A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [140]
“I’ll take my chances, then. I want some answers from your friend, good herbwoman.”
“So do I.” She laughed, as musically and lightly as a young girl. “But I’ve never gotten any from him myself, and so I doubt very much if you will either.”
She turned on her heel and walked off into the darkness, leaving Yraen staring after her. Smiling to himself, Rhodry laced the saddlebag up again, then laid it aside right close at hand.
“Why didn’t you give her the blasted thing?” Yraen said.
“I don’t know, truly. She’s probably right enough about Evandar not answering my questions.”
“Who or what is this Evandar, anyway?”
“I don’t know. That’s one of the questions I want to ask him.”
“Oh. Well, he and this strange hag seem to know you well enough. Here, wait a minute. She called you Rhodry ap Deva-something. What kind of a name is that? Your father’s, I mean.”
Rhodry looked at him for a long, mild moment.
“Elven,” he said at last, and then he tossed back his head and howled with laughter, his icy berserker’s shriek.
Demanding an explanation from him in that mood was the furthest thing from Yraen’s mind.
“I’ll just go get some more firewood.” He got to his feet. “Fire’s getting low, and I wouldn’t mind some light.”
As he hurried off to the area where the provisions were stacked, Yraen was remembering all the old children’s tales he’d fever heard about the people called the Elcyion Lacar or elves. If any such race did exist, he decided, Rhodry was the best candidate ever he’d found to be one of them, simply because he seemed so alien at his very heart.
When he went to sleep that night, Rhodry tucked the bone whistle into his shirt. Although he doubted very much if Dallandra would stoop to stealing it, he was expecting one of the strange creatures to take advantage of his weariness, and he put the bronze knife right beside his blankets, as well. Sure enough, he woke suddenly in the middle of the night at the sound of someone or something dumping out his saddlebags. When he sat up, grabbing the knife, whatever it was fled. He could see nothing but his strewn gear, and the whistle was still safely in his shirt. Moving quietly he got up, knelt and put the gear away again, then pulled on his boots for a look round and a word with the night watch. Although the camp was ringed by sentries, none of them had seen anything moving, either in the camp or out in the silent valley.
About halfway between two sentries, Rhodry paused, rubbing his face and yawning while he considered offering to stand someone’s watch for them. From where he stood he could see the bleak lines of dead men, waiting under their blankets for their burying on the morrow. With a sharp sigh he turned away, only to find Dallandra walking toward him. In the moonlight he could see her quite clearly as a young and beautiful elven woman. With her long silvery-blond hair carelessly pulled back with a thong, she seemed no more than a lass, in fact, but he’d heard enough tales to know who she was.
“Good evening,” he said in Elvish. “Looking for me?”
“No, I just couldn’t sleep.” She answered in the same. “Ych, this slaughter! I feel like crying, but if I let myself start, I’d weep for hours.”
“It takes some people that way, truly.”
“Not you?”
“It did at first. I grew past it, as, or so I hope, our young Yraen will. If he insists on riding with me, he’ll see plenty of this sort of thing.”
She merely nodded, staring out over the field with her steel-gray eyes.
“Tell me something,” Rhodry said. “You have dweomer, don’t you? Every other man in this camp thinks you’re an ugly old crone.”
“That’s Evandar’s dweomer, not mine. I should have known that a man of the People would see through it. You’ve met me before, Rhodry, in a rather odd way. I think you might have seen me, anyway, even though I wasn’t truly on the physical