The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [97]
“It’s time you made up your mind. If you stay a Hawk, you’ll die, sure enough. Come over to us, and give us your word on it, and I’ll beg the gwerbret for your life.”
Gwin began shaking so hard that the sword blade nicked his skin. Rhodry moved the blade a little, then glanced her way with eyes that seemed to understand her better than she did herself. Salamander said nothing, but she could tell from the tense way he stood, half a warrior at the moment, that something of great importance was at stake. A man’s soul if naught else, she thought to herself, and at the thought she went cold. All at once Rhodry lowered the blade, glanced at the old blood on it, and stooped to wipe it clean on the dead man’s tunic. When he sheathed it, the sound was like a slap in the breathless room. As he stood there in his muddy clothes, unshaven and damp, with half his memories gone and his life still broken, she saw him suddenly as the gwerbret, the ruler he would be—no, that he was now, despite everything. She knew then for a surety that Rhys was dead, and that Wyrd had picked up the dice to roll a turn.
“I’m not killing you, Gwin,” Rhodry said. “You can come with us as a prisoner, or as my man. Which is it?”
Gwin gave one last convulsive shudder.
“Rhodry,” was all he could say, because he was weeping.
Salamander grabbed Jill’s arm, but he had no need to drag her away; she was in as much hurry to get out of the chamber and leave them alone as he was. A few steps led them up to a muddy, bare farmyard between a long whitewashed house and a square building that might have been a barn or a granary. Lying near a well was another dead man, and tethered out in a meadow were some twenty-five horses—theirs among them. Overhead the sky was a low, cold gray, swirling with wind.
“That was a fine thing you did in there,” Salamander said.
“Was it? If he’s lying, I’ve endangered us all.”
“Lying? Gwin? Not by a pile of horseshit, he isn’t. Mayhap you’ve never seen a man broken down to naught before—I have. Oh, he’ll follow our Rhodry to the death, he will, and see him as a god, too, after this.”
The wind picked up, and Jill shivered, looking around her for the first time with eyes that truly saw.
“Where are we?”
“A farm in the hills. In the flood-time the tenants who hold isolated little places like this take shelter with their landlords in the big villas. When Gwin and his late and unlamented friends needed a place to hide, all they had to do was ride in and make themselves at home.”
Jill nodded, barely hearing him. She was remembering Gwin’s eyes, turning from black to blue, and the firelight that seemed to have burned behind him in her vision. Small wet fingers touched her cheek: rain, the first fat drops of a storm.
“Gods!” Salamander snarled. “Run for it!”
They dashed across the yard and ducked into the open door of the farmhouse just ahead of a drench of water.
“When it rains in this benighted country, it rains!” Salamander said, tossing his head and scattering the drops from his hair. “This is going to make traveling most unpleasant indeed, my wee waterfowl. We might just stay here for a day or two. Gwin and his freshly felled fellows seem to have broken the door right off its hinges, so we’ll have to leave the good farmer some coins for damages anyway. We might as well leave him a few more for rent.”
“I think we should get on the road and use the rain to our advantage.”
“Advantage? What advantage? Maybe you see advantages in riding wet, sodden, damp, saturated, and soaking, to say nothing of cold, chilly, freezing, and frigid, or—”
“What about riding invisible?”
Salamander stopped his lexiconic recital in mid-word and blinked at her.
“I don’t mean invisible to ordinary sight. You’re the one who’s always talking about the astral vibrations of water interfering when someone wants to scry.” Jill waved her hand at the down-driving rain outside. “Well, what about all this?”
“It