A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [26]
“There never will be if I can help it,” Aderyn said. “I’d be twice cursed before I’d let a man be killed for taking the freedom that the gods gave him. I think my magic might make us harder to find.”
Both men smiled, reassured by Aderyn’s lie. Although he could control his aura well enough to pass unnoticed and thus practically invisible, Aderyn couldn’t make an entire village disappear.
For two days they went north, keeping to the rolling hills and making a bare twelve miles a day. The more Aderyn opened his mind to the omens, the more clearly he knew that they were being pursued. On the third night, he scried into a campfire and saw the ruins of the old village, burned to the ground. Only a lord’s warband would have destroyed it, and that warband would have to be blind to miss the trail of so many goats and people. He left the campfire and went to look for Ibretin, who was taking his turn at watching the goats out in the pasture.
“You’ve called me Wise One. Do you truly think I have magic?”
“I can only hope so. Wargal thinks so.”
It was too dark under the starry sky to see Ibretin’s face. Aderyn raised his hand and made the blue light gather in his fingers like a cool-burning torch. Ibretin gasped aloud and stepped back.
“Now you know instead of hoping. Listen, the men chasing you are close by. Sooner or later, they’ll catch us. You offered to die to save your friends. How about helping me with a little scheme instead?”
At dawn on the morrow, while Wargal rounded up the villagers and got them moving north, Aderyn and Ibretin headed south. Although Aderyn rode, he had Ibretin walk, leading his pack mule as if they’d been traveling together for some time as servant and master. About an hour’s ride brought them to the inevitable warband. They were just breaking their night’s camp, the horses saddled and ready to ride, the men standing idly around waiting for their lord’s orders. The lord himself, a tall young man in blue-and-gray-plaid brigga, with oak leaves embroidered as a blazon on his shirt, was kicking dirt over a dying campfire. When Aderyn and Ibretin came up, the men shouted, running to gather round them. Aderyn could see Ibretin shaking in terror.
“Oh, here,” a man called out. “This peddler’s found our flown chicken! Lord Degedd will reward you for this, my friend.”
“Indeed?” Aderyn said. “Well, I’m not sure I want a reward.”
With a signal to Ibretin to stay well back, Aderyn swung down from his horse just as Degedd came pushing his way through his men. Aderyn made a bow to him, which the lord acknowledged with a brief nod.
“I’ve indeed found your runaway bondsman, but I want to buy him from you, my lord. He’s a useful man with a mule, and I need a servant.”
Caught utterly off guard, Degedd stared for a moment, then blinked and rubbed his chin with his hand.
“I’m not sure I want to sell. I’d rather have the fun of taking the skin off his cursed back.”
“That would be a most unwise pleasure.”
“And who are you to tell me what to do?”
Since Aderyn was not very tall, the lord towered over him with six feet of solid muscle. Aderyn set his hands on his hips and looked up at him.
“Your men called me a peddler, but I’m nothing of the sort. I’m a herbman, traveling in your country, and one who knows the laws of the gods. Do you care to question me further?”
“I do. I don’t give a pig’s fart whether you’re a learned man or not, and anyway, for all I know, you lie.”
“Then let me give you a sample of my learning. Enslaving free men to work your land is an impious thing. The gods have decreed that only criminals and debtors shall be bondsmen. That law held for a thousand years, back in the Homeland, and it held for hundreds here, until greedy men like you chose to break it.”
When his men began muttering, shamefaced among themselves at the truth of the herbman’s words, the lord’s face turned purple with rage. He drew his sword, the steel glittering in the sun.
“Hold your ugly lying tongue and give me back that bondsman! Be on your way or die right here, you scholarly swine!”
With a gentle