The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [184]
In her grief over Dougie and her terror of Horsekin raiders, Berwynna had quite simply forgotten about the dweomer book. While Richt and Mic conferred with Rori, she ran back to camp. She noticed Laz’s men standing in a tight knot between the two trees with Laz in the center of the group. They were arguing about something, but she couldn’t understand a word of their language. They ignored her, as did the muleteers from the caravan, even when she began searching through the pack panniers, hoping desperately that her saddlebags had turned up on one of the returning mules. She never found them.
When she asked the muleteers, none of them had seen a pair of tan leather saddlebags with dwarven runes upon them. She went through every pannier and sack again—still nothing.
The mule she’d been riding had galloped off into the wilderness and never returned. She forced herself to admit that the magical book, which may well have been her father’s only hope of returning to human form, had disappeared. And I’m to blame, she thought. She knelt in the dirt among scattered packsaddles and panniers and cursed herself. Why had she taken it? Why? It could have been safe on Haen Marn instead of wandering through the wilderness on the back of a panicked animal.
Wolves would doubtless find the mule and pull it down to eat it. The book would be lost forever. In sheer frustration she began to weep. When she heard someone walk up behind her, she twisted around and saw her uncle, looking at her sadly.
“Ai, weeping again?” Mic said in Dwarvish. “Mourning your Dougie, no doubt! Ai, my poor little lass!”
“Worse.” Berwynna scrambled to her feet. “Uncle Mic, I’ve got to go hunt for my mule, the one I was riding, I mean. I had my saddlebags on the saddle, the ones Grandfather Vron gave me, and in them—”
“No!” Mic shook his head vigorously. “You are not going out there, whether it’s alone or with a guard. Wynni, we’ve got to get out of here.”
“But Da’s here to protect us—”
“He can only do so much. For all we know, there’s a whole army of Horsekin around here somewhere. We’ve got to get off this road and start south today.”
“But I had—”
“Hold your tongue!” Mic laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “I won’t hear it. You could be killed out there. Ye gods, you nearly were! Those men who tried to grab you—do you want to end up raped and a Horsekin slave?”
“No, no, of course not.”
Now was the moment, Berwynna realized, that she should confess, tell her uncle that she’d taken the book and lost it again. But no one else knows, she thought. Maybe I’ll never have to tell Da or anyone else. Yet such would be a coward’s trick, she realized, one unworthy of her Dougie’s gift.
“Wynni, are you listening to me?” Mic said.
“What? I’m sorry, Uncle Mic. What did you say?”
“I said, here come the men to load the mules. Come along, let’s not get in their way.”
Mic grabbed her hand; she pulled free.
“You don’t understand,” Berwynna began. “Do let me explain.”
“Here, what’s all this?” Laz walked up to them, with his men close behind him. They walked warily and kept their hands on the hilts of their weapons. When they formed a half circle behind him, some of the men turned around to keep watch, as if they expected another attack at any moment. The man called Faharn stood next to Laz and glowered like a winter storm.
“Wynni,” Laz said, “I know your heart aches for your Dougie, but—”
“It be not only Dougie!” Berwynna drew herself up to her full height, not that it amounted to much over five feet. She spoke in the Mountain dialect so Laz could understand her. “It be the book, that book with the dragon on it, the one Dougie did bring to Haen Marn. I did carry it in those saddlebags, and now it be gone.”
Laz did the last thing she would have expected: he laughed. “So you did steal it,” he said, “and here I thought Mara had just mislaid it.”
“I did, and I know not why. It were sitting on a bench among the apple trees, and somehow I did feel there were a need on me to have it.