Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [173]
“She will get round to Enj some while soon,” Angmar said. “There be no hurrying the child. I doubt me if she may choose what she do see or not.”
“Probably not, truly.”
Not that he would have blamed her, but Rhodry did have a brief wondering if Angmar was postponing his leaving for her own reasons. He wondered about himself, as well, and his own lost appetite for taking up the burden of his Wyrd. When Avain started talking in broken fragments of words and sentences, Angmar frowned, trying to decipher.
“An odd thing, this. She do tell that back in the city of men, the many-towered city where first she did see you, a woman be looking for you, and that she does vex herself over your being gone. A woman with white hair, and very frail and slender. Be it your mother, Rori?”
Rhodry laughed.
“It’s not, but the dweomermaster who laid the geas upon me to find the dragon.”
Told this news, Avain giggled, cocking her head first one way, then the other, several times running in a sort of dance before her mother stopped her with a gentle hand on the cheek. She looked down again, frowning into her basin, shaking it every now and then to dance the ripples round, then all at once cried out. She began babbling in a flood of words that even Angmar had trouble understanding. At last, however, something came clear. Angmar looked up, pale and trembling.
“Rori, the town where that geas master does live? It be sieged. A huge army camps all round it, and they be neither human nor Mountain People, but some strange folk the like of which she can barely tell. Hairy, she says, and that’s all she does say, hairy and big, Mam, hairy and big.”
Rhodry grunted. The news hit him as a physical pain, a run of rage down his back that wrenched him away from the wall and made him arch like Dar’s bow. When Avain cried out, he forced himself calm, unclenched his fists, and let out his breath in a gasp. He knelt by her chair and smiled.
“My thanks,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
His tone, his smile, made her smile in return. Angmar spoke for a moment or two in a soothing way. In a few moments the lass returned to her scrying, murmuring Enj’s name.
“We’d best be gone,” Angmar said. “With you here she’ll be returning to that siege, and I want that not.”
“Nor do I, my lady.”
Rhodry clattered down the staircase, waited for her just outside the tower while he stared across the lake without truly seeing either water or hill. Together they walked down to the shore without saying a word and stood, a little ways apart, watching the waves run up onto pale sand. The wind whistled round Haen Marn like a dirge.
“Will you be leaving us straightaway?” Angmar said at last.
“To go back to Cengarn, you mean? What good would that do, one more swordsman against an army? The lord of that city has powerful allies. No doubt they’ll be riding to relieve him with all the men they can scrape together. I can’t know, but I think me that the best thing I can do is carry out my geas.” All at once he laughed, a brief echo of his berserker’s howl. “I doubt me if the dweomer will give me much choice.”
“I did wonder. You have spoke to me many times about your friends in that city.”
“And my heart aches for all of them caught there. It’s a terrible thing, being besieged.”
“So I’ve heard. My mother was taken in a siege, and she did often tell me of it, when she were in one of her black moods and crying for her homeland.”
“Your mother was one of the Mountain People, then?”
“Nah nah nah. It were them what took her, as tribute like when her town fell”
Rhodry spun round to stare. She smiled, a wry twist of her mouth.
“Envoy Garin be a good man, and many of his people, they too be good folk, but they do like to nurse their injuries and claim how they were put upon by my mother’s folk, by our folk, Rori. But it do take two to twist a rope, I always say, and not all the injustice does get birthed south of the Deverry border.”
“Just so. And so you were raised in a dwarf hold?”
“I was, and brought here when the lord of Haen Marn did need a wife. They did rightly think that I would