“Now, look here,” he called out. “There’s nothing wrong with you at all, is there? You’re just annoyed at your appearance again, like the time before last, aren’t you? I’m sorry for you—you know I am. You know I want to do what I can to help you. But that doesn’t include sitting here by the roadside until you see fit to reveal yourself. So, I’m going without you. Right now. If you’re still here when I get back, I’ll take you with me. If I pass this way.”
“Wait a minute!” the nasal voice whined. “You can’t leave me here! Where is this place? What kinds of things live in these woods?” A large freminiad shook momentarily, as if itself terrified of the prospect. “I could be killed!”
“So could I. There really isn’t anything else to say. You can stay in the forest and meet some ignominious end at the mercy of a—a rabid squirrel. Or you can come with me. We may be too late, you know. He had a good lead on us and I’ll be damned if I’ll waste any more time on your conniptions. Good-bye, Borregad.”
The yellow bush was jostled again. Then the voice cried, “Drat! This thing’s covered in some kind of sap. It’s all over my pal—paw. Paw! Lyrec! Don’t you leave, you hear me. Wait a minute, I’m coming with you.”
From behind the bush a huge black cat appeared, waddling on its hind legs. It was a punchinello of a cat, its coarse fur standing up as if in anger. Its blue eyes were twice the size of a normal cat’s eyes.
The cat frantically rubbed one forepaw against the other as it waddled up to the man named Lyrec. Its tail dragged in the dirt. “Here,” it said and thrust out its afflicted paw. “Do you have a cloth or something? I can’t get this stuff off.” The cat stumbled and caught its balance. “How do these creatures manage to walk?”
Lyrec shook his head. “Borregad, you’re a waste, do you know that? In the first place, you don’t need a cloth, you just lick it off. If you weren’t so damned busy flapping that tongue, you’d realize that it has certain properties. In the second—”
“Lick it off? Do you have any idea what it tastes like?”
“I won’t until
you
taste it.”
The cat gave him an up-from-under look of smoldering doubt, then tentatively brought its paw to its mouth and licked the rough pads. Its thin lips smacked and its eyes narrowed. “Nuh, fuine. Nuw is snuck nu my nungue.” Its whiskers twitched angrily.
“Oh. Well, maybe I got that part wrong. But I do know that you’re what they call a f-f-feline. Your family group walks on all fours. You’re not meant to walk on two legs alone.”
The cat spat. “I refuse to walk on four legs. It’s demeaning.”
“Fine. Maybe we can find a little wagon to put your front feet in and you can just trundle along behind me.”
Borregad’s cleft upper lip curled back, revealing very long, sharp teeth. His lips smacked again. “I don’t like this incarnation. And why do I always end up some second-rate brute while you’re always a paragon? Hmm?”
Ignoring the question that they both knew the answer to, Lyrec bent down and lifted the minstrel. The body relaxed as he touched it. He carried it into the high grass.
“The minstrel sleeps very deeply,” observed the cat. “Are you sure he’s alive?”
“Are you questioning my capabilities? Of course I’m sure.”
The cat clicked his tongue, secretly pleased with himself for having rankled his friend. He tried waddling a few more steps, then finally gave up and dropped onto all fours. “I hate this incarnation. Why couldn’t that minstrel have thought of some less restrictive life form?”
“What a distempered little monster you are. Get up on my shoulders.”
Borregad crouched, then leapt up to Lyrec’s right shoulder. “Well, at least this body’s good for something. How far do we have to go?”
“I don’t know. There was something about ‘steys’ —some measure of distance, but I didn’t get anything definite. There seemed to be a point where his mind was blocked off. Some sort of interference.”
“Probably atmospheric.”
“Probably you.”
“That’s a rotten thing to say, ’pon my soul. Cob.”
Lyrec kept his comment to himself. He started down the road to the south, and hoped that they had come to the right place.
Borregad muttered, “Rabid squirrel,” and then fell silent.
Chapter 2.
Grohd the tavern-keeper manufactured his own
grynne
, aged it in casks that he built himself, and probably drank as much of it as any two of his regular customers, which may have accounted for his resemblance to a keg of his brew, and certainly accounted for the veined flush of his cheeks and nose. The resemblance was not lost on his patrons, who jokingly asked after the private stock in his special keg, to which Grohd replied with a warm smile and a hand on his belly.
By rights he should have been a happy man. He’d built his tavern at a critical crossroads—the one leading from the kingdom of Miria in the south to Dolgellum and other points north, and the other through Sivst to Atlarma in the west. And because the crossroads occurred just at the northernmost tip of Kerbecula Forest where it bordered on Mormey Marsh, there wasn’t enough arable land to support more than a handful of farms in whatever direction one looked; thus no town had grown up here, and Grohd’s was the sole tavern for thirty steys in any direction. He had a stable large enough to accommodate two coaches and the accompanying teams of horses, and enough beds in the outbuildings for a full company of travelers. He made ample money, saved a good portion of it; owned a piece of a neighboring farm someone else worked and that kept him in food the year round; and although he would never be a land baron, he would certainly never starve.
Yet he was unhappy. His perfect life contained one flaw, one insurmountable problem.
The problem traveled the road from the east: That road, leading as it did out of Secamelan and over the Mormey Tors, arrived eventually in the small country of Ladoman. And Ladoman was the domain of a fat and oily cutthroat by the name of Ladomirus.
Although Grohd had never actually seen Ladomirus, he had experienced enough trouble on the villain’s account to loathe the very mention of that name. People in flight from the harsh laws and crippling taxation in Ladoman stopped at Grohd’s tavern. He didn’t ask them; but there was no other outpost of humanity around where they could stop. Following on their heels as invariably as thunder follows lightning, the soldiers Ladomirus came. Time and again they ransacked Grohd’s buildings in search of fugitives. The soldiers in keeping with the kingdom were filthy, foul, and vicious. They threatened him, baited him; once even beat him. Two years earlier, one of his outbuildings had mysteriously burned. He had learned to expect nothing better from the privileged spoilers of Ladoman. Half their kingdom was mire, and the rest was barely tillable land. The people there were treated like slaves, watched over with care so they did not escape to more enviable lands—to Miria and Secamelan—and thus deprive Ladoman of its labor force. Fugitives were punished with death, and anyone found harboring them was press-ganged into service in their place. Grohd had been cautious enough never to be found harboring fugitives, but his main advantage was his occupation. Should they lead him away in chains, the Ladomantine soldiers would find no more grynne and hot food at the end of a cold pursuit through the marshes.
Lately, though, the soldiers’ behavior intimated a change in the murky kingdom, leaving Grohd with the distinct impression that they were merely biding their time until they could break him and everyone else.
Something was happening in foul Ladoman—something frightening and insidious.
Grohd smelled war in the air and grew more frightened because that ought to have been impossible: Ladomirus lacked the manpower or the brains to conquer his enemies. His warriors comprised the dregs who’d been driven out of more civilized domains. They were disorderly drunken louts, mean and stupid—not the kind of soldiers who could be organized into a fighting force. He’d survived this long only because no one wanted his flyspeck of a kingdom.
Grohd’s anxiety over the undertone of the Ladomantines’ behavior fed on itself: He grew wary of anything out of the ordinary. Anything at all.
When the door of his tavern creaked back to reveal a tall, broad-shouldered silhouette filling the doorway, and when Grohd squinted into the afternoon light to see that four eyes stared back at him from beneath the figure’s hat, he gave a little yelp and considered quickly the distance from his hand to the double-bladed axe he kept beneath the bar.
He decided it was too far to reach. He cleared his throat, swallowed, and said, “Hello?”
The tall figure entered and closed the door. With the sunlight blocked off, Grohd saw the man clearly. To his enormous relief, saw the huge sullen cat perched on the stranger’s shoulders.
The stranger himself seemed pleasant enough, although he was a massive figure, nearly a giant by Grohd’s standards. His forearms were bare and roped with muscle, but he wore no weapon, unless you considered a silver sword hilt in a truncated scabbard a weapon—not terrifically imposing. The man’s hair beneath his feathered hat was shaggy and silvery, although his trim beard was jet black like his cape.
The stranger was smiling. The cat, then, also seemed to smile at Grohd; an unnatural expression, to be sure. Its teeth were extraordinarily long.
The man walked to the nearest table and set the cat down on it, then came languidly toward Grohd while dusting himself off. “Good day,” he said. “Warm afternoon, isn’t it?”
Grohd sighed with relief as he recognized the stranger for what he was—a pilgrim, and not a fugitive. The voice gave it away: Its silky accent was not from around here. It was vaguely familiar and, after a moment’s deliberation, Grohd recalled where he’d heard such a voice. He wondered if this fellow, too, was a Mirian minstrel. But, seeing no
cymrallin
, he decided probably not. The man certainly wasn’t going to play any songs with an abbreviated sword.
He might have thought more about it, but he found the stranger’s smile to be infectious, and realized an answer was expected from him.
He said, “Warm? Oh, for this time of year it’s hot. Wouldn’t want to be out on the road all day in this heat—
I’d
need something to drink.” He patted his belly. “On the other hand, you wait and see how cold it gets tonight—why, a man’ll shiver to death without a hot meal and a hot drink to keep his blood pumping. And, of course, a place to stay.”
“Well, then isn’t it fortunate, Borregad, that we chanced upon this tavern. And you’re absolutely right. This heat’s parched my throat. I could use a cup of—” The man looked deeply into Grohd’s eyes. The taverner felt a tickle inside his head. He reached up and scratched at it, above his ear, where he had some hair left. The tickle stopped, and Grohd was left with the unaccountable feeling that more time had passed than he was aware of. “Where was I?” the stranger said. “Oh, yes, a cup of your grynne, sir.” His smile grew.
“A … a cup. With pleasure, sir.” Grohd moved to where he kept the cups beneath the bar. A pilgrim all right, he thought. He hoped the stranger’s thirst matched his size and that the man had found wealth wherever he had been.
A moment later Grohd placed a full, frothing cup on the bar. “There y’are. That’s one plentare.”
“One … plentare.” The man’s smile faded for a moment, replaced by a strange inward look, which came to appear as if the stranger were angry with himself. “In advance?” he asked.
“If you don’t mind, sir,” Grohd said with practiced casualness. “What if you were to drink it and then refuse to pay? Now, how would I go about wrestling with the likes of you? And over one plentare. That’s not to say I don’t trust you or—”
The stranger waved his hand. “Not at all. But, first, might I borrow a plentare from you to show you a bit of magic?”
“Oh, a magician, are you? That funny sword, I didn’t think you were a fighter. And I’ll bet you play music as well—there’d be a coincidence, right enough. Well, I love a good trick.” He bent down behind the bar.
“I’m relieved to hear it,” Lyrec replied. Borregad’s laughter rang inside his head.
“Here.” Grohd slapped a coin down on the bar. “That’s a ten-piece. Will that make a difference?”
“I shouldn’t think so—except of course that you’ll lose ten instead of one.”
Grohd’s smile spread like a white stain. He knew this trick very well, and how to follow it. “Oh? Well, I can afford ten.”
“All right.” The man carefully placed his hands over the coin, then moved them around in opposing circles on the bar top. “Tell me when you want me to stop.”
Grohd looked him in the eye. “Stop,” he said.
The stranger looked at his hands. A smile flickered on his lips. “Now, do you know where the coin is?”
The taverner shook his head and began to laugh. “You’re all alike. Did you teach that one to the minstrel or did he teach it to you?” Grohd lifted the stranger’s drink and swept up the ten-piece from beneath it. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. “Your friend was in here just yesterday, playing the same game on me for a drink. You
do
know who I mean, don’t you? Of course, you don’t dress anything like him, but you both talk so much alike you could be brothers.”
Lyrec’s face flushed. The cat’s secret laughter bellowed with raucous abandon inside his head. “Just yesterday?”
“That’s so. Now, about paying for the drink.”
“W-would you care to try it another time?”
“What happens if I win? What do I get?”
“Another ten-piece.”
“I might point out that I’ve not seen a first one yet.” He scooted a coin across the bar top. “But I’ll trust you this far again. You still pay for the drink, though, before you drink it.”
Lyrec put his hand over the coin and closed his eyes very tight as he moved his hands around. Grohd watched the hands more carefully this time. When he was certain he had spied the hint of movement that meant the coin had been palmed away, he said, “Stop.” Then he reached across the bar and into the stranger’s left jerkin pocket. His brows knitted as his fingers encountered nothing but a bit of dirt. He withdrew his hand, rubbed off the fingertips with his thumb, then reached into the opposite pocket. That also proved to be empty. Finally, in desperation, he lifted the stranger’s hands and then the drink. The coin was gone. Exasperated, he met the stranger’s amused eyes.