A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [119]
“I can’t see a cursed thing.” Yet still, he whispered. “Much less anything I could call a ‘him.’ What do you—”
He stopped, feeling cold fear run down his spine. Although he saw nothing solid twixt the window and the cart, a shadow suddenly fell, a distinct silhouette, on the white square. It looked like a shadow thrown by a man standing sideways, except for the head, which was blunt and snouted. In one clawed paw it carried a dagger, raised and ready. In dead silence Rhodry drew his sword and flashed the blade in the light. The shadow wavered and distorted like an image seen on a still pond will bend and billow when someone throws a rock into the water. Yraen could have sworn he heard a faint and animal squeal; then the shadow disappeared. Chortling under his breath, Rhodry sheathed the sword.
“Still think I’m daft?”
Much to his surprise, Yraen found that he couldn’t talk. He shrugged and flapped one hand in a helpless sort of way.
“I’ve no doubt that every man in this dun thinks I am,” Rhodry went on. “And you know, I wish I was. Things would be so much simpler that way.”
Yraen nodded with a little gargling sound deep in his throat.
“It’s spring. The roads are passable and all that. Why don’t you just ride home, lad?”
“Shan’t.” Yraen found his voice at last. “I want the silver dagger, and I don’t give up on things I want so easily.”
“As stubborn as a lord should be, huh? Well, as our Seer says, in the book called On Nobility, it does not become a noble-born man to quail at the thought of invisible things or to run from what he cannot see merely because he cannot see it.”
“I’m not in the mood for great thoughts from great minds just now, my thanks. I—here, hold a moment! What was that bit you recited earlier? Not to the eyes of elves, he said. I always thought elves were some sort of a daft jest or bard’s fancy, but…”
“But what?” Rhodry was grinning at him.
“Oh, hold your tongue, you rotten horse apple!” Yraen spun on his heel and strode back into the light and noise of the great hall. For the first time in all the long months since he’d left Dun Deverry and his father’s court, he was beginning to consider riding home.
Over the next few days Yraen kept a jittery watch, but never did he see more evidences of hidden things or presences. Mostly he and Rhodry had little to do but sit in the great hall and dice for coppers with the rest of the warband while the negotiations went back and forth between Tewdyr and Erddyr in a regular spate of heralds. The gossip said that Tewdyr was trying to bargain for a lower rate of exchange.
“What a niggardly old bastard he is,” Renydd said one morning.
“Just that and twice over,” Rhodry said. “But in a way, he’s got a point. With a war on, coin’s as precious as men.”
“It must look that way to a silver dagger.”
There was such cold contempt in his voice that Yraen felt like jumping up and challenging him, but Rhodry merely shrugged the insult away. Later, he remarked to Yraen, casually, that causing trouble in the warband was a good way for a silver dagger to lose a hire.
Soon enough, though, the men as well as the lords realized that Tewdyr was holding out for a very good reason. Late the next day a rider came galloping in with the news that Erddyr’s allies had marched and were holding Lord Adry under siege. Since Erddyr was required to join them at once, he was forced to lower his demands, at which Tewdyr finally capitulated and arranged the exchange. Early in the morning, Lords Erddyr and Oldadd took their full warbands and escorted the prisoners back to neutral ground, an old stone bridge over a deep-running stream.
On the other side of the bridge, Tewdyr, all red beard and scowls, waited with the remaining men of his warband and another noble lord with twenty-five men of his own. The two heralds walked their