A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [94]
At one of the fires Rhodry found Enabrilia, sitting on a wooden chest, her two grandsons fighting at her feet over a pair of pottery horses. She looked tired, that morning, and scattered through her golden hair shone an obvious sprinkling of gray. When Rhodry hunkered down next to her, she smiled at him, then went back to peeling roots with a small knife.
“The warband’s always in the way when there’s work to be done,” she remarked, but pleasantly. “Hanging round asking when the food’s going to be cooked and distracting the girls who are supposed to be working. You’re all the same, you know.”
“Well, that’s true enough. I thought I’d come distract you.”
“Oh, get along with you! I’m old enough to be your grandmother—well, three times over, no doubt, and I feel every one of my years this morning, I tell you.”
“Is something wrong?”
“Oldana’s having one of her bad turns again.” She paused with a significant look at the boys, all ears at the mention of their mother, who had been ill for months.
“Ah. I see.”
Back in Eldidd, where he’d been a great lord and one of the High King’s personal friends, Rhodry would never have given the two children, one barely out of diapers, a thought. Since he was out on the grasslands now, he held out his arms to the younger one, Faren, who toddled over and laid both of his tiny hands into one of Rhodry’s callused and weather-beaten palms.
“Let’s go for a walk and let your gramma cook in peace. Val, are you going to come with us?”
Val shook his head no and grabbed both horses with a grin of triumph. Carrying Faren, Rhodry went back to his aimless wandering. In the center of camp, near the ritual fire that burned at the heart of every alardan, he found Calonderiel talking with the king and his young son, who at twenty-six was still a child by elven standards. They looked too much alike to be anything but father and son, with raven-dark hair yet pale gray eyes, slit vertically like a cat’s to reveal a darker lavender, and they were slender even for men of the People. Rhodry was honestly shocked to see how deferentially the two of them treated the banadar, nodding thoughtfully at his remarks, laughing at his little jokes in exactly the same way as the other men did. When Rhodry joined them, both of them greeted him by holding up their hands, shoulder high and palm outward, in a gesture of profound respect; yet all his instincts were making him want to kneel to their royal blood instead.
“I’ve wanted to meet you,” Aledeldar said. “I have great respect for your father’s poems.”
“So do I,” Rhodry said. “Not that I understand them very well.”
Everyone laughed but Faren, who squirmed round in Rhodry’s arms and pointed over his shoulder.
“Who’s that? She’s strange.”
“Beautiful, maybe,” Calonderiel remarked. “Wouldn’t say strange.”
When Rhodry turned to look, he saw what seemed to be an ordinary elven woman, with waist-length hair the color of strained honey, bound back in two severe braids, standing among the tents some twenty feet away. She was wearing an ordinary pair of leather trousers and an ordinary linen tunic, and carrying a basket of greens in one hand while she watched the men, but she stood so still, and her stare was so intense, that she did indeed seem strange in some hard-to-place way. Cut off from the bustle around her, perhaps? Rhodry had the peculiar feeling that she wasn’t really there, that she stood behind some invisible window and looked into the frantic camp. When Calonderiel gave her a friendly wave, she turned and walked fast away, disappearing into the constant scurry of people among the tents.
“What’s her name?” Rhodry asked.
“I don’t know,” Calonderiel said. “Del, does she ride with your alar?”
“No. Never seen her before. Well, there’s a lot of people here. Bound to be a few that we don’t know.”
Out of curiosity and not much more, Rhodry kept an eye out for the woman all during the rest of that day. Although he described her to a number of friends, no one remembered her or would admit to knowing her, and she should have