The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [37]
“Yes, indeed, you’ve guessed his riddle.” Dallandra felt her voice waver. “He did love riddles, and his elaborate jokes.”
“You still miss him, don’t you?”
Dallandra nodded, fighting back tears. Over the years the true mourning had left her. Whole months would pass with never a thought of Evandar, but now and again, she would remember some detail of their time together, and the grief would stab her to the heart.
Fortunately, a distraction arrived in the person of Carra’s youngest child. Followed by a pair of big gray dogs and a stream of Wildfolk, Rodiveriel came running. Laughing, he threw himself into Carra’s lap. The dogs flopped down, panting, displaying wolfish fangs. They had white faces and a black stripe of coarser hair down their gray backs like wolves as well, but they were, or so Carra assured everyone, merely dogs, descendants of the loyal pet that had guarded her when Elessi was an infant.
“What’s all this, Rori?” Carra said, smiling.
“Nothing.” He slid off to sit on the ground near the dogs. “I’m tired, but I don’t want to go to bed yet. It’s not even truly dark.”
“All right, then, but when it’s truly dark, in you go.”
He made a face at her but said nothing. He’d inherited his father’s raven-dark hair, but his eyes, though a pale gray like Dar’s, were human in shape. His name was a hybrid—Carra had wanted to honor Rhodry, the man who’d saved her life all those years past. And yet he was also the Marked Prince of the Seven Cities, assuming of course, that the kingdom ever came back to life. If the cities did become a prize worth fighting over, would the People accept a man with human blood as their ruler? Dallandra doubted it. There’s trouble enough to worry about without that, she told herself. If the Horsekin murder us all, no one’s going to care about a dead kingdom anyway.
Late into the night the men talked of war. Dalla left them when the stars had completed half their wheel of the sky and went to her tent to sleep. Yet an omen-dream woke her in the gray light of dawn. She sat up and stared at the tent bags hanging on the wall, but in her mind she was seeing the omens.
“A silver dagger and a bone whistle.” She spoke aloud to ensure that she’d remember what she’d seen. “Someone’s silver dagger and a long bone whistle. Ye gods, what an odd pair of things!” Yet she’d seen them both before, she realized, and eventually she retrieved the memory. One of Alshandra’s followers had tried to work evil with a dragonbone whistle during the siege of Cengarn, and Yraen’s silver dagger had ended up in the hands of the Horsekin after his death. “It was never truly finished, that war,” Dalla whispered. “May the Star Goddesses help us all!”
Neb was quite proud of the letter he wrote for Tieryn Cadryc. Since it was addressed to a gwerbret, he trimmed up the best piece of parchment and chose the Half-inch Royal hand for the letters. For good measure he put a line of interlace at the top and a little sketch of a red wolf, the tieryn’s blazon, below the place where Cadryc would make his mark.
Neb had an odd knack when it came to drawing things: he would picture his intended images in his mind, get them clear, and then push the image out through his eyes—or so he thought of the process—onto the parchment or whatever surface he was using. All he had to do then was trace around the image, which he could see as clearly as if it were already drawn. The trick came so naturally to him that he’d never given it much thought, but as he worked, he remembered Lady Galla telling him about Branna’s needlework skills. She can do this, too, he thought. We’re alike in this. The words pleased him deeply: we’re alike.
When the ink had dried, Neb took it up to the table of honor, where the noble-born were finishing up their breakfast. Cadryc took it from him and glanced at it, then took Neb’s pen and put an X over the red wolf.
“Looks splendid,