Page 79 of Into the West

Delia was alive with anticipation. Midwinter back in Valdemar generally meant that Kordas would fling open the manor, invite all the nobles in his Duchy to come and stay (some did, some didn’t, because he also threw open his festivities to people like the Squire), and there would be two weeks of celebration—one leading up to Midwinter, and one following Midwinter. During the daytime there would be a Midwinter Fair on the manor grounds, minstrels in the Duchess’s solar, the (generally unused, and closed up) Dowager Duchess’s solar, and the library, and more rambunctious sorts of entertainers in the Great Hall. All during the day, sideboards in the Great Hall had cold food laid out. Then every night there would be a festive dinner for all the guests (not a feast, not yet) and dancing and music afterward. On Midwinter Eve itself was the big feast, with full entertainments and a “vigil” till midnight. “Vigil” was not quite the right word, since it mostly meant staying up, being entertained, and then cheering at the stroke of midnight. Perhaps at one point it had been something more religious, or mystical, but the Emperor preferred all attention to be on himself rather than gods, and that had been the case for at least the last three Emperors, so Midwinter had gradually become almost entirely secular in nature.

The second week was devoted to more outdoor entertainment. By day there were hunts, skating, and entertainments at the Fair—and a lot of contests. Archery, knife and axe throwing, livestock competitions, races both on foot and skating, and the most exciting of all, horse racing. But not just any sort of horse racing. The competitors didn’t ride. They wore long, flat boards on their feet and were pulled by draft horses. Obviously you didn’t dare go fast enough to endanger the horses in any way, and there was a lot of hilarity when people lost their balance, or they fell into a drift, and the traces that attached them to the horse’s harness broke free of their belts. And it took a lot of skill, because you had to manage both the traces and the reins.

Now, these festivities were rather rural in nature, and shifting to them was designed to encourage the departure of those whose interests did not extend to the same sorts of entertainments enjoyed by the farmers and laborers. Food was presented at actual mealtimes, and they were served at “country” hours. Breakfast (far too early for those who were not “country” people) was the real feast of the day, and the last meal of the day (though most people would not realize it) was composed of artful presentations of what were, essentially, the previous week’s leftovers. There was quiet music after supper instead of raucous music and dancing. Drinking was not encouraged, and early bedtimes were. Things didn’t quite go back to “normal” until the end of the week, but the second week definitely had more of a tone of “relaxing with friends,” and those who were there to see and be seen generally found this sort of provincial entertainment . . . provincial.

Obviously a Hawkbrother Midwinter was going to be nothing like this. There were the decorations, for one thing, but she wondered what the heart of the celebration was going to be like. Delia was looking forward to seeing and experiencing it all.

Somewhat to her disappointment, Jelavan told her that there really wasn’t anything but decorations and perhaps some individual gift-giving until Midwinter’s Eve.

That was not to say that there wasn’t a lot of Midwinter frolicking going on among the Valdemarans, because there certainly was. But constraints being what they were, from the need to be careful about supplies to the lack of a Great Hall or any other places where there could be gatherings, even among the nobles who had followed Kordas here, the celebration was a lot more restrained and a lot more “provincial” than it had been at home. There were no big feasts, but with the help of the really good cooks, and some careful culling of wildlife, there were quite a few “small” feasts, things that took all day to cook and were served a bit later than supper usually was. The Hawkbrothers were not behind in offering good things as well, but there were a lot more Valdemarans than there were Hawkbrothers, so quite a bit of the Tayledras offerings were things like herbs and mushrooms and fresh vegetables and fruits from their gardens. Still it was winter, and fresh vegetables and fruits were prime luxuries at this time of year. And since there wasn’t much for the farming folk to do in the middle of winter, other than tend their stock, those winter games had been resurrected.

Thankfully, it didn’t appear that the Hawkbrother culture practiced intensive gift-giving at Midwinter, so she didn’t feel pressured to produce anything more than little tokens. She wasn’t any good at needlework, but she had hit on the idea of cleaning the fleeces still stored in the barges from when the culled sheep had been sheared. Virtually everyone was happy with cleaned and carded wool—if you couldn’t spin, you could trade it to someone who did for yarn, and if you didn’t need yarn, you could always find someone willing to take it in trade for something else. Cleaning the wool was very labor intensive and repetitive, but strangely soothing. And the lanolin from the wool made her hands the softest they had ever been. In return, she’d gotten a few little gifts, like new stockings and a couple of books—small things in comparison to past times, yet where would she put anything substantial? The storage-barge?

Finally the day arrived. The Hawkbrothers had kept their plans very much a secret, and Jelavan had been impossible to tease anything out of. “Sleep late,” was all they were told. “And don’t eat much. You’ll be eating all day, and staying up very late.”

So it was with growing impatience that Delia waited with the rest of the Valdemarans until the sound of a horn summoned them all into the Hawkbrother groves.

Groves which sparkled with tiny mage-lights and had decorations and food and drink laid out everywhere.

And that was just the beginning. As Delia explored the Vale, she discovered that in nearly every place you looked, there was something simple yet delightful to do, see, or listen to. Tervardi and Hawkbrother musicians in trios and quartets provided music the likes of which she had never heard before. Dyheli offered rides to children, on special saddles padded so one didn’t get bisected by their very sharp backbones. Other Hawkbrothers taught and played games, everything from simple things children could do, like ring-tossing, to a very complicated board game that used miniatures, stacks of books, and strange dice, which Delia didn’t even begin to understand.

“Try this!” Jelavan would say, thrusting something that smelled wonderful into her hand. “Let’s go play this game!” he would say as soon as she had finished wolfing the tasty treat down. And off they would go to a guessing game, or a quoit battle. There were no prizes for winning these games, but both children and adults were enjoying them anyway.

But it was what the Hawkbrother mages were doing—with the assistance of some of the Valdemaran mages—that was special. One had flocks of the little, brightly colored messenger birds doing tricks, singly and together. They fascinated Valdemarans and their cats alike, but fortunately, the little birds had enchantments to bodily defend against predators. Several junior mages accompanied storytelling with illusions playing out the scenes before the wondering eyes of the audience. Some created miniature fireworks. One made the flames of a fire itself dance to music.

Jelavan made sure she saw everything—at least as far as she could tell, anyway. With him scampering in the lead, she was pretty sure they explored every nook and cranny of the Vale in search of delights.

They stopped just long enough for a lunch, a sort of browse along a table crowded with vegetables and noodles in sauce, vegetables grilled and stuffed and roasted, vegetables mashed and served in their own skins, and an assortment of raw vegetables with sauces to dip them in. That was when Delia asked him a question that had been lurking in the back of her mind for some time. It had seemed odd to her that the hertasi wore anything at all. The dyheli and tervardi didn’t. And Jelavan had, multiple times, urged her to ask him anything, even if it seemed rude. So she did.

“Why do hertasi wear clothing?” she asked. “You don’t need to, do you?”

Jelavan hiss-laughed. “Of course we don’t need to, at least in the Vale. But we like to! We love clothing, we love jewelry, we love all things ornamental as much as our partners do! Maybe more! When we are working in the fields and gardens or anything else where we might get clothing dirty, we don’t bother, but the rest of the time?” He flung up his claws and turned, inviting her to admire a verdigris-green tunic and trews covered with tiny copper beads and leaves. “Who doesn’t like to look fabulous!”

Delia snorted. “Jonaton?” she suggested. And since Jelavan had been distressed earlier by one of Jonaton’s “fancy bags” and had rushed to the mage to offer hertasi expertise, he immediately erupted into laughter.

The entertainment continued after dark. Gradually some of the Valdemarans got up the courage to perform for their hosts, who seemed far more appreciative of what was played for them than Delia would have thought.

The grand conclusion to all this was just before midnight. The Heartstone, she was told, had been raised up from its usual home in the center of a domed building, and its stand held it a barge-length high now. It was awe-inspiring to think that around her was a society that felt so comfortable wielding so much power that it would use a Heartstone as a holiday decoration. Everyone gathered at the Heartstone for a grand display of much larger magical “fireworks,” which was capped by three of the Hawkbrothers in androgynous garb hanging from impossibly silky scarves suspended from nearby trees, who “danced” in midair, spinning, climbing, falling, twirling to the sounds of a chorus of tervardi singing and Hawkbrothers playing—it was all so beautiful it took her breath away. And just at midnight, the Hearthstone lit up like a fountain of colored lights, with streams of sparkling motes rising from its tip, shooting skyward, and cascading down its sides.

Delia could not bear to tear herself away, and she was not alone. But eventually, once that great finale ended, and the various entertainers began closing down and going to their own rest—usually in pairs or more, she noted—she did find herself stumbling to bed, hands full of sweet grapes, and eyes full of stars.

The day after Midwinter, the first heavy snow fell.

Inside the Veil, it was a continuous rain, a real downpour, as the Veil melted the falling snow and turned it into a rainstorm, but without the lightning or thunder. At least inside the Veil it was a warm rain. It went on for a full day, and this was when the first problems began.

At the intersection of the Veil and the outside world, snow piled up in a crusty frozen ridge that had to be broken down with a pickax so people could get to the herds that were outside the Veil. Hauling green hay to them had been a chore before the snow; now it was complicated four times over, at least until the stock tenders beat down a path—which was, of course, covered over when the next heavy snow happened a few days later. Meanwhile, inside the Veil, you had to be sure your footgear was waterproof and your hems hiked up above your ankles, because the ground was soggy, and if you went outside the Veil with soggy clothing, it immediately froze to ice, which was both uncomfortable and potentially dangerous.

The Tayledras “move” from this new Vale had always been planned as a piecemeal operation, with the last few to remain being the ones who would feed the power to the new Heartstone along a ley-line, and shut down the old one. It had been going on since before the Valdemarans had been recruited to take possession of the Vale—there were a lot of creatures that depended on the Hawkbrothers, like the little messenger birds, that couldn’t take cold and weather. A new Vale, with a new Veil, had to be established first before those delicate beings were moved.

The Hawkbrothers had all known they were going to be moving in winter; strategically speaking, winter was the best time for it. A lot of hazards went into hibernation, and the rest would have trouble moving around in the snow.

It was actually a variation on what the Valdemarans had done, but without the part of “living in your barges.” The Hawkbrothers made use of their powers to create sledges and barges that floated just above the ground for their belongings and everything else that they were taking with them.

They moved as the Valdemarans had moved—with the assistance of Gates. Long before Silvermoon had come to bring the Valdemarans to this Vale, their initial party had found a suitable spot for a new Vale, cleared out immediate threats, created a Veil, and set up a Gate. All the time that the Valdemarans had been here, floating barges had been going through the Gate here full, and coming back empty.

Singles and couples had left first; most of them hadn’t had dwellings bigger than one or two rooms. But now larger groups of Tayledras were moving. So as ekeles emptied, some of the more adventurous of Kordas’s people moved into them and out of their barges. Not everyone found the light, woven screens that the Hawkbrothers used as walls to be comfortable to live with. “Not enough privacy,” was the general consensus, and Delia—as charmed as she was by the Tayledras—couldn’t help but think that lack of privacy was a standard of life for them. Hertasi watched from everywhere, messenger birds and bond birds watched from above, the walls were thin, every noise made by humans and others carried, and anybody could—and apparently did—just walk through lovers’ assignations in the more public areas. She would ask Jelavan about it soon.

Even so, Delia took to one of the ekeles immediately. With the Vale always at a pleasant temperature, even at night, she enjoyed having fresh air moving through her living space at all times. Her storage in the barges was emptied, and slowly she was finding spaces for all the things in her boxes and trunks—and Jelavan was extremely helpful in either finding her furniture, or having it made for her.