Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [34]
“Sounds reasonable. Oh. Ye gods, I nearly forgot.” He reached into his brigga pocket and pulled the by now ill-used feather on its chain. “What do you think about this? I found it in Beryn’s lodge.”
Jill took the chain and considered it with the same look she’d give maggoty meat.
“I’ve seen one of these before, when I was still traveling with my Da,” she said at last. “They’d hanged the woman who was wearing it. I don’t know why. Da wouldn’t let me look at the corpse for more than a moment, and he wouldn’t let me ask the townfolk, either.”
She started to toss it away, then reconsidered, kneeling down to put it in a saddlebag.
“You should give that to the gwerbret,” Rhodry said.
“Well, sooner or later. But I want to show it to someone else first. I’m starting to get another idea. You know, I heard some rather strange things about Lady Mallona when I was up in the women’s hail of Coryc’s dun.”
“Obviously. Ye gods, I’ll never forget the look on poor old Cadlew’s face.”
“Not just that, dolt. There were rumors that Mallona studied the Old Lore. Lady Ganydda swore she didn’t believe it, but she was awfully eager to repeat it. She was supposed to have been fond of a strange old woman near her brother’s dun when she was a child—”
“And of course the poor old woman was a witch.” Rhodry finished this all-too-familiar bit of gossip for her. “Any old woman who lives alone is always supposed to be a witch.”
“True spoken, but consider this. Mallona had that lover for a couple of years, and she only had the one child by Beryn. Now, whether that was Beryn’s trouble, who knows, but if that lover was a cold stick, she wouldn’t have bothered with him, and she wasn’t interested in Cadlew for fine conversation. Why doesn’t she have a couple of bastard children to palm off as her husband’s?”
“They always say the Old Lore can remove that kind of nuisance from a woman’s life, don’t they?”
“Just that.” Jill thought for a moment. “Lord Beryn’s cook told me that every now and then, the lady had weak spells, when she’d take to her bed for days and look terrible ill.”
“Ye gods! I never realized that the servants in a dun know about every blasted thing their masters do.”
“Oh, doubtless the cooks and suchlike in Aberwyn could tell plenty of fine tales about you, Rhodry Maelwaedd.”
Rhodry had the unpleasant feeling that he was blushing.
The hunt should have been easy. A woman traveling alone was such an unusual thing in those days that anyone she passed should have noticed and remembered her. A woman who’d spent most of her life shut up in a dun should have had every possible trouble on the road, too. Although Lady Mallona’s life had hardly been pampered and courtly, still, she’d doubtless never had to build a campfire, haggle for food, find water for her horse, or do any of those hundred other tasks that fell to travelers on the Deverry roads.
An easy task to find her, stuck somewhere with a lame horse or trying to bargain with suspicious innkeeps—except that after a full day on the south-running road, Rhodry had to admit that she seemed to have disappeared like dweomer. No farmer had remembered seeing her, no tavernman had given her shelter, no noble lord had wondered about a solitary rider traveling across his demesne.
“I’m beginning to think that she didn’t go south after all,” Rhodry said. “Not even to lay a false trail. May the gods blast me if I give up, though. If any woman ever deserved hanging, she does.”
“I suppose.” Jill thought for a while, staring moodily into the flames of their campfire. “Now, from the way she was described to us, I can’t believe she’d have any luck disguising herself as a man, not during broad daylight.”
“I’ve been wondering about that myself.”
“And she’s never been more than thirty miles from her home in her life. You’d think she’d get lost or suchlike.”
“So you’d think.”
They shared a sigh of frustration and contemplated the fire.
“I wonder if she’s dead,” Jill said abruptly. “Maybe she killed herself somewhere, or ran into a pack of young