A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [60]
“I just wanted to thank you for allowing Salamander to take us on like this. If he weren’t advancing us the passage home, I don’t know what we’d do.”
“Well, it was his decision, but you’re all welcome enough.”
“Oh, please!” Keeta laughed, a pleasant if rather deep chuckle. “It’s obvious that you do the deciding around here, no matter how much he talks, and by the Star Goddesses themselves, he does a lot of talking, doesn’t he? But I’m glad that we’ll be taking Marka away from her father before she gets cold feet and runs back to him.”
“Kin ties are hard to break, and she’s very young.”
“Um.” Keeta sat down on the edge of the tiled fountain. Even sitting while Jill stood, she looked Jill straight in the face. “She’s a wise child, old beyond her years—well, in most things, that is. When it comes to others…”
Jill waited, not quite sure of her drift. Keeta frowned at the dappled lantern light on the water.
“I’ve seen it happen before,” Keeta said at last. “A young girl in the same troupe with some good-looking man. Sometimes there’s trouble over it—trouble for her, anyway. I intend to talk some sense into her head. You don’t need to worry about her making a fool of herself over your man.”
“What?” Jill burst out laughing. “Let me assure you that Salamander’s nothing of the sort! He’s more like a brother to me than anything.”
“Oh! Well, that takes care of half the problem, then.”
“And the other half is?”
“I’d hate to see little Marka pregnant and deserted.”
“He wouldn’t do that. Oddly enough. He looks like the sort of man who’d leave with never a backward glance, but he’s not. I’ll give him a fair bit of credit—he’s got more honor around women than most men do.”
“Wouldn’t be hard, huh?” Keeta considered for a long moment before she smiled. “Well, that eases my mind, I must say. I didn’t want to see the child get free of one mess only to land in another.”
Although Keeta took the lantern and went back inside, Jill lingered in the cooler air. By then the moon, just past her full, had sailed over her zenith and was beginning to sink off to the west. The silver light fell dappled through the sparse trees and danced on the moving surface of the fountain. As Jill watched, the light seemed to thicken and take shape like the drift of smoke over a dying campfire. At first she assumed that it was merely some of the Wildfolk, in a semimaterialized form, playing in the water; then she realized that the waft of palpable light was swirling, growing, stretching upward as it spiraled round to make a silver pillar some ten feet high and four across. Inside the pillar, glowing all silver, stood a vaguely elven shape, not as solid as water, yet more so than a beam of light.
Jill raised her hands palm-out and chest-high, then spoke in greeting the magical names of the Lords of Water, for she thought that this being was one of the elemental kings. Yet as the form thickened within the pillar of light, she realized that it belonged to an elven woman, familiar-looking at that, with a long mane of silvery-blond hair and steel-colored eyes.
“Dallandra! How did—” Jill was too surprised to say more.
Dressed in an elven tunic and a pair of leather trousers, Dallandra seemed almost solid as she stood hovering over the water in the basin. Jill had never seen her so clearly before. She could pick out the separate curls and masses of her hair, see the folds of cloth in her tunic, and just make out a pale shard of landscape behind her, a grassy meadow and a single tree. Round her neck Dallandra was wearing on a golden chain a single large amethyst carved into some ornamental shape—or so Jill thought