The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [112]
At the base of the hill, the Mountain Folk had set up a camp just as well-organized. Sentries armed with long battle-axes stood at the entrance to the winding earthworks that lined the road up to the walled dun. More sentries called out a greeting at every turn and stood at the open gates. When Laz and his party dismounted in the ward, four men of the Mountain Folk hurried over to take their horses.
“If you’d just hold our mounts for us?” Rhidderc pointed out the other three messengers to include them in the “us.” “We’ll doubtless be going back to our camp after we give the prince his messages.”
The men nodded but said nothing. They were all looking at Faharn with suspicion in narrowed eyes.
“He’s all right,” Rhidderc said, a touch jovially. “Both of these men have good reason to hate the Horsekin. Laz, show them. They tortured him, you see.”
Laz held up his maimed hands. Two of the Mountain men winced and looked away; the others nodded their understanding.
“Don’t know where you’ll be quartered,” Rhidderc said to Laz. “Up here, I’d think.”
Rhidderc’s thought proved accurate. As the important translator and scholar, Laz found himself billeted in the dun itself. The prince’s quartermaster gave him a chamber near the top floor, a tiny space, but it did possess an actual bed. Laz asked him to give Faharn a straw mattress to put on the floor rather than letting his apprentice sleep outside on the cobbled ward as most servants and apprentices did.
“He’s Gel da’Thae, not Horsekin,” Laz told the quartermaster. “But will the other apprentices appreciate the difference?”
“They’d make his life miserable, no doubt,” the fellow said. “Well and good, then. He can share your chamber.”
They dumped their gear next to one of the wickerwork walls. While Faharn went off to tend their horses, Laz sat on the wide stone windowsill and looked down into the ward below. The view was shockingly, achingly familiar. Had Lord Tren come to this isolated chamber to brood or to spy on his household? Or had some servant lass caught his lordship’s fancy and earned a few trinkets on that bed? Laz suspected the latter, but the memory-feeling refused to clarify itself.
That evening, Laz ate in the great hall at a table headed by Prince Voran’s scribe, who ignored him in an icy way that indicated the scribe saw him as a rival. This disdain allowed Laz plenty of time to look around the great hall, packed with fighting men, human and Mountain Folk both. He was searching for Faharn, but he never saw him. He could guess that, as an apprentice, Faharn was being fed somewhere else with the servants. He did see a man who had to be Prince Voran, because he was sitting at the head of the honor table, a tall fellow, neither ugly nor good-looking, with a touch of gray in his brown hair and a wide mouth that gave him a froggy air when he grinned. On either side of him sat men of the Mountain Folk; the three of them stayed deep in conversation throughout the meal.
Serving lads and pages dashed back and forth, handing out food and drink while the men yelled requests and oaths. The hall stank of moldy straw, sweat, and smoke from the rush torches burning in the wall sconces. Any kind of meditation on past lives was out of the question in the noise and heat. Laz ate quickly, then got up and slipped away while the others at his table were talking among themselves.
Back in his chamber, still overwarm from the day, Laz returned to his watch in the window. He could see over the dun walls to the gray sea of tents, illuminated here and there by tiny campfires, and beyond them to the countryside, dark under the stars. Feelings that he knew came from his life as Tren rose in his