Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [176]
“So that’s Enj, is it?” Rhodry said. “He doesn’t look in the least daft, not to me, anyway.”
Garin seemed to be biting his tongue.
“Imph,” he said at last. “I’m cursed glad to see him, I don’t mind telling you. I’ll spend the day negotiating with him to take up Otho’s clan debt and making arrangements for the provisioning and all, and then I’ve got to be heading back to Lin Serr. I hope you understand, Rori. If things were different, I’d go with you, just to keep Otho civil if naught else, but as it is, with the siege and all—”
“Of course I understand. And with Mic along, the old man will behave himself somewhat.”
“So we can hope.”
Since it was several hours before Angmar and Enj returned to the great hall, Rhodry had a good long wonder what mother and son might be discussing. Round noon, when they walked into the great hall, servants appeared as well, to lay a meal. For a few moments everyone exchanged strained pleasantries in Dwarvish while Angmar took her usual place at the head of the table and Enj hovered near her chair. Rhodry waited near the hearth to let him have the family seat at his mother’s right hand if he chose. The hall fell silent; everyone, servants and all, turned to watch the pair of them.
Enj glanced round and pointed to another chair that was standing against the wall, half-round and heavily carved. When he snapped out an order to a servant, everyone in the room who knew Dwarvish gasped in surprise. The servant picked it up and put it at the end of the table opposite Angmar. Once it was settled, Enj sat down on the bench by his mother’s right hand, leaving only one place for Rhodry to sit, and glanced his way with a brief smile,
“My thanks,” Rhodry said.
As he sat down in the chair that had once belonged to her husband, Angmar looked down the length of the table between them with eyes that showed no feeling at all — She remembers that I’m leaving, he thought. For a moment he nearly howled aloud in rage at the Wyrd that kept tearing his life into pieces and then shredding what few scraps of happiness he redeemed from the ruin. He wanted to jump up and run outside, screaming like a madman. Instead he picked up his tankard and had a long swallow of ale. At the signal the servants came forward and began serving food.
With the meal Garin broached the job ahead to Enj, and once everyone had finished eating, the negotiations began in earnest. Even though for courtesy’s sake Garin kept the talk in Deverrian, Rhodry said little. As long as he was eventually satisfied with the settlement, the details were none of his affair, not under either of their systems of laws. Angmar, however, listened closely, murmuring a word of advice to her son every now and again—shrewd advice, too, from the way it made Otho wince. He needed it, too, since everyone there could see that he’d have gone off tracking a dragon for no repayment at all.
As the afternoon heat dragged on through this mire of haggling, Rhodry muttered a few excuses and fled. Down by the lakeshore the wind growled through the rocks and whined in the trees. Rhodry found himself a spot under a bent and twisted pine where he could sit in the cool. For a long time he stared out across the lake at the silver riband of water falling over the cliffs on the far shore. He was tired, he supposed, merely tired to the bone of all his wandering, tired of fighting in one battle after another, whether he fought with a sword or with dweomer that he didn’t even really understand. Why else would he be hating the idea of leaving Haen Marn?
“Rori?” Angmar’s voice, coming toward him. “Rori, be you there?”
His eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away on the back of his hand.
“I am,” he called out. “Do they need me in the great hall?”
“They do. To agree to the settling of the debt.”
When Rhodry picked his way through the rocks and joined her, she smiled at him, but so blandly that he knew she wished nothing of any import said aloud. He caught her hand and squeezed it.
“We’d best go back then, my lady.”
“So we should, my lord.”
Hand