A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [179]
“Close to it.” She paused to smile at him. “But spirits from the Otherlands can’t set broken legs and suchlike, so you can lay your troubled heart to rest. I’m real enough. The light’s only the Wildfolk of Aethyr. I’m surprised you can’t see them. They’ve taken to following me around, and most times I don’t have the heart to shoo them away.”
“Well, I can see somewhat moving there, sure enough. It still creeps my flesh.”
Here he at last had the leisure to take a good look at her. Her hair, cropped off like a lad’s as usual, had gone perfectly white, and her face was thin, too thin, really, as he studied her, so that her eyes seemed enormous, dominating her face the way a child’s do. Overall, in fact, she was shockingly thin, and quite pale, yet she hardly seemed weak. It was as if her skin and blood and bone had all been replaced by some finer substance, some magical element halfway between glass and silver, say, or some sort of living silk.
“Have you been ill or suchlike?” Rhodry said.
“Very ill. In the islands it was, what they call the shaking fever. I’ve had it a number of times, now, and there’s no guarantee that I’m rid of it, either. They say that once it gets into your blood, it’s yours for life.”
“That aches my heart.”
“Not half as much as it aches mine.” She grinned with a flash of her old good humor. “I must look hideously old, I suppose.”
“You don’t look truly here. It’s like you’ve already left us for the Otherlands or suchlike.”
“In a way, perhaps, I have.”
“Ah. You know, you look like Nevyn used to. I mean, you’d think he was old, truly, and then he’d speak or do somewhat, and you’d know it no longer mattered in the least how old he was.”
She nodded, considering what he’d said.
“But here, where’s Yraen? And is the lass safe and well?”
“Safe, she is, and Labanna—that’s the gwerbret’s lady—tells me she’ll be back to her old self in a day or so. I was truly worried about that child she’s carrying, but the womenfolk say she’s not far enough along to lose it just from being tired and cold and suchlike. As for Yraen, he’s eating his dinner in the great hall. I came out to fetch you.”
Yawning and stretching, he found his boots and put them on.
“By the way, about Yraen,” he said. “Do you know who he really is?”
“Of course. Don’t you?”
“Some son of a noble house who went daft and ran off some years back, but I don’t know his real name, no.”
She laughed with a toss of her head.
“Well, then, maybe it’ll come back to you, sooner or later.”
“What? Are you telling me that I used to know him or suchlike?”
“Well, not to say ‘know’ him, not intimately or some such thing. You weren’t in any position to make a friend out of him.”
“Jill, curse it all! I’m as sick as I can be of dweomer riddles!”
“Indeed? Then what do you want to know?”
“For a start, how did you know where I was?”
“I scried you out, of course. In the fire and water.”
Rhodry felt profoundly foolish.
“Ah, curse it! Let’s just go to the great hall. I want some ale, I do, and the darker the better.”
“What? No more answers?”
She was smiling as if she might be teasing him, daring him, even, to ask her the questions that suddenly frightened him, no matter how badly he’d ached to know them before.
“Just one thing. Our Yraen? Does he have royal blood in his veins?”
“He does, at that, but he’s a long, long way from the throne, the youngest son of a youngest son. The kingdom won’t miss him. I’m glad you decided to pledge him to the silver dagger and let him follow his Wyrd.”
“I decided? Since when have I had one wretched chance at deciding anything, whether for me or some other man?”
“Well, that’s a fair complaint.” She laid a hand, as light as the touch of a bird’s wing, onto his arm. “You’ve been thrown about like a shipwrecked man at sea, haven’t you? But I think me that the land’s in sight at last. Let’s go join the others.” She stood up. “Cadmar’s having somewhat of a council of war, and I’ve told him he should include you in it. And you shouldn’t be sleeping out here in the barracks, either.”
“Why