The Wind-Witch Read Online Free PDF

she’d have had a home there while she did that. As it was. . .
    The land would pass to some overlooked son of one of Travic’s great-aunts, and Travic’s barren widow would have to leave. Go back to her family, which no longer had a place for her. She’d been settled, dealt with, married off, and if she returned now it would be in disgrace, having failed at the most basic of womanly tasks. Druyan pressed her face into Valadan’s silky mane but could not shut out that desolate future.
    She could marry again. Certainly her family would try to arrange that for her. It would, of course, be a very hard bargain for them to strike, with any man having half his wits about him.
    She had no lands. She had no looks—not with her long, thin nose and her grandmother’s square jaw. Not with hair the color of dead salt-grass and eyes that were pale gray without even a hint of blue—and there were lines at the corners of them, from gazing out over the marshes, from being out in the weather and not caring. She freckled if Esdragon got sufficient sun, though that was rare. And her hands were still too big for grace, though they were deft at spinning and weaving the wool from Travic’s sheep, where more delicate fingers would not have served so well.
    Worst of all, she was barren . What sane man wanted that in a wife, with naught of looks or money to offset the defect? She’d been fortunate with Travic, he had not reproached her or beaten her. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t especially grieved that she’d had far more in common with her husband’s farm dogs than she’d had with the man himself—they shared her devotion to the sheep. She had no reason to expect such forebearance of another man. Outside of Splaine Garth she had nothing, no place, no life.
    Druyan dismounted and looped the reins over Valadan’s neck, out of his way. He followed at her heels like a dog as she walked over her land—which was hers no longer.
    They hadn’t cut hay here—too near the winding stream that clove a lazy way to the sea. They’d have had to carry it too far, to spread it for curing or even to load it on a wagon. The grass rose to her waist, held secrets of bird nests and rabbit runs among its roots. They were far enough upstream that the salt tide did generally not invade, so purple-flowered mint clothed the streambanks. She should cut a bundle while she saw it, to dry for winter tea. Physick for digestive troubles, pleasant simply to sip with a bit of honey. . .
    Druyan halted abruptly. What was she about, planning as if she’d be there when the mint leaves were dried, much less come winter? Hot tears blurred her sight again, and she put her big hands over her eyes. When Valadan nuzzled her arm, she flung both arms about his neck and soaked his shoulder with her grief.
    When must we go? he asked her. The wild swan called a question of its own.
    “I don’t know.” Her voice was thick. Druyan swallowed hard to clear her throat, blew her nose into a mullein leaf. “I hadn’t thought that far—” She patted his shoulder. “Not today.”
    Nor next day. Travic’s body was barely carried home, scarce committed to the earth. Nothing would or could happen at once. There’d be a search for whoever stood heir to him. Time would pass.
    Who’d search? Druyan suddenly wondered. The question hung in her mind, like the afterimage of a lightning bolt. She listened to the wind sighing through the tall grass.
    The reality was, Splaine Garth was a backwater farm on the edge of nowhere, not a great landholding. Travic’s lands didn’t include a town and its population, just the marsh and the cropland and the few unremarkable folk who dwelt thereon, none of them his heirs, all of them waiting as she did, for whatever happened next. Suppose nothing happened? Suppose no one came from afar to claim the land?
    Travic had taught his wife to care for Splaine Garth, had shared the stewardship of it openhandedly with her. There were few parts of its