The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [117]
“I saw him in the great hall when I fetched our breakfast.”
Sure enough, Laz found the prince sitting at the head of the honor table with Brel and Garin to either side. Laz decided that Brel would be the most approachable. When he knelt beside the dwarven warleader, Brel greeted him with a brief smile and took the proffered documents.
“My thanks,” he said. “Your Highness, the loremaster’s brought back those letters.”
“Good, good!” Prince Voran favored Laz with a nod. “Here, good scholar, I want you to continue in my service. It’s likely we’ll find more letters like those. I’m offering you your maintenance for the campaign, for you and your apprentice both, of course, and a silver piece a week.”
“Very generous terms, Your Highness,” Laz said. “I’ll accept your commission gladly. I take it we’re heading for the Boar dun?”
“We are.”
“Well and good, then.”
The prince sent a page for his quartermaster, who promptly paid over the first silver piece. Where he would spend it, Laz thought, was probably as great a mystery to the quartermaster as it was to him. After many bows and professions of gratitude, he left the prince’s company and hurried back upstairs to tell Faharn the news.
“Exactly what you wanted,” Faharn said. “Now we see if we can get that book back.”
“Just so.” Laz grinned at him. “And wouldn’t my mach-fala be proud of me? I may be only a humble translator, but I’m riding to war at last.”
Out in the Rhiddaer, the oddly circular town of Cerr Cawnen sheltered some four thousand souls. It lay in the midst of water meadows, a first line of defense against Horsekin raiders, whose mounts would have had to pick their way through the little streams and springs that turned solid-seeming ground into bog. On its outer walls, made of good stone, guards prowled the catwalks and stood at the ironbound timber gates.
Inside the walls, a wide strip of grassy commons surrounded the town, which in turn surrounded the roughly circular Loc Vaed, the crater of an ancient volcano. Most of the buildings crammed into the pale greenish shallows: a jumble and welter of houses and shops all perched on pilings or crannogs, joined by little bridges to one another in a confusing jumble. The edge of the crannog-town bristled with rickety stairs and jetties, where leather coracles bobbed at the end of their ropes.
In the center of the lake lay deep water, fed by underground hot springs. Drifts of mist hung over the lake on cold days and veiled the shores of the rocky central island, Citadel. On Citadel, a few large houses and a scatter of shabby dwellings clung to its steep sides, along with the town granary, the militia’s armory, shrines to the local gods and ruins of an ancient temple, tumbled in an earthquake so long ago that no one remembered exactly when.
Niffa, the dweomermaster who had once been Dallandra’s apprentice, lived with her brother’s family in a large house out on Citadel. Jahdo had grown up as an apprentice to a successful merchant, who had traded with Lin Serr among other places in the Northlands, though only rarely with the Gel da’Thae. After Verrarc’s death, Jahdo had become rich on his own, then married Cotzi the weaver’s daughter, who’d borne him a fine clutch of children. Just that spring he’d been elected Chief Speaker of the town council—an honor that had delighted him at the time. Now, however, his feelings had changed. Niffa was lingering at the breakfast table with him when he brought up the election.
“I do wish I’d turned down the post,” Jahdo said that morning. “And kept on leading the caravans myself. Better that I’d died than our Aethel. He were so young, and I’m but an old man now. I’ve had my life, and—”
“Nah, Brother!” Niffa said. “Hold your tongue! Be not blaming yourself. It was his wyrd.”
“And no one can turn aside another’s wyrd?” Jahdo made a sour face at her. “That old saying does sicken me this morning.”
“It be true whether you do like it or not.”
He scowled at her then shrugged