The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [149]
Gwin smiled again, and for a moment they stood there together, savoring each other’s company and little more. Then Rhodry glanced up to see Jill, Nevyn, and a much-subdued Salamander coming down the outside staircase together. He felt an odd guilt at the sight of his betrothed, as he thought of her these days, but even more, a resentment, to see her in the company of sorcerers. At times he felt that she was drifting away from him, floating out to a measureless sea on a cryptic tide, inexorably sailing farther and farther away beyond his power to call her back.
“What’s wrong?” Gwin said. “You look half-sick about somewhat.”
“Naught, naught, just thinking. I’ve been penned up too long. It gets on my nerves.”
With Salamander and Jill in tow Nevyn swept over to join them, and the old man was grinning like a berserker himself.
“Are you ready to ride, lads?”
“We are,” Rhodry said. “But do you know which way we’re going?”
“I do—in a general sort of way. The Old One’s villa is to the east of here, up in the high hills, and a good ways away. I finally thought of the obvious and asked the Wildfolk. They know it well—to avoid it.”
“Oh by the Clawed Ones!” Gwin burst out. “Can they lead us straight there?”
“The Wildfolk have never led anyone straight to anything. I’ll do my best to think up something better, but for now, they’re the only guides we’ve got.”
Although it wasn’t very wide and neither graveled nor drained, there was a road of sorts that ran roughly east and west through Pastedion. To the west, or so the priests told Nevyn, it dwindled to little more than a goat track before it ended at an insignificant village, but to the east it wound all the way through the mountains past Vardeth to Wylinth far across the island. If Salamander had taken that road after rescuing his brother from slavery, he might well have led Rhodry right to the Old One, Nevyn realized—provided, of course, that the Old One’s villa did indeed lie to the east of Pastedion but the west of Wylinth. On the material plane, the Wildfolk are easily confused; such abstract concepts as east and west are beyond them, to say nothing of true abstractions such as distance or time, and, without abstractions, they can only follow routes that they’ve traveled before, even if those routes are the longest possible way to their destination. For all Nevyn knew, the gnomes who were trying to help him had once started out to the east, then wandered off in another direction, or doubled back, or simply gone skipping from hilltop to hilltop all over Surtinna before they’d ended up near the Old One’s villa. If he’d been trying to find an ordinary person or place, he could have sent the Wildfolk out on random hunts over the countryside, but he refused to let them near someone as dangerous as the Old One, anymore than he would have sent Salamander out flying in his newly learned and unstable bird-form.
“By the way,” Nevyn asked the gerthddyn that morning. “When you fly, what bird are you?”
“You’re going to laugh.”
“What?”
“Well, you don’t exactly get to pick the bird whose shape you want to assume. The dweomer itself finds one that reflects your nature. It’s rather like freezing water in a clay pot. When you break the pot, lo! ice in a pot-shape!”
“True, true, but what bird do—”
“I might as well admit it and get it over with, oh Master of the Aethyr. Try though I might to take a nobler form, I always end up a magpie.”
Nevyn laughed.
“See? Everyone laughs.”
“My apologies, Ebany. A magpie can fly with the best of them.”
“How kind. Yet true, truly though alas. I’m willing to shapechange if you need me to. Mayhap the Old One would never suspect a giant magpie of possessing dweomer. Then again, he might be laughing too hard to harm me.”
“Now there’s a wager I wouldn’t lay a copper on. I doubt me if the Old One’s laughed in fifty years. I’d go out on the etheric myself before I’d let an apprentice do such a dangerous thing.”
“It would be more dangerous for you just because the Old One’s going to be watching for you.