The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [101]
Unfortunately, to get a place in a dun you needed to know someone who already worked there. The only person Glomer knew, a serving lass named Nonna, came mincing down to visit her family, the potters who lived across and down by the coppersmiths, about twice a month. She would wear her newest dress and bring her mother and her siblings scraps of fancy cake from the gwerbret’s kitchen, then sit at their hearth like a fine lady and regale the locals with all the latest gossip and news. Every time Glomer tried to ask her to put in a word for her, Nonna would turn her nose up and make snide remarks, usually about Glomer’s supposed laziness. There were times when Glomer wished she could follow her into some dark street and strangle her on her way back to the dun.
Just lately the tales that Nonna brought home had been exciting ones indeed. Early in the fall a mysterious noble-born prisoner had arrived from Cerrmor, and Nonna overheard two men from the warband saying that, by all accounts, he wasn’t a man at all but a fiend in human form. Their authority for this was something that old Nevyn, who absolutely everybody said was a sorcerer, had let slip one night when he was leaving the prisoner’s guarded chamber. And now everybody was also saying that the enormous Bardekian ship’s captain was a sorcerer, too, because he’d captured the demon and brought him in. At any rate, not long afterward the famous Cullyn of Cerrmor, captain of the regent’s personal war band, had stopped Bryc the groom from murdering Lord Rhodry’s only heir. Everyone (including Bryc himself, before he went back to his father’s farm in the north) said that the lad had been bewitched. Nonna was sure that the prisoner from Cerrmor was responsible.
“Probably Nevyn doesn’t want to kill this red-haired demon because he can use his powers—Nevyn can use this Perryn’s powers, I mean, because I’ll wager the old man’s stronger than any wretched demon. You should see the old man, and the look in his eyes. Oooh, like ice they are, and he could bewitch anyone, I’ll wager, just by snapping his fingers or suchlike. Everyone’s afraid of him, well, except Cullyn of Cerrmor of course. I’ll wager he’s never afraid of anybody.”
And everyone sitting in the potters’ kitchen nodded their heads sagely and agreed.
Perhaps it was stories like this that made Glomer so suspicious of the peddler named Merryc. At first glance he was ordinary enough, a man in his mid-thirties with dark hair and the walnut-shell skin that bespoke some Bardek blood in his veins, and he had the easy courtesy and ready way with a jest that a traveling man had to have in order to survive by selling ribands and embroidery thread and bits of lace and beading. Certainly Sama trusted him when he told her that he needed a place to live for a few months, till the worst of the winter was over and he could get back on the road again. Of course, she always needed custom so badly that her judgment might have been blurred by the good copper coins he handed over for a week’s room and board. There was just something about him that sat all wrong with Glomer—his oily little smile, perhaps, or the way he stared at her buttocks when she went past. Late at night, too, she would sometimes hear odd noises coming from his chamber, as if he were whispering orders to large rats, who scurried td do his bidding.
“I wish you’d turn him out, Mam, I truly do,” Glomer remarked one afternoon when their lodger had gone out for a walk. “I swear he’s out to work harm.”
“Oh, listen to you! And what’s he going to do, steal my fine lot of silver dishes or all our lovely jewels?”
“I don’t mean harm to us. I—oh, no doubt you’re right, and I’m imagining things.”
The shock of hearing her daughter actually agree with her was almost too much for Sama. Muttering to herself and shaking her head she went out back to feed the chickens. But Glomer stayed in the