The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [152]
All at once she broke off the thought and fixed her mind firmly on her meal. She concentrated on chasing a bit of meat through the gravy, forced herself to think of only that. For a moment, as she was thinking about Rhodry, she’d felt the touch of another mind on hers, just a light brush, but she could feel the cold, impersonal malice in it. In a few seconds the mind moved on, leaving hers. She laid the spoon down in her bowl. Appearances or not, she found it impossible to eat another bite.
“Just going out back,” she said to the peddler.
He nodded and went on eating. No one else even looked up as she headed out the back door in the direction of the privy.
Directly behind the inn stood a horse trough, where the water caught the firelight spilling out the windows. She paused beside idly trailing one hand in the water as if washing it off, and using the dancing ripples to think of Salamander. Immediately she felt the touch of his mind, but it was some minutes before he answered her. She could see his image on the water only dimly.
“My apologies for taking so long. I was having dinner at the gwerbret’s very table, and it took both some while and some fancy courtesies before I could leave.”
“No matter. Some of the gwerbret’s men were just in the Capstan. I take it that they haven’t found Rhodry yet.”
“They haven’t, curse them. Are you still certain he’s alive?”
“I am. It’s the one thing I have to cling to. But here, I contacted you because I felt someone else touch my mind, someone who hated me.”
“By the scaly underside of a dragon’s balls! Say no more about this now, my turtledove. I’ll see you on the morrow. There are times when words are safer than thoughts.”
With that, his image disappeared.
When Jill returned to the tavern room, she found the peddler gone, but he came back in just a few minutes. With a broad grin he held up two silver pieces to show the crowd.
“From one of the town wardens. He’s got a pouch of silver to pay for any information about Rhodry of Aberwyn, lads. I’d say that somewhat grand’s afoot.”
“Sounds like it’d be worth everyone’s while to remember what they can about him,” Jill remarked in what she hoped was a casual tone of voice. “My heart aches that I haven’t seen him in months.”
Everyone within earshot laughed their agreement and set to considering the question. Unfortunately, no one there had a scrap of information about Rhodry, and they agreed that lying to the gwerbret’s men was unhealthy in the extreme. After a few hours Jill went up to her chamber. For all her grief, she was so weary from weeks of traveling that she fell asleep as soon as she lay down on her blankets. Yet she dreamt of Rhodry. It seemed she heard him calling out to her out of a desperate darkness.
Nevyn spent much of that night awake. He was sleeping on a cot in Rhys’s chamber, where the slightest change in the gwerbret’s labored breathing would wake him, because to a man as badly injured or ill as Rhys was, the hours right before dawn are always the most dangerous, when the astral tides of earth run low and sluggishly. Although Rhys spent a better night than anyone had a right to hope for, still Nevyn sat up, brooding over the low fire in the hearth and using it to talk with other dweomermasters. He had set men and women all over the kingdom to scrying, not for Rhodry, which was futile, but for odd breaks and discrepancies in their visions which might reveal an astral seal set over something that a dark master