The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [109]
“No horses come through here,” Leejak remarked. “Too thick.”
“You’re right.” Kov felt greatly relieved. “As long as we’re quiet, no one on the river can spot us, either.”
“True. Tomorrow we dig.”
“Or maybe we can find another tunnel system. Surely some gatherers must have investigated the long barrow.”
“Maybe, maybe not. We see soon.”
Yet despite these rational reassurances, it took Kov a long time to fall asleep, even though he felt exhausted from the long day’s march and the night’s danger. Just as the sun broke above the horizon, he got up from his improvised bed and made his way to the forest verge. Overhead a stipple of gray clouds was sailing in from the south. Rain! he thought. Ye gods, just what we don’t need!
He looked back at the bridge, some two hundred yards away across ground mostly open, though littered with tree stumps. On one of the ancient pillars he could see what appeared to be a carved design, though it stood too far for him to distinguish what it might be—dwarven runes, perhaps, cut on a bridge made by refugees from Lin Rej as they made their way east to found Lin Serr.
His curiosity would have to wait, he realized. In the light of day, going back to examine the carving struck him as infinitely foolish. What if a barge came downriver? As he made his way back through the forest to warn the others about the coming rain, he told himself that he’d try to see the carving on the return journey—if he lived so long.
Down to the south and east, the warm summer storm had already broken over the grasslands. Life in the Westfolk camp moved indoors to wait out the rain. Branna had been assiduously following her teacher’s advice and centering her meditations on the problem of returning Rori to human form. Late one drizzly afternoon, when Neb was working in the healers’ tent, she stumbled across a memory knot from Jill’s life, the moment when that dweomermaster had seen dark wings of wyrd enfolding the man she’d once loved.
Although Jill knew she’d be unable to turn the wyrd aside, she’d sworn a vow to undo whatever it brought upon him, no matter what the risk to herself. It was enough reason, Branna supposed, for her desire to set things right for the man inside the dragon—and yet something more lay hidden at the center of the knot. She could feel it but not identify it.
The problem reinforced another that troubled her these days. Neb had found his true wyrd when he’d resolved to use dweomer to further the healing arts. She envied the clear focus it gave him, the power it had released for his studies. She had no idea why she was studying dweomer, except that she loved it and had the gifts to master it.
“There must be some reason I’m doing this,” Branna told Grallezar. “Something specific, I mean. I swore a vow that I’d use it to help others, but that’s all kind of vague, isn’t it?”
“It is—now,” Grallezar said. “You be young yet. Wait till you reach your third nine of years, and then will you be working a ritual that tells of your true wyrd.”
“But Neb—”
“Neb be not you, and you be not Neb.” Grallezar fixed her with a narrow-eyed glare. “And this be not some race or mock combat with lords to set a prize.”
“True spoken. My apologies. It’s just so hard to wait.”
“That be because of what I did say: you be young yet.”
Branna felt a profound temptation to sulk, but she shoved it aside. I’ve almost reached two nines, she told herself. It’s not all that long till I can work the ritual. It only seems like it’ll be forever.
Dallandra had been using her tent-bound rainy days for meditation, as well, and on the same subject of dragon dweomer. She’d discovered little in these astral forays. When she discussed them with Valandario, she learned that Val had been doing the same, with the same disappointing results.
“You