Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [106]
Sitting on a bench, framed by roses, the raven woman was waiting for him. She reminded him of Mallona, though younger and somehow coarser, with raven-dark hair and lovely eyes, but her mouth was too full, her neck too thick, and her smile too sly. She had blunt heavy fingers, too, peasant’s hands, he found himself thinking, folded over some shiny object hidden in her lap.
“Well met, Rhodry Maelwaedd,” she said. “Is it that you know who I be?”
“I don’t know your name, if that’s what you mean, but I think me we’ve met before.”
“We have at that. It does surprise me that you remember.”
“I’m more surprised you do, frankly.”
“My Goddess, she does show me many a hidden thing. There be power upon her beyond your imagining.”
He merely shrugged, glancing round. The walls of the brochs seemed to have closed in round the garden, penning them in with no gate or door. A low ceiling blocked out the sky as the garden turned into a chamber with a single chair and a woman’s riding gear scattered on the straw-strewn floor. She rose, laughing, her hands still clutched tight over her mysterious holding.
“Never will you escape from here,” she snapped. “You did trap me once, and now I’ve trapped you.”
“Indeed? I’m bound to wake up sooner or later.”
She tossed her head up, her eyes narrowing in rage. Rhodry laughed, making her a mocking sort of bow.
“What did you think? That I wouldn’t know I was dreaming? That I’d believe in you and your wretched little spells?”
She cursed in cold fury, then began to chant in some language that he’d never heard. With her right hand, she began to sketch a strange pattern in the air, while in her left she held out a little glass vial, gleaming with silver light. Out of sheer reflex, Rhodry slapped at her arm with a wide sweep of motion. His hand seemed to pass right through her flesh, but the vial fell spinning to the ground and shattered.
He was wide awake, sitting up in his blankets in the gatehouse and sopping with cold sweat. He got up, swearing with every foul oath he could muster, ran both hands through his damp hair, and staggered over to a window. Out to the east, the sky was just beginning to lighten. He leaned onto the sill until the sun rose to banish the dark. With one last shudder, he turned back, picked up his brigga from the floor, and pulled them on, then reached for his shirt and saw something gleaming on the stone, a curved fragment of silvery glass.
“Oh, horseshit and a pile of it!” Rhodry whispered.
He hunkered down and inspected the floor, but he found only that one piece. Even in the brightening sun, it seemed to glow with its own private light. And what would she have done with that vial, he wondered, trapped his soul the way witches were said to do in the old tales? Or was it merely poisoned? He found his sword belt, started to draw his silver dagger, then reconsidered. He had another knife as well, a crude bronze blade bound to a wooden handle, which Dallandra had given him a long while ago. He drew that from its crumbling sheath and slid the point under the fragment to pick it up for a closer look, but the moment the bronze touched the silver glass, the fragment puffed up, hissed, began to steam, and with an evil smell boiled away like a drop of water on a hot griddle stone.
Rhodry was too stunned to cry out or swear. He sat back on his heels and stared at the knife point. When he risked touching it, the metal felt cool and hard, just as it always did. Jill had told him once that this particular knife had great dweomer upon it; she’d said something about it existing in several worlds at once, but since he hadn’t understood what she’d told him, he’d forgotten exactly how it might do so. From now on, he decided, he’d sleep with that knife in his hand.
After he finished