She finally pulled an annoyed breath. “Can’t hear a word. They’re too far away to see their lips, so I can’t get any help by that, but still, I don’t hear a thing, and I should.”
Dalton looked down, close to the building, three stories below. “What about those two.”
Franca leaned out for a look. Dalton could almost hear them himself; a chuckle rose up, and an exclamation, but no more. Franca again went still.
This time, the breath she pulled bordered on rage. “Nothing, and I can almost hear them without the gift.”
Dalton closed the window. The anger went out of her face in a rush, and he saw something he had never before seen from her: fear.
“Dalton, you have to get rid of that man. He must be a wizard, or something. He’s got me all tied up in knots.”
“How do you know it’s him?”
She blinked twice at the question. “Well… what else could it be? He claims to be able to eliminate magic. He’s only been here a few days, and I’ve only had this problem a few days.”
“Have you had trouble with other things? Other aspects of your gift?”
She turned away, wringing her hands. “A few days ago I made up a little spell for a woman who came to me, a little spell so she would have her moon flow back, and not be pregnant. This morning she returned and said it didn’t work.”
“Well, it must be a complex kind of conjuring. There must be a lot involved. I expect such things don’t always work.”
She shook her head. “It always worked before.”
“Perhaps you’re ill. Have you felt different of late?”
“I feel exactly the same. I feel like my power is as strong as ever. It should be, but it’s not. Other charms have failed, too—I’d not let this go without testing it, thorough like.”
Troubled, Dalton leaned closer. “Franca, I don’t know a lot about it, but maybe some if it is just confidence in yourself. Maybe you just have to believe you can do it for it to work again.”
She glared back over her shoulder. “Where’d you ever get such a daft notion about the gift?”
“I don’t know.” Dalton shrugged. “I admit I don’t know a great deal about magic, but I really don’t believe Stein has the gift—or any magic about him. He’s just not the sort.
“Besides, he’s not even here today. He couldn’t be interrupting your ability hearing those people down there; he went out to tour the countryside. He’s been gone for hours.”
She slowly rounded on him, looking fearsome and at the same time frightened. Such opposing aspects at the same time gave him gooseflesh.
“Then I fear,” she whispered, “that I’ve simply lost my power. I’m helpless.”
“Franca, I’m sure—”
She licked her lips. “You have Serin Rajak locked away in chains, don’t you? I’d not like to think him or his lunatic followers…”
“I told you before, we have him in chains. I’m not even sure he’s still alive. After all this time, I doubt it, but either way there is no need to worry about Serin Rajak.”
Staring off, she nodded.
He touched her arm. “Franca, I’m certain your power will return. Try not to be overly concerned.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Dalton, I’m terrified.”
Cautiously, he took the weeping woman in his consoling arms. She was, after all, besides being a dangerous gifted woman, a friend.
The words from the song at the feast came to mind.
Came the thieves of the charm and spell.
25
Roberta lifted her chin high in the air, stretching her neck, to guardedly peer off past the brink of the cliff not far away and look out over the fertile fields of her beloved Nareef Valley far below. Freshly plowed fields were a deep rich brown among breathtakingly bright green carpets of new crops and the darker verdant pastures where livestock, looking like tiny slow ants, cropped at tender new grass. The Dammar River meandered through it all, sparkling in the early-morning sunshine, escorted along its route by a gathering of dark green trees, as if they’d come to watch the river’s showy parade.
Whenever she went up in the woods near Nesting Cliff, she had herself a look from afar, just to see the pretty valley below. After allowing herself that brief look, she always lowered her eyes to the shaded forest floor at her feet, the leaf litter, and mossy stretches among dappled sunlight, where the ground was firm and comforting.
Roberta shifted the sack slung over her shoulder, and moved on. As she maneuvered through the clear patches among the huckleberry and hawthorn, stepped on stones set like islands among dark crevices and holes, and ducked under low pine boughs and alder limbs, she flipped aside with her walking stick a fern here or a low spreading balsam branch there, looking, always looking, as she moved along.
She spied a vase-shaped yellow cap and stooped for a look. Chanterelle, she was pleased to see, and not the poisonous jack-o’-lantern. Most folk favored the smooth yellow chanterelle mushroom for its nutlike flavor. She hooked the stem with a finger and plucked it up. Before sticking the prize in her sack, she ran her thumb over the featherlike gills just for the pleasure of the soft feel.
The mountain she searched for her mushrooms was only a small mountain, compared to the others jutting up all around, and but for Nesting Cliff, reassuringly round, with trails, a few made by man but most made by animal, crisscrossing the gentle wooded slopes. It was the kind of woods her aging muscles and increasingly aching bones favored.
It was said a person could see the ocean far off to the south from many of the taller mountains. She’d often heard it to be an inspiring sight. Many people went up there once every year or two just to view the splendor of the Creator by what He’d wrought.
Some of those trails took a person along the scruffy edges of cliffs and scree and such. Some folk even tended herds of goats up on those steep and rocky slopes. But for a journey when she was a small child, when her pa, rest his soul, took them off to Fairfield, for what she could no longer remember, she had never even been up there. Roberta was content to remain near the alluvial land. Unlike a lot of other folk, Roberta never climbed the higher mountains; she was afraid of high places.
Up higher yet, in the highlands above, were far worse places, like the wasteland up above where the warfer birds nested.
There was nothing in that desolate place, not a blade of grass nor a sprig of scrub brush, except those paka plants growing in that poison swampy water. Nothing else up there but the vast stretches of dark, rocky, sandy soil, and a few bleached bones, as she heard tell. Like another world, those who’d seen it said. Silent but for the wind that dragged the dark sandy dirt into mounds that shifted over time, always moving on, as if they were looking for something, but never finding it.
The lower mountains, like the ones she hunted for mushrooms, were beautiful, lush places, rounder and softer, mostly, and except for Nesting Cliff, not so steep and rocky. She liked it where it was full of trees and critters and growing things of all sorts. The deer trails she searched stayed away from the edges she didn’t like, and never went very close to Nesting Cliff, as it was called because the falcons liked to nest there. She liked the deep woods, where her mushrooms grew.
Roberta collected mushrooms to sell at market; some fresh, some dried, some pickled, and others fixed in various ways. Most folk called her the mushroom lady, and knew her by no other name. Sold at market, the mushrooms helped earn her family some trading money for the things that made life easier: needles and thread, some ready-made cloth, buckles and buttons, a lamp, oil, salt, sugar, cinnamon, nuts—things to help a body have an easier time of it. Easier for her family, and especially for her four grandchildren still living. Roberta’s mushrooms provided all those things to supplement what they grew or raised themselves.
Of course, they made good eating, too. She did like best the mushrooms that grew in the forests up on the mountain, rather than those down in the valley. Touched as they were up there by clouds so much of the time, the
mushrooms grew well in the damp conditions. She always thought there were none better than those from up on the mountain, and many folk sought her out just for her mountain mushrooms. Roberta had her secret places, too, where she found the best ones every year. The big pockets in her apron were plump and full with them, as was the sack over her shoulder.
Because it was still early in the year, she’d mostly found heavy clusters of the tawny-colored oyster mushrooms. Their fleshy, tender caps were best for dipping in egg and frying, so she’d sell them fresh. But she’d been lucky, and would be setting out chanterelles to dry as well as offering fresh. She found a goodly number of pheasant’s-backs, too, and they’d be best pickled, if she wanted to get the highest price.
It was too early for woolly velvet in most places, even though it would be common enough later on in the summer, but she’d gone to one of her special spots where there were a lot of pine stumps and she’d found some of the ochre-colored woolly velvet used to make dye. Roberta had even found a rotting birch with a cluster of smoky brown polypores. The kidney-shaped mushroom were favored by cooks to keep a fire blazing and by men to strop their razors.
Leaning on her walking stick, Roberta bent over a harmless-looking brownish mushroom. It had a ring on the off-white stalk. She saw that the yellowish gills were just starting to turn a rust color. It was that time of year for this mushroom, too. Grunting her displeasure, she let the deadly galerina be and moved on.