A Time of Omens (44 page)

“You’re a bit east of Dun Mannannan and the shop of
Cardyl the silversmith,” he called out. “Farewell, silver daggers, and may your gods give you luck that’s good and horses to match it.”

The mist sealed him over, then vanished, blowing away in a sunny spring wind, tanged with the smell of the sea. They were riding on a hard-packed dirt road that ran through fields where young grain stood maybe two feet high, nodding pale green in a morning breeze. Far off to their left stood cliffs, dropping to the ocean below. Air at once Yraen realized that he was having trouble seeing, that he was shaking and sweating all at once, that his hands simply wouldn’t hold his reins. Rhodry leaped over and took them from him, then brought both horses to a halt.

“Go ahead and shudder,” Rhodry said. “There’s no shame in it.”

Yraen nodded, gulping for breath and clutching at the saddle peak. Rhodry looked away, watching the swell and rise of the distant ocean while he spoke.

“I’m glad I thought to mention silversmiths to Evandar. It’s time we got you a knife of your own. Still want it?”

Yraen had never thought that he would ever feel such pride, the sort that comes from knowing you’ve earned a thing yourself, and against all odds.

“Well, call me daft for it, but I do.”

“Good. You know, I just realized a thing that I should have seen years ago. Once the wretched dweomer’s had its hand on you, there’s no going back; there’s no use in pretending that things will ever be all quiet and peaceful and as daily as before.” He turned, glancing Yraen’s way. “You’re a silver dagger now, sure enough, as much an outcast as any of us.”

Yraen started to make some jest, but all at once he could think of nothing to say, just from hearing the bitter truth in his friend’s words.

By the time Dallandra reached Bardek, summer was well along in Deverry, though the journey seemed to take only a day to her. As usual, she started from the Gatelands in Evandar’s country, at a spot near the river where white water foamed and churned over black rock. When she thought of Jill, the image that rose, seemingly standing between two trees, seemed so faint and silvery that Dalla was
alarmed. She hurried over just as it disappeared, called up another image, followed that, trotting faster and faster until at last the river disappeared far behind her, and she heard the ocean. In a swirl of mist upon a graveled beach, Jill’s image appeared again, a little more solid and bright this time. When she approached it, Dallandra felt the gravel underfoot turning to coarse, stunted grass, rasping round her ankles. The ocean murmur disappeared. She hesitated, looking over a brown and treeless plain, wondering if she’d made a wrong turn, but tracking the images had never failed her before.

As she walked on, she kept expecting to find herself emerging into a jungle, but the air stayed cool and the landscape barren. It seemed that the very sunlight changed, turning pale while she picked her way through huge gray boulders along the crest of a hill. All at once she realized that the amethyst figurine was gone. She was fully back in her body, shivering in cold sunlight, breathing hard in thin air. Below her a cliff dropped down to a long parched valley gashed by a dry riverbed; far across rose mountain peaks, black and forbidding, peaked with snow. A wind blew steadily, whining through the coarse grass. The stunted slant of the few trees she saw told her that the wind rarely stopped.

When she turned round, she saw directly behind her more of the deformed trees, scattered round a spread of low wooden buildings, long oblongs roofed with split shingles. They were covered with carvings, every inch of the walls, every window frame and door lintel, of animals, birds, flowers, words in the Elvish syllabary, all stained in subtle colors, mostly blues and reds, to pick out the designs. From round behind the complex she could hear a faint whinny of horses, and a snatch of song drifted on the swirling dust. Out in front of the nearest building a gray-haired woman sat reading on a wooden bench, a pair of big tan hounds lounging at her feet.

“Jill! By the gods!”

The dogs leapt up and barked, but Jill hushed them, laying a slender scroll down beside her just as Dallandra hurried over. She was much thinner, and her hair was going white round her temples, but when she shook hands, her clasp was firm and strong, and her voice steady.

“It gladdens my heart to see you,” Jill said in Deverrian. “What brings you to me?”

“Just concern. Evandar said you’d been ill.”

“I have been, truly, and I’ve been told I still am, though I feel mended. I’ve had a shaking fever. I picked it up in the jungle. They have a tree there, whose bark has the virtue to cure the symptoms, but they say it gets in your blood and lies quiet for years and years, only to flare up when you get yourself cold or tired or suchlike.”

“That’s a grave thing, then.”

Jill merely shrugged, turning to snap at the dogs bounding round them. With little whines they lay down on the hard-packed reddish ground.

“Where are we?” Dallandra said.

“Outside the guest house of… well, the only word I can find for it in my own language is temple, but it’s not that. It’s a place where a few scholars of the People keep lore alive, and teach it to any who ask.”

“I’ve heard about such places from the days of the Seven Kings. I think the People sent their children to them as a matter of course, but I’m not sure why.”

For a moment they both turned, looking at the huddled longhouses, some hardly better than huts, that sheltered what was left of one of the finest university systems the world has ever known, then or now, not that either of them realized what such a word meant, of course. Once Dallandra saw a man of the People, dressed in a long gray tunic gathered at the waist with a rope belt, crossing from one house to another, but he never so much as looked their way.

“It’s so lonely up here,” Dallandra remarked at last. “Why did they choose this place?”

“See those mountains over there? Well, on the other side and down below them lies the jungle. All the clouds that come from the sea fetch up against those peaks and drop their rain. So up here, the air’s dry as a bone, and books and scrolls last a fair bit longer than they would down in the jungles. It was a long hard journey getting here, let me tell you, and of course, I had to go and get sick on the way.”

“Oh, come now! Don’t blame yourself for that.”

“I should have been able to turn it aside.” Jill sounded
genuinely aggrieved. “Well, but it’s too late now to worry about it, I suppose. What’s done is done. I must say, I’ve come to have a lot of respect for the physicking your People know.”

“Oh, by the gods! Forgive me, I feel like a dolt, but you know, it’s just dawned on me what all of this means.” Dallandra waved her hand round at the buildings. “It’s true, isn’t it? Refugees did reach the islands.”

“Quite a few of them, Dalla, quite a few.” All at once she grinned, a flash of her old humor. “Here, I’ve forgotten all my courtesies! Won’t you come in?”

Dallandra hesitated, suddenly afraid, wondering why she should be afraid rather than eager to learn this ancient lore of her people.

“I can’t stay long. I need to get back to Elessario. She might be in danger.”

“Ah. Forgive me. Of course, you’ve got your own work to do. Don’t worry about me. I’m as well as I need to be. And you know where to find me now.”

“So I do. I take it you’ll be here a long while?”

“Oh, you could spend a life here, if you had one to spare. It’s amazing, Dalla, just simply amazing! They’ve managed to preserve so much, most, I’ll wager, of what they brought with them. It’s their whole life, up here, copying things. You know, my teacher here, Meranaldan, his name is, told me that men risked their lives—gods! some actually died, saving these books when the city was falling.” She shook her head in something like sadness. “The history of your race, their songs and poems, some of their magic, though not as much of that as I’d like to see, and all sorts of odd bits of craft lore and learning—scrolls and codices, heaps of them. A true marvel it is, all of it.”

All at once Dalla knew why she was afraid, and that she’d have to face that fear.

“And what of the Guardians? Do they speak of them?”

“They do, but I don’t suppose they know much about their true nature. I’d wager that you know more about Evandar’s folk than any person alive, man or woman both.”

Dallandra smiled, glancing away to hide her stab of relief that no one but her knew just how strange her lover was, and how unnatural a love they shared.

“Well, you know, maybe I should come in and talk
awhile. Jill, the time’s coming near for the child to be born. I can feel it, deep in my heart. If I’m to succeed, then I’ve got to make my move soon.”

“When you need me, we’ll go back to Deverry together.” She hesitated, looking across the far valley. “And we’ll pray that this rotten fever’s gone for good.”

Yet even as she spoke, Dallandra saw a shadow cross her face, not some trick of the physical light, but a dweomer warning, as if the dark bird of Death were blessing her with a flick of its wing.

Arcodd,
Summer 1116

“Those brigga don’t fool me none. I know a pretty lass when I see one.”

The girl looked up from her bowl of stew to find the man leaning, elbows splayed and his dirty face all drunken smile, onto the table directly across from her. Around them the tavern fell abruptly silent as the customers, all men except for one old woman sucking a pint of bitter in a corner, turned to watch. Most grinned.

“What’s your name, wench?” His breath stank of bad teeth.

In the uncertain firelight the tavern room seemed to shrink to a frieze of leering faces and the pounding of her heart.

“I said, what’s your name, slut?”

He was leaning closer, red hair and beard, greasy, dabbed with food, the stinking mouth twisting into a grin as he reached for her with broad and dirty fingers. She wanted to scream but her throat had turned stone-dry and solid.

“Er, ah, well, I wouldn’t touch her, truly I wouldn’t.”

The man jerked up and swirled round to face the speaker, who had come up so quietly that no one had noticed. He was old, with a pronounced stoop, his hair whitish though touched with red in places, and he had the most amazing pair of bags she’d ever seen under anyone’s eyes, but her would-be molester shrank back from him as though he’d been a young warrior.

“Ah, now, Your Holiness, just a bit of fun.”

“Not for her—no fun at all, I’d say. She’s quite pale, you see. Er, ah, well, I’d leave if I were you.”

At that she noticed the two enormous dogs, half wolf from the look of them, that stood by the priest’s side with their lips drawn back over large and perfect fangs. When they growled, the man yelped and ran out the tavern door to the accompaniment of jeers and catcalls. The priest turned to look at the other customers with an infinite sadness in his blue eyes.

“Er, well, you’re no better. If I hadn’t come in…”

The laughter stopped, and the men began to study the ground or the tables or the wall, looking at anything but his sad and patient face. With a sigh the priest sat down, smoothing his long gray tunic under him, the dogs settling at his feet.

“After you finish that stew, lass, you’d best come with me. You’ve picked the worst tavern in all Arcodd for your dinner.”

“So it seems, Your Holiness.” She was surprised that she could speak at all. “You have my humble and undying thanks. May I stand you a tankard?”

“Not so early in the afternoon, my thanks. I’ll have a drop of ale of an evening, but truly, these days, it doesn’t sit so well in my stomach.” He sighed again. “Er, well, um, what
is
your name?”

She debated, then decided that lying to a priest and a rescuer was beyond her. Besides, her ruse was torn already.

“Carramaena, but call me Carra. Everyone does—did—people who know me, I mean. I’ve been trying to pass for a lad and calling myself Gwyl, but it doesn’t seem to be working.”

“Um, well, it isn’t, truly. Gwyl? The dark one?” He smiled in a burst of surprising charm. “Doesn’t suit you.
With your yellow hair and all Now my name does suit me. Perryn, it is.”

“You don’t seem foolish in the least.”

“Ah, that’s because you don’t know me very well. You probably never will, seeing as you must be going somewhere in a great hurry if you’d ride with only a lie for company.” He paused, frowning at the far wall. “Have to do somewhat about that, you traveling alone, I mean. Are you going to eat that stew?”

“I’m not. I’m not hungry anymore, and I’ve already picked one roach out of it. Will the dogs want it?”

“Mayhap, but it’ll make them sick. Come with me.”

When he got up and headed for the door, Carra grabbed her cloak from the bench and hurried after, her head as high as she could hold it as she passed the men by the fire. Outside, drowsy in the hot spring sun, her horse stood tied to the hitching rail in front of the round tavern. A purebred Western Hunter, he was a pale buckskin gelding.

“It was the horse that made me go in,” Perryn said. “I wondered who’d have a horse like that, you see. You shouldn’t just leave him tied up like that in this part of the world. Um, well, he could get stolen.”

“Oh, he’ll kick the demons out of anyone but me who comes near him. I’m the only person who could ever touch him, much less ride him. That’s why he’s mine.”

“Ah. Your father give him to you?”

“My elder brother.” Try as she might to hide it, bitterness crept into her voice and tightened it down. “He’s the head of our clan now.”

“Ah. Then you
are
noble-born. I, er, um, rather thought so.”

She felt her cheeks burn with a blush.

“Truly, you’re not much of a liar, Carra. Well, fetch your horse and come along. Do you like dogs?”