The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [129]
Neb heard someone walk in behind him and turned to see the neophyte, no longer burdened with the loaf, gesturing at the door. The audience was at an end.
During his steep walk back up to the dun, Neb thought over the priest’s answer. The priests of Bel would see all dweomer as evil witchcraft, he knew. Some witches were reputed to survive their deaths in one form or another, either as haunts or as magical birds who could speak to the living under certain circumstances. Like that raven? he wondered. Perhaps the bird wasn’t an evil omen, but merely a ghost who wanted to tell Branna some secret or other. There was no doubt that his beloved had talent for dweomer. He had come to accept that fact, just as he had come to realize that he, too, was marked for a stranger craft than letter-writing.
If only I could find the room with the tapestries. In his mind Neb had the image of a suite of rooms in a tower. In the largest, fine Bardek tapestries decorated the stone walls. Between two of the hangings a shelf of seven books waited for him, seven priceless books that stood between a pair of bronze wyverns. But he’d lost the way. He’d forgotten how to reach his rooms. As he puffed up the last hill to the gates of the dun, it occurred to him that Branna somehow knew where those rooms were. All at once he saw it with a strange cold certainty. If he could solve the puzzle of this ghost or this “other lass” or whatever was haunting her mind, he would solve his own riddle as well.
By the time he returned to the dun, noble-born lords and their honor escorts thronged the great hall. Servants brought the men ale in tankards and the noble-born, mead in goblets. Talk and laughter boomed under the high ceiling and reverberated across tables set so close that the serving lasses could barely edge through. The womenfolk of higher rank had retreated upstairs, but after some searching Neb found Branna, waiting at the top of the curving staircase.
“There you are!” Branna said. “I was wondering where you’d got to.”
“It all took a fair bit of time,” Neb said. “I did speak with the high priest. He’s immensely old. Why, he must be near seventy! His memory’s not what it was either, but he did know somewhat about the siege of Cengarn. That’s when a woman died at the ford, a witch woman, he called her. She somehow or other saved the city from the demoness Alshandra, destroyed her somehow, but it cost her own life.”
“Calling her a witch strikes me as a nasty way of speaking, then.”
“It struck me the same, truly, but what else can you expect from Bel’s priests?”
“Naught, I suppose.”
“She does seem to be the sort of woman who could come back as a haunt, doesn’t she? And maybe have a message for someone?”
Instead of answering, Branna half-turned and looked away down the corridor, but Neb doubted if she was truly seeing the view of doors and the far stone wall. All at once she shuddered, then turned back with a brittle smile. “I’ve got to rush off to the women’s hall. I should have been there ages ago, you see, to be presented to the gwerbret’s betrothed.”
Before Neb could say anything, she hurried off. About halfway down the corridor she opened a door and slipped into one of the few places in the entire dun where he was forbidden to go. The idea of witchery scared her good and proper, he thought. Later, he supposed, he’d be able to discuss it with her, once she’d had a chance to think it over.
The proper term for Lady Drwmigga, the gwerbret’s new wife, was bovine, Branna decided. Oh, she was pretty enough, with her long dark hair and dark blue eyes, and she wore a beautiful overdress, a gift from the queen herself down in Deverry—blue Bardek silk embroidered about the neck and down the sleeves with floral garlands in the Westfolk style. As she half-reclined in a cushioned chair, her pale hands flaccid in her lap, she