A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [99]
“Let’s go take a look at the firewood. The women tell me that we’d better do the ceremony tonight.”
They crossed the neatly tended boundary of the forest into the dark and spicy-scented corridors of trees. In a clearing, not ten yards in, stood a structure of dry-walled stone and rough-cut timber about thirty feet long. Inside they found it stacked with cut wood, a fortune in fuel out on the grasslands.
“Good,” Calonderiel said. “Fetch the others. Let’s get this over with before the rain hits.”
But as if in sympathy with their loss, the rain held off. The wind rose instead, driving the clouds away and letting the stars shine through. Close to midnight the alar burned Oldana’s body to send her soul free to the gods. Rhodry stood well back toward the edge of the weeping crowd. Although he’d traveled with the Westfolk long enough to witness several cremations, still they disturbed him, used as he was to burying his kin and friends in the hidden dark of the earth with things they’d loved in life tucked round them. He found himself moving slowly backward, almost without thinking, easing himself out of the crowd, taking a step here, allowing someone to stand in front of him there, until at last he stood alone, some distance away.
The night wind lashed at the lake and howled round the trees like another mourner. Rhodry shivered with grief as much as the cold, because she had indeed been so young, and so very beautiful. Although he’d never known her well, he would miss her presence in the alar. Among the Westfolk, that last remnant of a race hovering on the edge of extinction, where the loss of any individual was a tragedy, the death of a woman who might have borne more children was an appalling blow of fate. In the center of the crowd the women howled in a burst of keening that the men answered, half a chant, half a sob. Rhodry turned and ran, plunged into the silent camp, raced through the tents and out the other side, ran and ran along the lakeshore until at last he tripped and went sprawling. For a long time he lay in the tall grass and gasped for breath. When he sat up the fire was far away, a golden flower blooming on the horizon. The wind-struck water lapped and murmured nearby.
“You coward,” he said to himself, and in Deverrian. “You’d best get back.”
The alar would expect him, the banadar’s second in command, to be present at the wake. He got up, pulling down his shirt, automatically running one hand along his belt to make sure that his sword was still there, and of course his silver dagger—which was gone. Rhodry swore and dropped to his knees to hunt for it. It must have slipped out of its sheath, he supposed, when he’d tripped and fallen flat on his face. In the starry dark his half-elven sight could make out little: the blacker shapes of crushed-down grass against the black shadows of grass still standing. On his hands and knees he crisscrossed the area, fumbling through and patting down the grass, pulling it aside, hoping for the gleam of silver, praying that the wretched thing hadn’t somehow or other slid into the lake. A gaggle of gnomes appeared to help, though he doubted if they truly understood him when he tried to explain what he was doing. Finally he gave up in disgust and sat back on his heels. In a flurry like a whirlwind the gnomes all disappeared.
“Rhodry, give me the ring, and I’ll give the dagger back.”
The voice—her voice, all soft and seductive—spoke from behind him. Swearing, he got to his feet and spun around to see her, standing some five feet away. She seemed to stand in a column of moonlight, as if the air around her were a tunnel to some other world where the moon was at her full, and