Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [62]
“Your betrothed is long away,” she said shrewdly, the moment he walked into her fragrant kitchen. The door stood open to let out the heat, and the air was full of the scent of perfectly baked bread. “I sense this was not planned.”
“My betrothed answered the summons of her father, and it has taken longer than either of us thought,” he replied. “But I do not think it is her father that is detaining her.”
The witch nodded, and bent to remove loaves of rich, dark bread from the oven. “I do not, either, though I have no real word to give you. Whatever has gone amiss, it has a land-feel to it, not a sea-feel.”
He did not even have to think what his answer would be now. If Katya’s father was not the problem, then she was in trouble; and if she was in trouble he would find his way to her. “I was already going to go to her. Is there any help you can give me at all?”
“These.” She nodded at the bread. “I dreamed you would go, though I did not know why—I only saw you taking to the road and the road stretching on before you farther than I could see. I began my baking for it last night, when I woke from the dream. Other than that—” She shrugged, and then looked up at him, a rueful expression on her face. “I am not very powerful. My abilities lie mostly in seeing what is to be seen here in the village, some healing, a little advice, once in a while, a dream. And bread.”
“Then I will have that, and your blessing, little mother,” he replied, and bent to kiss her hand, a little rough with honest work, and so very different from the hands he usually had to kiss.
“Oh get on with you!” she said, blushing, as she snatched her hand away. “Take my bread and my blessing, and bring your love back.”
So when the Fortunate Fool rode out a short time later, it was with the blessing of the Witch of the Jolly Sturgeon, a pannier full of rich bread wrapped for travel, and only the vague direction that the troubles had a “land-feel” to them.
But Sasha was not stupid. He knew The Tradition like few in this kingdom. He knew his land and its people. And he was accustomed to looking at the vaguest of hints and turning them into answers.
Sasha had only just ridden the boundaries of the kingdom. He knew where the trouble spots were and he had dealt with them. So whatever had happened, whatever it was that Katya was to look into, there were two things he knew for certain. The place had to border the sea, or the Sea King would not be concerned about it. And it was not inside Led Belarus.
So. The logical place to start would be to follow the coastline northward, to cross the border into wilderness claimed by no Kingdom. There were plenty of nasty things there, lurking in ancient, be-spidered and be-haunted forest. There were no few things he had sung out of Led Belarus that could have gotten stronger since he removed them. There were also rumors of very, very powerful Old Things. If one of them had decided that decades, centuries of quietude were about to end, then things could be very interesting indeed.
So northward he went. As it happened, there were a few creatures he could ask for advice on the way, and it would be in the true Tradition of the Fortunate Fool to do so.
He pressed his horse as much as he could to reach his first destination by nightfall.
The woods to the right were still haunted-looking, but nothing like as sinister as the last time he passed this way. Instead of oppressive, endless shadow beneath the trees, there were will-o’-the-wisps, not dancing off into the distance, mockingly, but hanging quietly in one place or at worst, drifting about a little. The scent of the place was of fallen leaves, cool, old—not of death and decay. Still unnerving, but not terrifying.
The trees, though they stirred without a breeze to move them, and made ominous creaking noises, did not reach out to grab him or his horse as they made their way down the path. The path did not grow holes, or roots, or stones to trip the horse. It did not suddenly seem to squirm in a different direction. In short,