Ishta looked at Garander, who turned up an empty palm. “No,” he admitted. “But wasn’t this Northern land during the war? Shouldn’t there be mizagars? You always warned us about them.”
Grondar frowned. “Maybe the gods and wizards killed them all.”
“Or maybe surviving shatra who don’t want to restart the war are holding them back.”
“And maybe they all flew away to the third moon. We don’t know what happened to them, and I’m not going to take a shatra’s word for it.”
“So what are you going to do about Tesk?”
Grondar hesitated, then looked out the window at the snow piling up on the barn roof.
“Nothing,” he said. “At least for now. I don’t know how to catch it, and if I tried it would probably kill me. Even if it didn’t want to-it’s not human, and it probably can’t always control its own actions. According to the stories I heard during the war, sometimes the demon takes over when it needs to fight; that’s part of why we needed wizards or dragons to fight them, the demon part is more ferocious than anything that belongs in the World. So I’m not about to go after it, and with this snow I’ll know if either of you goes into the woods after it, so you won’t go warn it, either. When the weather lets up and we’ve all had time to think about it, maybe I’ll send word to the baron. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s best left alone. I don’t know. And neither do you-I don’t care how much fun you had playing with it, it’s dangerous, and you need to stay away from it!”
“That’s right,” their mother said, clearly upset. “You stay away from that thing! And Ishta, hold still, unless you want me to stab you with this pin.”
Ishta stamped her foot, then straightened up and froze into position.
Garander looked at her for a moment, then at his father, then at the kitchen. “I’m going to get lunch,” he said.
“You’ll stay out of the woods?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then let me give you a hand with the food.”
Father and son headed for the kitchen.
Chapter Nine
The snow stopped around mid-afternoon, leaving about a foot on the ground. Grondar and Garander slogged through it to the barn, where they checked on the livestock, then found shovels and began clearing paths between the various outbuildings. By suppertime they were both chilled to the bone and thoroughly exhausted.
As they worked Garander saw his father staring at the snow-covered woods, and studying the snow for tracks. He was obviously not convinced Tesk would remain safely hidden away. For his own part Garander thought the shatra was probably just fine where he was, out in the forest somewhere, and would not intrude where he wasn’t wanted. He wondered whether Tesk even felt the cold; demons were supposed to be immune to heat and cold, weren’t they?
By the time they finally went inside for supper and peeled off their sodden coats Garander was too tired to care what Tesk was doing. He was much more interested in eating the stew his mother had prepared, and then collapsing into bed.
The next day was mostly sunny, but cold; not much of the snow melted, and the glare off the white surface made any outdoor activity unpleasant. Accordingly, Grondar and his wife and children mostly stayed inside, huddled around the hearth, once the necessary chores were done.
At first they were largely silent, talking only about the minutia of their lives-how much firewood was stocked in the shed, what vegetables were in the bins, whether they had enough thread to do all the sewing Shella of the Green Eyes had planned, and so on. Shella the Younger asked Garander a few questions about what he had seen women wearing in Varag.
But then, out of nowhere, Grondar asked Ishta, “What did the shatra tell you about mizagars?”
“What?” She looked at her father, startled.
“You said the shatra told you things, and that there are mizagars in the forest. What did it tell you about mizagars?”
“Oh.” Ishta thought for a second, then answered, “Well, he said they had been created by Northern sorcery three or four hundred years ago to watch border areas where the Empire didn’t want to bother putting soldiers…”
Garander listened with interest. Now that Ishta was no longer trying to keep anything secret, and seemed to be over her anger at the loss of her talisman, she seemed eager to talk about Tesk, and to repeat everything he had told her over the past few months-not just about mizagars, but about trees and moss and squirrels and birds’ nests and spiders and leaf mold and a hundred other things.
It occurred to him, as he listened, that Tesk knew as much about the forest as Grondar knew about farming, and Ishta had been far more interested in learning it than she ever had been in what her father had tried to teach her.
But then, she had always loved the woods, even before she knew anyone was living out there. Garander wondered whether there was some way she might make a living in the forest when she grew up; he had heard old stories that mentioned woodcutters and hunters, but he did not know of any such people in the present day. Despite the frequent parental warnings of danger, he had never seen any game bigger than a rabbit in the woods. He didn’t really see how anyone could make a full-time job out of hunting rabbits. If anyone wanted that many rabbits it was easy enough to raise them on a farm, as old Elkan did.
Perhaps there was some other occupation that would suit her interest in the wilderness.
After supper, as the family gathered around the hearth again, Ishta was tired of talking, but now Grondar was the one who seemed eager to speak. Instead of talking about the farm as he usually did, though, he talked about his days in the Ethsharitic army during the Great War. He had served seven years in the Central Command under General Anaran, but he had never actually met the legendary war leader. He had never seen any shatra, or any mizagars, either. He had seen dragons, but only from a safe distance-a mile or two. He had seen three wizards, but had never spoken to any of them. His company had had a witch to look after their health, but he had never seen her do any magic other than healing. He knew there were wonderful stories about the war, about gods and heroes and monsters, battles and magic, stratagems and surprises, but most of what he remembered was mud and cold and hunger, and never knowing where the enemy was or what was going on. He had been in four small battles and two or three skirmishes too small to qualify, and had seen perhaps thirty of his fellow soldiers die-mostly from arrows or sorcery, not the sort of close-in sword fight that the stories talked about. Sometimes he didn’t know how men had died; he saw them lying on the ground, covered in mud and blood, and didn’t have time to worry about it. He had never been stuck with the unpleasant duty of hauling the bodies to the pyres, though he had helped build the pyres a few times.
He described the smell of a battlefield after the fighting was over, the stink of the dead. He talked about the smell of the pyres, and the smoke staining the sky.
Over the years Garander had heard his father tell a few war stories, but never like this.
Finally, during a brief pause in the flood of memories, Garander’s mother asked, “Why are you telling us this all of a sudden?”
“The shatra,” Grondar replied. “It’s brought the war back.”
“No, he hasn’t,” Ishta said. “The war’s still over. Tesk doesn’t want it back.”
Grondar shook his head. “It’s not like that. It’s…” He took a deep breath and held it for a moment, then let it out. “My life is in two parts,” he said. “There’s the war, and there’s after the war. They’re two different lives, in two different worlds. Shatra are from the war. If there are still shatra out there, then there might be other things I thought were gone-officers and orders and marching and killing, wizards and dragons, magic and monsters, all those things I never want to see again. And the things I thought I would keep forever, maybe I don’t get to keep them-the farm, and my family, and my friends. During the war I never got to stay in one place for very long; we would have to move because the front was moving, or because we were needed somewhere, or because it wasn’t safe anymore where we had been. Whole villages would grow up in a month when an army camped somewhere, when everyone came to support the army, and whole villages would disappear overnight when the Northerners showed up.”