The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [204]
“Truly?”
“Truly. Who will be priest when I die? You’re the only man I’ve ever met who cared one way or the other for Kerun’s rites.”
“Oh.” Perryn considered for a moment. “Oh, er, ah, well. Thank you. I’d love to stay. Truly. Er, well, um.”
He looked down to find indignant cats glaring at him.
“I’d best see where Caetha went,” Perryn said, mumbling again. “Don’t want her running off.”
Hugging his welcome he ran out the door into a night washed silver with a full moon. Although the farmyard was silent, the barn door flapped open, and he could guess where she was, because like him, she found the company of horses a comfort. In a pile of hay she was sprawled full-length and sobbing in the dark. When he sat down beside her, she looked up and hissed at him.
“Er, I’m not going after all, you know.”
The sobbing stopped while she considered.
“Not ever?”
“Not ever.”
In the trickle of moonlight spilling in through a nearby window he could see her long tangle of hair, the palest silvery-red in this light, covering her like a matted blanket. He stroked it lightly; then, starting down near her waist, he picked out a particularly tangled bit and began teasing it out with his fingers. At first she went rigid, then slowly relaxed, as a bit at a time he worked his way up to the nape of her neck and got that one long lock of hair smooth and tangle-free. When he started on the one next to it, she moved a little closer to him, then closer still as he fell into the rhythm of the work. All at once he realized that there was a rhythm, that he was performing some sort of ritual, something half-remembered and half-known that seemed to come from the deepest levels of his soul. She stretched luxuriously and rubbed up against him as he worked, as if she too understood. Although his back began to ache, because it took hours to get that mane smooth, he never once considered stopping.
At last he could comb her hair with his fingers without meeting anything nastier than a bit of straw. She sat up, smiling at him, stretching again, then putting her hands on his shoulders and kneading them like a cat. The warmth of that smile was so palpable that he felt as if they sat in noontide sunlight.
“Er, well, we’d best get married, hadn’t we? First, I mean. Er, ah, your father is a priest and all that.”
She jumped up, slapping him across the face, but she was giggling as she ran out the door. As he followed, he was wondering why he’d never noticed before how truly beautiful she was.
Although in the village the folk snickered about how clever Middyr was, to find a husband for his half-wit daughter and a successor all in one lucky stroke, Perryn himself knew that Kerun had at last heard his prayers and brought him home.
Three
Up in northwestern Cantrae, on the banks of the Aver Can, is a small town called Brin Toraedic, which gets its name from a strange hill rising out of a meadow about two miles to the south. At the rocky crest of the grassy mound is a ravine, a deep cleft running as straight and smooth as if a giant had sliced it open with a sword. If you ride that way, the townsfolk will tell you that an evil demon once built himself a dun on the hill and waged war on the gods until Bel struck him down with a thunderbolt. The demon sank back down to the Third Hell through the cleft, which to this day will lead you down to the Otherlands—if you have the nerve to try the climb. But even with the demon long gone, strange things still happen on the tor, or so they say, blue lights dancing in the moonlight, half-seen shapes skittering around, and wails, creaks, and knockings in the night.
In Jill and Nevyn’s time, the town was only a tiny farming village, some five miles from