The Fits o' the Season

By Katherine Lampe

He’s a man with a dark past and a possibly darker future, a troubled soul who walks the narrow path between healer and warrior. Since his first appearance in The Unquiet Grave, Timber MacDuff has fascinated readers of the Caitlin Ross series. The four stories in this volume finally give fans a peek into the mind and motives of this complex character with accounts of significant events in his life. “The Source of the Sword” tells how Timber left his youth behind and took up the practice of the broadsword. “Summoning Scáthach” relates his first encounter with the warrior goddess and the circumstances which led him to seek her out. “Battle Blessed” details how he tracked down and fought the Ring of Omicron, and “Without Holding Back” is the story of how he followed Caitlin Ross to Gordarosa and, eventually, married her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katherine Lampe
• Release date: Dec 9, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301625048

Katherine Lampe

Some people posit that Katherine Lampe is a construct capable of existing in multiple realities simultaneously. Others maintain that she is a changeling, or at least has a large proportion of non-human blood. It is possible that her brain is the result of a government experiment, although which government is uncertain and as of this date none has claimed responsibility.

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The Fits o’ the Season

Katherine Lampe

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Katherine E. Lampe

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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By Katherine Lampe

The Caitlin Ross Series

The Unquiet Grave

She Moved Through the Fair

A Maid in Bedlam

The Parting Glass

The Fits o’ the Season

Other

Dragons of the Mind: Seven Fairy Tales

Copyright © 2012 by Katherine E. Lampe. All rights reserved. For reprint information, please contact the author. Cover copyright © 2013 by Michael J. Zimmerle. Sword & poppy motif © 2013 by Michael J. Zimmerle

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance by the characters depicted herein to any person living or dead is a coincidence. Really. But I’m not responsible for the gods and cats.

Dedicated with respect to

The Association for Renaissance Martial Arts

http://www.thearma.org

"He is noble, wise, judicious, and well he knows

The fits o’ the season…"

--Shakespeare, MacBeth, VI, ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Source Of The Sword

Summoning Scáthach

Battle Blessed

Without Holding Back

Afterword

The Source of the Sword

Portland, Oregon, September 1989

He looks around the nearly-bare apartment and does not feel at home there.

The feeling isn’t new to him. He hasn’t felt at home anywhere, in more years than he can count on both hands. Not since leaving Skye, with her mists and green mountains, her rocky moors. The blue vault of heaven overhead. There was room for him, on Skye. He could disappear for days at a time, lose himself, let the wild places swallow him up. It seemed like days, anyway. More likely, it had been hours. Mam never would have stood for days.

But since the move, especially since the year of his illness, he has not felt at home. Oregon is all right. It’s green enough, at least. There are mountains, if not the right mountains. The overcast and the soft rains of winter are familiar to him. And there are trees. More trees than on Skye, which is one good thing. Portland is a fine city, as far as cities go, which is not far, in his opinion. Better than many places he’s been, especially in the last six years.

Still, it isn’t home.

Home is an idea, Mitch, his teacher, a Tlingit shaman, has told him more than once. You carry it here. Pointing to his head. And here. Pointing to his heart. Find it there, and you will never lose it.

And he’s tried. All the gods must know he’s tried, so hard. Yet he can’t seem to reach that place. His center is far, far away. Lost in mist, lost in time. Lost in a vision he does not want to think about. A vision of Skye.

Someday he’ll go back there, he knows. He’s seen it. Someday when he’s older. Twenty years from now, perhaps more. If he lives so long. He does not really expect to live so long. There are still times, more times than he lets anyone know, that he doesn’t wish to.

He thinks he should make an attempt at settling in, so he looks around again, taking inventory. Taking stock. His own place. His own walls, his own table. His own dismal chairs. His own ugly sofa that folds out into a bed. Not his own, not really; they came with the apartment. But his own for now, which is all he’s ever had. The board and brick bookshelves are not his own; the last tenant left them. An inheritance, of a sort. Perhaps he should start by claiming them, by unpacking his own few books and aligning them in rows.

He wanders over to one of the boxes on the floor and stares at it. Wanting answers, wanting something. Wanting to fill the vast, aching hollow of his heart. If his heart were a box, he could find something to put in it. Something to fit the shape of the emptiness at his core. But there is nothing, ever. Or if there is, he hasn’t found it. Sometimes he plays with the possibility that what he wants, what he needs, does exist and waits for him in some future he cannot imagine. That he’ll find it. Stumble upon it, perhaps, when he least expects it. And then he’ll be whole.

Most days, though, he doesn’t believe that. Most days, he believes he’ll feel this emptiness, this poverty of soul, forever. Or as long as he can stand to live with it, which amounts to the same thing.

Has he ever, truly, thought things could be better? Perhaps. Three years ago, when Mitch showed up at the abandoned warehouse in LA where he slept those days, when Mitch dragged him out of his narcotic stupor and back to Portland, perhaps he did believe. He’d been young enough, still, to want rescue and naïve enough, in spite of everything, to cling to the idea that someone else could save him. Or perhaps he’d simply run out of room, run out of time, run out of places to hide. Easier, then, to give in, to go along.

If Mitch hadn’t shown up, he’d have been dead, perhaps within weeks. From drugs, from hardship, from sorrow, from simply ceasing to care. Three years on the streets, three years of caring had worn him out. Three years of impotent rage at the world he couldn’t change. It didn’t take him six months, after he left home, after he left his mother’s house, to discover that junk helped. Helped calm the storm inside him. Helped him not care.

Three years on junk was a lifetime. Lots of kids didn’t make it half that long.

So, he’d gone with Mitch, and Mitch had cleaned him up, and now he is here. Here in this one-room flat that does not fit him. Because Mitch said it was time.

College! The idea horrifies him. I dinna want tae go tae college!

He’s hung around colleges. Kids do, even the ones with homes. There are three in Portland, alone. The Catholic college. His brother started there last year, and he has no intention of ever setting foot in the place. PSU. Reed, which everyone knows is where you go to buy drugs. And he’s seen plenty of others. They’re good places to panhandle, if you can spot the right mark. Not the ones with perfect teeth and fancy clothes, the poster kids. They’d just as soon kick you. The ones who look a bit harried, a bit different. Art students with restaurant jobs. They consider themselves sensitive, empathetic, and they’re always good for spare change, a few bucks, perhaps even a meal if you catch them on the right day. Sometimes more than that. The girls always fall for his charm, for his smile.

But they’re all the same, those places. The kids with their bright eyes, their hope. They’re too clean. Their outfits look contrived, like costumes, like uniforms, marking this one as a geek, this one as a punk, this one as a cheerleader. And even the older ones, the ones who’ve been there years, look young to him. They haven’t seen the things he’s seen.

You’re a smart young man, Timber, says Mitch. Brilliant, some say.

Brilliant, is it? Although the praise is good to him, he tries hard to keep his face blank. Not to show his pleasure, his curiosity. He wants to know who said such a thing. But he won’t be drawn in that way.

I’ve kept you almost three years, Mitch goes on when he refuses to take the bait. You need more, now.

What more?

Your own place. Your own path. Your own life.

He snorts, contemptuous. I dinna think a college will provide those.

Many people find things at college that they did not expect, says the old man with infuriating serenity.

So ye think I need tae find myself, then? He hates the concept. He’s watched people, he’s always watched people. He’s seen the ones who claim to be finding themselves. The constant Seekers. Always searching with no wish of finding at all. Flitting from one thing to the next with no more intent than butterflies. Less, for butterflies at least know which flowers will satisfy them. They feed, and then they change. But Seekers never change. And he’s seen the way they treat people. Thoughtless. Self-Centered. Hypocrites.

I did not say so, Mitch replies.

They stare at each other across the table in Mitch’s kitchen. The table where they’ve sat so often. And he knows, he already knows, that he’s going to lose this fight. Not only because Mitch is his teacher, and the habit of obedience is strong in him now. But because the old man is right. He’s a man, not a child. He needs to leave this temporary safety, to branch out, to grow.

He badly wants a beer. He knows there’s beer in the fridge, and he could get up and grab one. He doesn’t need to ask permission. But he doesn’t get up.

There are things I cannot teach you, Mitch says.

Such as?

How to be the man you are in the world you live in.

Again, he snorts. "I dinna think college will teach me