The Shadow Isle - Katharine Kerr [99]
“I’ll do that,” Vron said, “after I help you get Otho settled in our compound.”
Vron squatted down by the carrying chair to speak to his aged brother. Kov lingered, watching as Berwynna followed Enj across the entrance hall to take a look at the envoy’s quarters. She moved so gracefully—entrancing! Kov thought. Someone cleared his throat entirely too loudly. Kov glanced up to see Douglas the Giant, arms crossed across his broad chest, glaring at him.
“Dougie?” Mic stepped forward and spoke in Deverrian. “Go join Berwynna. Go take a look at your chamber.”
“Good,” Dougie said in broken Deverrian. “I need wash, too.”
Kov turned away fast and from then on, concentrated on the tasks he had in hand.
Berwynna had never seen a room as heavily decorated as the foreign envoy’s quarters. The pierced carvings on the wooden shutters, folded back on either side of the one large window, shamed the moldy tapestries she’d noticed during her one visit to Dougie’s grandfather’s dun back in Alban, when Marnmara and her herbs had been called to treat a fever. The tall steel panels, set at intervals along the walls, far outshone anything else in that lordship’s possession. She spent a long time studying the engraved pictures upon them: hunting scenes and battles set off by borders of delicate patterns.
“This is a lovely chamber,” Berwynna said. “These pictures are beautiful.”
“So they are,” Dougie said. “But it’s better because you’re staying with me.”
“Well, it annoys me that everyone treats you like some kind of large dog.”
“Not half as much as it annoys me.” But he grinned at her.
“Wynni, please tell him I’m truly sorry,” Enj said. “It’s just the way that the Mountain Folk are. It has naught to do with him personally. ”
Berwynna translated, and Dougie smiled Enj’s way to show that he understood. Berwynna continued her slow circuit of the room. The bed would be just wide enough, she decided, for the two of them. It certainly looked comfortable with its finely woven blue blankets. On top of a carved chest lay a strange stone object in the shape of a tube tightly wound into a spiral. At first she thought it was a carving of a snail, though oddly flat and as big as both her hands laid side by side.
“Enj,” Berwynna said, “what is that?”
“I’m not sure,” Enj said. “The miners find them embedded in sea-rock when they’re splitting slates and then clean them up for trinkets.”
“I wondered because I saw part of one sticking out of the cliff. I thought maybe it was some sort of rune or magical mark.”
“Alas, naught so interesting,” Enj said, smiling. “The cliff’s made of sea-rock, so I’m not surprised you saw one there. Now, would you tell Dougie that there’s not a bathing tub in all of Lin Serr that’ll fit him. If he’d like, we can go down to the parkland for a swim. I could use a wash myself.”
Berwynna translated back and forth.
“That would do splendidly.” Dougie told her. “But will you mind my going?”
“Not at all. Mic promised that someone would bring me hot water up here.” She returned to speaking Dwarvish. “But one last question, brother of mine. Where are all the women?”
“Down in the deep city,” Enj said with a furtive glance Dougie’s way. “I’ll explain some other time.”
Dougie’s eyes narrowed; apparently he suspected that once again, he was being excluded. Berwynna patted him on the arm.
“There, there, my love,” she said in the Alban language, which Enj, of course, couldn’t understand. “I’ll tell you whatever they tell me, and they won’t have to know a thing about it.”
After they found a chamber for Otho near Vron’s own, Kov and Vron arranged for an elaborate dinner to be served in Berwynna and Dougie’s chamber. Kov shamelessly invited himself, and Otho insisted on joining them, but Vron bowed out.
“I’ll let you get acquainted with them all,” Vron said. “I want to go bargain with that caravan leader. I want to get some of those opals before they’re all sold.”
“Do that,” Kov said. “They’ve found a new vein of the fire opals, by the way. The city wants