The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [56]
‘I do. It’s all a question of finding the right goods to trade, the right temptation, if you will. The Westfolk are an odd-looking lot, but they’re human enough. Greed, my dear herbman—it’s a merchant’s true friend. Find the right bait, and the fish will swarm to the hook. I could be properly rich, I could.’
‘True spoken.’ Nevyn bit back his own temptation to point out that greed seemed to have become Wffyn’s mistress rather than a mere friend.
‘Now,’ Wffyn continued, ‘when shall we leave? I was thinking on the morrow, assuming that Devaberiel’s got himself here by then.’
‘You never know with the Westfolk, truly,’ Nevyn said with a sigh. ‘They come and go as they please and when they please and not a moment before.’
Wffyn nodded sadly. At their table Tirro and Gwairyc were still gaming, throwing the dice as grimly as if the fate of kingdoms depended upon their luck. Across the broad round room, the innkeep’s wife was swabbing out tankards with an old rag and rinsing them in a wooden bucket of well water. A few of the more industrious flies circled around her. Nevyn got up and strolled over to hand her his empty tankard.
‘I happened to speak with Morwen,’ he remarked, ‘when we went out to warn Varynna that her child’s father was on his way.’
‘I’ll bet you got a scant welcome from both of them.’ The innkeep’s wife tossed her grey and fraying rag into the bucket.
‘From Varynna, certainly, but I had a bit of a chat with Morwen. She mentioned a friend of hers, Lanmara. That’s an unusual sort of name.’
‘She wasn’t your usual sort of lass.’ The woman frowned in thought. ‘Now, don’t take me wrong, good sirs. Lanni was a decent lass, the blacksmith’s youngest, and very well brought up. The whole village was shocked that she’d befriend a witchmarked lass. Some people even said truly nasty things, that mayhap the two lasses were entirely too close and familiar with each other, if you take my meaning like, but I never believed that.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘Because Lanmara was too well brought up, that’s why, to even think of such! Though she did say some truly odd things, now and again, and I swear she had the second Sight.’
‘Truly? Why?’
‘She and Morri had a game they played when they were little lasses, all about the Wildfolk. They were pretending, like, saying they’d seen this one or that one, or pretending they were talking to some of them.’
‘Well, here,’ Nevyn said. ‘Most children do like a good tale about the Wildfolk.’
‘True spoken, good sir, but these two, well, they never grew out of it. Or at least, Lanmara never did. She was old enough to marry and still babbling about them.’ The innwife glanced around her, then dropped her voice to a conspiratorial murmur. ‘And I swear, she saw somewhat, sure enough. You’d see her eyes moving, like, but there’d be naught there. A bit touched, she was.’ She tapped her forehead with one finger and winked. ‘But then she foresaw her own death. It gave us all a fair turn, that.’
‘No doubt! What happened?’
‘She caught a fever a few winters back, and it was a nasty thing that settled in her chest. Coughing up blood she was, poor lass! With the spring it went away, but she told her mam plain as plain that it would return with the winter, and that she’d die. Her mam told her she was just ill and imagining things, but by the Goddess herself, come the first snow, the fever comes with it, and Lanmara was dead in four nights.’
‘The poor lass!’
‘Truly. It’s a pity you weren’t here with your herbs.’
A pity in more ways than one, Nevyn thought. Lilli, mayhap? She’d died of a consumption of the lungs, after all. Since that particular trouble had an etheric component, it might well have followed her from life to life. He had no way of knowing for certain, but the omen he’d felt earlier returned with a touch of ice along his spine. He went back to Wffyn, who was half-asleep at the table.
‘I’m just going to take my mule to the blacksmith,’ Nevyn said. ‘His shoes aren’t as new as they might be, and I don’t want to take any chances.’
The blacksmith, a short but heavily muscled fellow,