Deverry - A Time Of War Part 38

'I haven't the slightest idea.'

Yraen stared.

'My apologies, lad, but I don't. I can't work miracles, I can only follow the laws of the cursed dweomer, and I've got no idea of where Rhodry may or may not be, so why don't you get out of here and leave me alone?'

Yraen fled, slamming the door behind him. Jill kicked the table leg so hard the table rattled, Wildfolk scattered like terrified chickens. With a growl for them as well, Jill went back to her brooding at the window.

In Haen Mam's great hall Garin, Mic and Otho lounged round a table at one of their perennial dice games, but the joy of it seemed to have run thin. Mic propped himself up on one elbow and drew little patterns on the table with a bit of charcoal, while Otho and Garin rolled the dice this way and that between them with not one snarl or insult. Rhodry leaned in the sunny doorway, yawning and watching them.

'Would you either sit down or leave?' Otho snapped. 'It drives me daft, having you hover there for hours like that.'

'Oh hold your tongue!' Garin said. 'Look, we're all on edge, waiting like this, but there's no need to be making things worse.'

Otho merely growled. In the spirit of compromise Rhodry dipped himself a tankard of ale from the open barrel by the hearth and bat down next to the envoy.

'Care for a turn at tfiis game?' Garin said.

'I don't, but my thanks.'

'Ilah!' Otho said. 'He's found other ways of amusing himself. Leave it to the elf among us to seduce our hostess.'

Rhodry threw the ale in his tankard full into Otho's face. With a yelp the old man scrambled up.

'Say what you want about me.' Rhodry slammed the tankard down. 'But leave her name out of it.'

Before Garin could stop him, he swung himself free of the bench and stalked round the table. With a little shriek Otho stepped back and back till he fetched up against the wall and could step no further. Rhodry grabbed him by the shirt and lifted him off his feet.

'My apologies!' Otho wailed. 'I meant no insult to the lady.'

'Just to me, eh?'

Rhodry laughed and let him go, setting him down gently and brushing drops of ale from the old man's face with the side of his hand.

'Well and good, then. Better go wash your beard, Otho my friend. It stinks of strong drink,'

When Otho ran out of the great hall, Mic got up and followed him. Rhodry sat down across the table from Garin and gave him a sunny smile.

'You're daft, Rori. Do you know that?'

'All berserkers are daft. It comes in handy, like.'

'Well, I wouldn't know about that, but I'll admit that the old man had it coming. He's been riding you for weeks.'

'For years, if truth be told, ever since the first day we met. I don't truly remember, of course, but I think that he may have handed me my first insult before he even knew my name.'

Garin sighed, rose, and took their tankards to the barrel to refill them. For a few minutes they drank in a companionable silence.

'It's that nasty tongue that actually got our Otho exiled.' Garin remarked. 'Not paying his debt was the formal charge, but he showed the judges - well, shall we say less than full respect?'

'I can believe it of him. Tell me somewhat. Will things go badly for my lady because of me?'

'Why would they? She's a widow and the mistress of Haen Marn as well. If she chooses to keep her bed warm at night, who's to say her nay?'

'Well, things are a fair bit different in my country.'

'True, true, but we're not in it, are we?' Garin smiled, just briefly.

"Well, so we're not.'

They drank for a few moments more.

'I do wonder about Enj,' Garin said. 'I get the odd feeling that he's staying away on purpose, odd because the servants here have all confirmed what I've been thinking all along. He's going to covet the joining of this hunt.'

'Splendid, but if he doesn't even know we're here -'

Garin looked at him and lifted one eyebrow.

'You think he does know?'

'Rori, we're in Haen Marn. The lady and her brood are not what you'd call ordinary souls, are they now?'

'Urn, well, true spoken. Let me see, we got here just before the moon turned full, she went to her dark time, and now she's what?'

'She reached the waxing quarter last night.' All at once Garin looked into his tankard and struggled to suppress a grin. 'No doubt you've been a bit too busy, like, to notice.'

Rhodry swung one hand toward him in a mock blow.

'Be that as it may,' Garin went on with some dignity. The summer's not getting any younger. You're going to have a fine time of it up on the Roof of the World if you don't get yourself there soon, and it's not what you'd call a short journey.'

'True. Well, I'll go see if I can find Angmar. She's often in the tower this time of day.'

In the tower was indeed where he found her. Angmar had persuaded Avain to set her basin upon the table and sit in a proper chair; she herself sat opposite, while Rhodry leaned against the wall and watched them, two golden heads together in the sunlight, the one so strong, the other so vulnerable to every ill whim of a world she'd never be able to understand. Safe under her mother's protection Avain was so sunny, so loving, that it was hard not to like the child. Even the *dourest servant, Angmar's maid, always had a smile for her when she came up to help with some task or other.

'She will get round to Enj some while soon.' Angmar said. 'There foe no hurrying the child. I doubt me if she may choose what she do see or not.'

'Probably not, truly.'

Not that he would have blamed her, but Rhodry did have a brief wondering if Angmar were postponing his leaving for her own reasons. He wondered about himself, as well, and his own lost appet.i.te for taking up the burden of his Wyrd. When Avain started talking in broken fragments of words and sentences, Angmar frowned, trying to decipher.

'An odd thing, this. She do tell that back in the city of men, the many-towered city where first she did see you, a woman be looking for you, and that she does vex herself over your being gone. A woman with white hair, and very frail and slender. Be it your mother, Rori?' Rhodry laughed.

'It's not, but the dweomermaster who laid the geas upon me to find trie dragon.'

Told this news, Avain giggled, c.o.c.king her head first one way, then the other, several times running in a sort of dance before her mother stopped her with a gentle hand on the cheek. She looked down again, frowning into her basin, shaking it every now and then to dance the ripples round, then all at once cried out. She began babbling in a flood of words that even Angmar had trouble understanding. At last, however, something came clear. Angmar looked up, pale and trembling.

'Rori, the town where that geas master does live? It be sieged. A huge army camps all round it, and they be neither human nor Mountain People, but some strange folk the like of which she can barely tell. Hairy, she says, and that's all she does say, hairy and big, Mam, hairy and big.'

Rhodry grunted. The news. .h.i.t him as a physical pain, a run of rage down his back that wrenched him away from the wall and made him arch like Dar's bow. When Avain cried out, he forced himself calm, unclenched his fists and let out his breath in a gasp. He knelt by her chair and smiled.

'My thanks,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

His tone, his smile, made her smile in return. Angmar spoke for a moment or two in a soothing way. In a few moments the la.s.s returned to her scrying, murmuring Enj's name.

'We'd best be gone,' Angmar said. 'With you here she'll be returning to that siege, and I want that not.'

'Nor do I, my lady.'

Rhodry clattered down the staircase, waited for her just outside the tower while he stared across the lake without truly seeing either water or hill. Together they walked down to the sh.o.r.e without saying a word and stood, a little ways apart, watching the waves run up onto pale sand. The wind whistled round Haen Marn like a dirge.

'Will you be leaving us straightaway?' Angmar said at last.

'To go back to Cengarn, you mean? What good would that do, one more swordsman against an army?

The lord of that city has powerful allies. No doubt they'll be riding to relieve him with all the men they can sc.r.a.pe together. I can't know, but I think me that the best thing I can do is carry out my geas.' All at once he laughed, a brief echo of his berserker's howl. 'I doubt me if the dweomer will give me much choice.'

'I did wonder. You have spoken to me many times about your friends in that city.'

'And my heart aches for all of them, caught there. It's a terrible thing, being besieged.'

'So I've heard. My mother was taken in a siege, and she did often tell me of it, when she were in one of her black moods and crying for her homeland.'

'Your mother was one of the Mountain People, then?'

'Nah nah nah. It were them what took her, as tribute like when her town fell.'

Rhodry spun round to stare. She smiled, a wry twist of her mouth.

'Envoy Garin be a good man, and many of his people, they too be good folk, but they do like to nurse their injuries and claim how they were put upon by my mother's folk, by our folk, Rori. But it do take two to twist a rope, I always say, and not all the injustice does get birthed south of the Deverry border.'

'Just so. And so you were raised in a dwarf hold?'

'I was, and brought here when the lord of Hacn Marn did need a wife. They did rightly think that I would flourish more in the sun and air, where a Mountain woman would have sickened and pined.'

'You weren't given much choice in the matter, were you.'

'None.' Her mouth twisted in the same smile. 'But I were well-pleased, all the same, to walk in the light, and he were in his way a good man. When he did drown, I wept.'

He could hear old pain in her voice. He glanced round - no one in sight - and took her hand to pull her close beside him. She sighed, letting her head rest against his shoulder, just briefly before she pulled away.

'Where Enj be I know not,' she said. 'I would worry about those enemies who did try to prevent you here, but Avain has seen him many times, safe and on his way.'

Rhodry heard then what she must have heard, the crunch of footsteps on gravel. With a face as sour as old vinegar and the smell of it hanging about her as well, the maidservant walked out from among the trees. When she said something in Dwarvish, Angmar nodded agreement.

'It be needful for me to go, Rori. They be pickling beef, and I must be unlocking the salt chest.'

'I'd best go back with you if I want to reach the manse.'

The maidservant shot him a glance of pure venom, as if she'd been hoping he'd stay by the lake and end up feeding one of the beasts.

Otho and Mic had rejoined Garin in the great hall. When Rhodry eame trotting in, they all slewed round and looked at him.

'What's so wrong?' Garin said.

'Cengarn's under siege. Avain saw it in her basin.'

Garin went dead-still, sat for a long time with his hand frozen round his tankard's handle. Otho and Mic said nothing, either, merely watched the envoy as if waiting for orders. At last he muttered a few words in Dwarvish.

'Ye G.o.ds,' he whispered in Deverrian. 'Grim news, Rori. Grim grim news indeed. I've got to get back to Lin Serr as soon as ever I can. We have alliances with Cadmar, after all, and kin in that town as well.'

He rose, setting the tankard down. 'I must find Angmar. Otho, I hate to let you negotiate on your own over your debt, but -'

'Oh, don't vex yourself about that.' A note of cheer crept into Otho's voice. 'I'll manage, I'll manage.'

'If I find out later you've been miserly, you'll pay double in fines.' Garin hesitated, considering something. 'Well, I'll speak with Angmar. It's too late in the day to leave right now, anyway.'

He ran out, leaving the rest of them looking round at each other with not a word more to say.

That night Rhodry retired to their chamber early, undressed and got into bed, lying awake with his hands tucked under his head to wait for Angmar while she settled A vain down out in the tower. Moonlight poured through the unshuttered windows, and the damp summer breeze ruffled his hair. He had lived through a number of sieges in his life, on both sides of the town walls. No matter how hard he tried to banish them, memories crowded round him of the horrors a long siege would bring. Worse yet were his memories of a town falling to the besiegers, himself among them. He knew all too well how brutally a man could act after long months of frustration under some stubborn enemy's walls. He sat up, shaking his head hard as if he could spit out the taste of shame. He got up and went to sit in the window seat until Angmar came in to distract him from his remembering.

She barred the door behind her, then set her candle lantern down on the little table. He got up and kissed her, then lay down on the bed to watch while she undressed, taking her time, primly folding each piece of clothing and laying it down on top of a wooden chest.

'You're truly beautiful,' he said.

'Do you be thinking so? Always I did feel so strange and ugly, in the dwarf hold and to my husband as well, too tall and spindly, like, and with this yellow hair.'

'I'm not one of the Mountain People.'

She smiled and lay down, turning into his arms for a kiss. Before he could take another one, she laid her fingertips on his mouth.

'Tell me one thing first, Rori. Is it that you've seen the woman in white these past few days?'

'I haven't.'

'When did you see her last?'

She sounded so urgent that he considered with some care.

'I do remember,' he said finally. 'It was some days ago, and we were lying here, and just before I took you into my arms, I thought saw her, standing by the window. For a moment it gave me pause, but then she vanished.'

'And you've not seen her since?'

'I haven't.'

'Truly? Now that does gladden my heart.'

There was such an odd note in her voice, a thrill of hope like a songbird flying free into sunlight, that he raised himself up on one elbow to look at her. In the guttering light of the candle, her face revealed nothing.

'Be there somewhat wrong?' she said.