The Gold Falcon - Katharine Kerr [80]
Salamander felt a ripple of dweomer cold run down his spine. No doubt he’d understand danger, though not a danger of the spirit, once he reached the new fort, but he’d expected nothing else. She took a step toward him and held out a hand.
“You will be coming with me, won’t you?” Rocca said.
For a moment, with the dweomer cold all around him, he hesitated. She watched him silently. With her dirty face and rough clothes, she looked like a beggar child, utterly vulnerable.
“Of course I will,” Salamander said. “I long to see Alshandra’s shrine. Naught will keep me away from that.”
Rocca smiled, and despite the dirt her face turned beautiful. Salamander soothed his guilt by pointing out that seeing the shrine meant seeing the dun that housed it, so that in a way, he wasn’t truly lying to her.
By midafternoon they’d left the settled farmland behind. The road turned into a narrow track through sparse forest where slender pines grew among shrubby underbrush and long grass. Judging from the cut stumps and broken limbs, these trees had been supplying firewood to Honelg’s people for some years. On such rough ground it became impossible for Rocca to walk next to him as he rode, and the horses had to pick their way on the uneven ground. With her long easy stride Rocca took the lead, though occasionally she would pause to let him catch up. Each time she’d ask him to repeat one of the lists—the wretched, revolting, vile, and despicable lists, as Salamander came to call them, though not, of course, aloud.
Toward sunset they reached a wild meadow, where he could tether out his horses and let them graze. Salamander made a bed of rocks, cleared the grass from around it, then stacked up scraps of deadfall wood that he scrounged from the forest edge. For kindling, he mounded up bark and dry leaves. After they’d eaten, and once it was growing dark, he struggled with flint and steel to light the tinder. In front of Rocca he didn’t dare invoke the Wildfolk of Fire, though eventually they took pity on him and showered a few sparks onto the leaves. The bark caught, and with it the wood. Salamander sighed his relief, then sat down next to Rocca, who’d been watching all of this with a small smile.
“It truly does comfort the heart to have a bit of light at night,” Rocca remarked.
“Don’t you make yourself a fire when you travel?” Salamander said.
“I don’t. Since there be with me no horse to feed or tend, I be accustomed to traveling till it be too dark to see, and by then I want naught but sleep.”
“Ah.”
She turned toward him and seemed about to speak—more lists, he thought.
“Somewhat I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Salamander said hurriedly. “That iron bracelet you wear. Does it have a meaning?”
“I’d not call it a meaning, precisely. I do wear it to repel dweomer, were it to be used against me.”
“Repel dweomer? Iron can’t do that.”
“The high priestess herself in Taenalapan did tell me of its power, and she’d not be lying, would she, now? There be a need upon anyone who goes east among Deverry folk to wear this blessed vambrace for the fending off of their nasty dweomer.”
“Ah. You—I mean we—we see dweomer as evil, then.”
“It be not a question of seeing. We ken its evil nature. Once there were among my people those who did work dweomer, and of the worst sort, too. They did boast of their power to turn themselves into animals and birds, so that they might creep or fly about and spy on people. Mazrakir, the Horsekin did call them. When the joyous light of Alshandra began to shine among us, most of these sorcerers did lay aside their foul ways and worship her, but there were some among us who were too puffed up with pride to surrender their evil powers.”
“What happened to them?”
“A decree did go out, and they were slain. Their impious knowledge did vanish with them, so that none left among us now kens how to transform himself.”
“Do the priests kill all magicians?”
“They do and with great dispatch, wherever they may find them.”
Gods help me! Salamander thought.