The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [18]
“Lovely night, isn’t it?” Salamander said.
Although Gerran had been thinking just that, hearing this unmanly sentiment voiced annoyed him.
“Warm enough, I suppose,” Gerran said. “Tell me somewhat. What made you ride with us?”
“I’m not truly sure,” Salamander said.
“You told our lord that you wanted vengeance.”
“Well, that’s true enough. The Horsekin killed a good friend of mine some years ago. And I’m looking for my brother, of course. You may remember that when I last passed your way, I told you—”
“—about your brother the silver dagger. What is this? Do you think you’re going to find him just wandering around the countryside?”
“Imph, well, you never quite know where he’ll turn up.”
Gerran waited, then realized that Salamander was going to tell him no more unless he pried.
“Well, now that you’re here, you’re riding under my orders,” Gerran said instead. “I want you to stay well back out of the way if it comes to battle.”
“Fair enough.” Salamander bowed, took a few steps away, then suddenly stooped down and picked something up from the grass. “One of the lads is getting careless. I wonder whose bridle this belongs on?”
When he held up a brass buckle, Gerran could barely see it. Salamander pressed it into his hand, then walked on with a cheery good night. Gerran rubbed the buckle between his fingers as he watched him go. So, he told himself, that’s why he’s so cursed odd! There’s Westfolk blood in his veins.
Around noon on the morrow, the combined warbands reached a stone marker beside the road. The tieryn called a halt to rest the horses and let the men eat a scant meal from their saddlebags. Although the cairn, a mere heap of gray stones, carried no inscriptions, those who had been let in on its secret knew that a shallow canyon nearby led straight south. The road itself ended at the marker, because extending it south would have given their enemies an easy path to the tieryn’s lands.
At the head of the canyon, a small waterfall trickled down over ragged shelves of dark rock, fringed at the edges with long streamers of ferns. The men dismounted and led their horses down a narrow path to the reasonably flat floor of the canyon, where a faint trail led along the edge of a stream through pine forest. After a mile or so of this difficult traveling, the canyon walls grew lower and began to splay out. The trail widened just enough to allow the men to mount up and ride single file. They could see bright sunlight and open space ahead through the trees where the trail widened once again. Gerran yelled at his men to fall into their regular riding order, two abreast and ready for trouble, as he remarked to Lord Pedrys.
“Do you think the Horsekin would lay an ambuscade?” Pedrys said.
“I don’t know, my lord, but I wouldn’t put it past them.”
In dappled sunlight the men rode through the last of the pines. No one spoke; everyone kept one hand on his sword hilt and the reins of his horse in the other. Cut stumps appeared among the grasses and weeds of second growth. One last bend in the trail brought them to the long broad valley, green with ripening wheat and meadowland. A couple of miles off to the west the Melyn ran, a thin sparkling line at their distance. Gerran could just make out a patch of black beside it—Neb’s farm, he assumed.
“I don’t see any Horsekin,” Cadryc remarked. “Don’t see much of anything but grass.”
“True spoken, Your Grace,” Gerran said. “Most likely the bastards are long gone.”
“We’ve got to get more fighting men down here. All there is to it!”
“Or else stop these cursed raids once and for all, Your Grace,” Gerran said. “If the king would lend us an army—”
“That’s in the laps of the gods,” Cadryc said. “We’ll worry about the grand schemes later. We’ve got a hard job to do right now.”
With a wave of his arm the tieryn led them forward. They rode on down to the smoking tangle of wood and ashes that had once been Brwn’s farm. The fire had leaped to the apple tree outside the earthen wall and left it as black and gaunt as a dead sentry, but the damp grass still