Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [107]
Rhodry blinked at her.
“Haven’t you ever wondered what got him exiled?” she went on.
“Many a time. I never thought it my place to ask.”
“Right you were, too, and if you ever tell anyone you know this, I’ll be displeased.”
Rhodry shuddered, but it was only half a jest.
“He wouldn’t pay a debt.” Jill ignored the gesture. “I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but he owed a man some steep fee, and he wouldn’t pay. He had it all worked out why he shouldn’t pay in his own mind, like, but no one else agreed, and he had to go into exile.”
“Go into exile for a debt of coin?”
“Just so. The Mountain People take their obligations very seriously.”
“So that was it.” Rhodry winced at the memory. “When Garin asked me not to judge them all by their kinsman, I knew I’d made some sort of botch of my courtesies. Well and good, then. Let’s go torment the old man a little.”
They found Otho sitting in the common room with his kinsmen, drinking and playing at dice. At the hearth, the innkeep was adding chunks of some indefinable vegetable to the stew pot, but he stopped to listen in.
“Otho,” Jill snapped. “You owe Rhodry and Yraen coin.”
The elderly dwarf howled and turned his face to the distant sky, perhaps asking it to witness his sufferings.
“Is this true?” Garin snapped.
Otho moaned, muttered, moaned again, but when every dwarf in the room stared at him, arms crossed over their chests, he reached for the pouch at his belt. Jill took half of what he handed over to give to Yraen.
“Will you all be going with your kinsman?” Jill said to Garin.
“I will, at least as far as Haen Marn, though Jorn here won’t. If Enj won’t take our clan’s coin, I’ll go a-hunting the wyrm instead, hut a weak reed I’ll be to lean upon, I tell you. I’m sure that loremasters spend years memorizing all the things I know not about dragons.”
“I’ll go,” Mic broke in. “May I, Uncle Otho? I’ve never been anywhere nor done anything.”
“Hah, and no doubt you’ll wish you’d stayed in that blessed condition before this little walk is over,” Otho said. “But come along you may, if your father allows.” He glanced at Jorn and raised an eyebrow. “Think he will? My brother was always the most stubborn man on earth.”
“Until his son was born and took the title from him,” Jorn said, grinning. “Well, ask him. You’ll have to go home first before you head out to Haen Marn. He’ll probably want to set a blood price for young Mic, though, in case he never returns.”
“A blood price? The gall!”
“Otho!” Jorn and Garin spoke in chorus.
Jill left them squabbling and went back to the dun.
Yraen she found in the great hall, sitting and drinking at a table near the back door. When she gave him the coins, he grinned, a rare thing for him, and slipped them straightaway into the pouch he wore round his neck and under his shirt.
“Rhodry taught me to do that,” he remarked. “Keep your coins out of sight, I mean. He said he learned it from you.”
“So he did, when we were both a fair bit younger.”
“I’m glad old Otho finally came across. I was wondering if he ever would. Here, is he daft?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Cursed strange thing, a few nights past. I happened to run across him in the ward. Come to pay me, have you? says I. All in good time, says he, I’ve been to visit the princess. And all at once he fixes me with this look. You owe her a debt, says he, though you won’t remember it, and if ever a debt should be paid, it’s that one. And then he stumps on by without so much as another word.”
“Well, um, odd indeed.” Jill fished round and came up with an evasion. “Maybe he thought you were someone else. He’s getting on a bit.”
“True enough, true enough. That’s probably all there was to it, then.”
Jill left the matter there, but she was honestly surprised that Otho would recognize in their new bodies souls he’d known so long ago, in his youth but when they were living out other lives, turns of the wheel of birth and death that had long since ended. It was all because of Carra, or so Jill assumed, who back in that other long-gone