Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [105]
“He spoke against her holy war,” Tren snapped. “Do you deny that he got what he deserved? Would you say such a thing aloud?”
Ddary might have been slow, but he wasn’t stupid.
“Never, my lord. The Keepers did what they had to do, sure enough. Blessed be she, who watches over us all.”
When Tren glanced his way, their eyes met in something much like agony. Tren looked up at the sky, darkening to a velvet gray. Off to the east, a few stars were coming out.
“I’d best get back to the other captains. They’re waiting for the high priestess to return.”
Ddary’s hands twitched, as if he were forcibly keeping himself from making the warding signs against witchcraft.
“I see, my lord. Where is she, if I may be so bold as to ask?”
“I’ve no idea. She keeps her own counsel.”
But there’s not a man of us who wouldn’t like to know where she’s got to, Tren thought. We could have used the bitch’s help this afternoon. Sorcery! It makes a man’s blood run cold. He spat on the ground, whether the Goddess was watching or not.
Up at Lin Serr, Rhodry was coming to much the same conclusion. That night, he stood at the window of his tower room and watched the stars while he thought of Angmar, remembering the brief months they’d shared, praying to every god that she was well, wherever the island’s mysterious dweomer had taken her. He wondered about Enj, too, keeping his watch up in the mountains. At that moment, with his hiraedd lying upon him, he doubted if either of them would ever see Haen Marn again. At length he lay down and slept, but he dreamt of Angmar, and the view from their bedroom window of the lake, so vividly that when he woke, he nearly wept to find himself not there.
That morning, since he was shut out of the main city and thus any councils of war that might have been taking place, there was nothing for him to do but fume, pacing back and forth in his quarters up in the gatehouse or wandering through the old watchtower. He found himself wishing that Alshandra’s peculiar creatures would come back and give him a fight, but apparently their experience with the iron-filled gatehouse had scared them off. Finally, he went down to the riverbank and the dragon’s company. In the hot morning sun, Arzosah stretched out and lazed, turning from one side to the other as if she were meat on a spit, browning by a fire. To give himself something to do, Rhodry groomed her as he would have done a horse. With handfuls of oiled rags from the gatehouse storeroom, he rubbed her down till every scale gleamed, while she stretched and rumbled in the sun.
“Revenge will come when it comes,” she remarked. “A dragon lives many a long year, while the Horsekin live but few.”
“My heart longs to make them live even fewer,” Rhodry snapped. “I’m sick as I can be of all this delay.”
Later that afternoon, he did receive some news, when Garin came down from the city. Rhodry looked up to see him hurrying down the long stairs and strolled across the grass to meet him by the river.
“One of the women passed along a message this morning,” Garin said. “Seems like someone did a little scrying. There’s been an attack on Cengarn, but it was beaten back easy enough.”
Rhodry stopped walking and swung round to face him.
“When was this?”
“Two days past, round noon or so. They couldn’t tell me much about it, of course.”
“Of course.”
“All this wretched dweomer! Well, it comes in handy, every now and then. Too bad our enemies have it as well.”
For a long moment they stood looking up, but nothing moved in the cloudless sky, not natural bird or shape-changer.
Rhodry saw no sign of the raven woman all day, but that night she invaded his dreams. Once before a woman—or to be precise, a female spirit in that case—had taken over his dreams. Although it was years past, he remembered it well enough to recognize the sensation when it happened again. He was having an ordinary dream, where he walked along the shore of Haen Marn’s lake with Angmar, neither of them speaking, merely delighting in each other’s company like the dragon in her sun. At one point,