Seasons by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2019-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

Cloudwalker

Michele Lang

Life is not about the calm, it is about the storm.

Sparrow found it hard to remember this essential truth, sometimes. Or, even, to accept it. After all, she was lucky enough to live with her family, her beloved heartmate, the Herald Cloudbrother, and their son, Thistle. Together, they had made their home in the beautiful oasis of K’Valdemar Vale, where storms appeared to be more of an illusion than a reality.

In the Vale, Sparrow could almost pretend that storms and sorrow had become a fable of distant legend, rather than an unavoidable aspect of life itself.

Almost.

But times like the Summer Gathering drew her out of her personal paradise and back into the larger world of Valdemar. And Sparrow knew a great reckoning was waiting for her outside the safety of the Vale.

Summer in the Vale was, if anything, even more lush than in all the rest of the year. After the intense growth spurts of spring, the Vale settled into a glorious sequence of blooming, flowering, fruiting, repeating. Sparrow had grown up in the stony northern village of Longfall, her childhood punctuated by ice storms and heavy snows. Now, she marveled at the temperate bubble that was K’Valdemar Vale.

The Vale’s heat and abundance, so easy and overflowing, thrilled Sparrow every summer. Intoxicated by the heavy floral perfume of the multicolored canopy blooming overhead, waking to the rising chorus of exotic, intensely plumed birds, warmed by the languid heat, she walked more slowly, smiled more often, took naps in a hammock out back in the heat of the afternoons.

The Vale was her home. But while Sparrow much preferred the peace of her calm and anonymous life in the Vale, the storms of the world outside her ekele reminded her how precious her life with her family was, how fragile.

She turned her mind away from such huge, overbearing thoughts, and instead concentrated on setting things to rights in her own sphere of being. Her comfy ekele, snug at ground level, seemed too small of late. Mostly because of her rapidly growing son Thistle, who was undergoing his own intense growth spurt.

At the moment, Sparrow concentrated on polishing her best serving bowls. She sat in the shade outside her front door on a wrinkled old blanket as she scrubbed away, the beaten copper of the largest one singing under her fingers. A gentle, cooling breeze caressed the back of her neck.

After the Gathering, she expected at least a few members of her heartmate’s clan, the Cloudwalkers, to stay in the Vale with them for an extended visit.

First, they had to get through the Gathering. But Sparrow had to keep her thoughts close to the ground, snug and safe in her nest.

It had been years since Cloudbrother’s adopted family had ventured so far south, and Sparrow welcomed the opportunity to offer hospitality to the people who had saved her heartmate’s life long ago, when he was a lost, desperately ill little boy.

Even smaller than her son Thistle was now.

Thistle was six going on seven.

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