Wythe had not meant to confide in Tuomo so soon, but as they sat awake beside the fire, alone in the peaceful forest, she had felt more than one spirit urging her. As she pulled her blankets up around her shoulders and prayed for tranquil sleep and useful dreams she realized that she was going to have to depend on Tuomo – the people would have to depend on him, and her, and all their shamans.
She had been unable to answer Tuomo’s question, not because she distrusted Renhold, but because she was unsure of his ability to follow his own intentions. The civil war had ended ten years ago with the appearance of reconciliation. There had been no executions for treason, though Lord Valmur had been convicted posthumously, and would have been sentenced to death if he had been taken alive. But all of his supporters were pardoned. They had retained their seats on the Council of Lords, though all those on the privy council had been replaced by loyalists. Still the traditionalist lords had their wealth, and their own armies, and they had the same convictions that had inspired them to follow Valmur. Wythe knew enough of Vaaselian politics to know that if they saw an opportunity to undermine Prince Renhold’s authority, they would do it. If Pieter Sevren were allowed to spread his knowledge of the fields of fire, there would be others of his kind who would want to see them too, and with the same intentions. The people would have to defend their sacred places – Irjo would take up arms, and persuade others to do so – and war would come to Vaaseli again, and certainly utter destruction for the Telmi. The Raven were certainly both fierce and skilled enough to have some success in arms against even armored southerners – but they would be outnumbered, even if only the private armies of a few traditionalist lords should march against them. Renhold would have to oppose them with his own forces to prevent it – and he hated war as much as she did.
Wythe realized that her thoughts were running away with her. She would never have a worthwhile sleep if she continued in this vein. Their survival would not be insured by arms and fighting, but by the ancient powers entrusted to the shamans. That was how they had prevailed before. It was the only way to prevail again and avoid bloodshed. Wythe turned to her old service exercises for calming and clearing her mind, but paired them with invocations to her nearest spirits – the raven and the marten, and the guide of all her people, brother deer. And before she was able to notice, she was sleeping.
There was some grumbling from Tuomo’s brothers when he began to wake them before dawn, but when Wythe woke to hear it she cautioned them sternly at once – in thought only, to avoid embarrassment for Tuomo, but the older boys took notice immediately. Wythe lay still awhile after that, to remember what she had dreamed. Most of it seemed to be merely past events revisited – but strangely old events. There was a ship sailing on a grey sea, and Wythe had not been on shipboard nor thought of sailing for five years. And there were the battlements of Essin castle, and the city below, and a throng of townspeople before its gates – like the crowd that had greeted her and Mathis when they returned with Aulia and Maaki and Saaro after the defeat of Valmur. Wythe had a hard time remembering exactly where she was in these visions – observing or participating? There was no specific occurrence in any of it that she could identify either. Only a ship sailing, and a crowd gathering.
But there was a horse. That was the other thing – a horse that had come up out of the water and had run, streaming with sea-foam, directly to her. It had stopped and stood in front of her, shaking its head, almost beckoning – yes, beckoning – and she had gone to it, and was upon its back without knowing how she mounted. Before the horse she had been worried and frightened – but once upon its back, she felt safe.
This would be something to think about. Wythe had never communicated in any way with a horse spirit. Horses were not of much importance to the people, though every clan had some. Neither was the horse a totem of any clan, nor did Wythe know of any individual who had its spirit. But of course there was a spirit of the horse – every living creature, even every plant, had its own spirit, and every spirit had its wisdom. When they returned to the clans, and brought the fire to the Owl, she would ask Oumua.
After checking their snares Tuomo’s brothers rode with him and Wythe as far as the northern fringe of the forest, but from there the shaman and her apprentice must go alone, and on foot, bringing only the little fire-box and Tuomo’s herb satchel with them. As they went through the last reaches of the wood Tuomo gathered wood and mosses for the last hearth from their old fire, and to feed the first spark of the new one. Among the rocks Wythe knew they would find hot springs where they both must bathe, before the final approach to the fires themselves. As they went they kept silence, even of any thoughts that might have passed between them, but Wythe felt certain that Tuomo was thinking of what she had told him the night before, even as she was. It was best that they should think of it, she reflected. The fires of ritual that would be kindled from today’s flame were certain to be called on for prophecy in the year to come, and she was also certain that the knowledge the people needed most would have to do with Pieter Sevren.
But Wythe made every effort to keep from dwelling on Vaaselian politics, instead turning her mind to the lives of her people, and how to preserve them, just as they had always known them. The movements of the deer from pasture to pasture, the signs in the forest of where to find creatures for food and for clothing, the deep lakes and swift rivers where the fish gathered, the places where herbs, nuts, rice, and berries could be harvested, the shapes of the clouds and the shifts in the wind that signaled the weather, the stories and songs repeated at firesides and during long miles of migration. And the pattern of the sun and the moon in their courses, the slow shift of the stars through the night, through the seasons, the curtain of light in the sky to the north, that came when the geese departed, and faded with their return. Everything moved, always, departing and returning, in the sky, from the sky, from under the earth and over its surface. And the people moved with it, and in it – departing, returning. Nothing could stop the flow of that movement, nothing could stop the movement of life – and the people would live, as long as they remembered.
The sun was well up in the sky by the time they reached the rock shelves, ranked like steps for a giant down to the salt marshes. The hot springs were easy to find, both by the clouds of steam they sent up into the cool morning air and by the sulfurous smell they emitted. There were at least a dozen separate pools, most screened from one another by rocks, and Tuomo and Wythe each chose one to bathe in, and parted company for the duration of the invocations required of them at this point in their journey. The place itself must be called on now, so that they might request entry, and Wythe was careful to include an apology for the intrusion of the southerners during the winter as she disrobed and slowly entered the waters. The water was very hot, but not too hot to bear, and the smell seemed to dwindle after a few minutes. Wythe watched the surface of the pool, which bubbled slightly in places, and focused her thoughts on the need to protect her people, reciting the names of each clan’s spirit in their order, beginning with the fish of the streams and lakes, then the birds, then the fur-bearing animals – and ending with the mother and father of all their lives, the sturdy northern deer.
When the pair finished their prayers they dressed again in their deerskin clothing, leaving their boots together by the side of Tuomo’s pool. Tuomo took up his satchel, removed a small vial from it, and filled it with the sulfurous water, and Wythe took up the wood he had gathered. They went forward in silence, following the great steps down toward the marshes.
The sea, the Uttermost Sea, as Vaaselian maps labeled it, stretched before them, still crowded with blocks of blue-white ice, but showing clear and gray in great patches. Already there were some geese and sea-birds gathering in the marshes. Even from a distance their calls could be heard, and their movements observed, as they began their courtships before nesting. A few individual geese stood sentinel, still as statues, except for the occasional turning of their heads on their long necks as they watched for danger, and Wythe felt moved to call on their spirits. “Keep good watch, my brothers.”
The fields of the fire were apparent first by their smell also. Not as pungent as the sulfurous pools, but of the same nature – a smell of the bones and blood of the earth – a smell of the earth’s marrow. Wythe and Tuomo saw the black smears of oil first – like impossibly still waters, some smaller and some larger than the hot springs they’d bathed in. Wythe put a hand on her companion’s shoulder, and when he glanced at her she nodded. Here was the place to build their fire.
While Tuomo laid the kindling, Wythe called upon the fire’s spirit. In a way it was the first spirit she had ever communicated with, when she was an infant, before she knew anything of the Telmi, or shamans, or powers outside of her own mind, or the world outside of her family. The memory of her experience as a baby had unlocked her powers when she approached womanhood: her first entirely conscious act of telekinesis had been to lift a burning brand from a campfire, and that memory came back to her with a living force now, but she suppressed it – it was bound too closely to Timu and the past, and she felt she must concentrate on the future.
Now the fire was laid, and must be kindled. Tuomo opened the box with last year’s fire nestled in its mosses, and lifted the embers with his thoughts, in three separate fragments, one for sky, one for earth, one for water, transporting them slowly to the sticks and chips of lichen. He and Wythe both leaned over the fire and fed the embers with their breath, until flames sprang to life. Then, while Wythe added fuel to the fire, Tuomo extracted his herb packets from the satchel, chose those he needed, and poured them carefully into the fire box. With his fingers he gently mingled the herbs with the remnants of charred moss, then added the still-warm water from its vial, then placed the box cautiously in the flames.
Now they both prayed for visions.
The potion in the box slowly heated, and fragrant steam began to rise from it. Wythe and Tuomo bent over it, inhaling the bittersweet moisture. When the surface of the liquid began to show small bubbles, Wythe wrapped her hand in the hem of her dress, and Tuomo pulled his sleeve down over his fingers, and cautiously they lifted the box from the fire, already collapsing into embers, and placed it on the smooth rock between them. The metal of the box soon cooled in the morning breeze, and Wythe took the first sip of the potion, then they drank slowly of it in turn. The fragments of herbs and moss were coarse and bitter, and the liquid was bitter also, but the heat of the potion was soothing to their throats, dry from their complete fast since the night before, and the warmth felt satisfying to their empty stomachs. When Tuomo had drained the last drop of the liquid, he scraped the dregs of herbs and moss into Wythe’s cupped hand, and she then used her thoughts to transport it into the embers of the fire, where it sizzled and steamed, finally drying enough to burn before the last heat of flame was entirely smothered.
The old fire would smolder until it died, and the time had come to collect the new flame. The potion would spread its effects through their bodies slowly, and bring the visions to their minds when the new fire for the people had been kindled.
Tuomo chose a branch from their fuel supply and dipped it in a nearby oil pool until its end was well-coated, then they set off in search of the fire, a little further down the rock shelves, near where they ended in the soft earth of the lowlands. The flames were not easy to see in the light of late morning, but they both spotted a group of three flares, shaded a little by an outcropping of rock, and Tuomo held the branch to one of them. The black oil on the wood’s surface caught fire quickly, and dark pungent smoke writhed into the air with the flames. Wythe took the torch from her apprentice’s hand, and they returned to their hearth place, for the birth of the fire that would light the new year’s rituals.
Tuomo worked quickly to lay a fresh fire, while Wythe held the torch and began the chant of birthing. It was the same chant she had sung and would sing at the coming of all new life in the clan, both of humans and deer, but this time sung for the fire of life itself, for its new incarnation, bringing it forth from spirit to flesh. The words wove a new thread into the life of the people, already stretched back into time’s beginning, drawing it forward into the future – it would soon draw Wythe’s mind and Tuomo’s along with it.
The fire was laid, and now Wythe touched the torch to its mound of tinder. When the flames caught, she placed the still burning brand on one side of the fire, and Tuomo laid two slim, straight branches across its center, crossing them squarely. Shaman and apprentice were now kneeling on either side of the fire, and they looked at each other, in each other’s eyes, for the first time that morning.
Wythe saw in Tuomo’s smooth boyish face the bright black eye of the raven and the deep peaceful eye of the deer, somehow mingling with his own clear grey eyes, and she knew that in hers he could see the marten, and the deer, as well as her own eyes, naturally deer-like. They both felt the pull of the visions, like a gale sucking up their breath and swirling around them, and their joined minds lifted, free of their bodies.
The first time Wythe had experienced the effects of a Telmi potion, she had no knowledge of the spirits, except for vague, instinctive knowledge, and she had had no clear visions, only sensations – sensations of flying, of falling – sensations of her body intensified, so that she felt her hair growing and the pores of her skin breathing. The nearest she had come to a shaman’s experience, that first time, sheltering in Timu’s arms after her first ritual, was a brief incarnation as the marten, relying on that creature’s senses and instincts. And her dreams, later that night, had been of both prophecy and discernment. But now she knew what to ask and look for, and she knew that Tuomo, though this was his first full pursuit of the wisdom of visions, also had the knowledge he needed.
Now their joined minds ascended above the fields of the fire, above the marshes, and they could see the land of their people spread below them, the plains and hills unfolding to the woods and lakes to the east, and the outlying ridges of the Tolmyn to the south. For Wythe it recalled the service method of the mind-cast, but was at once more vivid and more general – her mind was not traveling across the landscape of northern Vaaseli – it was seeing it in one great vision, one huge intake of knowledge, like a deep breath of cold air. At the same time – which was not a time at all – she could discern individual lives, individual spirits – of beasts and people – or discern them in their relationships, a mosaic of heartbeats and breathing and thought and instinct.
Wythe felt Tuomo’s mind moving with hers, thoughts darting and streaming to focus on this spirit or that, or pulling back and floating, to absorb the whole fabric of life in the north. She felt his mind tugging on hers a little too, trying to move their perceptions even farther, but she restrained him. “Now we must ask our questions – seek useful knowledge.”
Tuomo focused his thought energy immediately, almost to Wythe’s delight. He was looking among the minds of his brothers where they were camped with Irjo and the herd – quite far to the north now. Wythe felt she could leave him there, and sent her own thoughts to the southern reach of their vision, scanning the land near the river that bordered the Toler road – just to check on the southerners – yes, they were approaching the first Toler outpost – another day’s journey – and their memories were still well cloaked, thoroughly clouded.
Out of this time – there was the past, but that was not necessary, not for this vision – what moved in the land in the future?
The meadow grasses waved in the wind, becoming greener, and growing, as night and day swept across the face of the plain, night becoming ever briefer, until it was only a slight fading and dimming. There were the great fires of Midsummer, the drums and the dancing, in the most northerly pastures. Here in the north all was as it should be. But the south – Wythe knew she must look there. The river, the road – three horsemen riding north – Farin – a warning.
Wythe’s mind snapped back to the sacred lands – still in the white light of midsummer, but haunted by shadow – a dark cloud of thought, threatening and greedy – and then, with a suddenness quicker than a breath or an eye blink, wiped bright and clean again, even brighter – even safer. Safe – the lands were safe – and the power that wiped away the threat – it had come from her spirit.
Somehow, a great power that she had never known had been drawn from her, had come from her. And the lands, the people – they were safe.
“Sister! Sister! There is trouble – I do not know what it is – trouble among our brothers – ”
“Yes, Tuomo – I know it.” Wythe felt curiously resigned. There was trouble among the people, though they were safe – she was sure they were safe. There was trouble in her spirit too, but there was something else – was it hope? Was it something even better than safety?
“Come back with me, Tuomo. Come back with me.”
They drew their thoughts together, and back to the midday in spring where they had begun, and lingered for awhile in the realm of the visions, the peace of the land and the people. And then Wythe drew their perceptions back to their bodies.
The physical effects of the potion would linger for several hours, mostly as great gulping breaths and yawns, and a persistent glimmering on the edges of vision. And both Wythe and Tuomo would find laughter easy, and sorrow impossible – but there would still be the trouble they had both foreseen for their people.
As the sun traveled westward they sat at the new fire and fed it and banked the embers until they formed a dense glowing mass that could survive in the fire box on the journey back to the clans. Tuomo gathered the embers with his thoughts and nestled them in their bed of moss. Wythe knew that the potion’s effects were wearing off when she heard her stomach grumble, and Tuomo’s answer it. They smiled a little foolishly at each other, then Tuomo rearranged the contents of his satchel while Wythe scattered the remaining ashes of the fire gingerly with her bare foot. They retrieved their boots and set off for the forest, still reluctant to break the silent peace they had enjoyed since the end of their visions.
It was Tuomo’s thought that was the first to disturb the tranquility they clung to. They were among the trees now, and the shadows of afternoon were lengthening, and the happy afterglow of the visions was receding. “Sister, in the future my brothers were fighting. They were quarrelling with each other, and my father was angry. And they turned to me to end their quarrel. Why would they turn to me?”
“Tuomo, I cannot answer you yet. I think that you may know the answer yourself, if you wait for it to emerge. Remember patience. I learned something I don’t understand also – but I know I will need to let full knowledge unfold in its own time. There will be dreams, Tuomo, and more visions – there will be the Midsummer rituals. We will have more answers, and come to understand the ones we received today.” Wythe folded Tuomo’s restless thoughts in her own, to soothe them – she still felt the strange resignation that had come in their vision, and she felt that Tuomo would need it – he would need any peace she might be able to give him. She put her arm around his shoulders, and was gratified at his reaction – first he shrugged a little, then he put his own arm around her waist, and chuckled.
“I think I smell Turpu’s cooking,” he said. “For once I think I will enjoy it.”
