The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [157]
‘How much have you been scrying?’ she said.
‘Too much. I should have known I couldn’t hide it from you, oh mistress of mighty magicks. The problem is, I can’t see Sidro.’ Although he wasn’t telling the entire truth, what he was telling was true enough to pass Dallandra’s muster, or so he hoped. ‘I can find her, but she’s built some kind of shield around herself, so I spend a great deal of time trying to break through her defence.’
‘If she’s using dweomer, she can’t still be a priestess.’ Dallandra said. ‘I wonder where she learned that trick?’
‘From our raven mazrak, mayhap? He was following her when last I saw her clearly.’
‘You told me, yes, that she’d left the temple and met up with him.’
‘Well, now she’s living in a forest. She herself is mostly a patch of fog, the clot-of-wool sort you get hanging over Cannobaen in the summer, but I’ve had glimpses of trees and shadows around her. The raven might well hide in the forest.’
‘Just so! Isn’t this interesting? Curse it all, I wish I’d seen her in the flesh so I could scry her out. Rori’s convinced she was Raena in her last life, or at least, in some life, so she must have a certain amount of dweomer talent.’
‘I suspect that all the priestesses do. They merely won’t admit it. Rocca can summon the Wildfolk of Aethyr to make a dweomer light, for example, but she insists that Alshandra’s sending it to her, and that she herself has naught to do with it.’
‘Raena said the same, but in her case, it was accurate enough, though she could work a little dweomer on her own. I suppose Sidro has gifts in this life because of Alshandra’s meddling in her last one. But that’s only a guess on my part.’
‘It sounds reasonable to me. Perhaps you’ll meet up with her one fine day, and then we’ll know.’
When he returned to his tent, a question of a different sort waited for him. Gerran had been telling Clae what he knew about the Horsekin, and something odd had occurred to him.
‘When we were still back at the Red Wolf dun, gerthddyn,’ Gerran said, ‘you told us a tale about the burning of the Vale of Roses.’
‘I did, indeed. It was a translation of a long poem my father recites now and then. I didn’t put it in rhyme though, that lying beyond my modest powers.’
‘Well, somewhat just struck me. In the tale, you said the Horsekin were small, like demons or suchlike, clinging to their horses’ necks.’
‘I didn’t say that. The tale did. And now that you mention it, I wonder why. The Horsekin are anything but short.’
‘Think that scribe of Prince Dar’s would know the answer?’
‘Most likely. Shall we search him out?’
‘Let’s go.’
They found Meranaldar sitting near Prince Daralanteriel’s tent. When he saw them coming, the scribe rose and bowed to Gerran, then favoured Salamander with the briefest possible nod. He did, however, listen carefully while Salamander explained their question.
‘Naught happened to make them grow,’ Meranaldar said. ‘They’ve always been large. Making them small was just a poetic convention.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘Well, they were enemies, so of course they had to be described as ugly and despicable, as their name, Meradan, that is, demons, also indicates. They certainly couldn’t be portrayed as the equals of the People, could they?’
‘Why not?’ Gerran broke in. ‘It would have given us a picture of them, and that would have been cursed useful when they showed up again.’
‘Ah.’ Meranaldar blinked at him for a moment. ‘Your lordship, I’d not thought of it that way. But you have to admit it makes for a better tale.’
‘Hang the tale! What we needed was hard fact.’
‘The sagas present things symbolically. How could those horrible bloodthirsty beings be as tall and graceful as we are?’ Meranaldar laid a hand on his own chest. ‘Inwardly their souls are shrunken and hairy, so the poets made them consistent, that’s all.’
‘That’s all?’ Gerran snapped. ‘You mean they lied.’
‘No, they were depicting an inner truth.’ He turned to Salamander. ‘Here, you’re a gerthddyn. You know tales. You must see that the poem’s better the way it is.’
Salamander