Spellfire - Ed Greenwood [107]
"There will be, indeed. Sir Cook, if you do the boar just so," the merchant replied smoothly. Korvan, looking up with knife in hand, saw Lureene gliding into the kitchen behind him. He glared at her.
"What keeps you, girl?" he growled. "Can't you seduce patrons as fast as you used to? I'll be needing butter and parsley for those carrots, and I need the fowl-spit turned now, not on the morrow!"
"Turn it, then," Lureene said crisply, "with whatever part of you first comes to hand." She swept warming rolls from the shelf above the stew cauldrons into a basket and was gone with an angry twitch of her behind.
The merchant chuckled. "Well, I'll not keep you.
Domestic bliss, indeed. My thanks, Korvan. Is there anything more?"
"They all went off northward, the herder said, from where he saw them, near the Sember. Nothing more." The onions sizzled with sudden force, and Korvan stirred them energetically to keep them from sticking.
"Well done, and well met, until next time," the silky voice replied, and when Korvan turned to reply, the merchant was gone. On the counter beside Korvan were three gleaming red gems, laid in a neat triangle.
The cook's eyes bulged. Spinels! A hundred pieces of gold each, easily, and there were three! Gods above! Korvan snatched them in one meaty fist and then stood, eyes narrowed in suspicion. What if this was some trick? He'd best not be caught with them about the kitchen.
The kitchen door banged. Outside, Korvan glared all around until he was satisfied that no one watched.
With a grunt, he put his shoulder to the water barrel just outside the back door. Ignoring the water slopping down the far side, he tipped it so that he could lay the gems, and a dead leaf to cover them, in a hollow beneath the barrel's base. Carefully he lowered the barrel again and straightened up with a grunt to look about again for spying eyes. Finding none, he rushed back into the kitchen again where the smell of burning onions greeted him.
"Gods blast us!" he spat angrily as he raced across the kitchen. Lureene stuck her head in at the door from the hall that led to the taproom and grinned at him.
"Something burning?" she inquired sweetly, and withdrew her face just before the knife he hurled flashed through the doorway where her smile had been, and clattered off the far wall.
Korvan was still snarling when Gorstag found the knife, minutes later. "How many times have I told you not to throw things?" the innkeeper demanded angrily. "And a knife, man! You could have killed someone! If you must carve something to work off your furies let it be the roast! The taproom is filling up right quickly, and they'll all want to eat, I doubt not!" Gorstag tossed the knife into the stone sink with a clatter and went out.
Lureene, seeing his face as he went behind the bar to draw ale, sighed. He smiled all too seldom, now, since Shandril had run off. Perhaps the tales in Highmoon all these years had been true: Shandril was Gorstag's daughter. He had brought her with him as a babe when he bought the inn, Lureene was sure.
She shrugged. Ah well, perhaps someday he'd say.
Lureene remembered the hard-working, dreamy little girl snuggling down on the straw the other side of the clothes-chest, and wondered where she was now. Not so little, anymore, either…
"Ho, my pretty statue!" the carpenter Ulsinar called across the taproom. "Wine! Wine for a man whose throat is raw with thirst and calling after you! It is the gods who gave us drink-will you keep me from my poor share of it?"
Lureene chuckled and reached for the decanter she knew Ulsinar favored. "It is patience the gods gave us, to cope when drink is not at hand," she returned in jest. "Would you neglect the one in your haste to overindulge in the other?" Other regulars nearby roared or nodded their approval "A little patience!" one called. "A good motto for an overworked inn, eh?"
"I like it!" another said. "111 wait with good will-and a full glass, if one is to be had-for Korvan's stuffed deer, or his roast boar!"
"Oh, aye!" another agreed. "He even makes the