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The Solstice celebration had been lighthearted fun. The village and the Motherhouse combined for an afternoon of revelry, food, and small gifts for the children, many of which Joss had carved in his free time. These days the shapes came naturally to his knife – the one Quinn had slipped him, which he’d never returned – as if they were hidden in the wood, waiting to be revealed.
Joss liked the kids. The apprentices accepted his presence, the local urchins treated him like a giant play toy, and that was fine with him. It eased the loneliness of his life these days.
Such thoughts occupied him as he trudged toward the village, whose inhabitants provided support services for the Motherhouse. The forests and fields were snow-covered and silent, but the path bore enough traffic to thaw into a muddy slush. His destination was one of the long barns, his intention to check on the cows. Since he’d been stuck with these whisperer skills, he’d learn how to use them.
He kept his thoughts well away from Willow. Or from Bryar, or Ezra and his family. Simplest to focus on the present.
The present, for Joss, meant mornings with Quinn as she put him through his paces. No, he’d never be able to create a light globe. The best he got was a feeble glow that sat in his hand like a pet. But with her not so gentle tutoring, he was beginning to understand template work, the basic manipulation of the weaves. To sense the different energies, earth always the strongest. He struggled to detect fire, but the others, air and water, came more clearly. Phlegmatic, not passionate, Quinn had said with her usual detachment.
Passion. Sometimes he did think about Willow, far away with that intimidating man, in the land across the hills. Memory struck at night, or when the sun shone just so, reminding him of the meadow.
The afternoon was crisp and clear. With another day free of lessons, the younger apprentices would be out in the snow, the older ones gathered in their rooms – or paired off for some personal time. The sexual mores of the Midland still confounded him.
At the barn, he scraped the muck from his boots and ranged along the ranks of the cows. One forlorn lady lay on her side and had barely touched her hay. He registered discomfort. Fear.
“Hey, girl.” Joss stepped into the stall, ran his hand over her great, bony head, and emptied his mind, or did his best to. Her pain came through, as did another image...
Aha. He stood and crossed to a nearby store of apples. Choosing a healthy-looking one, he returned to the stall and held it out. The cow raised her head; Joss felt her craving. He grinned, replaced the fruit in the pile, then went to find Robby, the chief agriculturist.
“This girl’s been in apples,” he said. “That’s why she’s bloated.”
“Figures. Must have happened when we turned them out in the field a few days ago, before the last snow. There’s always windfalls. I’m gonna punch into her before the bloat gets worse.”
“Punch?” Had he heard right? But the man crossed to the workbench and returned with a small bottle, a knife, and a narrow tube that looked like bamboo.
“Yeah, punch. She won’t be impressed. Better stand back.”
Joss would swear the cow was begging him to ease her distress. Surely not, though. He was getting fanciful.
Robby swabbed the cow’s side and the tools with the liquid from the bottle – alcohol, Joss concluded – and rammed the knife into her side. He removed the knife and stuck the tube into the incision.
Joss stood frozen, unbelieving. But the cow seemed more irritated than pained.
“Now we wait,” Robby said, and clambered to his feet. While he cleaned and stowed his tools, Joss watched the cow. After a moment a greenish, slimy mess of gas bubbles emerged from the tube. The smell almost drove him from the stall.
“We’ll leave it in for five or six days, I reckon. It heals on its own once the tube comes out, so long as it doesn’t get infected. There’s a plant in the hedges the cows eat, dunno what it’s called but we keep some of it around, dried. Makes ’em burp. I’ll add it to her hay; she ought to start eating soon. She’ll be worrying about the young’un she’s carrying, like as not.”
“I’m not picking up any worry,” Joss said. “Mostly, just relief.” The bubbles continued to pour from the tube.
The cow looked hopefully toward the apples. Joss laughed. “Not going to happen, girl. Stick to your hay.”
“Let’s check the sheep while you’re here. Problem with their feet, some of ’em.”
“I’ll look, but I never learn much from sheep.”
They left the cow lazing in her stall and visited the other animal enclosures. Robby was as vital to Joss’s education as Quinn. By the time he finished his stint at the Motherhouse, he’d know enough to be truly useful as an agriculturist somewhere in the Midland. Hallan, by preference.
Once again, as happened so often these days, his thoughts wandered to Willow’s cabin. He yanked them away. She would return, or she wouldn’t. She would be healed, or not. She would move to Hallan, or she would travel. All imponderables now, and he had to learn to earn a living.
Before leaving the village, he stopped by the cow’s stall. A nasty-looking pile of froth had accumulated on the straw, and she had managed to take a mouthful of hay. She looked content, as if nothing had ever bothered her.
He’d help birth her calf in a month or two, he supposed.
~~
AT THE MOTHERHOUSE, Joss headed first to the dining hall for a cup of caff, dodging through an old-fashioned game of tag. He took his mug and a pastry with him and escaped the chaos. He’d been upgraded to a small suite in the guest lodge, giving him a bedroom and a sitting room, and it was to the table in the sitting room he went now. Quinn had diagrammed a couple of weaves for him. They didn’t make sense, yet. But they would. He settled his large frame into the chair, used the fire stone – not the Aura, he lacked the power – to light a lantern, and bent over his studies. The weaves weren’t so different from engineering, mastering the connections, the cause and effect.
Except to master these, he had to shut down his logical brain, turning himself over to the Aura to grasp the complexities in the diagram. He was battling his way through ephemeral realities now. So maybe not like engineering after all.
After an hour of study, he found himself staring out his narrow window, seeing nothing. He’d talked to Arwen about these moments of blankness. They hollowed him out, but she’d been unconcerned. It was only logical, she’d pointed out, that the magnitude of change to his life, however beneficial, occasionally threatened to overwhelm him.