Marise threw the light cover off and hurried to where Efeon slept, already knowing what she would find. The bedframe was bare, his blanket carefully folded. The worn leather pack she had given him the night before was nowhere to be seen. He was gone, gone without her, and Marise knew with a painful certainty that she would not catch up with him.
She might have birthed him, taken him from the ether and given him form and a name, but in the end he had made the decision of how he would live, and what he would live with. Could she blame him? Marise felt her lips twist in a wry smile. Of course she could. She could blame him for being a stubborn male, for wanting to protect her, for clinging to vows that only half of him had made—for being the man with whom she had fallen in love.
Retracing her steps, she stood over the worktable. Her hand shaking, she opened a small wooden box and withdrew three long strands of red-brown hair.
"My wish, river fox. That someday you find your way to wholeness. That one day you will find the road home again."
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Pigs could eat almost anything, but Sula wasn't sure about feeding her pig dragon bones. The time she had fed a nestling gryphon to her then-pig, Kara, the pig had given birth to kits instead of piglets, and had grown wings and learned to fly. Sula had brought the pig down out of the flower-nut tree with an arrow fletched with pegasi feathers, but oh, its meat had tasted strange, like storm sky, and not proper pig at all.
Sula had found the bones that morning while foraging farther afield than usual, in among fringes of the forest. Her now-pig, Kiki, was in the last month of pregnancy before farrowing, and needed bone meal. Sula brought the bones home before she noticed the red fire flecks in them that meant they were dragon bones.
If her Kiki should grow scales or a black heart from eating dragon bones, or farrow lizards, that was a loss Sula could ill afford so late in a gnawing cold winter. She had better burn the bones instead.
So it chanced that Sula was out in the weather, tending a blood-red fire of dragon bones and shifting away from the magic-tainted smoke on a morning when frost ferned the iron-hard ground and the chill wind froze the tears on a body's face. Everyone else in the village was snug inside their hovels, sleeping perhaps and starving for certain, waiting for a break in winter's grip. Even the leafless trees shivered in the cold, shaking themselves out of dreams of spring.
Up along the path past the midden came a little bit of a man, begging tea or even water warmed over fire. What was Sula to do? She had a fire, never mind how mixed it might be with fallen bits of sky; and water she had aplenty—indeed, it seeped into her house when the rains were worst. So she fetched her dented pot and filled it with water, then put some dried kithi leaves in it and set it to simmer on the red dragon-bone fire, asking the man mite where he might be headed.
He curled thin fingers around the chipped mug she gave him, and he shivered inside his tattered cloak. He sniffed at the steam from the tea. His thin smile revealed teeth stained from chewing tanni leaves, so he'd been having a hard winter too—as if she couldn't tell that just from the size of him, with his bones too big for his skin to hold, almost. Not many in the northern reaches could find enough food to grow into their bones, but his skin was stretched tighter across his cheekbones than most.
He never said he was a wizard. He spun her a tale about heading south to the fief where his sister worked in the kitchens, where work waited for him with the hunting dogs. Had a way with animals, he did, or so he said.
"Chancy days to be on the road alone," Sula told him.
He showed her his little knife, a silver pricker shinier than many a metal she'd seen, even in the tinker wagons where many things shone bright whether they were worth a shine or not. When she admired it, he said he'd taken the metal from a god's turd, one of the flaming stones that fell shrieking from the sky on some summer nights.
That gave Sula pause. No one she knew would touch a god's turd. One never knew what sort of magic they might leak.
"So does it carve a treat?" she asked.
"Like a hot blade through ice," he said. He hid the knife under his cloak again and sipped his tea. "This has a fine flavor."
She smiled at him then. Much he might know about hounds, and perhaps about hawks and horses, but little he knew of herblore if he did not recognize the taste of kithi. "There's more if you want it," she said, edging away from the smoke again, with its smell like the hot red heart of a mountain. Some said smoke followed beauty, but she knew she had none. Smoke, she figured, followed wherever it pleased.
"More," said the little man, holding out the cup.
The kithi leaves had stained the hot water a warm and welcoming dark brown. The steam smelled like night-blooming flowers and late summer fruit. She poured him a cupful of tea that could have felled a fat priest, and he drank it and slid down smiling.
No, he had never told her he was a wizard, drat the little man. Or that he had locked his heart in a box and buried it in an ice wall up north where the sun never shone and the ice never melted.
Pigs could eat almost anything, but once Kiki had eaten the thin flesh from the wizard mite's bones, and the brain from its bone box, she turned canny and slippery. After Sula ground the wizard's bones and gave them to Kiki, the pig began to murmur.
Sula didn't notice right away, preoccupied as she was with scrounging enough leaves and roots and offal to feed Kiki through her farrowing. The wizard's sky knife helped Sula slice the skin from trees, easily sliding between the outer and inner bark so that she had fine fresh inner bark for Kiki; and when the weather warmed a bit and Sula took Kiki to the forest to root, the sky knife dug down through frozen earth wherever Kiki pointed, seeking easily for the hidden treasures beneath the frost: fat juicy roots, squirrel-cached nuts, gryphon-buried kills. Never a thought did Sula give to what the sky knife might be carving into the things she and Kiki ate.
Sula and Kiki lived out the rest of the winter in comfort, thanks to the leavings of the little man from the north, and if Kiki's murmurs were more like moans than grunts, her squeals more like screams, it did not trouble Sula, who had weaving and knitting to do in the long evenings so she would have something to market come summer.