Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [137]
“Stop it!” Jill yelled, darting forward. “Stop it right now, or I’ll turn you all into frogs!”
The threat brought instant peace. The boys broke apart and rolled free of each other, young Lord Allonry to one side, Jahdo and Cae to the other. Although Jahdo and Cae seemed mostly bruised and filthy, Alli’s nose bled and his lip was split.
“He was hitting Cae,” Jahdo burst out. “I was trying to make him stop.”
Cae nodded fast agreement. Alli merely sniveled.
“I see,” Jill said. “My lord Allonry, I should have thought you’d have tasted enough trouble over that matter of the root cellar without wanting another meal of it.”
“They all hate me because of that,” Alli whined. “They mock me all the time and they won’t let me forget the whip-ping I got.”
Jill fixed Cae with a sorcerous-seeming eye. He turned white and began to stammer.
“A bargain,” she said. “Jahdo and Cae, neither of you mention the root cellar again. Alli, in return, no more mocking Jahdo for a bondman. The first one to break the bargain—into the marsh with him!”
Never had Jill had anyone agree with her so fast as the three lads did. She sent Cae off to the cook and Alli to the chamberlain, but she took a look at Jahdo’s bruises herself.
“Naught too bad,” she announced. “But you’ll need a bath before dinner.”
“I do know that, my lady, and bathe I shall, though it be likely it be in the horse trough there, all cold as it be. I do miss the hot springs of home, I truly do.”
“No doubt. Well, with luck we’ll get you back home one of these days soon.”
“Do you truly believe this thing, my lady? I daren’t hope, from the wanting of it so bad.”
Jill considered the question seriously, but the only dweomer feeling she received was a small surety.
“I do believe it, Jahdo, though I’ll wager the way home won’t be all that easy to walk. I’ll do my best to make it so.”
Jahdo grinned, a lopsided gesture what with the swelling on his right cheek.
“If you do say it, then it be so,” he pronounced. “Yraen do say that sorcerers, they do know what be so and what be not — He says you’ll find these enemies as soon as soon.”
“Let’s hope Yraen’s right, then. Now go wash that muck off you.”
The boy’s blind faith in her power wrung Jill’s heart, because there was nothing she could do but watch and patrol, whether in the hawk form or her etheric double. Although at moments she was tempted to hope that Alshandra had given up her mad plan, deep in her heart, deep in her very soul where all dweomer warnings spring, Jill knew that there was no hope, only waiting.
When Rhodry and the dwarves left Lin Serr, at first they had easy walking, with a pack animal to carry their gear down a proper dwarven road and farms close at hand to sell them fresh food. At every farm where they stopped, Rhodry saw only men, most of them young, some little better than boys, who lived a life as communal as any warband’s. As far as he could tell, anyway, from his brief looks round, and he certainly didn’t want to be caught prying, they slept in barracks and ate in communal cook houses as well.
After three days of this comfortable travel, they reached the edge of the plateau, where the farmland petered out among the rising hills and the white mountains towered close. Like clouds the snowy peaks seemed to float above pine forests so dark a green they seemed almost black, streaked here and there with outcrops of gray basalt. At the last farm Otho traded the mule for the privilege of cramming their packs with all the dried food and cheese they could hold.
“And it looks scant enough,” Otho remarked with a sigh. “No doubt the gods will starve us before they throw us into the dragon’s maw, just to make us suffer, like.”
“Otho old lad,” Rhodry said. “If you’d stayed behind you’d be handing over your life’s fortune in jewels to your debtors right now.”
Otho snarled and swung a weak fist in his direction.
“We may be able to snare a rabbit