The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [36]
“Oh.”
“Did she tell you not to?”
“She did. I was only trying to sharpen my second sight, but she told me it was dangerous at my stage of development.”
Branna made a noncommittal noise.
“And another thing.” Neb folded his arms tightly across his chest and glared at her. “If it wasn’t you, why did she bring up Nevyn, then?”
“When?” Branna rose to face him.
“Yesterday afternoon. And then tonight she mentioned somewhat again. It must have come from you.”
“I don’t even know what she said to you.”
“Yesterday she mentioned Rhegor.”
“I—who?”
Neb’s expression suddenly changed to something slack and exhausted. The silver light directly above him filled the hollows of his face with dark shadows. He turned away and shoved his hands in the pockets of his brigga. “I don’t suppose you would remember him,” Neb said. “My apologies.”
“Neb, I don’t understand what you’re going on about.”
He gave her one brief look, then turned and ducked out of the tent. It was some while before he returned, and by then Branna had given up waiting for him and gone to bed. For a few moments he stumbled around in the dark tent.
“You could make a light,” she said. “Or I could.”
He spoke not a word, merely sat down on the edge of their blankets and began to pull off his boots. The smell of mead hung around him. If he’d been drinking with the other men, she knew, conversation would prove frustrating and little more. Branna turned over and pretended to sleep. Eventually he managed to undress and slip into the blankets beside her, only to fall asleep with a loud snore.
Branna lay awake, wondering if she was sorry she’d married him. She found herself missing Aunt Galla and Cousin Adranna with a real longing to see them again, to sit down and ask them what they would have done, married to a man like Neb. I can never tell them, she reminded herself, not without mentioning dweomer.
With the morning Neb became perfectly pleasant again, charming, even. When he went out to help with the horses, he was whistling. Still, the farther north the alar traveled, the more thoughts of her kinfolk came to Branna’s mind. When by Prince Dar’s reckoning they reached the border of Pyrdon, she found herself wondering how the winter had treated them.
“I’ve been doing those exercises on farseeing that you gave me,” Branna told Grallezar. “Do you think I could practice by trying to see the Red Wolf dun? I do worry about my aunt, up there in the snow for months, and the army took so much food away, too.”
“That would be a good practice, I do think,” Grallezar said. “You be very familiar with the place, and your worry does lend strength to the seeing. But spend only a short while at each attempt, and bring yourself back to the earth plane when you be finished.” Grallezar glanced around the tent. “In that wood box there on the floor, below the red bag, there be a time glass. Take it. You may practice for as long as it takes the sand to run half out of the upper glass.”
Branna found the box and opened it, then took the glass out with great care. She’d never seen anything as fine as the pale green glass cones in their polished wood stand, about six inches high overall. She turned it over and watched the sand drip from one cone to the other at a slow, steady pace. Her gnome stared at it openmouthed.
“Take the box, too,” Grallezar said, “to keep it safe, like.”
“I will, then, and my thanks!”
During her first few practices, Branna saw nothing but her memories of the Red Wolf dun. Yet finally, early one morning when Neb was off studying with Dallandra, she received a very brief, very misty impression of the great hall. Aunt Galla was just coming down the stairs, and she looked well and happy, if somewhat thinner. Branna’s pleasure at seeing this vision broke it. It was another four practices before at last she saw the dun again and the fields roundabout, all muddy from spring rain. From then on, Branna managed to catch regular glimpses of the dun, although she couldn’t control which part of it she was seeing.
“Everyone looks well,” she told Grallezar. “It