A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [121]
Clucking to her horse and mule, she gathered her courage and walked over.
“Good morrow,” she said. “Is there a tavern in this town?”
“There is, good dame. Right over there.” A young woman smiled at her. “I don’t mean to be rude, but how are you faring, traveling the roads all alone, and at your age, too?”
“Oh, I’m like an old hen, too tough even for soup.”
The women all laughed pleasantly and nodded to themselves, as if wishing for a life as long for themselves. Feeling a good bit more sanguine about her ruse, Dallandra led her stock across the village square to the tavern. In a muddy side yard she found the tie rail, then went in. The small, well-scrubbed tavern room was empty except for the tavernman himself, a young, dark-haired fellow with a big linen apron wrapped around his shirt and brigga.
“Good morrow, good herbwoman,” he said. “Can I fetch you a tankard?”
“Of dark, and draw one for yourself and join me.”
They carried their ale to a table by an open window to sit in the pale afternoon sun.
“I was thinking of riding up into the hills to gather fresh medicines,” Dallandra said. “But a peddler I met on the road warned me about a blood feud brewing.”
“Indeed?” The tavernman had a sip of ale and considered the problem. “Now, a fortnight past, we had a merchant come in with fresh-sheared fleece for the local weaver. He was from the hills to the east of here, and he was fair troubled, he was, about a feud in his lord’s lands. Lord Adry, the name was. The wool merchant was telling me that the whole countryside could go up in a war just like tinder, he says, just like dry tinder in a hearth.”
“Sounds bad, truly. But I’ve been looking for someone, and a feud would draw him the way mead draws flies. He’s a silver dagger, an Eldidd man, dark hair with a streak of gray in it, blue eyes, the Eldidd way of speaking. Seen anyone like that through here?”
“I haven’t, no, but if he’s ridden this way, Lord Adry’s feud is where you’ll find him.”
The trouble was, of course, that Dallandra had no idea exactly which way Rhodry had ridden. As far as Evandar had been able to tell from his scrying, the silver dagger was somewhere in this part of Pyrdon, but her main focus was the bone whistle, which spent most of its time in the dark of Rhodry’s saddlebags. She was reduced, therefore, to asking round for information like any ordinary soul.
When she left the village, Dallandra crossed the river on a rickety wooden bridge and headed east for the hills and Lord Adry’s dangerous feud. She camped that night in a greening meadow by a small stream, where she could water her horse and mule and tether them out to graze. From a nearby farmhouse she bought half a loaf of bread and an armful of wood for a campfire. Once it was dark, she built a fire without bothering to use kindling, called on the Wildfolk of Fire, and lit the logs with a wave of her hand.
Dallandra called up a memory image of the bone whistle, focused it sharply, and let her mind range over the Inner Lands to pick up its trail. She was in luck. All at once, in a swirl of flames, she saw not a memory, but a vision of the thing, lying in Rhodry’s hands. He was showing it round to a circle of men standing near a campfire. When she expanded the vision, using Rhodry’s eyes as her own, she saw that the campfire was only one of many, spread out in a meadow crowded with soldiers and horses, arranged in a wide arc of a circle. In the center of that circle she could just make out the dark rise of a towered dun. So Rhodry had found himself a hire, indeed, and seemed to be in the midst