The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [103]
She was, of course, quite right. Since she knew her mother’s house so well, she discovered the hiding place immediately. The ceiling was laced together from woven wicker panels, daubed with cheap plaster and whitewashed; right at the joining of ceiling and wall one panel sagged. As a child she’d hidden coppers and other treasures she’d picked up from the streets between that sag and the thatch, and there she found Merryc’s saddlebags. For a long time, though, she was afraid to touch them. She fussed around, setting the second trap and baiting both with the bacon rinds, looking continually out the window to keep watch for the lodger, and then finally summoning her courage. It would be foolish, she decided, to go to all this trouble and then not even have a look.
When she tried, however, to slide the pair of leather bags out of the cache, they stuck. It felt exactly like someone was on the other end and pulling them back. She yelped, stifled the scream with both hands crammed over her mouth, and nearly ran from the room there and then, telling herself that, after all, now she knew the worst. Still, if she were going to carry out, her plan, she needed better proof of Merryc’s sorcererhood than one bewitchment that might just turn out to be a bent nail snagging a seam. This time she carefully slid her hand along the bags, found the bone toggle that held the flap closed, and unwound the tie without trying to remove the saddlebags at all. Her ploy worked; she could slip her hand all the way into the bag. She took one last nervous look out the window, then went fishing in Merryc’s gear.
She could feel perfectly ordinary things at first—socks, an awl for mending leatherwork such as a peddler might need for his pack on the road, a bag of small coins—then her fingers struck a metal disk that had the greasy feel of lead. Merely touching it made her feel uneasy; when she drew it out, she nearly screamed again. It was hanging from a leather strap, so that it had a clear top and bottom, and graved on it was the upside-down pentagram, the star of evil. She shoved it back in, then bolted from the room, clattering down the wooden stairs and out, running full-tilt to the public well so she could wash her hands in the open trough, over and over again even though the water was cold and she had no soap.
By the time she felt clean enough, it was growing dark. Glomer hurried back to the tavern and the light and warmth of her mother’s fire.
“And where have you been?” Sama said.
“Setting rat traps, Mam.”
“Well, my thanks, my sweet. I’ve heard them rustling about for days now.”
Glomer tried to smile and knelt down at the hearth to lay the bakestones into the embers. Merryc returned not five minutes later, striding through the tavern on his way to the stairs up.
“Oh, Merryc?” Sama called out. “We’ve had to put traps for the rats upstairs. Be careful you don’t spring them.”
“I will, then. This winter weather seems to drive them inside.”
“It does, truly, it does.”
Even so, Glomer spent all evening in a state of nerves, wondering if he would notice that someone had touched his hidden saddlebags, but he never said a word to her.
In the morning she was faced with the most difficult part of her plan. As soon as her mother’s back was turned, she left the tavern room, grabbed her old, patched cloak from upstairs, and slipped out the back alley without anyone seeing her. Once she reached the main streets, she slowed to a steady walk and