The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [200]
“Well, I’m hoping you’ll favor me, of course,” he said. “Surely that’s obvious.”
“It be so, which is why I did want to drag that fox out of his hole.”
“Now that you have, does the color of his fur please you?”
“In some small way. I think me that with much time the day will come when such things do please me greatly once again.”
“When that day comes, I hope with all my heart that it’s a wolf that pleases you, not a fox.”
“A red wolf, it be a fine sight, truly, yet none of us know what wyrd the gods have in store for us.”
“That’s so, and wisely said.”
Berwynna suddenly realized that Lady Galla was leaning so sharply their way, desperate to hear in the noisy great hall, that she looked as if she might be feeling faint. In his seat at the foot of the table, Uncle Mic was struggling not to laugh. Mirryn had noticed his mother’s angle as well.
“I hear that Lord Pedrys is planning on holding a tourney,” he said, a trifle loudly. “I think mayhap I’ll ride to it. Gerro, are you up for a little sport?”
“Depends,” Gerran said. “On how my lady fares. I don’t want to be away from the dun when she’s delivered of the child.”
Conversation, and Lady Galla’s posture, returned to normal.
Berwynna had barely finished her dinner when she heard drum-beats thrumming through the sky. With a murmured apology to Mirryn, she got up and left the table to run to a window and look out. By then, the rest of the great hall had heard the sound as well. Everyone stopped talking to listen as it came closer.
“Is that your father, Wynni?” Galla called out.
“It be not so, but my stepsister.” Wynni saw a flash of green and gold circling the dun. “I think me I’d best go meet her.”
Uncle Mic joined her as she left the great hall. In the warm summer twilight, they hurried down the path to the meadow by the dun, where Medea was drinking from the stream. She lifted her head in a scatter of drops and rumbled in greeting. Strapped to the tallest spikes on her neck was a leather pouch.
“Messages for the tieryn!” Medea sang out. “And one for you, Wynni, though that one’s not in the pouch. I’m here to take you and Mic back to Haen Marn.”
“Oh, ye gods!” Mic muttered. “Another wretched, sick-making ride through the air!”
“It be too far to walk, Uncle Mic,” Wynni said. “My thanks, stepsister! My heart does long to see my mother again.”
“I assumed it would, truly,” Medea said. “Mic, will you untie this itchy pouch and get it off me?”
“I will, and I’ll take it up to the tieryn as well.”
Carrying the messages, Mic hurried off, but Berwynna lingered to ask her stepsister for news of Rori. “He’s in splendid form,” Medea began, “so, now that the war’s over—”
“The war be over? Wait, go not so fast in your telling! I knew that not.”
“My apologies. Here I was thinking you’d have dweomer, so you’d know.”
“Our sister Mara has all of that on my side of the family. I have none, and truly, I be glad of it.”
Berwynna sat down in the grass. She stayed in the meadow for some time, listening to Medea’s report of the destruction of the Horsekin army, while the twilight slowly faded into night. Above them in the clear sky the stars came out and seemed to hang close to earth, as if they too rejoiced in the death of so many enemies.
Eventually Berwynna heard someone calling her name. Medea stopped talking and swung her head toward the sound. A gleam from a lantern, held in someone’s hand, bobbed down the path toward them.
“Uncle Mic?” Berwynna called out.
“It’s not.” Mirryn answered her. “It’s Mirro. I thought you might be glad of the light and an escort back to the dun.”
He had used the familiar form of the second person, “ti,” she realized, perhaps as a token of friendship, perhaps in hope of something more. She hesitated, then decided that it would be ungracious to deny him that hope.
“It does gladden my heart,” she said. “My thanks i ti.” “To you,” again in the familiar form.
As he walked up to join her, he was smiling so softly that Berwynna made a decision.
“We’ll be leaving you on the