Seeds by Amy Lame

***Note:  Linathien Thai—The ‘th’ in Linathien is soft, like the ‘th’ sound in they.  The ‘th’ in Thai is hard, like the ‘th’ inwrath.  The ‘a’ is long in Linathien, as in day, with the same sound in occurring in Thai. 

            She wore her full dress armor.  It was shined and polished, and it glared obscenely in the camp with the mud and the mold and the filth.  She strode purposely through the women’s tents, where there was some talking and some laughing, and past the men’s tents where there was much more of both.  She came to a stop at her c.o.’s tent, requested entrance of the sentry, and was granted. 

            She caught her c.o.’s eye, strode forward to the makeshift camp desk and lay down her insignia.  He was an impassive man, a few years older than she was.  He had been a green recruit under her father, when she was a child.  He was a broad, powerful, bull-necked man of few words.  He eyed the insignia, and then looked at her, waiting.

            “That house we saw, in the valley, two days ago—that was mine.”

             Comprehension dawned, then sadness.  “I’d forgotten.”  He said softly.  Then, more businesslike, “But Major Thai…”

            She looked away.  “Colonel Brine…” Her mouth worked, an anxious look knitting between her brows.   Finally she faced him, and shook her head.  “No words.”  She said, “No words.”  She bit her lip then, a vulnerable, feminine gesture that surprised him because he’d never seen the like on her.  Before he could register surprise or say another word, however, she had turned around and walked out of the tent. 

             She could see her cottage from the top of the butte that overlooked the valley.  The cottage itself backed right up against the sheer wall of the butte.   About 50 yards away from the cottage was a trickle of waterfall that spilled out of the gully that fell from the two mountains that had spit up the plateau itself.  Come June, she remembered the waterfall would swell and spray, until walking out of the front door of the cottage was like walking into a diamond rainbow.  But now the fall was trickling, and the buttes were still frosty in the frigid April winds, even though the valley itself looked green.  

            The cottage and its 25 acres of land were only a corner of the valley itself.   The plateau wound down from the mountains, trailing off into a well-used footpath that traders used to reach the village that sat clustered around a clear pool just a little too small to be a lake.  The pool was what became of a waterfall that spent all it’s energy in that breathtaking burst of June brilliance, and it sat dead, smack center in the middle of the peaceful looking little valley.  A wood, maybe a league wide and five or six across, split her little corner of home from the rest of the valley.  She knew from memory that a path wound through the wood, following the stream, and that as busy as the rest of the valley was, few people crossed that line.  From her promontory on the Butte, she could make out bustling streets in the town, a horse trader, some sheep and goats and some early produce vendors.  Linathien needed supplies, and she had near to ten years of saved army wages to spend.  That town was where she was heading. 

            She’d had to give the army back her horse, but she had started out in infantry so her stride was quick and purposeful when she at last started out.  She had spent many, many moments gazing at the valley and the village.  She had sat right down on the edge of the Butte and dangled her legs off the cliff as she broke her morning bread with the last supplies from her army scrip, in order to drink in the sight some more.  Many, many years before even her father’s father had been born, the valley had been the source of fierce fighting.  Theoretically it sat the border between the Garden Land and the Jeweled Kingdom, and there had been a time when armies such as hers had spilled blood and lives on the fertile earth.  Her father had an armory of rusted swords and mail that he had dug up in his yearly plantings.  He had kept the remains in an outbuilding that she had not seen standing when she had looked for the house.  The wars had gone when the valley had been soaked with blood and of no use to anyone and the valley had sat, hidden and purposeless until it had been settled again.  For three generations now it represented the one thing Linathien Thai craved: peace.  The rush of joy that had swept her when she saw the` outbuilding destroyed was almost physical.

             She made it to town before lunchtime and made her purchases before the last tavern visitor reluctantly left the warmth of the tavern for his or her livelihood.  By the time she was ready to leave, she had, among other things, over a months supply of food for herself, three hens, one affronted rooster, a shaggy nanny goat that would be good for wool, with a stubborn, ugly kid that made her good for milk, and two sets of clothes that were not army issue.  That last purchase surprised her the most.  There was a woven cotton skirt in that bundle, with a serviceable yet decidedly feminine blouse.  The last time she’d worn a dress had been the day Colonel Brine (then Corporal Brine) had brought her father’s bloody sword to her doorstep.  It had also been the day she’d enlisted.

            However surprising her purchase of clothing had been, the first truly impulsive thing she did happened on her way out of town.  The horse was not a filly, she thought objectively, but she wasn’t old yet.  She had, perhaps, a few more seasons as a brood mare left to her.  That was why it was so surprising to find her in the line for the slaughterhouse.  A flash of pity coursed through her, but she’d spent the last twelve years squelching things like pity in order to survive, so she continued on, shouldering her pack and readjusting the basket with the chickens, and finally giving the recalcitrant nanny goat a tug.  When she drew abreast of the horse, she gave her one last, searching look, and that was when the horse threw her head, snapped her reins, and stepped out of line.  She stood right in the middle of the road, and looked Linathien square in the eye, snorting a little. 

            “I don’t have that much money.”  She told the horse mildly.   The horse snorted.  “No, really—enough to get through winter, if the crops are bad.  I can afford some new walls— bedding, nails, that sort of thing.” The horse sniffed, and then butted at her scrip where three apples and a sandwich resided for Linathien’s dinner.  She sighed.  “You’d better cost no more than glue.”  She said.  And after a few words with the horse master, it turned out that the mare did not cost much more than glue.  Linathien had been secretly appalled that an animal of such intelligence was valued at so little.  Then the short stocky man who had sold her spoke.

            “Your father was kind to me, Linathien.”  He nodded when she blinked, as close to looking surprised as she ever came.  “Yes, I know who you are.  You haven’t changed much, you know.  Folks here’re just too polite to ask.”

            She wasn’t sure what to say, appalled that her anonymity was so illusive.  She stood there, quiet for a moment.  “I joined the army.”  She said at last, her voice rusty in human company.

            “How was it?  You see anything amazing?”  He asked, genuinely interested.

            She had.  She had ventured past the Jeweled Land, to where it was hot and dry, and had fed predators that no one in the valley imagined.  She had sacked cities more beautiful than sunsets, and had turned a blind eye to the atrocities committed within.  Her battalion had faced down a wizard once, half of them turning into spectacularly plumed toads before a thrown knife from her own boot had set him down before his curse could clear his throat.  The battalion had remained bird-toads, however, and many of them jumped onto their comrade’s swords rather than exist in such a half-world. 

            She looked starkly at the horse master, her eyes knit with an anxiety she could not name.  “Yes.”  She said roughly.  “I have no words.” 

            She was halfway down the road and onto the path through the wood, her possessions stored neatly on the horse’s back, before she realized she hadn’t said thank you, or goodbye. 

            She slept in the open that night, her chickens making unfamiliar clucking noises in their little wicker cage.  The horse, which she had not yet named, stayed nearby, untethered.  Somehow, Linathien had known the mare wouldn’t want to wander—a safe home was too hard to find.  It was chill, but she had known far worse, and her bedroll and blanket were more than enough.  She awoke alert to a fair, clear sunrise, smelling earth and holding an unfamiliar feeling in her cheeks.  Had she had a mirror—or a companion—they would have told her she was smiling.  She had worn her work clothes to sleep, and there was a nakedness in her, as she eyed the pile of armor she had removed the day before.  She wouldn’t need that here, but she didn’t know what to do with it just yet.

            In the course of the morning she had erected a little fence for her clipped-winged chickens, tethered the nanny and her kid so that they could clear some of the waist high weeds from around the yard, and chased several crawlers, most harmless, from her little house.  Then she burned the straw-ticked mattress that had once sat on the rickety wooden frame that would serve as her bed.  The bed had been her father’s, but it was larger than her old bunk in the window alcove.  The alcove was in the hallway behind the kitchen that connected the front room to the bedroom, and it felt… temporary.  Her father’s bed, sound after some repairs, that felt permanent.    Her roof needed patching, and the walls needed to be reinforced, but she had learned many things in the army and carpentry did not daunt her the way it had before her father died.  She took care of the repairs before the sun began to set, and spent the slant rayed, twilit hours staking out a place for her garden.

            She slept outside the next night, and the next, while she continued to patch rotted floors and clean and sweep the odd, neglected corner.  The house would have been a sound shelter on that first night, but it had felt odd, at first, unfamiliar and frightening, the way a child would view a place she had loved, after it had been neglected and forgotten for many, many years.  She dug a privy at the base of the hill, and a thin, trickling ditch from the stream that would seep into the ground and wash the waste through the sand she’d packed at the bottom.  The smell wouldn’t be too terrible at the base of that rise, and the soil would be rich.  On the fourth night, when the strangeness had passed, and the cottage seemed like a place the grown Linathien would inhabit and be comfortable in, she moved her bedroll to the newly repaired oak frame, and cooked her first eggs on the cleaned iron stove.

            The next day the horse awoke her with a chuff, as she stuck her oversized, roan colored face in the uncovered window.  Linathien decided that the horse, whom she had begun to think facetiously of as Sweetheart, needed to be made useful.  After breakfast she harnessed the horse, awkwardly, with a harness made mostly of leather straps and hope, to a rough wooden plow that she had found out behind the cottage near the crushed armory.  The plow had been sound, needing only reinforcement at the joint, but horse was angry and affronted.  Linathien asked her, in a voice rusty from disuse and halting for lack of words, what had she expected, coming off the line for dinner into a stranger’s hand?  The horse had chuffed into her chest, and sulked for a moment, but then it had agreed that yes, this was better than being turned into pig meal or steaks, and had plowed semi-willingly.  After that, Linathien lost the habit of speech.  The nanny and her kid needed only crooning, the horse, wordless words.  She clucked to the chickens in their own tongue, and they didn’t seem to notice that it was a human singing to them at all. 

            Over the next moon, she dug her garden and ploughed her field, changing as much in person as her person changed the land.  As the garden became a neat place of growing tomatoes and squash and eggplant and onions and potatoes (12 years in the military and she still loved potatoes!) her tense, soldiers posture relaxed, just a bit, and became the stance of merely a proud woman.  She took to donning skirts, where her work would permit it, and felt vaguely decadent in the freedom they afforded her.  Her tomatoes grew tall, over reaching her fragile stems, needing to be staked, and her own muscles grew wiry, without the bulk of sword work, but with a tense, woody strength of their own.  Her pumpkin plants pushed through earth and spread tiny, spiky leaves in the sun and her arms and face lost their paleness from the armor, and became brown and freckled.  (She did not mind the freckles on her arms, but wore a hat, because the burn on her cheeks was bothersome and distracting).  And as the spring turned to summer, and her grain, hastily strewn in the field became lush, and long and waving green, her hair, which had been brown and tight, used to braids and pins, and the occasional sword hack to simply shorten it outright, grew pale and sungold.  She began to have a vanity about it, that it slid through her fingers easily as she brushed it out at night and spilled over her naked shoulders when she bathed.  She braided it in the day, because it was practical, but at night, when no one was looking, and when she sat, alone in her home and made repairs or knitted (a craft an old soldier, long dead, had taught her in her first winter, when the boredom about drove a girl-child mad) she left her hair down, draping over her, and she pretended that she was beautiful. 

            June came, and the small waterfall grew fat and sprayed into corpulent diamonds, creating a rainbow of wonder to wake up to.  She stood there, the first day of the summer floods and simply stared.  When she left, her face was not wet because of the spray, but she didn’t notice.  In mid-June she went to town, and tentatively, seeking out the horse trader she’d met on that first day nearly three months ago, found a buyer for her grain.  She used few words, and those fumblingly, feeling like a child who wanted the moon and could only point and wail.  The man seemed to understand her, well enough, though.  She sold her first crop of grain and made enough for more seed and enough cloth to make a ticking pad for her bed, and to buy a piglet to slaughter next spring.  She hadn’t brought the piglet more than a half a league before she realized that if she were ever to eat pork again, it would be at the nearby tavern, because she was doing fine on eggs, squash and goat’s milk, thank you very much, and the piglet was much too human to eat. Abruptly, she turned around, selling the piglet back to a surprised pig-keeper, and spending the rest of her money at the glass blowers for several dozens of glass jars with cork tops, and some wax to seal them. 

 She wondered, briefly, when she arrived home.  She had killed many, many men and women, in her work.  She had fought, hard, past a wall of bodies, most of which left blood upon her sword, and her armor, and her soul, in order to place a tattered flag on a soiled hill.  She had been promoted for it, and had felt nothing for the men and women who had paid for that pin on her cloak with their lives.  But she wouldn’t kill one weanling, who, as far as she knew, had been so bred with the purpose of eating that it may very well throw itself on the axe come slaughtering time.

 It was one of those thoughts that hummed at the edge of her vision, like the sound of screaming and the clank of sword and shield that haunted her sleep but that she could not remember when she awoke.  Names haunted her, as well, Trece, Langan, Keenan, Quinn.  Gretty, Colce, Blade and Corin…ah, gods, Corin.  But she batted the names away, refusing to listen to their buzzing behind her eyes, their ricocheting in her skull.

 The day she had moved into the cottage she had thrown her sword and armor onto the rusted pile behind the house next to the privy.  She could have used them for something, she knew.  Pots for food, parts for the plow she had fashioned out of wood, they could have been anything.  But she didn’t.  She used the privy when necessary, but she never, if she could help it, looked at that pile of rusted scrap metal that had both killed and died a thousand times.  But the dreams and the sounds and the names and the tears at her periphery were growing thicker, like mosquitoes.  She wondered how long she could just bat them away, and how strong she would stand as they drained her life. 

August came, and she sold another crop of grain, walking away with canning jars.  For a week she wore her leather training gauntlets and picked the blackberries that grew as scrub down the face of the cliff, and spent the week after that putting up stores, not just of blackberries but of tomatoes and squash and eggplant and of pumpkin.  When she had finished the first round of canning, she dug a cellar behind the pantry wall, and fortified it with stripped blackberry branches, making it as long and deep as a man and as wide as three.  She filled it with her canning, and when she was done with that, it was time to can some more.  The dreams continued, during canning season, but instead of blood and bile and horse dung and vomit, she smelled blackberries and tomatoes and pumpkin and squash during her fitful sleep.  By the end of October, when the winds were chill and she found herself building a little barn with a smaller chicken perch within to put the nanny and her half grown kid, the chickens, of course, and the now plow-broke mare, she had enough food, she was sure, to feed many men.  She had never been so painfully aware that she was only one.   

            In the beginning of November, she walked into town, uncertain.  She had come to buy more worsted, and some dye, but she did not have only money with her.  Hesitantly, she walked to the horse-trader’s and put a jar of Blackberry preserves, and one of tomatoes, in his surprised hands.  She said little, something about “winter”, and “extra”, and then ducked her head and wandered to the tavern, where she sometimes had a bite to eat, and heard voices other than her own.  She left two jars there, and four with the widow with the many, many children who did other people’s wash at the pool, and two with the old woman who sold herbs who had helped her when Sweetheart had colic in September.  She left two with the spinner who sold her the wool, and two more, as she left town, with the young man who had bought back the pig she would not eat.  When she arrived back home, she felt empty with giving and full at the same time, and sure she would not need to talk to another human soul for several months more. 

            That certainty lasted until the snows came, in December.  She had dug a pool in the summer, upstream of the privy ditch, and every morning she walked along a rope she had tied to a nearby stake, and chopped a hole in ice there to water the animals.  When she had filled her buckets, she walked another rope to the barn, and yet another rope back to the house, and all the while, the wind howled, and swooped down from the buttes, carrying the merciless angel-white snow with it.  Her house, which she had figured to be sound, developed chink-holes and drafts with unknown origins, and she patched with mud and boards and knitted cloth, desperate to stop them.   She also needed to save the store of firewood that had been dragged painstakingly from the wood.  Every now and then, when the wind blew especially cold, she hauled herself to the snug little barn that she had built, and lay herself down to sleep in the box near the mare’s stall on fresh clean straw.  It was warm there, with her knitted blankets and the animals and the lack of drafts.  The Nanny and her little Billy goat would lie down with her, too, if she did not mind their snacking on her blankets, and no one cared if she had straw in her hair the next day.  But she didn’t lie down there too often.  She kicked in her sleep, she reasoned, and one day she would kick the wrong animal at the wrong time, and get walked on.  But the real reason was that she was comfortable there, and she hadn’t spoken to a real person in over a month, and she was afraid she might forget she was human, and be found during the April thaws raving mad, eating straw and nesting with the chickens. 

            December turned into a January, just as harsh and less forgiving, and she seriously contemplated burrowing under the snow to the town, just to see another human face.  She was sitting in front of the fire, knitting an especially thick pair of socks, when she heard her mare’s shrill whinny, and the answer of a stallion through the howl of the wind. She scarcely remembered to put on her boots and her cloak before she ran outside, clinging to her rope and peering furiously into the snow to see who was there.   She saw the horse, barely, he was black as hell, and stood out against the snow, but presented only an absence of snowflakes against the night itself.  On his back was a rider, slumped over, and even by the light of her lantern she could see the unmistakable stain leaking through his fingers onto the snowdrift below him.  The mare whinnied again, and the stallion reared, throwing his rider into a deep, soft snowdrift and disappearing into the night.  Linathien could only be thankful he hadn’t chosen to hammer down her barn, because the beast was huge and she didn’t think her snug little barn was up to that punishment. 

Quickly she reached the stranger before he disappeared beneath the swirling snow, and hoisted him on her back.  She had hauled men from battle before, and her muscles were as strong and as hard as ever.  She had him laid down on her own bed and out of his blood soaked clothes before she could talk to herself about the dangers of strange men locked with her in her cabin in the winter, and began tending to his wounds.  They were numerous and nasty, but she had seen the like before, and was more adept at treating them than many of her peers. 

It was while she was tearing her oldest, cleanest tunic into bandages that she sniffed the air, tentatively at first, and then in anger and fear, calling herself a fool.  She smelled several things—vanilla, poppies, rich wine, and underlying all, the faintest whiff of sulfur.  Damn.  Bringing her bandages, and the pot of hot water she always kept over the fire, she went to treat the wizard. 

Sprawled on her bed, he looked young—younger than she did, at any rate—and vulnerable.   It took power, she knew, to summon magic—even more for the really nasty, harmful stuff, like that pitiful room of suicidal toad-birds—and this puppy wouldn’t have the strength for that for a very, very long time.  Sighing, and wondering if it were her newfound reluctance to kill, or her pathetic, naked loneliness that prompted her, she began cleaning and dressing his wounds, silently, her thoughts creating a cacophony in her head that needed no accompaniment. 

She awoke early the next morning, her heart thundering from her dreams, and her body stiff from sleeping on the small window seat bed she had used as a girl, which now had no mattress pad.  She heard a moan in the next room, and ran to her young wizard, who was only a little feverish after she had tended him well into the night.  When she got to the room, frowzled and sleepy, she saw his eyes opened at her, green and hazel and clear in his angular wizard’s face, and she suddenly felt very much awake.  She had prepared a tea the night before, of chamomile and mint and other herbs she had gathered when she’d been clearing her fields for just such an emergency, and although it was cold now, she was sure his dry lips would be grateful. 

“Where am I.”  He croaked, trying she could tell to raise his head, and demanding even weakened as he was. 

Linathien licked her lips, suddenly desperate for a sip of the tea herself as she sat down and prepared to give it to the wizard.  How long, since she had ran to town and mumbled a few sentences, sure that was all she could muster?  And now he asked her a question—a simple one, yes—but she was sure he’d want an answer.

“Can you hear me?”  He asked, muzzily.   He was wondering if he were hallucinating or not, or if she were merely simple.  But he wasn’t demanding anymore, he was quizzical, and that gave her room to take a breath and to answer him, gruffly.

“My house—the valley.”  She said, pleased that she could.

“Which land?”  He asked, more awake by the moment, when she would have wished him less.

“The boundary.”  She said, “Between The Garden Land and the Jeweled Land.” 

The wizard raised his eyebrows, which were the same wet sand color as his scraggly little beard and his hair.  “So far.”  He murmured, then he looked at her, apprehensively.  “And you’re a friend, right?  Because I don’t know you, and I thought I would.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, because she certainly didn’t know him.  Some of her soldier’s forthrightness came to her, and her next answer was clearer and more certain than before.  “You keep your magicks to yourself, wizard, and make sure I stay me and my home stays where it is, and I’ll be all the friend you need.”  Her crispness made him smile a little, and then he sighed, and his awake-ness drained out of him.  “I’m going to change your bandages now.”  She told him, so he wouldn’t start at her cold hands on his skin, “And then, I’m going to be outside tending the animals.”  She enunciated clearly, making sure she didn’t sound as though she hadn’t spoken to a soul for more than two months.  “Will your horse return?  Because my mare’s not in season, but they won’t make a happy pair.”

The wizard shook his head and mumbled.  “He’ll stay away and safe, until I can call him—there’s shelter nearby?”

“There’s a wood, where the snow’s not deep, and the stream still runs.”

“Can you leave out some grain?”  He asked, and she could tell he was making an effort to stay awake. 

“Yes.”  She agreed, “But I can’t go far from the barn.” 

The wizard closed his eyes for a moment, scrunching them like a child, and his body tensed, making him cry out.  It only lasted a moment, then he sank deep into her mattress, the lines in his face easing.  “He knows.”  He murmured, before falling fast asleep. 

She went about her day after that, giving the animals food and water, mucking out the stalls.  She saved the muck in a pile, which she would use to fertilize the land before planting. The snow had ceased for a moment, and she brought the mare out for a walk around the homestead so she’d appreciate the stall and not be too restless. When she was done she left a small patch of grain near the pool. She went back into the cottage at midday, eating some dried meat and cheese that she’d purchased in town.  She boiled the rest of the meat up for a broth, which she fed to the wizard when he awoke again, and she brought in an old, hopefully sound bucket for him to use as a privy.  She had to help him use it, and his awkwardness and his youth showed plainly.  She had no words at first, to help him get through it, because she had to hold him upright, and help him with other things, and she could tell that in spite of his aura of command, her presence, and her gender, bothered him.

“Look,” She said at last, when his strength was fading and her patience wearing thin.  “I spent twelve years in the army.”  He looked at her in surprise.  “I’ve seen that before.”  She went on, feeling useless, “Now use it and get on with it.”  A smile quirked his lips, and after a moment, the business was completed.

“Twelve years in the army?”  He asked, all too casually as she helped him back into bed.  She grunted affirmative, rolling him over to clean his back and massage the skin a little so sores wouldn’t form.  “Did you know of General  Krieger?”  Her hands stilled, and she rolled him over roughly.  Her mouth worked, and when she spoke next it like spitting bile.

“Rat bastard.”  She said, her chest heaving.

“Him right—not me—right!”  The wizard said hurriedly, taking fear from her expression.  “He’s the one who… ambushed me.  What did he do to you?”

Her face contorted, and her breathing still heaved at her chest as she controlled a snarl that threatened to split her skin.  All she felt at that name bottled up in her throat, and her mouth worked again, and her brows knitted.  “No words.”  She gasped at last, “I have no words.”  And she turned and left the room. 

             Trece was sobbing, her clothes torn, bleeding.  They were raw recruits, just out of training camp, and the only two women in their squad, so they were as close as soldiers could be.  In the dream, Linathien could see clearly, the bruises on her thighs, but in real life, she hadn’t known what had happened, had only known that the General, with his fine features and his cruel lips, had singled Trece out, had praised her as a soldier, and had asked her to his tent to ‘discuss her future in the military’.  He’d asked Linathien as well, but she’d been repelled, both by his arrogance and his condescension.  Now she was grateful for that, if confused by her friend’s complete devastation as she sat Trece sobbing in the corner of their tent.  In her dream, though, she knew, she knew everything.  And she consoled her friend, and told her not to do it.  Told her to fight in the next battle, told her to hold her own, with her strength, and her quickness and her cunning.  But she knew, in the dream, how it would end.  Trece had waded into the fighting like a suicidal swimmer, wading into the sea.  Her eyes had been far away, and her hands had been at her sides.  She hadn’t even raised her sword to the cut that had killed her.

 Linathien woke up, screaming “Fight, damn you, Fight!”  Before she remembered where she was.  When her breathing had calmed, and she could hear over her heartbeat, she heard the wizard in the other room, calling awkwardly. 

“Pretty lady,”  He said, whimsically into the dark, “Pretty lady who’s been nursing me—is everything well.”

“All is well.”  She said, feeling foolish.  “I… apologize, go back to sleep, wizard.” 

“I will.”  He said, “I will if you will grant a request.”

“What?”  She snapped, moving to get out of the window bed.  He must have heard her. 

“No, no—don’t get up.  I just want to know your name, that’s all.”

A little part of her sighed in relief—he wouldn’t be planning to kill her when he was better, if he wanted to know her name, would he?  “Linathien.”  She murmured.  “Linathien Thai.”

“Pretty name for a pretty lady.”  He responded, talking gamely into a house only lit by the dying fire. 

“Don’t be foolish, wizard.”  She murmured, turning into her pillow.

“My name is Kyan, Linathien Thai.  Kyan Xerxes.”

She grunted, almost asleep.  “So you were born to be a wizard, then.”  She murmured into her pillow, and his gentle laughter eased the rest of her sleep. 

He didn’t mention the General again, over the next few weeks of recovery.  She moved him, on the fourth day, to the front room, in the one chair by the fire.  She fashioned herself a stool, from the planks she’d torn out to make the cellar, and some sound, straight logs for the fire.  When night fell, and her exhaustive round of chores was completed, they would sit companionably, while she knitted and he spun nonsense stories for her.  She had asked him, after his first round of tale-telling, when he’d spun a yarn about a soldier and twelve dancing princesses, if the story were true.  He’d replied, “Linathien, you’re all alone in a desert of snow, with only me for company.  Does it matter if the stories I tell are true or not?”  She’d smiled, looked at him, looked back down to her knitting.  “No,” She’d told him, “I suppose not.” 

The next night she’d presented him with the thick, warm pair of socks, both heated by the fire and her knitting that she had finished as he spoke.  He looked surprised.  “These are beautiful.”  He said, “They have a pattern on them—cables and textures and things—you didn’t need to do that.”  She shrugged, but he pursued.  “These were for you, I know—you’ve done plenty for me.”

She looked affronted, but said merely, “They’ll keep your feet from the drafts, so you don’t take ill, wizard.  I havesocks.” 

His tale that night was the best he’d told, a story of Dragons and Unicorns and enormous mystery, and untold humor.  She caught herself laughing, in the middle of it, and had looked surprised.  She wondered, that laughter was such an unusual thing for her now—when she was a child, and her father was home, she recalled laughing much of the time, as had her father.  What was different about her, that she would return from life as an honest mercenary, and not laugh, as he had?  The question made her ponder, and she smiled through the rest of the story, but did not laugh again. 

In the fourth week of his recovery, as January passed unnoticed into an equally unforgiving February, he began to limp around the house, cleaning this and cooking that while she made the round of chores.  He used a little magic, she knew, replacing the fur covered window in his room with one of real glass, and mending her stove so the draft didn’t blow smoke all over the house.  His best gift of repayment though, was curled up in front of the fire when she came in from walking the mare one day, and the house smelled especially of vanilla and exotic flowers. 

“Oh…”  She murmured, kneeling down in front of it and scooping it into her arms.  “Hello, puss puss.”  She murmured.  The kitten was unseasonable—most cats didn’t bear litters in the winter, and there was not a cat for thirty square acres—she knew, she’d looked when the mice got into her grain.  This cat had been magicked to her home, pure and simple, but she wouldn’t complain.  A friend in the house, so when the wizard left, she wouldn’t be alone.  She felt her throat close, and her eyes water suspiciously, and she looked blearily at the kitten, appalled.  “Thank you.”  She said rustily into the fuzzy thing in her hands, “Thank you, wizard.  This was well done.”

She met his eyes over the kitten, and he was staring at her, perplexed, and thoughtful.  He had an angular, wizard’s face, that was good for telling tales and bad for hiding secrets, although he’d told her that he was nursing the beard in order to give him an air of mystery.  “I’m glad you like her.”  He said absently.  “Linathien, how did you come to be here, alone?” 

Her face stilled, and she held the kitten in front of her, protectively.  “This was my home.  My father was killed. I joined the army. I left the army. I came home.”

He raised his eyebrows.  She often spoke tersely, like a soldier, or like someone unaccustomed to speaking, but this was a brief summary of twelve years of life.  “Why did you leave the army?”  He asked, unexpectedly. 

Her reply stoppered up in her throat, and her mouth worked, and her breathing grew harsh, and that look of anxiety knitted up between her brows.

He shook his head and held out his hand.  “I know, I know—no words, right?”

She nodded, and looked back down at the fuzzy ball of joy in her arms.  “No words, puss puss.”  She murmured, “You and me need no words.”  

In her dream, Corin was still alive.  They were off duty, so they slipped into her tent, unobserved they thought, and did what lovers will do, when they are alive and life is tenuous, and they are young and in love.  They were awakened by the General’s messenger, barely containing his sneer and giving them their assignment--their special assignment to do reconnaissance on a heavily fortified wizard’s den.  Linathien had remembered Trece, and had tried, haltingly, to tell of her misgivings.  And they were not General Krieger’s soldiers at all, were they?  Weren’t they Colonel Brine’s?  But Corin, Corin was ambitious, and he was a soldier.  “We do what we’re ordered, Linny.”  He’d said, and in the end, that was what it had come down to.   So they departed, slipping away in the dawn, and she’d had given one last, lingering look at camp, to see Colonel Brine, arguing with the general, and shooting her the age-old soldiers look of caution.  And she had known then, known in the Colonel’s troubled look that this was no ordinary recon, and she’d tried to tell Corin, but Corin wouldn’t listen.  In her dream she was screaming, begging, pleading, and she awoke, screaming his name, choking on tears. 

“Linathien, girl, wake up.”

Kyan was standing over her, shaking her soldiers, and for a moment she smelled only wizard and shied away.  But she took another look and remembered where she was, coming to herself with a start. 

“Fine.”  She croaked.  “I’m fine.” 

“You’re not.”  He told her grimly, “But I’ll accept you’re not dying yet.  Who’s Corin?”  The familiar look crossed her pointed, freckled features.  “I know,”  He responded, as if she had spoken, “I know, no words.”  She nodded.  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”  The wizard persevered, and she nodded again.  “How?”  He looked as though he expected her refusal again, but she surprised him, Linathien Thai, repeatedly by her toughness.  This time was no exception.

“We were doing recon… a bad wizard’s spell, wasting death, sloughing flesh…”  Her words choked in her throat again, and she looked at him helplessly.

Kyan looked sorrowfully at her, sitting down next to her on the hard, narrow bed.  “A horrible way to die.”  He murmured, hoping to comfort.

She looked at him, straight at him, and he noticed for the first time, in the dark, by starlight, that her eyes were an amazing color of blue, to go with the pale hair she brushed every night.  But tonight, they were shuttered and dark, a blue pool, with a dark bottom.  “That’s not how a soldier dies.”  She told him.  “That’s not how he died.”   And her throat worked again, and her mouth twisted, and her eyes shut.

Comprehension dawned then, and Kyan recoiled, looked down at her again, new respect for her soldier’s strength flooding him.  He murmured helplessly.  “No words, oh gods, you’re right.  There are no words.” 

They sat there, for a moment, in the still dark, and Kyan felt his hand go to her face, wondered for a moment.  This woman had killed her lover, and hated wizards.  But he touched her anyway, and her eyes closed, and she leaned, into his hand, feeling weak and for a moment in time, just a moment, she considered being vulnerable.

“This bed is hard.”  He whispered in the dark.  “It’s a child’s bed, and you are not a child.”

“You are sleeping in my bed.”  She told him, logically, if logic could apply when his hand was warm on her cheek and her face was still wet with tears.

“If it is your bed,”  He said thoughtfully, “Then you should be in it too.”

“You will leave.”  She asked him, unhappily, “In the Spring, won’t you?  Wizard’s have things to do, and all I want is peace.”

“You’re right.”  He nodded, looking troubled, “I’ll leave.  And I probably can’t return.  As you said, Wizard’s have things to do.”  She made as though to pull away, but he stopped her, gently, asking.  “I will leave, because I have too.  But for now, it is you and I, and my wounds have healed, and yours have not.  Let me do some healing, Linathien Thai, in return for your picking a stranger out of the snow, and making him well.”

She closed her eyes again, and leaned forward, feeling his breath against her lips, smelling his exotic wizard’s smell.  “I don’t know healing.”  She said for a moment, pushing past the lump in her throat that threatened to stop the words.  “But gods, young Kyan, I know loneliness.  If you can cure that, even for a moment, then I am in your debt.”

Their lips met, then, in the cottage in the snow in the dark, and they moved cautiously to her bed, where only the silence and the slick sounds of skin on skin, and breath caught, followed.

  February moved into March then, dreamily, blurrily, hellaciously fast.  One crisp March day, when the snows had not come for two weeks, and only a few inches remained on the ground, Kyan accompanied her outside for the chores.  They moved easily together, like lovers who knew where the other was stepping, and were not afraid of the casual touch.  When the Nanny and her now grown kid were introduced, and Sweetheart, and the maternal looking chickens, the wizard stepped outside the barn and whistled for his horse.  The animal, still black as hell and just as dangerous, came snorting over the frozen creek a few moments later, stopping where the wizard stood, and sniffing at him apprehensively.  When he was sure Kyan was whole, the wizard mounted, and while Linathien watched bleakly, cantered around the homestead a few times.  He dismounted after a few moments, winded and dismayed by his weakness, but otherwise jubilant. 

“I’d missed the brute!”  He told her, excited.  “I’ve had him since he was a foal—I even fed him from a bottle with an oil cloth for a nipple.  Damn, I can’t wait to ride him again.”  For the first time since that first night, she saw that he was very young, and she felt very much older.  She gave him a small, sad smile, and turned away, covering her dismay with the act of brushing the remaining snow from her garden boxes, and testing the ground to see if it were frozen, or merely wet.  Kyan saw, and came near her.  He had learned, in the last month, that if he wanted her to speak, he had to speak sideways, like a crab walks, to learn what was in her thoughts.

“You know, Linathien, I was not a political wizard.  My parents were merchants, and they sent me to wizard’s school when I showed aptitude.  I was pretty much minding my own business at their home after graduation when this General Krieger attacked.  He killed them you know.”  His voice wavered, at that, and she looked at him in surprise, because they had shared their bodies often in the last month, but she hadn’t known this.

 “Yes, you’re not the only one with secrets.”  He told her, almost bitterly, but not

quite.  “So, I fought the good fight, but he had an army, to destroy the home of two old merchants and one new wizard.  I don’t know why he attacked me, but I know his men were sullen, because they were not paid to do it.  When I galloped into the night, bleeding and furious, I had nowhere to go.  I didn’t want to sic the army on the wizard’s school, and I wouldn’t put my friends in their way, so I cast a spell.  I asked to be with the enemy of my enemy.  You can’t imagine my surprise when I ended up here, with a beautiful woman, all alone, and not enemy to much at all.  Why is the General your enemy, Linathien?”

            She frowned at him, and her brows knitted, and she felt the words gather in her chest.  She spat once, on the ground, a soldier’s gesture to clear the bile, and tried again, unsure of what would come out.   “He touched me once.”  She said, inanely, tried again, desperately.  “He touched my arm.  Asked me to come to his tent.  I didn’t.  My friend did… “  she looked away.  “I’ve got no words for that.”   Her breath heaved in her chest again, and she swore she wouldn’t do this.  Kyan had been good to her, and honest in his leaving, and he deserved an answer.  “Corin… he gave Corin and me those orders.  To do recon on the wizard’s stronghold.  I… we didn’t know why.  Tanden… Colonel Brine argued with him.  I don’t think there was a reason.”  She looked away from him again.  “He doesn’t like wizards.  He doesn’t like women.  He rose to the ranks in the condotierri so he could have power for himself.  He’s everybody’s enemy.”

            Kyan nodded.  “And now he is mine.”

            She looked at him sharply.  “If you kill him, he will just be gone.  He’s no one to base a life on, young wizard.”

            The wizard shook his head.  “No.  I don’t practice revenge.  But I do practice change.  Our lands use the condotierri at will, interchange their armies like girls trading gowns.  I think it would be a good idea to become a political wizard to change that.  Men can not be made to fight their fellows at the wave of a noble’s hand—it’s not good for the soul of a land.  Every wizard needs a calling.  This will be mine.”

            She looked stricken, felt young, foolish and vulnerable.  “Now?  Today?”

            He smiled tenderly, understanding, and for a moment she hated him for that.  “In a few weeks.”  He said.  “When I can ride Magus without toppling over his back, when the snows have cleared, and you can go into town.  Then I will leave.” 

            She nodded, and turned her back to him, unwilling to let him see her relief, or her bitterness.   Savagely she attacked the ground with the shovel, hacking a hole into the wet, only partly frozen ground.  She dug and ripped and gouged with her spade, and when she hit frozen earth, she bent and gouged with her fingers, until they bled through her gloves, and Kyan could only watch her.  With a grunt, almost like an animal, she threw an experimental handful of seeds into the six-inch hole, knowing that it was too deep for them to grow and not caring.  She had brushed the first handful of frozen gravel back into the hole when Kyan touched her shoulders, and she felt a wave of something, a smell of poppies and vanilla and patchouli, the last of which she hadn’t detected before.

Then Kyan spoke, in a voice that was not his.  “As you sow, Linathien Thai, so shall you reap.” 

She sat for a moment, her chest heaving, and then whirled, standing so abruptly that he fell back.  He would have stepped back anyway, recoiling from the betrayal on her face.

 “What have you done to me wizard!”  She rasped, feeling dizzy and off balance.  Kyan merely looked stunned.

“I don’t know…”   He said, half to himself.  “I don’t!”  Because she looked skeptical and angry, and he didn’t want her angry.  “Sometimes… sometimes we really are just vessels for power.  Sometimes we have nothing to do with it—it’s the first time it’s happened to me, Linathien.  I… I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“What did it mean, ‘As you sow, so shall you reap’—what have I done to deserve that?”

And now Kyan began to look angry.  “I don’t know—ask yourself.  What is it you are planting out here, Linathien Thai—you think it is grain?  When you found me you were half crazed with loneliness, and so afraid of what is in you that you could hardly speak.  What is in you?  You tell me “No words”—and even when you do speak, I see that look on your face and I know your words are being shoved down, deep within you—what do you think those words will grow into, Linathien Thai?  Madness?  Destruction?  Annihilation?  Why are you here, alone, growing grain in a place no one who would love you is likely to find?”   He turned away then, his anger spent, contrition taking its place, but a last barb of bitterness needed to be fired.  “So I don’t know what it meant—but if that tomato plant grows, I’d be damned leery about eating the fruit.”

She felt them then, the words, welling up within her, and her face twisted, and her breath came short, and her throat closed so tight she could hardly breathe.  Abruptly she turned, and marched straight past him, and past the house, and past the outhouse.  He did not see where she went, but he heard clanking and pounding with a hammer, and banging that would have woken the dead, had there been any in the valley fresher than two-hundred years.  He stood near the garden boxes, feeling befuddled and useless for nearly half an hour, judging by the thin, resentful rays of sun that passed through the iron March clouds.  Finally, he went to see what she was doing, and to see what she would say. 

She was almost done, by the time he had walked, slowly because he was still not too strong, past the house and to the armory.  She had fashioned a travois with the plough and boards from the demolished outbuilding, and had loaded it with the armor and mail that had rusted there in the grass for so long.  On top of the pile was her own armor—he could tell only because it was newer, and not so rusted as the other.  Still without speaking she brushed by him, returning with the mare, which she hooked up to the plough.  She had mounted up and was preparing to ride before she spoke, her voice tight and controlled, and not aimed at him really at all.

“Go inside, fix dinner, make the fire.  I don’t know when I’ll be back.”   

She hadn’t returned by morning.  Kyan did the chores, went back to the cottage, rested.  He went out again, at midday, with a scrip of dried meat and cheese, and a jar of preserves, and, in spite of his protests, the day before, that he was too weak to ride the beast, whistled for Magus to find her.   The horse was wise, and cantered just to the boundary of her land, where he saw the fist dirt mound.  He’d seen the day before that the ground was partially frozen, and his heart ached when he realized that there was ice melting from that dirt pile, and from the dozens of others he saw as he rode the perimeter of her property, as regular as fence posts.  He was tired and aching before he came to her at the end of the line of mounds, to the boundary that backed up against the cliff.  She was kneeling in front of the mound, her hands and wrists bloody from fighting the earth, speaking, shouting with a voice raw and whisper-raspy from shouting, and he could no longer make out the words.

  He was speechless with awe, and with pity, and with respect for what she had done.  “As you reap, so shall you sow.”  She had sown her youth with swords and glory, with blood and honor and pain, just as she had sown her armor into the fertile ground.  Only the gods knew now, what she would reap.

Gently, and moving slowly for his own benefit as well as hers, he dismounted from the stallion, and pulled her onto her hungry, restless horse.  He detached the travois, planning to come back for it later, and mounted his horse again, moving slower with every moment.  He told the stallion where to go, and held tight to the mare’s reigns.  They weren’t too far from the homestead, but Linathien, hacking her way into the earth, had traveled many miles during the bitter March night, and he could only pray that she would make it home without falling off her horse. 

When they arrived home, and he pulled her limp, unprotesting body from Sweetheart, leaving her in a heap.  As he took the horses to the barn for food, he thought he should have known better than to worry.  She was a soldier—she knew how to doze in the saddle.  When he was done with the horses he took her inside, and dressed her hands.  Dark was closing in on them, so he replenished the fire, then undressed her, and then himself, before he laid her into the bed, and fell in after her, half dead from exhaustion. 

Spring came.  The kitten grew, playing ‘catch the mouse’ about the house, and then about the woodpile, where it became less of a game and more of a skill.  Their lovemaking became furious, desperate, and then bittersweet.  Every touch of their bodies became farewell.  Curiously enough, the tomato plant grew, next to his later planted fellows in the garden box, in spite of the cold.  Linathien went out to it one day, to examine the fruit and see if it were sound.  The tomatoes were round, and firm, as ripe and juicy as summer fruit—too beautiful to be untouched.  She found below the pecked fruit several dead tomato worms, and three dead birds.  She said nothing but her eyes were eloquent and horrified.  They tore the plant out of the ground then and there, and burned it in the trash heap outside.

 From the homestead itself, they could see a strange hedge growing out at the perimeter.  Within a month is was tall, nearing five feet, and its rustling in the April wind had a metallic edge to it.  Now and then, when viewed from afar, a faint glint of metal seemed to dance off the darkly green, serrated leaves.  Linathien awoke once from her now-rare dreams, and heard their clatter in the distance, calling for blood.  Without thinking she told the hedge to hush, and looked in startlement at a sleeping Kyan when it did.  She was relieved.  It was a fierce and awful thing to have growing around her little peaceful farm.  She was happy it would heel when ordered. 

            One fine day, when the wind blew warmer and the air smelled of ploughed earth and plantings, Kyan saddled up the stallion, packing him with sweaters and blankets, and goat’s milk cheese, and a thousand regrets.  Linathien’s mare whinnied plaintively from the stable, but she would have a foal in a few months to look forward to.  Linathien had no such gift. 

            “Are you sure?”  Kyan asked, one last time, placing his hand protectively over her flat abdomen.  He had offered, and she had refused, but he worried, leaving her here, alone again. 

            Linathien looked sad, but her words were clear, and unstopped by rage or pain.  “I grew up alone, here.  I would not do that to a child, however much his father meant to me." 

            “It’s just as well.”  Kyan said, his green/hazel eyes far seeing.  The wizard had put on the weight he lost in healing, but his adulthood had come on him in the winter.  He looked gaunt and angular, and far more intense than he had, she would wager, sitting before his parent’s fire before a troop of soldiers had come on them in the dark. No longer did he seem younger than she, in spite of the six or eight years between them.  He stared ahead, in the process of checking the stallions strap one more time, and she smelled the now familiar wave of vanilla and poppies, and now patchouli.  A look of sadness crossed his face, of true farewell.  He had been planning, she realized with a faint shock, to return to her, right up to this very moment.

            “What do you mean?”  She asked, “It’s just as well?”

            He looked very young again, suddenly, and when he stared at her his eyes were bright and wounded.  “It’s just as well that I leave now.  Because he’s coming back for you.  You’ve had to face many dreadful decisions in your life, Linathien.  I would not be the cause of another one.”

            Confusion passed through her, and then a hidden joy unfurled its leaves, bathed in the slanting ray of hope that passed through her.  And then sadness.  And then remorse. 

She covered his hand, which was fumbling with the stirrup strap, and turned him to face her. 

            “I’ve had two lovers in my life, Kyan.  You make three.  You do not think I could spend this winter with you if I didn’t love you.  Don’t think that, please, ever.”

            He smiled, and the wounded look went away.  “Women—I went to school for six years to study wizardry. I should have studied women.”

            A rare, brilliant smile passed Linathien’s features.  A gift.  He took it as such, kissed her once, in the Spring, and was gone. 

            She was careful, in her planting that year, to think only good thoughts.  Sometimes she needed to dredge deeply, to being a child, and running lank limbed and wild through the grain in high summer.  Sitting on her father’s knee as a child, listening to his stories by the fire and feeling safe.  Sometimes, she was surprised by good thoughts from the military.  Swimming with her squad in a quiet pool they found during recon—no ambush tainted that memory of play.  She had learned to knit from an old man who had adopted her as a surrogate father—those hours had been sweet.  Trece, in the beginning, had been a friend, as she had never had one alone growing up.  Corin, awkward in his courtship, ardent and noble as only a young soldier could be, had been hers for nearly two years.  A bounty of riches in memory, and she had nearly forgotten in the wash of that bitter end. And even then, Colonel Brine had comforted her in the way only a gruff, seasoned soldier could.  There had been a week they had spent on leave the year after Corin’s death, a sudden, surprised thing that she was sure he had traded his life away in favors to arrange.  They had forgotten their rank then, and the army, and their respective pasts.  He had taken her to a wizard’s court showing, and she’d worn a gown that she still saved, deep in her saddlebags.  The flowers he’d given her had withered long ago, but that memory alone was sweeter than flowers.  They had returned, of course, and had spent a month looking at each other, bittersweetly, both too honorable to breach the carefully ingrained protocol of officer and underling.   In time the romance was only a hazy, miraculous dream, but it had been there. 

            She remembered simpler pleasures, then, as she planted.  The sunrises she’d seen on sentry that had taken her breath away.  The sound of children laughing, when they’d presented their dress uniforms and been on parade.  The feeling of the water when she bathed in the pool when it was warm and slid on her skin like silk.  Even the waterfall, with its diamond rainbow spilling over the face of the cliff provided solace for her thoughts as she went about her tasks of planting and weeding and tending.    And when she was saddest, closest to being bitter, she would carefully call up memories of Kyan, and the surprise of finding a lover in the snow.  She saved those memories, savored them, not wanting to wear them thin.

            The hedge continued to grow.  At night, as she sat knitting alone with only the kitten for company, the bitter memories surfaced and she could hear it, clattering in the distance.  It had been watered by the skies, but fed on her bitterness, and her anger, and nursed in her rancorous memories.  Her heart was good, her reason sound, so it had no rot at its core, but was itself sound and knotty.  She had ventured near it one day, to see if the glimmer of metal that seemed to flash fire every now and then were not a sword or helmet, pushed up by the branches themselves.  They were not.  The branches were serrated and sharpened, as were the leaves, which were shaped like shields, or thrust up between them like swords.  The metallic glint was from the leaves, and she did not venture her hands into the hedge to see if it were true metal, or only imagination.  The branches themselves were twisted and sinewy, like muscles straining in battle, or veins throbbing under skin. 

            When she went into town that June, she warned the horse trader, and all the others she knew, not to venture off the path or too near that hedge, and to think good thoughts should they need to venture that way.  The horse trader was happy to see her, eager to thank her for the preserves. 

            “The missus pulled them out in the deepest pit of January—for a moment there girl, it was like a bite of summer.  Better than the food itself.”  Linathien blushed under the praise, told him he was welcome, and resolved to bring him more in the fall.  The herb woman, the tavern girl, and the widow in the square thanked her as well.  After the misery of Kyan’s leaving, Linathien was surprised to find she had friends.  All asked about her winter, professing worry for a woman, out there all alone.  The herb woman only, nodded wisely, and smiled a wrinkled little old woman’s smile that spoke of closed in winters of her own.  As she made to leave, her traded purchases ready, she felt an ache unfamiliar in her cheeks, and realized that she had smiled all day.    The smile left her abruptly when she saw the soldier.

            He was still in armor, and one of her old battalion.  She’d trained him as a recruit, and would tentatively call him friend.  He waved and hailed her, but he looked troubled.

            “You live here, Major Thai?”  He asked baldly as he came near.

            “Aye.  But I’m a Major no longer, Corporal Alyn-- is it a bad thing to live here?”

            The young man looked around, seemed satisfied that he knew no one near, and spoke to her in an undertone.  “General Krieger is scouting for a stronghold this winter.  He’s got this place number one on his list.”

            Linathien blinked at him in shock.  Why her home?  She thought in anger, and from far off, she could hear the rattling of her hedge.  “But there’s folk here.”  She said, truly alarmed.  “The condotierri have their own wintering places—they always have.  We’ve never needed to displace farmers and merchants.  Why now?”

            The young man darted his eyes, looking truly afraid of talking to her now.  “Two reasons,” He all but whispered.  “It’s said that Krieger is looking to make himself a power, and he’s been building for the last two summers.  The nobles won’t house him anymore, because I don’t think he’s working for them anymore.  I think it’s likely he’ll even try and take a crown, but which one I’m not sure.”

            “Does it matter?”  She asked softly, bitterly, and to her surprise saw the young corporal nod in agreement.  He was far too young, wasn’t he, to be this cynical?  She hoped his bad master hadn’t spoiled him for a good one, because he’d be a fine soldier.  “What’s the other reason?”  She asked, not to be distracted by her thoughts.

            The young man looked straight at her.  “You.”

            She blinked.  “Me?”

            “He won’t say it, but you know he’s never…”

            “Liked me—or women in his army, for that matter?”

            “Aye— but its been getting worse.  He’s got this wizard on a leash, he has.  This winter, the fellow started spouting off, about a source of your strength, and the seeds of destruction, and the next thing you know we’re ordered to attack a wizard’s stronghold.  But it’s not a stronghold—it’s just a merchant’s home.  Fine, but simple, with simple folk.”  Alyn shuddered.  He had no stomach for it, she could tell, and again she ached for Kyan’s family.  “I tell you, Major, if I hadn’t signed on for three years, and given me word, I’d have left that night.”

            “You gave your word without knowing who you served, Alyn.”  Linathien said, her mind reeling with the implications of his words.  “There’s more merit in serving your conscience than in serving a madman.”  She patted the young man on the shoulder, and turned to leave.  As a last thought, she turned to him.  “If you ever need sanctuary, you and your mates, Alyn, ask the folk here—they’ll tell you where to find me.”  And then, unsure how to couch this next, “There’s a hedge on guard—you’ll know what I mean if you see it.  Think good thoughts, Alyn, and it will let you clear.”  And with that she was gone to her home. 

            When she had first come home, she had needed to clear a path through weeds and grass and meadows.  Now, she realized, there was a faint track, and in her frenzy, as she had planted her rage, she had left a gap in the hedge for the track to run through.  She hadn’t really thought of it, her loyalty to her land, the accessibility of her home, not just to her, but to others, until she found it threatened.  As she approached the cottage, she realized with a lump in her throat how much her land, her fields, her cottage meant to her now.  They were hers, by toil, by love—how could she let an army destroy them?  Put their horses in her little barn, cook her Nanny and Billy for food?  She gazed at the ripening grain in the sun, and pictured tents and mud, and her pool fouled with cooking pots and too many people, and she felt tears start at her eyes.  She had buried her sword in the frozen earth, but she had farmer’s tools—a spade and a plow—and she would fight to the death to keep her home.  She heard her hedge rattling about the perimeter and minded her angry thoughts.  She realized with a cold feeling down her spine, and bumps up and down her arms, that a spade and a plow were not her only weapons of defense. 

            She minded her thoughts, and calmed the hedge and continued walking, leading Sweetheart who no longer resented the burdens from town.  The horse had long ago learned that a trip to town meant sugar cubes, and from that moment on, had earned her name.  As she rounded the last gentle rise before the homestead, she saw a familiar mare tethered to the bar on her barn, and her footsteps began to quicken.  She looked closer, saw the figure she had hoped for, waited for, the curly brown hair, now streaked with gray, the stout, soldiers build, now clothed in homespun much like herself.  Without thinking of the mare or her burdens, she broke into a run her skirts swishing around her ankles like a girl.  Sweetheart followed doggedly behind her.

            He was who he had always been.  He was the youth who had sat at her father’s hearth and played Jacob’s ladder with his commander’s daughter. He was the quiet soldier, who had brought her father’s armor to her front door one spring, twelve years ago.  He was the commanding officer, who breathed confidence to those around him by a simple stalwart expression.  He was the gentle lover, who had consoled her after a loss too great to be named.  And he was no longer wearing armor, or a title, and he filled up her little cottage as easily as the night fire filled it with warmth and light. 

            They spoke of little things that afternoon.  He talked of his parent’s home, where she had visited as a raw recruit, and had taken comfort in the presence of the two kind farmers, and the flurry of younger children that had filled the place.  His next eldest brother took the homestead now, and his mother and father sat in the sun and crocheted blankets and whittled figures for children.

            “I brought you some.”  He told her, producing a pale rose colored blanket of quiet beauty, and two tiny figurines.  He was uncertain, as he sat on the stool by the stove and talked to her.  She blushed, turned her head, attended to the half-grown kitten that was making biscuits in her lap with dainty white paws.

            “That was kind, Tanden.”  She murmured.  “I have brought you nothing.”

            There was a silence, and he waited until she was looking at him, and could see his uncertainty and his daring to hope for her.  “You brought me home, have you not?”

            She smiled then, “Oh yes.”  Her expression faltered.  There was one last thing that needed to be said.  “There was a wizard, here, during the winter.”  She told him slowly, willing him to understand, because she wasn’t sure she could find words.

            He nodded.  “He the one who built the hedge?”

            “No—the hedge is mine—I sowed that with every action I ever took.  But he…” Oh please, she begged silently.  Please understand.

            “Is he coming back?”

            She shook her head, no.  “He knew you were coming.  He… he would not ask me to choose like that.  He was a young wizard… still noble and honorable, and all that’s good.”

            Tanden nodded, slowly.  “Then he’s the one that patched up the torn places in your soul for me, and made you whole.  I’ve nothing but thanks for him.”

            She felt tears starting at her eyes.  “Gods, Tanden Brine, you are a good man.”  And that was all that was said of the matter.

            He helped her with the rounds of chores that day, said hello to the goats and the bevy of chickens (there were now more than a dozen) and played ‘catch the mouse’ with the kitten, who stared worshipfully at this new and larger cat.  The mares sniffed each other a few times, and fell to munching hay like old cronies with much to say to each other.  He moved easily at the stove with her as she made dinner that night, and ate appreciatively.  He did not tell tales, or entertain her, but they talked of things, both large and small and she did not find it odd to laugh with him.  She had been laughing with him since she was a child.  After she retired to her room to wash in the basin she came out to the fire to brush her hair.  It was pale now, from the sun and she reveled in the way it moved between her fingers.  Her movement, she knew, became sleepy, sinuous when she brushed it down past her hips, and she moved that way consciously now. 

            She was not disappointed when he moved behind her, took up the brush and stroked her, spoke.  “I wanted to wait, court you, and woo you, but gods, Linathien Thai, your hair seduces me, and I cannot wait.”  They fell together rapaciously, laughing and greedy and sweet—sweeter than she remembered even with her young wizard—and they loved each other well.

            The next few months were happy and golden.  They ploughed and sowed and weeded and tended.  They reaped the first field, and began again.  Linathien, having help she had not had before, asked the horse trader for his windfalls, and was given leave to pick from apple, peach, and apricot trees.  She spent much of August and September canning, as Tanden relearned the craft of farming.  But there were two of them now—two to cook, and two to clean.  Two to tend the animals and two to mind the fields.  There were two in the evening, one to knit and sew, and one to whittle and build.  They sowed an extra two fields, and sold the Billy goat for stud services for the Nanny and a plough harness to comfort poor Sweetheart, who was growing larger steadily.  One day Tanden left the homestead, bearing his armor in a bushel at his back.  He returned leading a milk cow and her calf.  By the end of harvest time, there was another chair in the front room, and both had new cushions, ticked with fresh, sweet hay.  And even with all this industry, there were still moments, early in August when it was warm, later afternoons in September, as the evening air stole in cooler and cooler, when the two of them would lay still, on a pile of hay, staring at the quality of light in the world.  Still moments, wondrous moments, they encompassed the length and breadth of days, with the scent and the texture of warm hay and animals, of human sweat and hard labor—with happiness. 

            Their happiness came crashing abruptly down on them, one unseasonably warm day in October, when the horse trader and his family came clattering down the road in a cart bearing half their possessions.  They were breathless and terrified.

            “Soldiers,” the man panted.  “They’re taking over the town—kicking folk out, making themselves at home in people’s houses.  I woke up this morning and found my neighbor’s land a mass of tents and men—and a group of them walking up to me door.”  He stopped, and looked at her, pleadingly.  “Gods, lass, I know you left that life behind, but you and your man here, you’re the only ones in the valley that would have any idea what to do.”

            Linathien stared at him in shock, her next words making little sense to either the man, his wife, or even Tanden.  “The hedge then—it let you through.”

            The little man looked surprised.  “Not really—took a slice out of my gelding, there, and was going for my son.”  He pointed to the stripling boy, who she noticed now was nursing a cut on his hand.  “I told the family like you said—think good thoughts, I told them.  And the bloody thing seemed to leave us alone.  Why?”

            She nodded, thinking hard.  “Because it could save us all.”  She looked at Tanden, and he nodded, and she thought about the hedge, about Krieger and the damage he’d wrought on her neighbors, and her friends.  And the sound started, so loud it made the horse trader jump, and his wife comfort the three small ones at her knee.  It was the sound of rage, and pain, and fear and death.  And it was screaming for blood.  

 She gave orders then, accustomed to it.  The horse trader was to leave his family there, she’d set them up in the barn, or in a tent in the front, and he was to go to town and search out all whom wanted shelter.  There was a slight gap in the hedge, where it backed up against the cliff wall by the stream—she told him to lead them that way.  And she begged him to think of peace, and to make sure the others did so on their way back.  She was on the verge of ordering Tanden to town, to talk to the soldiers he knew, when she saw his raised eyebrows and blushed.

            “If I may, Major?”  He asked, faintly sardonic in tone.

            “Be my guest, Colonel.”  She replied, embarrassed. 

            He came to her, embraced her.  “It was a good idea, Linathien—I’ll leave at once—you would have done well in command.”

            “All I want to command for the rest of my life, is the cat, to get out of our cheese.”  She told him earnestly, and he nodded, and was gone. 

            The townsfolk began to slip into her corner of the valley that afternoon, in ones and twos, and the occasional family.  The widow and her eight children were one of the first families, and she put her to work, organizing the tents and the carts, and making sure everyone had food.  She had cans of preserves, still, from the last years canning, and these she spread among the people, as well as goat’s milk cheese, and bread baked from her own grain.  She assured each group, as she walked around the stubbled fields, that they would only be there for a day, maybe two.  At night Tanden returned, and with him, a sizeable number of deserters (Alyn in their number), looking sad and unhappy at leaving the military, but who had been even unhappier serving under Krieger.  There were ripples of dissent, as the soldiers approached, even with Tanden, who was known in town now, at their head. 

            Linathien, who the year before had not been able to speak sometimes, even to her horse, stood upon a hay wagon now and called people’s attention.  “I know they’re soldiers.”  She said, “But so was I—so was Tanden Brine.  They’re soldiers who didn’t want to put you out of your homes, or they wouldn’t be here.  Please, treat them well—we may need them.  But even if we don’t, it’s important,”  and she hesitated here, when she couldn’t dare hesitate, “It’s important, in the next few days, that you think only of peace.  The hedge—it’s angry, and hateful right now, and… and I need to control it.  I can’t do that, if you are angry and hateful too.”   She dismounted from the hay cart into Tanden’s arms, feeling her knees grow weak.  The hedge was screaming, as it had all day, clamoring for blood, for battle, for fierceness and carnage, and she’d been at it, all day as well, making it let the townsfolk, and the disowned soldiers through.  She was so weak from the battle she could hardly stand, and as Tanden carried her to their bed, she wondered at tomorrow, and the battle to come. 

            Krieger approached her property boundary the next morning, at the head of a still sizeable army, following in columns along the track she had forged on her own.  Beside him sat a broken man, dressed ostentatiously in purple robes, salivating over his front and giggling to himself.    The General’s bearing had not changed from ten years ago, when he’d raped poor Trece in his tent, nor from five, when he’d sent Corin to his death, nor from three, when he’d pitted a defenseless army against a stronghold of over a dozen wizards, fighting for their lives.  He was tall, and arrogant, cruel and coarse and ignorant as all his kind has been since the beginning of time.

 She and Tanden were standing at the gap in the hedge, watching him approach, and Tanden whispered “Prick.”  In her ear, making her smile, relaxing her with a soldiers humor, readying her for the battle to come. 

“Miss Thai.”  He said clearly from top of his war-horse, nodding towards her condescendingly.  “We need your homestead for the winter—I’m sure you’ll have no problem giving over.”

She smiled, a smile her young wizard would not have recognized.  It was feral and animal, all pointed teeth and lust for blood.  “You’re a funny man, General.”  She said, then spat, and spoke loudly for all in the column behind him.  “You, all of you, this is your only warning.  Once you come past this hedge, I can not vouch for your safety—and your lives are in danger here, make no mistake about that.  You need to leave this valley.  It’s not yours.  A noble didn’t pay it for, the people have settled here with their sweat and their tears.  You follow a false leader—he wants power only for himself, and he serves no one.  Every ideal you signed up to serve for he has violated, and now he is leading you to your death.”

There was silence, complete silence in the entire valley for a moment, before the General’s laugh boomed, inappropriate and profane in that vast, echoing silence.  “You’re the one with a sense of humor, girl.  You threaten me with what?  A bunch of sniveling farmers and some yellow deserters?  Have you lost your senses, child?  And you, Brine—you were a soldier.  Has this little…”  He was about to say something else, something biting and vicious and foul, when he was drowned out by the sound of the hedge, wailing as a banshee had never wailed, hungry for death and destruction. 

“Do you hear that, General?”  Linathien Thai asked, her voice not just louder than the hedge but amplified by it, until it echoed throughout the valley.  “That’s your own  planting you hear.  That’s my anger at your deeds, and my hatred for your soul, and my lust for your blood—I hacked it into the ground with my own two hands, and I watered it with my blood, and my tears of vengeance for all of those whom I loved and you wronged.  I fed it with the armor of soldiers dead at the hands of the incompetent madmen who led them, and I nursed it in my bitterness for the ideals that YOU killed.  Do you hear it screaming, General, do you hear the sound of your own destruction?”  The General heard, and looked uneasy, and through the ranks of men and women, she could see a similar unease pass.  The soldiers at the end of the column began to edge their way closer to the wood they had just passed through and those in command made no move to call them back. 

“It’s a plant—a bush.”  He said, sweating.  “Nothing more.” 

Linathien’s smile continued, sharper than ever, and merciless.  “Remember that wizard you tried to kill this winter, General?  He was here, you know.  Reap what you have sown, he hexed me, and this is what I have sown.  I sowed my hatreds and my vengeance here in the earth so they wouldn’t be next to my heart anymore, so they wouldn’t stop my throat and tear away my humanity.  And now they stand between you and my home.  Pass them if you dare.”  And with that she turned around and stalked back towards her house, and did not mount her mare, but led her away.  She was unmindful that Tanden and the horse trader, and the handful of others that knew and loved her followed at a respectful distance behind. 

When she’d gone beyond bowshot of the army, she heard the General’s strangled order to charge through the hedge, and she laughed in exultation.  As she stood, her back still towards the charging army, she screamed a soldiers bloodcurdling yell for battle, and the hedge took up the cry, rattling and clanging and deafening all who stood in the valley.  The frenzied yell was followed by the death screams of the soldiers who rushed the hedge, only to find their armor cut by leaves sharper than swords and knives, and their flesh rent by thorns as deep as a woman’s heart.  The cries of the hedge and the cries of the soldiers rent the air, until all at the homestead and all behind the slight woman with the pale hair sunk to their knees, holding their ears in pain.  And still, through it all, Linathien stood, her back to the carnage, shrieking and wailing her rage and her pain, until her throat was raw, and only sobs came out.  At last, like the snapping of a puppet’s string, the fire went out of her, and she turned around to see what she had wrought. 

Not a soldier who had charged the hedge remained, including the General, and his pet wizard, and all who followed him with a whole heart.  Later, by story and eyewitness report, they would find that nearly half the army had fled after the first deaths, horrible to behold, had been witnessed. But for that moment, what they saw was even more terrible to the eye.  Nothing but blood and silence stood in testimony to the army that had been there.  The blood covered every leaf and every serrated thorn with gore, but the soldiers, bones, armor and all, and been consumed by the hedge, which now stood more than eight foot tall, where it had been merely five before.  And that was all.  The blood and the silent, smirking, satiated abomination of bloodlust were all that marked the valley of the titanic struggle that occurred therein.

When Linathien beheld all that she had done, she fell to the ground in a dead faint, from which she did not recover for nearly two days.  As she slept like the dead, in the bed she had shared with two men who held her heart, her world returned to normal.             The townsfolk returned to their homes, to clean up and check their food stores for winter, all of which remained relatively unprofaned, due to the army’s short stay.  They were grateful, all of them, and concerned about Linathien.  He promised that as soon as she was able, they would go to town to reassure them.  To a man and woman, they promised a meal and good company, whenever the two would visit.  It was all the thanks plain country folk would give, and all he believed she’d want.  The deserters took the supplies gratefully donated by the townsfolk and marched to the city of the nearest noble, to offer themselves as a guard or an army, whichever the noble needed most.  The horse trader lingered, and helped Tanden clean up the stubble field and made sure that Linathien’s preserves were not too low to make it through the winter.  It turned out that they were far from depleted, and as Tanden wandered the now empty cottage and garden, he had cause to laugh, not bitterly, at all those preserves, put away by one woman.  And that, not the least of what she'd wrought.  Not long after the horse trader left, an unexpected rain broke.  It rained for a day and a night, and in the morning, the blood was washed from the serrated leaves and sword like thorns of the hedge, and even from the ground beneath it. 

And in the mean time, Tanden Brine cleaned up his stubble field from the rush of people on it, fed the animals he had come to love, and looked in periodically on the woman he had loved since she was a child.  She didn’t stir during her long sleep, and he was not sure if the fueling the anger for the hedge had simply exhausted her, or if she was hiding from what she had done.

He had his answer when she awoke on the second morning, sobbing for all she was worth.  The hedge stayed strangely quiet as she wept against his chest, never speaking, but weeping as though she had lost herself.  Eventually she found herself again, quieted, hiccuping only occasionally, and begun to inquire about every day things.  Had he left cream for the cat?  Had he cleaned up the field?  Did they have enough stores to last them the winter?  He answered yes to all questions, and then she stilled, and they sat for a moment, looking at each other in the natural quiet of an early morning.

“What now, Linathien Thai?”  He asked, seriously, meaning many, many things.

She thought for moment, told him, “We finish my canning, give some to the neighbors.  We make love all winter, raise a family, you and I.  We sow and reap, as farmers have done for years and years and years.”  A slow smile broke his plain-man’s features, and he nodded agreement.  “But Tanden,” she added seriously, “We must be very careful, in all that we plant, both children and grain, to think good thoughts.”

He caught his breath, nodded, smiled again.  The new day began.