Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [163]
“Just so, Your Highness,” Jahdo said. “Oh, please, if it were that you were wearing them, I would be sleeping so much better.”
Carra smiled, a sudden burst of gratitude like sun through clouds, and took the thongful of charms. When she slipped them over her head, when he saw them lying against the pale skin of her neck, Jahdo felt abruptly warm all over. He simply couldn’t understand why he’d turned so giddy and shy all of a sudden, though his heart pounded harder than ever.
“You have my undying thanks, Jahdo,” Carra said. “I’ll wear them always and think of you.”
Although Jahdo felt himself grinning and gaping like a fool, he couldn’t force out another word. When, guarded between Ocradda and Yraen, Carra went downstairs, Jahdo stayed kneeling on the landing for a long time, wondering if he’d ever been so happy in his life, siege or no siege. In his mind he could still see the memory picture of the thongs nestling at the hollow of her throat, the bound feathers, the silver disk—
“Oh! That other disk!”
He leapt to his feet just as a memory leapt into his mind, the peculiar sigil on the pewter disk that Jill had shown him out in the stableyard. He rushed downstairs dangerously fast, tore through the great hall, and burst out into the ward just in time to see Jill climbing down from her warding ritual.
“Jill, Jill,” he shouted. “I remember, I remember!”
Laughing, she took his arm and led him away from the puzzled crowd of warriors standing round the ward.
“Remember what, lad?”
“The squiggly thing on Thavrae’s amulets. Remember you it? You did show me when you’d taken them from the old jailor, and there were this squiggly thing on the pewter disk.”
“I do remember, indeed. You said you’d seen it before?”
“And I know where. I did find one just like it, lying in the grass outside the gates of Cerr Cawnen.”
“Ah.” Jill let out her breath in a burst. “Did you now? And what did you do with the thing?”
“I did give it to Tek-tek for her hoard. She be one of our ferrets, you see, and they do love to magpie away shiny bits and other such that catch their fancy. She took it thong and all into her treasure ball among the straw, though truly, Ambo, our big hob I mean, it may be that Ambo did steal it from her later.”
“But it’s among the weasels still?”
“It be so, for truly, I see no reason why Mam or Da would have taken it. It be a fair bit mucky by now, I wager.”
Jill laughed, a quick peal quickly over.
“Well and good, lad, well and good. Then I doubt me if our enemies will go a-hunting for it, and if we ever get you home again, there it’ll be, waiting for us to have a look at it.”
During those long days passing in the world of men, for Dallandra, Time’s wheel had turned little more than an afternoon’s hour. She’d occupied herself in alternately fuming at her captor and laying plans. If only she could get out of her prison and reach the page before he or his men could, grab him somehow and put him behind her, then they could both take their chances together in a fight. The question was how. Often in Evandar’s country things that seemed solid were nothing but illusion, and in the spirit of experiment she focused her mind on one of the cage bars nearby. If it didn’t exist, her mere skeptical attempt to put her hand through that bar would dissolve it, but when she tried, she got a solid bump for her trouble. It had proved hard-woven astral substance, perhaps even of Evandar’s making, if he’d created the trees her captors had destroyed to imprison her.
Although any piece of physical matter, if it had been possible to transport such to this plane of existence, would have gone right through the cage, her own illusion of a body was woven of the same stuff. Thus it behaved in relation to the “things” of Evandar’s country the same way as real flesh would behave in the physical world. Her body was also real enough to ache or, rather, to register the sense impressions of her etheric double as pain, modeling that feeling, most likely, on her memories of actual physical pain. From her rough capture she