For a time, I indulged myself and took a seat at one of the lesser hearths to hear a minstrel recite a traditional Winterfest tale. When I went seeking some chilled cider, a young woman who had had too much to drink caught me by the arm and demanded that I dance the next measure with her. She could not have been more than twenty, and to me she suddenly seemed a foolish child in a dangerous place. I wondered where her parents were and how they could leave her drunken and alone in the midst of the festival.
But I danced with her, one of the old partner-dances, and despite my fancy toes and lifted heels managed to keep to the steps and mark the time correctly. It was a merry dance, and she was a pretty girl with dark curls and brown eyes and layers upon layers of skirts, all in shades of blue. Yet by the end of the dance I was filled to brimming with loneliness and a deep sadness for all the years that were now behind me. I thanked her, escorted her to a seat near the hearth, and then slipped away. My Winterfest eve, I thought, was over, and I suddenly missed a little hand in mine and big blue eyes looking up at me. For the first time in my life, I wished my little girl had the Skill so that I could reach out to her across the snowy distance and assure her that I loved her and missed her.
As I sought my room, I knew that Chade would be as good as his word. Doubtless a messenger was already in the saddle on his way to Withywoods, my parcel and note in his pack. Yet it would be days before she received it and knew that I had thought of her in the midst of the festivities. Why had I never accepted Chade’s offer to give me a Skilled apprentice at Withywoods, one who could, in my absence, relay news and messages from there? It would have still been a poor substitute for holding my child in my arms and whirling her in a dance at midnight, but it would have been something.
Bee, I love you, I Skilled out, as if somehow that errant thought could reach her. I felt the soft brush of Nettle’s and Chade’s shared thought: I’d had as much drink as was good for me. And perhaps I had, for I Skilled to them, I miss her so.
Neither one had a reply to that, so I bade them good night.
Chapter Three
The Taking of Bee
Sometimes, it is true, a great leader arises who by virtue of charisma persuades others to follow him into a path that leads to greater good. Some would have you believe that to create great and powerful change, one must be that leader.
The truth is that dozens, hundreds, thousands of people have conspired to bring the leader to that moment. The midwife who delivered his grandmother is as essential to that change as is the man who shod his horse so that he might ride forth to rally his followers. The absence of any one of those people can tumble the leader from power as swiftly as an arrow through his chest.
Thus, to effect change does not demand military might nor the ruthlessness of murder. Nor must one be prescient. Gifted with the records of hundreds of prescient Whites, anyone can become a Catalyst. Anyone can precipitate the tiny change that tumbles one man from power and boosts another into his place. This is the change that hundreds of Servants before you have made possible. We are no longer dependent on a single White Prophet to find a better path for the world. It is now within the power of the Servants to smooth the path we all seek to follow.
Snow was falling, white stars cascading down from the black sky. I was on my back, staring up at the night. The cold white flakes melting on my face had woken me. Not from sleep, I thought. Not from rest, but from a peculiar stillness. I sat up slowly, feeling giddy and sick.
I had been hearing the sounds and smelling the smells for some time. In my dazed state, the roasting meat of Winterfest had been enticing, and the crackling sound of the huge logs in the grand hearth in the Great Hall. A minstrel was tuning some sea-pipes, the deepest-voiced of traditional wind instruments.
But now I was awake and I stared in horror. This was no celebration of Winterfest eve. This was the opposite of a gathering to drive darkness from our homes. This was a wallowing in destruction. The stables were burning. The charring meat was dead horses and men. The long, low tones that had seemed to be the slow waking of musical instruments were the confused moaning of the folk of Withywoods.
My folk.
I rubbed my eyes, wondering what had happened. My hands were heavy and floppy, with no strength. They were stuffed into immense fur mittens. Or were they huge white furry paws? Not mine?
A jolt. Was I me? Was I someone else, thinking my thoughts? I shivered all over. “I’m Bee,” I whispered to myself. “I’m Bee Farseer. Who has attacked my home? And how came I to be here?”
I was bundled warmly against the cold, enthroned like a queen in the bed of an open sleigh I did not recognize. It was a marvelous sleigh. Two white horses in red-and-silver harness waited stoically to pull it. To either side of the driver’s seat, cleverly wrought iron hangers held lanterns with glass sides and worked iron scrolls as decorations. They illuminated the cushioned seat for the driver and a passenger, and the gracefully curved edges of the sleigh’s bed. I reached out, thinking to run my hand over the finely polished wood. I could not. I was rolled and wrapped and weighted with blankets and furs that bound my sleepy body as effectively as knotted ropes. The sleigh was drawn up at the edge of the carriageway that served the once-grand doors of Withywoods. Those doors were caved in now, broken and useless.
I shook my head, trying to clear my mind of cobwebs. I should be doing something! I needed to do something, but my body felt heavy and soft, like bags of wet laundry. I could not remember how I had been returned to Withywoods, let alone dressed in a heavy fur robe and bundled into a sleigh. As if I were backtracking my day, trying to find a lost glove, I set what I could remember in order. I’d been in the schoolroom with the other children. Steward Revel, dying as he warned us to run. I’d hidden the other children in the secret passage in the walls of Withywoods, only to have the door closed to me. Fleeing with Perseverance. He’d been shot. I’d been captured. And I had been so happy to be captured. I recalled no more than that. But somehow I’d been brought back to Withywoods, buttoned into a heavy fur coat, and swaddled into a dozen blankets. And now I was here, in a sleigh, watching my stables burn.
I turned my eyes away from the leaping orange flames of the burning stable and looked toward the manor. People, all the people I had known my whole life, were gathered in front of the tall doors of Withywoods. They weren’t dressed for the snow. They wore the clothes they had donned that morning for the day’s work inside the manor. They huddled together, hugging themselves or clinging to one another for warmth. I saw several shorter figures and finally my blurry vision made out that they were the children I had earlier concealed. Against my stern admonition, they had come out and betrayed themselves. My slow thoughts put together the burning stable and the hidden children. Perhaps they had been wise to come out. Perhaps the raiders would burn the house next.
The raiders. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, fighting for clarity of vision and thought.
This attack made no sense to me. We had no enemies that I knew of. We were far inland in the duchy of Buck, and the Six Duchies were not at war with anyone. Yet these foreigners had come and attacked us. They had battered their way into our halls.