A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [174]
“Not bandits. But there’s no time. Get to Gwerbret Cadmar. Tell him you met up with the raiders, and tell him you’re a friend of mine.”
“Aren’t you coming with us?” Otho broke in.
“Not exactly.” She allowed herself a brief smile. “But I’ll be there soon enough.”
Carra remembered the bird, dropping gracefully from the silver sky, and shuddered.
“My lady, you must be half-frozen,” Otho said. “Let me get your cloak.”
Once she was mounted and wrapped in the heavy wool cloth, Carra turned to say farewell to Jill only to find her already gone, slipped off into the forest, apparently, when none of them were looking. But all during that long and miserable ride down the wooden road, Carra would look up every now and then to see or think she saw a bird-shape sailing in the moonlight, high above them as if it were on guard.
The rest of the ride as well crossed over into that mental land where everything could be either real or dream. At times she drowsed, once so dangerously that Otho woke her with a shout; he grabbed the reins from her and led her horse along after that. At other times she felt that she’d never been so wide-awake in her life. She would see some detail of the forest around them, a spill of moonlight on a branch, say, or a carved stone slab rising out of a clearing, so plainly and precisely that the image seemed burned into her consciousness to last forever. Yet, when she would try to place that image into a context, she would realize that she’d been half-asleep again and for miles.
Toward dawn they stumbled free of the forest to the relative safety of open and cultivated land, a roll of ripening wheat over long downs, striped green with pastures where white cows with rusty-red ears were lurching to their feet in the brightening sun. A few more miles brought them to a spiral of earthwork walls enclosing a round, thatched farmhouse. Much to Yraen’s surprise, Otho—Rhodry’s coin still lay in the dirt among the boulders—spent some of his precious coin to get a hot meal for them all. The farm wife, a stout woman missing half her teeth, clucked over Carra and brought her a steaming cup of herbed water.
“To warm your innards, like. You look to me like you need to sleep, lass.”
“I do, truly, but we’ve got to get to the gwerbret. On top of everything else, I’m with child, you see.”
“Well, may the Goddess bless you!” The woman smiled, all brown stumps but good humor. “Your first, is it?”
“It is. Well, if I don’t lose the poor little thing, anyway, or die myself or something.”
“Now, now, don’t you worry. I’ve had six myself, lass, and don’t you go listening to them ever-so-fine town ladies, moaning and groaning about how much pain they felt and all that. Why, no reason for it to be so bad, say I! My first one, now, he did give me a bit of trouble, but with our last, our Myla that is, I had her in the morning and was out digging turnips that night.”
Late that day, when the horses were stumbling weary and Carra herself so tired that she felt like sobbing aloud, they wound their way past one last farm and saw the rough stone walls of Cengarn, Gwerbret Cadmar’s city, circling round to enclose three hills. Above the walls, she could see roofs and towers climbing up the slopes; at the rocky crest of the highest hill a tall stone broch rose in a flutter of gold-colored pennants. As they rode up, they found a river flowing out through a stone arch, guarded by a portcullis, in the walls. Although Rhodry and Yraen had been worrying about the sort of reception they’d get, at the city gates the guards hailed them with an urgent friendliness.
“Silver daggers, are you? Is that young woman with you her ladyship Carramaena of the Westlands?”
“Well, I’m Carramaena, sure enough.” Carra urged her horse a little forward. “How do you know—”
“Your husband’s waiting for you up in the dun, my lady. Come along, if you please. I’ll escort you there straightaway.”
Although the men dismounted to spare the horses their