The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [121]
“What? Of course not. I love you more than I love my life. I’ll never leave you.”
He drew her into his arms and kissed her, then held her close. She was unsure of how long they sat together in the warm sun, but when he let her go, the sun was close to zenith. She wandered over the stream and lay down to watch the Wildfolk sporting there until she fell asleep.
Late that same afternoon, Rhodry came to Leryn, one of the biggest towns in Cerrgonney with about five hundred houses huddled behind a low stone wall on the banks of the Camyn Yraen. Since Leryn was an important port for the river barges that brought the mountain iron down into Deverry, he was planning on buying a passage downriver for a ways to save himself some time and to give himself and his horse a much-needed rest. First, though, he went to the market square and asked around about Jill and Perryn. Quite a few of the locals knew the eccentric Lord Perryn well.
“He’s daft,” said the cheese seller. “And if that lass is riding with the likes of him, she’s even dafter than he.”
“A bit more than daft he is,” snorted the blacksmith. “I’ve wondered many a time where he gets all those horses.”
“Ah, he’s noble-born,” chimed in the cloth merchant. “The noble-born have horses to spare, they do. But I haven’t seen him in many a long week now, silver dagger, and I’ve never seen a lass like you described.”
“No more have I,” said the cheese seller. “She sounds a bit of a hard case, she does.”
As he went back to the cheap tavern he’d marked earlier, Rhodry was wondering if Jill and Perryn had taken a different road south. If so, he’d have to abandon his plans for the river, in case he passed them by. As he was stabling his horse, a fellow came out to join him, a rather nondescript man with the bent back of a wandering peddler.
“You the silver dagger who was asking for Lord Perryn?”
“I am, and what’s it to you?”
“Naught, but I might have a bit of information for you for the right price.”
Rhodry took two silver pieces from his pouch and held them between his fingers. The peddler grinned.
“I came up this way from the southeast. I stayed one night in a little village inn, oh, some thirty miles from here, it was. I was trying to get my sleep about dawn that night when I heard someone yelling out in the stable yard. So I sticks my head out the window, and I see our Perryn arguing with this blond lass. Seems like she was leaving him, and he was yelling at her not to go.”
Rhodry handed over the first silver.
“‘I’m going to find no one,’ she says,” the peddler went on. “Seemed like a cursed strange thing to say, so it’s stuck in my mind, like.”
“So it would. Did she say where ‘nev yn’ was?”
“Not truly. But she did say to his lordship that if he tried to follow her to Cerrmor, she’d take his balls off with her silver dagger.”
With a laugh, Rhodry handed him the second coin, then dug out a third for good measure.
“My thanks, peddler, and it gladdens my wretched heart that you lost that hour’s sleep.”
When Rhodry left the stable, Merryc laughed quietly under his breath. It was a good jest, to make the silver dagger pay for the false rumors that were going to mean his doom.
Jill woke suddenly at the sound of horses coming. She sat up, wondering why she hadn’t tried to escape before Perryn returned. Now it was too late. She stood up, very slowly, because the ground seemed unsteady under her feet. As she walked back to camp, the grass swelled and billowed, as if she trod on a huge feather mattress.
“Jill! Fear not! Rescue is at hand, though truly, as a shining avenger one could want better than I.”
Startled, she spun around and stared openmouthed at the man dismounting from his horse on the other side of the clearing. For a moment she thought he was Rhodry, but the voice and the pale hair were all wrong. Then she remembered him.
“Salamander! Oh ye gods!”
Suddenly she was weeping, doubling over as she sobbed, throwing herself from side to side until he ran over and grabbed her tight.
“Whist,