Fire Dragon - Katharine Kerr [91]
“What a pity Alshandra never saw the truth,” he said aloud. “She died believing herself a goddess, and by the true gods, the troubles that's caused!”
On a mother road made of twilight, Evandar travelled back to Deverry. Meranaldar had unwittingly handed him a riddle along with the map. When, last summer, Evandar had been laying his plans, he'd assumed that he'd simply keep the map with him until that future time when he would at last be ready to build Rinbaladelan anew. Now, however, with the omens—or rather their lack—gnawing his soul with fear for teeth, he knew that he had best find a place to keep his treasure where eventually someone who'd appreciate it would find it.
He considered Rinbaladelan itself, but the ruins offered no safety to something as fragile as a papyrus scroll. Perhaps the temple of Wmmglaedd, where priests dedicated to learning had assembled hundreds of scrolls and codices of ancient lore? But they were human men, and he hated the thought of entrusting them with this record of elven civilization. He could give it to Dallandra, but that choice struck him as too logical. He knew that he was playing carnoic with Wyrd for the map's survival. Only a spectacular move, something with a touch of wild luck about it, would win him the game. Yet thinking of Dallandra made him think of Rhodry, and there he found an answer.
In those days the border between Eldidd and the lands of the Westfolk lay unmarked for most of its length, but down at the seacoast stood a stream called Y Brog, the Badger, and upon it, the westernmost human settlement, a town called Cannobaen. For hundreds of years this demesne and its dun had belonged to the Maelwaedd clan. Back in the 1040s, the holding had passed briefly into the hands of the Clw Coc, the Red Lion clan, in the form of a dower settlement upon one of its daughters, the lady Lovyan. In her will Lovyan had given it back to the Maelwaedds by settling it upon her granddaughter, Rhodda, the bastard Rhodry had sired on a local lass. In Rho-dda's veins, therefore, ran enough elven blood to satisfy Evandar's schemes. He'd used her dun as a treasure-house before, in fact—not that she knew it.
The dun stood on the edge of a cliff behind high stone walls, a typical enough fort, with a round broch rising some four stories at the center of a cobbled ward. Around the broch stood wooden sheds for storage, servants' huts, stables, a pigsty, a smithy, and the like in a disordered profusion. When Evandar turned up at its iron-bound gates, he wore an elven form, but that of an old man, all withered and stooped. He'd made himself illusions of Deverry clothes, and he'd stolen a horse to ride upon. Her gatekeeper told him that the lady was up in her chamber and sent a page to announce this unexpected guest.
“So it's you again, is it?” the gatekeeper said. “Come to sell her more of those cursed books, have you?”
“Oh, I have a thing that might interest her,” Evandar said. “But I assure you, it's not cursed.”
“Well, it's an eerie thing, our lady always shutting herself up like she does, up there with all them books. Makes folk talk. Tain't natural.”
While he waited, Evandar tipped his head back and considered the stone tower that loomed over the dun. It was a slender thing, and tall, wound round by spiralling stone stairs. He could just see, up at the very top, a shedlike structure: a roof supported by four pillars but no walls. Once Rinbaladelan's harbor had sported a lighthouse like this one, though made of finer stonework and set with brightly colored tiles.
“Had many storms?” Evandar said to the gatekeeper.
“Oh, it's been a powerful bad winter, truly. We had a shipwreck, too. The lighthouse keeper couldn't keep the fire burning in all the wind and wet.”
“Tell him he needs a glass wall.”