink.”
“Warn them not to fight, tell them we’ll take care of this,” Vixen told him—not at all sure how they would do this, but certain that fighting back was going to end in Kettleford people dead. “You lie down on the hearth; Matya, wrap up his leg like he broke it. Harmony, Rhapsody, you get up into the loft and pull your legs in so you look like cushions. Don’t move until I tell you.”
The spiderlings were fast, and a good thing too; they were up in the loft, and Matya had just finished wrapping Vanyel’s leg, when the door crashed open and three heavily armed men wrapped in half-cured furs shoved inside.
Vanyel looked up at them with a faintly puzzled, dazed expression. “Oh hello!” he said, wiggling his fingers at them. “I’m sorry, I ate the last of the bacon-pies.”
This was not the greeting the bandits—they were without a doubt bandits—had expected. The stared for a moment, jaws dropping open. Van smiled vaguely.
“What the hell’s going on here?” roared a voice from behind them, and a fourth man shoved his way into the room. The lamps flickered in the cold breeze from the door, and the fireplace flames thrashed madly. The fourth man was dressed the same as the others, and looked about the same—unkempt beard, hair, moustache all varied colors of brown and blending into the fur around his face. But it was clear from the way the others acted that this was the leader. “I told—” He, too, stopped in his tracks, taken aback by the three people who were not shrieking at the tops of their lungs and cowering away from the intruders. “Who’re you?”
“For god’s sake, shut the damned door!” Matya snapped, and once again caught off-guard, one of the underlings obeyed her. “I’m Matya. This is my sister Morya, and this is our stupid nephew Ifan, who managed to break his leg dancing at the Midwinter Feast. Who the hell are you?”
“Oh hello!” Van repeated, and wiggled his fingers again. “I think I’m going to lie down now.” And he suited action to words, quite as if four obvious miscreants armed to the teeth had not broken through the door a moment ago.
“I’d like a cup of whatever he’s drinking,” said one of the bandits. The leader smacked him in the back of his head with his open hand.
“We’re not here for a festival, idiot!” the leader barked. “Tie them up and get to it.”
The leader left. The remaining three looked at each other doubtfully for a moment, then tied Matya and Vixen up and began a methodical rummage through the kitchen. It was obvious immediately what was going on; they were here to take everything food-like and portable. And anything of value too, probably.
“Just behave yourselves and nothin’s gonna happen to ya,” said one of the men, as he stuffed a ham into his pack and followed it with some random jars. Matya’s teeth ground audibly.
Vanyel, seemingly asleep, was watching them through slitted eyes. :Plan?: She “heard,” the “voice” sounding like it originated between her own ears. Vanyel’s Mindspeech, as she knew well, was strong enough that he could read just about anyone’s thoughts, and be heard even by those with no Mindspeech themselves.
If you can blind them all, Harmony and Rhapsody can jump them from above, and you can get the third one, she suggested.
:I like it. Tell me when the spiders are ready.:
Vixen adjusted her thoughts to the odd “level” where the spiderlings thought—Mindspeech, as far as she could tell, was a lot like sound. Some things were too low or too high for humans to hear, unless you had Animal Mindspeech, which she did.
And as soon as she had done so, Harmony’s distressed thoughts broke in on hers. :They’re stealing the food! They’re going to leave everyone to starve!:
:Not while we’re here to stop them,: she told them. :Move slowly and carefully to the edge of the loft. One of you take the leftmost one, one take the rightmost one. Vanyel will take the one in the middle. When I tell you, drop on them, bite them quickly, and leap as far as you can away! In fact, get into the loft! They can hurt you quite a lot if they hit you!:
Actually, she was afraid that a blow from a fist from one of these men would kill a spiderling. A blow from a weapon certainly would. She turned her attention toward Vanyel, who nodded slightly as one of the invaders found the honeycakes and began stuffing them into his mouth.
“Hey!” the second said, smacking the back of the first one’s head. The third reached for the container where they were stored. And that put them right in line for the eager spiderlings above.
“Now!” she shouted.
It was all over in a flash. Van rose from his “bed,” a stick of firewood in hand, and bashed the one in the middle so hard the stick broke, and she definitely heard the distinctive sound of a broken skull. Harmony and Rhapsody dropped down on threads of silk, bit one of the men in the face and the other in the back of the neck, and were back up in the loft before either man could scream.
They did scream, though, a horrible sound that started in terror and agony and ended in a gurgle as the spiderlings’ quick-acting poison hit their brains. They collapsed beside the one Vanyel had hit.
“I have ’Fandes ambushing any singletons she finds by herself,” Van said grimly as he stripped the dying men of weapons, then cut the women loose. “So far she’s got two. So that’s five down. Shall we repeat this in the next house?”
“It worked before,” Vixen agreed. :Girls, take the walkway to Taffy’s house and stay in the loft and tell us what’s going on.:
There was a faint scuttling sound as the spiderlings headed down the wooden tunnel to the next house. :There’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven here,: said Harmony, counting them out. :They’re drinking Taffy’s ale because they can’t carry it.:
Vixen relayed this to Vanyel, who pursed his lips, considering it. “Let’s leave them there getting drunk; they’ll be easier to handle. Send the girls to the next house.”
But Vixen didn’t have to. They were already on the way. And before she could tell them what to do there, Rhapsody called out :There’s only one! We’ll get him!:
:No!: she exclaimed, but it was already too late.
:We got him!: crowed Harmony.
:Stay where you are for now,: she cautioned. :Tell Cannar and his family to get into hiding and leave the door open. You hide too.:
:Yes!: There was a pause, then, :Cannar doesn’t understand why you want to do this, but they are slipping out the door and going to hide in the tanning shed.:
“Well, that should keep them safe enough. No one with a working nose is going in the tanning shed,” Vixen muttered. Vanyel nodded, and the two of them slipped out the door just in time for a flicker of movement at Cannar’s house to tell them the last of the littles was out and on the way to the shed. And it was pretty obvious why no one had reacted to the screaming. It looked as if pretty much all of the raiders were converging on Taffy’s house. Word of where the beer was must have spread.
“Tell the girls to check all the other houses but Taffy’s, and if there is only a single person there, to take him out,” Vanyel whispered. “‘Fandes just got another one.”
Vixen relayed the order, adding to it, :Don’t forget, you’re not as strong as a human, and if they hit you, they can hurt you very, very badly.: The girls were young, though . . . she had misgivings that they’d take her seriously. The young always think they are immortal.
They slipped around to the back of Matya’s house and hid in the bushes on the other side of the garden wall. There was a fair amount of shouting going on outside of Taffy’s house now—it sounded as if the leader had discovered his men were drinking rather than looting, and was not pleased about it. They huddled in the shelter of the bushes in the snow, and Vixen was just glad she was wearing that nice, warm costume that she’d been given for Midwinter. I bet Van’s glad too . . . if he’d been in Whites, he’d be dead already.
:We got two more!: crowed Rhapsody. :Guntrun’s family is out and safe!:
“Enough!” roared a voice from Taffy’s house. “Kolgar, Yan, Renfri, Lun, Jarri, Sulma—get yer asses back in that house, and if ye touch another drop, I’ll chop off yer drinkin’ hands myself! The rest of yew, back to th’ houses I sent yew to!”
“We slip in the back of Taffy’s,” Vanyel whispered. “We overpower them—”
“No, we go get Cannar and Cannar’s wife and eldest son. Then we get Guntrun and his two hellcat daughters. We arm them from whatever we can find out there, and then we slip in the back of Taffy’s,” she hissed at him. “I’m a Healer, you idiot, not a Guard!”
She heard Vanyel take in a breath as if to retort, but he wisely kept his mouth shut. They don’t call me “Vixen” for nothing. . . .
Instead, he slipped away from her. She stayed put after fetching the two axes from where Matya kept them hidden in the woodpile. After all, she wasn’t trained in moving silently the way he was, either.
:Harmony, can you nip back into Matya’s house and get some knives? I’ll be at the back door.: Van had grabbed his sword on the way out, but she had nothing. She eased up to the back garden door and waited until she heard a faint little three-note “song.” The door opened a trifle, and three big kitchen knives slid out through the crack.
:Our venom sacs are empty,: Harmony said mournfully as she skittered back to Matya.
:That’s all right. Hopefully you’re done now. Just stay in hiding with Matya.: Vixen picked up the knives, then went back to her hiding place and listened to the muffled sounds of houses being ransacked and waited.
It wasn’t long until Van was back with seven more people. Guntrun’s wife evidently wasn’t going to be left out of the action.
“Are you armed?” Vixen asked.
“Not the way we’d like,” grumbled Cannar.
“I have two axes and three knives, who wants them?” she asked.
By common accord, the twin girls got the two axes; the knives went to the two wives and Cannar’s son. Vixen got Cannar’s wife’s frying pan, which was exactly the sort of thing she wanted in her hands.
“Now we go in the back door of Taffy’s,” she whispered.
The brigands were not as drunk as she would have liked, but they were drunk enough that the nine of them overpowered and trussed them up without a lot of trouble. They freed Taffy and his family, who armed themselves with the weapons of their captors, and passed spares around.
“Now the odds are even,” Van proclaimed grimly. “Don’t kill anyone you don’t have to—”
“What if I have’ta kill all of ’em?” Taffy demanded.
“You don’t,” Van corrected him sternly. “Now come on.”
He turned and opened the door. And stopped abruptly.
A babble of voices erupted behind him, wanting to know why he had stopped, but Vixen felt a cold chill coming over her. Whatever this was . . . it wasn’t anything good. . . .
“SHUT UP!” roared a voice—that wasn’t Vanyel.
Silence fell.
“That’s better,” said the voice, deep and harsh. “Now alla yew come out, slow-like, hands i’ th’ air. Don’ make any quick moves.”
By the time Vixen made it out the door, there were only a couple of other people behind her. And given what she’d heard, she was completely unsurprised to see at least a dozen fur-clad, bearded brigands facing them with bows drawn, backing another fur-clad, bearded brigand who had Kaylie’s oldest daughter Liliana in a choke-hold, with a knife to her neck.
She edged along the front of Taffy’s house to the right side of the group as the last two villagers emerged from the door. :Harmony, I have an idea. Go to Matya’s house. Tell her this—:
“Ye see what’s gonna happen here,” the brigand chief said through a smirk that exposed a mouth full of bad teeth. “Ye’re gonna put everythin’ ye ain’t wearin’ down, an’ one uv m’men’ll collect it all. Then ye’re gonna let ’im tie ye up. Then ye’re gonna tell us where all th’ good stuff is.”
And then he’s going to have us killed, Vixen thought—angrily. But she didn’t have any time to think of anything more, because at that moment, Matya emerged from her cottage, a large bundle in her hands. The villagers all tensed. They certainly recognized what looked to the brigands like a lumpy pillow covered in knitted wool.
“Hey! Hey!” the brigand chief yelled, as his men got his attention directed toward Matya. Liliana winced as the knife scored her neck. “Hey! Ol’ woman! Stop right there! Show me whatcha got!”
“Ain’t nothin’ much,” Matya whined, in a thin, reedy voice. “On’y—this!”
And she tossed Harmony at him.
