The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [94]
“Salamondar?” Berwynna said. “Be that whom you be named for? That real name of yours, I do mean, Salamonderiel.”
“It is—me and dozens of other men.”
“Ah, I see. He were a hero.”
“So he must have been,” Mic said. “And so your Da’s tale makes sense now. Salamander, they did survive. They ended up down in Deverry somewhere, or so Rori told us. He saw a dwarven colony there when he was a young man.”
“So the sacrifice wasn’t in vain?” Salamander paused to wipe sudden tears from his eyes. “How very odd, peculiar, and unanticipated, to weep over it! That all happened twelve hundred years or so ago, but ye gods, it’s still good to know the outcome.”
“Ai!” Mic said. “How I wish our Otho was still alive to hear this.”
“Oh, come now!” Salamander said. “I didn’t mean to make you start mourning yet another soul.”
“I’m not.” Mic grinned with a wicked gleam in his eyes. “I’d love to rub it into the old man, how wrong he was.”
“That’s better!” Salamander paused briefly to mug deep thought. “I suppose.”
Berwynna laughed but then cut it off when Salamander raised one hand for silence. Someone outside seemed to be beating a drum, a huge drum, growing louder and louder. She could hear women outside running back and forth and calling out to one another.
“That be Da, I’ll wager!” Berwynna got to her feet. “I do hope the horses, they all be tethered and the like.”
“So do I,” Salamander said. “Let’s go see.”
Berwynna ducked out of the tent and looked up. Sure enough, the silver dragon was swooping over the camp, then turning south, away from the herds. She waited till she saw him land, then ran to greet him with Mic trotting after.
Dallandra had heard and seen the dragon as well. After she rounded up her medicinals, including her clay jar of leeches, she hurried out to join Rori. Berwynna had already reached him; she sat between the dragon’s front legs and leaned back against his massive chest, while Mic stood nearby, watching with a fond smile. Dallandra marveled at Wynni’s courage. Many a lass would have preferred to honor her dragon father from a safe distance. Still, as a precaution, Dalla asked her to move while she treated the gash in Rori’s side.
“He gets irritable when the willow water stings,” Dallandra remarked. “And he can’t seem to stop his tail from lashing.”
“It has a life of its own, truly,” Rori said.
Berwynna and Mic sat down in the grass some yards away while Dallandra readied her leeches. The edges of the wound showed only a thin stripe of morbid flesh, but she wanted to make sure the contagion spread no further. With wooden tongs she fished out the thinnest leech and set it feeding.
“And how was the scouting expedition?” Mic asked. “What are the Horsekin up to?”
“Too many evil things,” Rori said. “I’ll give Cal and the prince a full report when they come back. For one thing, though, the bastards are building their fortress upon some sort of long barrow.”
“That can’t be stable,” Dalla said. “Good.”
“Indeed, but I saw somewhat stranger still. Wynni here told me about a bridge over the Dwrvawr, so I decided to take a look at it. I found it near that strange little village, just as you told me, Wynni. Fire and fumes! It’s the most flimsy-looking bridge I ever saw, but that’s not the strangest thing yet. In the water there were two huge animals with brown fur, like enormous otters.”
“Gartak,” Mic broke in. “The folk there called the monsters gartak.”
“Mazrak’s more like it.” Rori swung his