C. J. Cherryh
The Goblin Mirror
1
A WITCH WIND, COUNTRY FOLK CALLED THE SUDDEN STORM that plunged Maggiar from autumn into winter, that stripped the colored leaves from forest and orchard all in a night. Behind it came an ice wind, edged with sleet and bitter cold— but that same winter brought a wealth of game the like of which the old folk had never seen. Hunters trekked home over the drifts with their pack ponies laden with meat and furs to keep old and young well-fed and warm; and with ample stock besides for trade to the west: deer and badger skins, marten and fox and ermine, from a plenitude of game that never seemed diminished. By midwinter deer had stripped the forest branches low enough to reach, foxes raided middens and storehouses, and the hunters could not shoot or trap them fast enough. Deer took to farmers' fruit trees. Boar rooted after winter stores, and marten and ermine hunted right up under the porches of Maggiar's isolated steadings. The old folk said: It was never like this before.
Behind the deer and the marten came the wolves, well-fed, content, inclined to lie about at first, but more and more of their voices sang in the mountain heights, songs cold and keen as the winter wind, that set folk looking anxiously toward the shutters at night and asking themselves was the door latch snug enough and had they barred all the sheds?
At last and as suddenly came the melting wind, a dark nighttime storm that rattled doors and windows, pelted the trodden snow with mingled sleet and rain, and turned the fields overnight to hedge-rimmed lakes. Farmers slogged about their spring chores in mud-weighted boots, attempted planting in the high spots, and swore that they had never seen so quick a thaw or so much flooding.
In that season hunters began to find strange tracks in the woods, and spied shadowy movements flitting at the edge of the eye—a creature that left beatiike prints, walking upright. The forest took on a dangerous feeling then, and the Old Folk whispered that a troll might have moved in. As yet no one had seen it, but the woodcutters and the charcoal burners cast anxious looks over their shoulders as they worked; while in lord Slant's keep, hunters old and young gathered and whispered in somber tones. Lord Stani's wizard, Karoly, wore a longer and longer look, casting the bones often and listening with his ear to the stone of the walls and the earth of the courtyard. Lord Stani asked Karoly what he heard in the earth, and the hunters asked. At one such asking, Karoly only muttered that many things seemed blessings that were not, and that father Sun and mother Earth never gave so liberally without a cost.
A deer was found at the forest edge totally blind and thin as a wraith—hunters killed it out of pity and let it lie and rot. That, too, they whispered about, unsure why that single death so disturbed men—but the truth was, once pity had afflicted them, a sense of guilt crept in, and made them think twice about the pelts stacked so high in the storehouses. It made them wonder for the first time whether luck that came so easily could be wholesome, or whether there might be something wrong in what they had gained too cheaply—as if they had plundered what was sound and left what was lame to breed and increase.
Master Karoly waked the watch one midnight swearing that he smelled something burning—not cookfires or rushlights, but something like old straw set ablaze. The watch failed to smell it, the night scullions railed to find it in the kitchens, and no more discriminating nose they roused could smell it at all. Still, when a wizard insisted, it seemed only prudent to wake the lord and lady, so before all was done, lord Stani had his men and lady Agnieszka her women searching the keep from tower to deepest cellars, while servants scoured every outbuilding and haystack inside the walls and nearby for any hint of smoke.
But nothing turned up, after the hold had been in uproar half the night. There was bleary-eyed grumbling among the people at breakfast that their wizard might be confused in his old age—complaint that fell silent once Karoly came draggling into the hall, haggard and worried, and begging their pardons for his foolishness. Somber looks followed his distracted passage through the room, and folk whispered how wizards sometimes had the Sight, though Karoly had never had it: the bones gave him merest hints about the future.
In one rainy mid-afternoon soon after, Karoly asked a passing serving maid what child was hurt; but the maid heard no crying child at all. Karoly stopped more than one servant, upstairs and down, distressedly asking did they not hear some child? And that report sent more chills through the keep. A ghost, some muttered. Ill luck, the servants began to say. The cooks obsessively feared fire, and parents kept an anxious eye to their children.
"What do you see?" lord Stani asked Karoly that night. "Is there some danger—of fire? Of flood? Or is it some other thing?" There had been peace in lord Stani's land for all his lifetime, except the ordinary bear trundling out of the forest after easier pickings, and once, twenty years ago, an incursion of bandits. So lord Stani asked the questions the hunters had asked, as a man who had known peace all his life, and feared now, as the hunters feared, that his run of luck might have been too much and too long. "I need leave," Karoly said for reply, "to visit my sister over the mountains, and , ask her what she sees. My dreams worry me."
Lord Stani (the servants who witnessed it reported so) asked very cautiously, "So what do you dream, Karoly?" :. Karoly was silent a moment, gazing at the wall. Finally he said, "Wizards' dreams are all true and all treacherous; and if we knew always what we dreamed, we'd be no wiser. I put no trust in my dreams. I beg you, let me go." No one had known Karoly had a sister—that news flew | quickly about the halls, likewise Karoly's saying that.
"Something drove the deer." The rumor of the hour said that lord Stani was reluctant for his old tutor to leave, especially now, but saw no way of stopping him, none, at least, that Karoly would regard. It was foolhardy to ignore Karoly's advice, that was the consensus on the scullery stairs and in the smithy: some disaster boded, that Karoly sought to head off at its source.
So Stani called his two elder sons, Bogdan and Tamas, and bade them take Karoly through the mountains and bring him home again as soon as possible.
"It may be an old man's notion," lord Stani told them, "or it may be foresight—he always was wise before. Don't let his horse throw him, don't let him go cold or hungry— and above all bring him back in one piece. Woodcraft was never his best point; and he has no seat at all. If his horse so much as caught wind of a bear, he'd be afoot with it."
The brothers laughed, restless with the spring rains and delighted with the proposal. Bogdan said, "So much worse for the bear," and Tamas, the younger, said, "We'll take good care of him, papa." No one of their generation had ever ventured over the mountains. They had distant cousins and uncles in that land, they supposed. They knew of places like Krukczy Straz and Hasel, Burdigen, and Albaz, where their grandmother had had brothers and sisters—a land, the gran had told them, of beautiful waterfalls and tall pine forests. They knew all the names of them: the land over-mountain was their own land of once upon a time, and to ride out on their father's orders, to find this unguessed and surely witchly sister of master Karoly's—for the rescue of Maggiar, if the .rumors were true—all this, and to have a winter full of their own tales to tell when they got safely back again? This was the chance of their young lives.
Their mother took a far dimmer view of matters. Lady Agnieszka went storming to lord Stani's chambers and servants pressed ears against the doors and listened wide-eyed to the shouting inside for half an hour; while the youngest of lord Stani's three sons, Yuri, aged fourteen, declared to his friends that Bogdan as heir should by no means put himself in danger; he should be the one to ride with Tamas—which opinion he bore to lord Stani, himself, hard on his mother's icy retreat.