A sorcerer casts in proportion to the cold. Warmth leaves it lazy and nearly harmless; every degree the air loses is paid out as spellwork, and the appetite rises to match. The one watched this season lives above the fjord head at Jorvasund, in a turf-roofed house with a pasture behind it. In September she does nothing more alarming than light her pipe with a snap of two fingers, and she sleeps until noon.
By October the mornings are hard and she eats like a threshing crew. Cathrine Yttergard, whose sheep share her fence line, counts a whole smoked leg of mutton going in every second day, with the sorcerer thinner each week regardless. Her spells run small and sour. Milk turns in pails on the near farms, and hair lifts off the neck as she passes. Every house on the slope keeps a river pebble in the stove ash for this; dropped hot into a soured pail, it brings the milk back sweet enough for cheese. Callers touch the rain barrel by her gate before they go near the door, to drain the static off themselves, and she turns away anyone who skips it. She leaves rings of scorched turf with a glaze of fused grit at the center, and the sheep graze with their rumps toward the house.
November brings the petty business. A man at Kaldmyr, across the water, borrowed her ladder in spring and never returned it. She has answered by striking his rooster mute. Each frosty morning the bird stands on the woodpile with its neck stretched and its beak working and nothing comes out. His hens, his barn and his wife she has left alone. The man has offered a new ladder. She has declined, because it is the wrong ladder, and nobody at Kaldmyr will say she is wrong about that.
On the December visit snow has covered the pasture, and she no longer needs a flame for the pipe; she lights it with a look. The left eyebrow she singed off in October has grown back white. She casts from the doorway now, in long bursts, and the ice she lays on the lane is thick enough to bear a sledge. Cathrine has stopped counting the mutton. The rooster still has no voice. By the thaw in March, the scorch ring behind the house measures eleven paces across. In September it was four.
- Classification
- Innate caster, human-descended
- Habitat
- Fjord heads, cold upland farms
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft, lean and long-handed
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Northern fjord country
- Binomial
- Thaumaturga hiemalis
- Diet
- Smoked mutton, rye bread, strong tea
- Temperament
- Proud, sour, patient with grudges