The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [52]
The time was wrong to think of grievous things. The festival proceeded with songs and declamations, feasts and dancing, powerful enough to draw most of the changelings into a web of laughter and good music. For an afternoon here, an evening there, Dallandra could even forget the danger gathering in the west. But the threat never quite left her, and others feared as well. Carra in particular began to worry about her younger daughter, Perra, riding with her husband’s alar.
“They really should have been here by now,” Carra remarked one morning. “Dalla, don’t you think so?”
“Perhaps, but the festival only began three days ago.”
“I suppose,” Carra said, “but you never know these days. Things happen. If the Horsekin start raiding . . . ” She let her voice trail away.
“That’s true enough,” Dallandra said. “I’ll scry.”
Dalla walked down to the lakeshore and stared at the rippled water while she thought about Perra. The image built up fast: Perra was kneeling in the grass and lashing a blanket-wrapped bundle to a travois while her husband led over the horse chosen to pull it. Thanks be to the Star Goddesses! Dallandra thought. I wonder how I would have told Carra if they’d come to harm? Carra loved her children extravagantly, just like Londrojezry and his wife. And I? The question nagged at Dalla all day.
One worry solved itself when Perra and her alar rode in before nightfall. Dallandra was relieved to see that the new grandchild, some four months old, showed every sign of being an ordinary baby. In fact, she looked completely elvish, with furled ears and cat-slit purple eyes, just as if her grandmother’s human nature had never tainted her blood.
“I’m glad, too,” Carra told Dallandra. “She won’t get teased about her ears the way poor Perra was. Children can be so awfully cruel.”
“Well,” Dalla said, “they do cruel things, but they do them out of ignorance. They don’t know how much pain they’re causing.”
“I suppose. At least Rori’s learned to fight back. The last time someone teased him, he knocked him down with one good punch.”
“He seems to have something in common with the man you named him for.”
They shared a laugh at Rhodry Maelwaedd’s expense.
“It’s so odd, Dalla,” Carra went on. “Here you never wanted children of your own, but you’ve ended up the honorary aunt of so many. Every mother who has a changeling in her care turns to you for advice.”
“You’re right, aren’t you? It goes to show, that you never know what your wyrd is going to bring you. But I did have a child once, a son—I must have told you that story.”
“You did, yes. I’m sorry, I’d just forgotten him.”
I tend to do that myself, Dallandra thought. Poor little Loddlaen! Aloud, she said, “Well, it was all a very long time ago now.”
Carra let the subject drop.
And of course, there were more worries than those about children for the alarli to discuss. When she told the men in Perra’s alar about Salamander’s fears of a Horsekin incursion, they had information for her, a few scraps only, but better than nothing. She contacted Salamander that very evening. In the vision she could dimly see a stone wall behind him and a faint silver light.
“Where are you?” Dallandra thought to him. “I’m at the festival, and I’ve heard something about the Horsekin.”
“Up on the catwalks of our good tieryn’s wall. I came up to watch the moon rise, actually, though I had thoughts of contacting you once it had. Tell me what you’ve learned, oh mistress of magicks mysterious. I hang upon your every thought.”
“Well, it’s rather short on hard fact. One of the alarli here told me about an escaped Horsekin slave. They helped her get back to her people in Deverry, late last autumn, that was. As far as they can remember, she’d escaped from somewhere not all that far from the Westlands, up north and west somewhere. Either she didn’t know, or they didn’t remember just how far she’d traveled after she got away.”
“Of course. But