The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [203]
Perryn’s heart thudded once. While his lordship, his dog, and his man were all tromping off again, Caetha looked only at Perryn, her eyes as rich and lively a green as spring ferns on the forest floor. When he risked smiling at her, she smiled in return with a witch-warmth that wrapped his soul. His heart began pounding in earnest—could she truly be like him?
“Well, good traveler,” Middyr said. “Can we offer you our hospitality? We have a little house not too far from here in the woods, right beside Kerun’s shrine. If naught else, no doubt you’d like to pray at the altar of the god.”
“I would. My thanks, Your Holiness. Let me just bury this fire and saddle my horse. I’d like naught better than to visit you tonight.”
That night’s visit stretched to another, and a few more beyond that, then an eightnight or two more, as Perryn began, almost without thinking or asking, to help Middyr with the work of his holdings as well as the shrine. The local noble-born clan had given the priests of Kerun four large farms to support the temple as well as a large tract of wild forest around the shrine itself, but up in that sparse country the rents and dues from the properties wouldn’t have been enough to support the widowed priest, his daughter, and their two servants. Perryn helped Middyr tend his horses and pigs or worked with Caetha in the kitchen garden. Planting and tending living things was something she loved, and her knowledge of herbs and garden lore was so profound for a young lass that he rapidly realized that she was no village idiot or ordinary half-wit.
She had her quirks, though. No one could persuade her to wear any sort of footwear, not shoe nor clog, unless the snow was so icy that an ordinary person’s feet would have frozen fast to it. As for her hair, she refused to have it cut, yet she also refused to comb it. At times she was given to fits of horrible temper, when she would throw sticks of firewood or iron pans around the kitchen, then rush outside to collapse weeping on the grass. She would let no one near her then, not even her father or the household cats, whom normally she treated like babies, cuddling them and feeding them with her fingers.
At night, with the work done, Middyr would tell Perryn about Kerun’s lore, and his was no idle chatter or storytelling. He would discuss some point of the god’s tale, then question Perryn about what he’d heard, patiently correcting his more than willing pupil until Perryn had every detail perfectly memorized. At times they would tend the shrine itself, wiping clean the stone altar and oiling and polishing the wooden statue of the god until it gleamed. Although Middyr gave him scraps of temple lore, there he was cryptic, passing on only those details that an uninitiated man could hear.
When the first crop of wheat was turning golden in the fields, Perryn realized that he was never going to want to leave. He was also certain, however, that he was about to wear out his welcome, simply because he always did wear out welcomes, even among his kin. One cool evening he and Middyr were sitting at the round table by the kitchen hearth, discussing how Kerun had been born in the wilderness and suckled by a doe for a foster mother. Nearby Caetha sat sorting dry beans with six cats round her feet—the ginger torn always liked to sleep with his head right on her feet, in fact—and frowning as she worked. Her hair was its usual thorn bush, clean and gleaming in the firelight, but tangled into thick fuzzy clots at the nape of her neck. At a break in the conversation Perryn mustered what was left of his sense of courtesy.
“Er, ah, well,” he mumbled. “Somewhat I’ve been meaning to say, er, oh well. Um, I’ve been rather rude, imposing on you like this. Time I er, ah, got on the road again.”
Caetha looked up with a howl that sent cats scattering.
“Ah well, I can’t stay here forever,” Perryn said, feeling close to tears. “Eating your father’s food and all that.”
She threw the bowl of beans across the room and jumped to her feet, howling again as she rushed out the door.
“I get the