The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [53]
“No. Master Jantalaber will give me another one.” She picked up the bundle again and handed it over. “Bread and cheese. Eat it first, before the overseers take it.”
“I will. It’s kind of you to remember me. I wondered if you did, up there in the palace and all.”
“Mama, how could I ever forget you?”
Sudden tears ran down Gertha’s face. Hwilli hugged her again and wept with her. The horse soldiers were riding up and down the line, yelling at everyone to get ready to move. Whips cracked, the horses tossed their heads and snorted. Hwilli gave her mother one last embrace, then turned away, half-blind with tears. She worked her way free of the mob just as the villagers began to walk away. Some turned for a last look at Reaching Mountain, the huge slabs of rock that had loomed over them every summer of their lives. Most concentrated on pushing their belongings ahead of them down the rocky path.
Hwilli stood on the first terrace and watched until the last figure, the last wisp of dust, had faded from sight. By the time she returned to the fortress, she’d managed to stop weeping.
A few nights after the refugees had started their trek to Rinbaladelan, the first snow fell, but it stayed up high on the mountains. The fortress itself received an icy rain that froze only in the deepest shadows. As soon as the sun climbed halfway to zenith, the frost melted again, but winter had arrived in a swirl of north wind as cruel as thrown knives. Hwilli worried about her mother and Nalla incessantly. Not even Rhodorix could lift her spirits.
“I feel an evil wyrd coming,” Hwilli told him one night. “I don’t know what, but I can feel it deep in my heart.”
He said nothing, merely stroked her hair, twining it lightly around his fingers then releasing it.
“Do you feel it, too?” Hwilli said.
“I don’t.” He smiled at her. “In the spring, now, when the Meradan are on the move again, then mayhap I will. But we’ll have a winter here first.”
For his sake she voiced nothing and let his kisses distract her. The spring will come too soon, she thought. Far, far too soon.
With Nalla gone, Master Jantalaber took over the task of teaching Hwilli her first lessons in dweomer craft, which amounted to her learning proper words and definitions. The universe, it turned out, encompassed far more than the world Hwilli had always seen, and each of these worlds contained their own proper order of beings and creatures. At times, the lesson over, Jantalaber would talk of his dream of building a place of healing as well, particularly when Paraberiel joined them.
“I’d thought of building it of stone in the usual way,” Jantalaber said one evening. “Down by the Lake of the Leaping Trout, I thought.”
“That’s a lovely place,” Paraberiel put in. “Very restful, if someone was ill.”
“And close enough to a forest for the wood to send our failures on to their new life.” The master smiled with a wry twist of his mouth. “But it’s so far away, all the way on the other side of the grasslands.”
“I was thinking it would be safe, therefore,” Paraberiel said.
“No place is safe any more, not with these horse beasts carrying our enemies.”
“It’s too bad you couldn’t build a refuge that could move,” Hwilli said, smiling. “We could use the horses to pull big sledges or some such thing.”
The men both laughed at her jest; then Jantalaber fell silent, looking away from his two apprentices at a pair of sprites, hovering in the air. Par seemed unaware of them. Both apprentices waited, unspeaking, until the master remembered their presence.
“My apologies,” Jantalaber said. “But, Hwilli, you’ve given me an idea. Not sledges, no, but I wonder—” He got up from his chair. “I need to go consult with Maral. I wonder—”
Murmuring to himself, he hurried out of the room. Hwilli felt a cold shudder of awe that the master could just go to Maraladario without sending a message first. Even Paraberiel seemed surprised into better manners than usual.
“I’ll help you finish hanging those bundles of herbs,” he said.
“My thanks,” Hwilli said. “There’s a