The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [159]
“Flat, mostly, and forested. Not many do live there, though the land, it does look rich enough. Now, the far north, it be a strange place, a barren place, much rock and little soil. The gods did take a shovel and scrape it bare, I think me, some long while ago. Here and there along the streams, there be grass and suchlike, but not much land a man could farm. I heard tell that there be ghosts up there.” Richt leaned forward and quirked a conspiratorial eyebrow. “And another thing. Once we do reach the flat lands, ride not off on your own, fair lady. There be dragons there.”
“I do know that,” Berwynna said. “One of them be my father. The silver wyrm.”
Richt stared openmouthed, then glanced at Kov, who’d turned to listen to Richt’s tale.
“He is,” Kov said in his perfect Deverrian, “though the tale is far more complicated than you might think.”
Richt looked back and forth between them. Berwynna smiled brightly and waited. Finally Richt muttered an excuse, got up, and left. It took all her self-control to keep from laughing at his retreating back.
The silver wyrm was, at that moment, lairing far to the west of the caravan. When he left Cengarn, Rori flew straight north to the spot where he’d earlier seen the Horsekin army. By then they’d moved on, but they left tracks and litter behind them, a trail that angled eastward. Rori eventually found them setting up an elaborate camp. He stayed high enough overhead to prevent them seeing more than a birdlike shape, white against the sun, if indeed they noticed him at all.
The spot they’d chosen, a low rise of hill that overlooked a shallow valley to the south of it, made a good choice for a fortress, but it lay too far north to offer any sort of threat to the Westlands. Since the Horsekin had marked out the site of its future walls by clearing away the grass and shrubby ground cover, Rori could estimate its size—too small to garrison any sizable number of troops. As a staging ground, however, to store provisions and provide support for an army on the march, it would do quite well.
The question then became: where was that army and when would it march? When he woke that morning, he decided that he’d best go take a look at the heart of Horsekin territory, just to see if troops were gathering or if more of the savage Horsekin from the far north were moving south to join their brethren. He could fly there and back in but a few days, a journey that would take men on horseback months.
Rori got up from the rocky ledge where he’d been sleeping and stretched. The wound on his side itched, as it continually did. He desperately want to scratch it, but fear of making it worse stopped him. It had nearly poisoned him to death, back when it was black and crusted, oozing a continual slime of blood and pus. If only I had hands, he thought, as he did every time the wound forced itself into his consciousness. Perhaps then he could find some relief, carry with him that willow bark Dallandra had used to soothe the itching for a little while, brew it up himself. All he had now were paws, four huge clawed paws, too clumsy for delicate acts like lighting a fire or peeling bark from a tree.
By turning his head at the right angle he could see the pink stripe on his belly. Before Dallandra had pointed out that he was making it worse, he’d licked it in a futile attempt to keep it clean—licked it like a dog, he reminded himself, not a man. Now he could do nothing to it or for it. He’d come to hate it more than he’d ever hated an enemy. Perhaps it was an enemy, a constant reminder of his lack of hands, of his lack of the ability to do all those little human things he’d always taken for granted.
With a growl he launched himself into the air. When he flew, hands became irrelevant. It was the one thing he could do to ease his soul as well as the wound.
During the day, when the caravan was making its slow way west, Envoy Kov had taken to riding at the head of the line with Aethel. This position spared him the sight of Berwynna and Dougie laughing together or talking in the intimate way that only young