A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [159]
“You must have heard tales about the Westfolk, too. That they’re very odd but kind to strangers?”
The boy nodded, his hair glinting like metal in the strong spring sun.
“Do you think they truly are kind?”
He grinned, shrugging to show his utter ignorance, but excited nonetheless.
“I hope they are, because I don’t know how we’re going to find Dar without some help. He told me that he wanders all over with his tribe and their horses, you see, but I’m not truly sure just how big this ‘all over’ is.”
“North with the summer. South with the rains.”
He spoke so softly, so lightly, that she barely heard him.
“Did someone tell you that?”
He nodded a yes.
“Is that how the Westfolk travel? Well, it makes sense. It’s more than I’ve had to go on before. But maybe we should be riding south, then, to meet them as they come north. Or due west. But they may have already passed us up, like, if they left their winter homes early or suchlike.”
Nedd nodded, frowning.
“So let’s head north,” Carra went on. “That way we’ll either meet up with them or be in the right place to wait for them.”
For the rest of that day and on into the next one they traveled through farm country, but although they stopped to talk with the locals along the road, everyone heaped scorn on the very idea of going off to look for the Westfolk. Arcodd province is still on the very edge of the kingdom of Deverry, and in those days it was a lonely sort of place, where little pockets of settled country dotted a wilderness of grassland and mixed forests. And more wilderness was all, or so they were told, that could possibly lie to the west—except, of course, for the wandering clans of the Westfolk, who were all thieves and ate snakes and made pacts with demons and never washed and the gods only knew what else. By the third day Carra was disheartened enough to start believing them, but turning back meant her brother, a beating, and the pig-breathed Lord Scraev. At night they camped out in copses near the road, and here Nedd showed just how useful a person he was. Besides insisting on tending the horses, he always found firewood and food as well, hooking fish and snaring rabbits, grubbing around to find sweet herbs and greens to supplement the bread her coin bought them in villages.
In his silent way, he was good company, too, patient as he taught her how to command the dogs with subtle hand gestures and a few spoken words. Sleeping on the ground meant nothing to him; he would roll up in a blanket with Thunder at his back and go out while Carra was still tossing and turning, trying to sleep with a patient Lightning at her feet. Although she was used to riding for long hours at a time, either to visit her friends or to ride with her brother’s hunt, sleeping on the hard, damp ground was something new, and she began to ache like fire after a few nights of it, so badly that she began to worry about her unborn child, still a tiny knot deep within her but as real to her as Nedd and the dogs. When, then, on the fourth night they came to a village that had an inn, she was tired enough to consider spending a few coins on lodging.
“And a bath,” she said to Nedd. “A proper hot bath with a bit of soap.”
He merely shrugged.
From outside the inn didn’t look like much: a low roundhouse, heavily thatched, in the middle of a muddy fenced yard, but when she pushed open the gate and led her horse inside, she could smell roasting chickens. The innkeep, a stout and greasy little man, strolled out and looked her over suspiciously.
“The common room’s full,” he announced. “Ain’t got no private chambers.”
“Can we sleep in your stables?” Carra gave up her dream of a hot bath. “Up in the hayloft, say?”
“Long as you don’t go bringing no lantern up there. Don’t want no fire.”
The hayloft turned out to be long and airy and well supplied with loose hay, a better night’s lodging, she suspected, than the inn itself. After the horses were taken care of, Carra and Nedd, with the dogs trotting busily behind, headed for the tavern. In the half round of the common room, set off