The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [215]
“Your Grace? Am I disturbing Your Lordship?”
“Not truly.”
“Well, Your Grace, there’s this shabby old herbwoman at the door, and she’s insisting on speaking to you. One of the guards was going to turn her away, but she gave us this look, Your Grace, and I … well, I was frightened of her, so I thought I’d. best tell you.”
Rhodry’s heart pounded once.
“Did she give you her name?”
“She did, Your Grace. It’s Jill.”
“I’ll receive her up here.”
The lad frankly stared, then bowed and trotted away.
While he waited for the woman he once had loved more than life itself, Rhodry paced back and forth from window to door. He hadn’t seen Jill in thirty years, not since the night when she left him, simply rode out of his life without a backward glance—or so he assumed—to follow a Wyrd even stranger than his own. At first, he thought of her constantly, wondered if she missed him, wondered if her studies in the strange craft of the dweomer were bringing her the happiness she sought. Yet as the years passed and his wound healed, he let her memory rest except for an idle wondering every now and then if she were well. Although she did come to Aberwyn to tend her dying father, Rhodry was at court in Dun Deverry at the time. Every now and then, some news of her doings came his way, but never in any detail. Now she was here. He was dreading seeing her, because she was only a few years younger than himself, and he hated the thought of seeing her beauty ravaged by age. When he heard her crisp voice thanking the page, his heart pounded once again. The door opened.
“The herbwoman, Your Grace.”
In strode a woman dressed in men’s clothing, a pair of dirty brown brigga and a much-mended linen shirt, stained green in places from medicinal leaves and stems. Her hair, cropped like a lad’s, shone a silvery gray, and crow’s-feet round her blue eyes ran deep, but she seemed neither young nor old, so full of life and vigor that it was impossible to think of her as anything other than handsome. Beautiful she wasn’t, not any longer, but as he stared at the face which coincided with the one belonging to his lovely young lass of past years, he found that it fit her better than the beauty he was remembering. Her sudden smile could move him still.
“Aren’t you going to say one word to me?” she said with a laugh.
“My apologies. It’s just a bit of a shock, having you turn up like this.”
“No doubt. You’re in for a worse shock than that, I’m afraid.”
Without waiting to be asked she sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth. He took the other facing, and for a few moments the silence deepened around them. Then he remembered that his silver dagger must have been coming home at the same time as she was riding into Aberwyn, and he shuddered, feeling a cold touch of Wyrd that made the hairs on the nape of his neck bristle.
“And what is this shock?”
“Well, for starters, Nevyn’s dead.”
Rhodry grunted as if at a blow. He’d known Nevyn, her teacher and master in the craft of magic, very well indeed—in fact, Rhodry owed him his life and his rhan both.
“May the gods give him rest in the Otherlands, then. Somehow I thought the dweomer would keep the old man alive forever.”
“He was beginning to wonder himself.” She grinned so broadly that it seemed inappropriate. “He was glad to go, when the time came.”
“How did it happen? Was he ill, or was there an accident?”
“What? Oh, naught of that sort. It was time, and he went. He made his goodbyes to all of us and lay down on his bed and died. That’s all.” Her smile faded. “I’ll miss him, though. Every hour of every day.”
“My heart aches for you, truly.”
As if to share his sympathy Wildfolk came, sprite and sylph and gnome, materializing like the fall of silent drops of rain to float down and stand around them. When a skinny gray fellow climbed into