The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [106]
“You were right,” Penna said. “I be half an otter, and we must come from the Dwrgi folk, Taurro and me.”
“Indeed you must. Did that hurt, changing so?”
“It did not. It were the sweetest feeling I ever did have, a melting, like, into the water. My thanks, Lady Berwynna, my humble thanks! May the Goddess bless you forever for the helping of me.”
“You be most welcome, truly. Mayhap someday you’ll be going north to meet your kin, someday when the Horsekin be not prowling around.”
“Mayhap. Yet I do think my mam, she were forced to flee them. Why else did we fetch up so far from—from home?” Penna’s voice broke, and she wept, covering her face with her hands.
Berwynna threw her arms around her and held her while she sobbed. It be a hard thing, she thought, to learn such dweomer truths about yourself. For the first time in her entire life, she considered the possibility that Mara, her ever so annoying sister, might have been equally distressed to learn that she was no ordinary lass, but one with an enormous wyrd laid upon her, a burden to be carried as much as an honor to be cherished. There be a need on me to ask her about that, she thought, if ever I do see her again.
Penna’s tears ended at last. She pulled away and wiped her face on her overdress before putting it on. Berwynna pulled a handful of grass and gave it to her to use to blow her nose.
“My thanks,” Penna stammered. “For the truth, too. I just be so—well, so surprised, I think I do mean.”
“No doubt!”
Penna smiled, blew her nose, and let the ill-used grass fall to the ground. She turned and looked northward.
“We’d best get ourselves back to the dun,” Berwynna said. “I would you not take a chill or suchlike.”
“Well and good, then.”
Yet as they walked back, Berwynna noticed how often Penna looked to the north, as if she might see her peculiar kinfolk, so far away, by force of will.
Kov, meanwhile, had seen all the Dwrgwn he ever wished to see, even though traveling with a group of dedicated spearmen proved far faster and easier than traveling with an entire village of their kind. As they marched through the narrow tunnels that led west, Kov found himself missing the treasure chamber and its gold so badly that he knew he’d escaped the glittering trap just in time. You’re like a sot, he told himself, moaning and shivering when there’s no drink to be had. Without the gold’s invisible mist to deaden his feelings, he lived with the infuriating awareness that he’d been enslaved.
The presence of Gebval the spirit talker became a second irritation. Every now and then he caught this supposed dweomerman staring at him grimly. When Kov would catch his gaze, Gebval would ostentatiously test the sharpness of his bronze blade with a callused thumb. You fraud! Kov would think. I’ll wager your supposed dweomer is just as false as that silly binding spell. Yet he refrained from voicing the insult. Since the others believed that Gebval had magic, they doubtless would react badly to any slight to their shaman.
On the journey west, Kov might have schemed out a way to escape had he not realized that he hated the Horsekin even more than he’d come to hate the Dwrgwn. He wanted little Clakutt avenged, for starters, and then vengeance for his ancestors, slain as they fled Lin Rej, for Lin Rej itself, for the Mountain Folk slain in the recent wars, the same for the dead Westfolk, and even for the Deverry losses, the soldiers killed as allies of his people. By the time he and his band of Dwrgwn reached the fortress, Kov had worked himself into a state of icy rage.
Late on an afternoon, the tunnel they were currently following led them to a wide circular chamber, some twenty feet underground by Kov’s estimate. Scraps of rotting cloth, bits of rope and leather thongs, pieces of broken pottery, and fragments of wooden boards, black with age and mold, littered half the floor, though the other half looked reasonably