The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [171]
“Nor from bitches, either.” Niffa snapped the words out before she could stop herself. “Or did things lie different in the kennel you were raised in?”
Cotzi laughed, then stuffed the side of her hand into her mouth as if to shove the sound back in. Farra flung her spindle onto the floor and leapt up, going for Niffa with an open-handed slap. In a swirl like dead leaves gnomes materialized and flung themselves at the older girl’s feet. With a yelp she fell spraddled onto the floor in front of Emla’s chair. The gnomes disappeared. With a long sigh Emla laid her spindle and thread down on the rush-covered floor.
“Get up, Farra,” she said. “And do you mind your tongue from now on. Niffa, you apologize to her.”
Niffa hesitated, then decided that peace in the house would be worth it.
“I be sorry, Farra. It were a wrong thing for me to call you a bitch.”
Farra got up, smoothing her dresses down, and refused to look her way. Emla sighed again.
“If you can’t be civil and take an apology—”
Farra sat down on the bench and grabbed her spindle from the floor. Emla looked at her, considering, then merely shrugged and returned to her own work.
By then it was growing dark. As Niffa struggled to twist her wool into thread, she felt her mood blackening to match the day. Farra would find a way to get back at her, and after all, they’d have to live here together forever. All at once she felt dread like the slap of a clammy hand across her face. With a gasp for breath she let her spindle fall into her lap.
“What be wrong?” Emla said. “You do look as pale as death.”
“Be I so? I know not, Mother. I did feel so faint, all of a sudden.”
Yet she lied. She knew what was wrong, knew what she could never tell the others, that some great evil had marked her Demet out with hate-filled eyes. She felt the danger to him like a shout, ringing in her ears. When she glanced around, she found all the women staring at her.
“May I go take Demet his bread and cheese?” Niffa said. “It do be a bit early, but the fresh air would do me good.”
“By all means,” Emla said. “But be you well enough?”
“That I am, truly.” Niffa managed a bright smile. “I’ll just be putting his supper together and grabbing my cloak and going.”
By the time she left the compound, the full moon was rising in a cloudless sky. With Demet’s supper in one hand and a lantern in the other, Niffa made her way across the crannogs to the lake shore. In the moonlight the stone town walls rose like the shadow of death. Her heart began to pound so hard that she had to stop for a moment and gulp cold air.
“Who goes?” The voice belonged to Gart, the watch-sergeant.
“Just Niffa. I’m bringing my man’s supper.”
Gart himself materialized out of the shadows at the base of the wall.
“Well, now, it be needful for you to wait a bit,” the sergeant said. “I did send him across to Citadel.”
The shouting voices in her mind roared, deafening her. Dimly she was aware of Gart hurrying forward. He caught her elbow and steadied her.
“What be so wrong, lass?”
“Oh, the cold air and little else. Citadel? Will he be there long?”
“I’ve no idea. We were up on the walls, and we did see the strangest thing, so I did send him across to see what it might be. It were a light, a silvery light up on the very peak of the isle, where that fallen house or whatever it might be lies.”
“The stone ruins, then.”
“Those, indeed, and they lie too close to our armory for me to ignore any strange goings-on among them. Here, give me that lantern, and then walk you down the shore a little ways, and see if you can see it there still. It were such a strange light I did wonder if we both were seeing some fancy, Demet and I.”
Picking her way across the dark and trampled snow, Niffa walked a fair bit away from the pool of lantern glow. When she looked up toward Citadel, she could see its crest clearly above the mists. Sure enough, a silver light shone, the strangest color she’d ever seen burning, but no, it was