Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [17]
“What was it?”
“How would I know? But I was sent to find him and beg him to come home.”
“Sent by your mother?”
“Just so.”
“Do you think you—I mean we—can find him?”
“I don’t know.” Meer sighed, running both hands through his tangled mane of hair. “By now he and his men should have found whatever this mysterious object is and be returning. I hope we’ll meet them on the road back.”
“What road? We don’t even know where we’re going.”
“True.”
“Then how do you think we’ll ever find him?”
“If I can get within a reasonable distance, the brother bond will guide us.”
“The what?”
“The brother bond.” Meer hesitated for a long time. “Now, that’s one thing I can never explain to you, Jahdo, even if you were to walk away again and leave me here to starve. It’s a magick, and some magicks are Gel da’Thae. They cannot be shared. In the temple we swear holy vows.”
“Well, all right, then. My mam does always say that if you swear a thing, it’s needful for you to do it. But I still don’t see how we’re going to find him. What if he goes north and we go south or somewhat like that?”
“It might happen, truly. But a mother’s charge is a sacred charge, and I must travel and try.”
Jahdo hesitated, considering.
“Be you sure this is all you’re doing? I did hear you talking to Verrarc back home, Councilman Verrarc I mean, and you were talking about your mother and stuff, but I did get this strange feeling. You weren’t telling him everything, were you?”
Meer laughed.
“I figured I was choosing the cleverest lad in town, and I was right. But actually, I wasn’t lying. I was merely editing. I didn’t want to go into detail. There is somewhat about Councilman Verrarc that creeps my flesh. I hear things in his voice, somehow.”
“Things?”
“Overtones, odd hesitations, a peculiar timbre. He sounds enraged, but at the same time, he reeks of fear.” Meer paused, considering. “I can barely put it into words, it’s such a subtle thing. But he’s an ominous man, in his way, an ominous man.”
Jahdo shuddered. Yet once again the buried memory tried to rise, bringing with it a cold shudder. He caught his breath with a little gasp. Meer turned an inquiring ear his way.
“Geese walking on my grave,” Jahdo said. “Oh, ych, I wish I hadn’t said that.”
“More likely the evening breeze, lad. I wouldn’t take it as an omen.”
Later, as Jahdo was falling asleep, he remembered that Meer had found him clever. In spite of the trouble this opinion had got him into, he was pleased.
It took three more days of their slow journeying before they left settled country behind. The road climbed steadily, and the last few farms they passed nestled in hills where sheep, not cows, grazed the sparse pasturage between huge gray boulders. What trees there were, scrubby pine and second-growth alders and suchlike, hugged the narrow valleys, leaving the hilltops to grass and the wind. As the road diminished to a rocky path, Meer began to worry about the horse and mule, stopping often to run a huge hand down their legs to check for swellings and strains. He told Jahdo how to pick up their hooves and look for tiny stones or thorns that might have got stuck in the soft frogs. Although Jahdo was afraid of getting a kick for his trouble, as long as Meer was holding their halters or even simply touching them, the horse and mule stood still and docile.
“If either of these creatures comes up lame, lad, we’re in for a miserable time of it.”
“I do see that, truly. Well, I’ll be real careful and take good care of them.”
The next day early they left the Rhiddaer behind, not that there was a formal boundary or cairn to mark the border. It was just that Jahdo happened to glance back from the top of a hill and realized that he could see nothing familiar—not a farmhouse, not a shepherd, not a cultivated field nor a coppiced wood—nothing to mark the presence of human being or Gel da’Thae, either. For a long moment he stood looking back west and down across the low hills to catch a glimpse of the valley, all misty