Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [193]
She pressed back against the wall as the officer in charge came bustling up the ladder, followed by Verrarc, the youngest member of the Council of Five. Bundled up in a cloak of the finest blue wool, trimmed with embroidered flowers round the hood, the councilman stood just about Demet’s height, and he was as blond, too, though more slender. When he glanced Niffa’s way with a polite nod, she shrank back and refused to look at him.
The officer grabbed the lantern and leaned over the wall just as the cloaked figure reached the gates.
“Who goes?” he bellowed.
“Oh, ye gods, have mercy!” It was a woman’s voice, drifting up faint. “Let me in, I pray you. I’ve not eaten for days.”
“Raena!” Verrarc called out. “It that really you?”
“It is, Verro. Oh please, have mercy!”
In a flood of orders, the councilman sent guards down to open the gates, then followed, smiling in the light of his lantern. Demet stayed with Niffa, who was waiting till the excitement died below to climb down. He glanced her wray and rolled his eyes heavenward.
“So, her people must have turned her out,” Demet said. “Sent her back to her lover, did they? I wonder if she’ll be any more faithful to him than she was to her husband?”
Even though Niffa knew the story of Raena and Verrarc’s old scandal as well as he did—after all, everyone in the town had talked of naught else, two years past—it took her a moment to figure out what he meant. The woman at the gates brought with her such a stink of bad omens that Niffa simply couldn’t identify her with something as human as the councilman’s adulterous love affair. Yet when she climbed down and saw the woman, she recognized her, even though Raena’s long black hair was all matted and dirty, and she was no longer as fleshy as Niffa had been remembering. Thin and somehow shrunken, she clung to Verrarc’s arm as he helped her hobble across the rough ground.
“She did have a bad time of it, then,” Demet murmured, “if she did walk here from her people’s farm up by Penli. That be a fair long journey.”
Niffa stopped herself just in time from blurting out a sudden truth—that’s not where she did come from, she’s been elsewhere. She knew it even as she could never have said how she knew, just as she knew, in spite of herself, that letting Raena into Cerr Cawnen was like clutching a rat to your breast. She looked up and found the moon, but as she watched, it sailed behind torn clouds and turned them to dirty fire.
And in the Lands, Evandar went to the silver river to free his brother from the oak, only to find tree and the soul within both gone. Where the oak had stood lay a raven’s feather, blue-black and three feet long, left behind, no doubt, to mock him.
“So,” he said aloud. “Our little friend has found herself a new god, has she? Now this will be a nuisance and a half!”
GLOSSARY
ABER (Deverrian) A river mouth, an estuary.
ALAR (Elvish) A group of elves, who may or may not be blood kin, who choose to travel together for some indefinite period of time.
ALARDAN (Elv.) The meeting of several alarli, usually the occasion for a drunken party.
ANGWIDD (Dev.) Unexplored, unknown.
ASTRAL The plane of existence directly “above” or “within” the etheric (q.v.). In other systems of magic, often referred to as the Akashic Record or the Treasure House of Images.
AURA The field of electromagnetic energy that permeates and emanates from every living being.
AVER (Dev.) A river.
BARA (Elv.) An enclitic that indicates that the preceding adjective in an elvish agglutinated word is the name of the element following the enclitic, as can+bara+melim = Rough River, (rough+name marker+river)
BEL (Dev.) The chief god of the Deverry pantheon.
BEL (Elv.) An enclitic, similar in function to bara, except that it indicates that a preceding verb is the name of the following element in the agglutinated term, as in Darabeldal, Flowing Lake.
BLUE LIGHT Another name for the etheric plane (q.v.).
BODY OF LIGHT An artificial