The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [63]
I won’t have to hide it any more, she thought. They see them, too. She felt like throwing her head back and howling with delight, but the presence of the human men, who obviously saw nothing at all, kept her silent. All day the Wildfolk came and went, hovering around the Westfolk men. At night, when the caravan made its camp in a forest clearing, salamanders appeared to play among the flames in the Westfolk campfire. Evan had always been able to see the Wildfolk, and now he pointed them out to his father.
‘Manders, Da,’ he said.
‘Salamanders,’ Morwen corrected him. She glanced at Dev. ‘They’ve always been his favourites. I realized that he’d started to crawl when he nearly went right into the fire after them.’
‘Well, I’m glad you pulled him back in time,’ Dev said, smiling. ‘Here, Evan. I’ll tell you a story about salamanders. You can lie down on my blankets right here to listen.’
Once Evan had fallen asleep with his father to watch over him, Morwen got up and moved away from the smoky fire. To a farm woman like her, a day spent riding was a day free of real work. Since she wanted to exhaust herself in the hopes of having a sleep free of violent fantasies, she decided to walk around the edge of the camp a few times.
Out behind the tethered mules and horses she saw someone moving through the trees—one of the muleteers, she assumed, but when she came closer, she saw a Westfolk woman. She was dressed just like the men, in leather leggings with high boots and a loose shirt belted at the waist, but she wore her thick honey-blonde hair in a single long braid down her back. In one hand she carried an unstrung bow, and at her hip hung a quiver of arrows. She smiled at Morwen and beckoned her over.
‘Forgive me for sneaking around like a thief,’ the woman spoke in a whisper. ‘But I can’t let the men see me here.’
‘Indeed?’ Morwen kept her voice low in return. ‘Why not?’
‘I’m looking for the man who stole my daughter. The child riding with you—he’s a little lad, isn’t he?’
‘He is, truly. Devaberiel’s his father.’
‘Ah.’ The woman nodded slowly. ‘Well, then, he can’t be my daughter, can he now? My thanks!’
She turned, took one step, and vanished like a puff of smoke in the wind. Morwen felt the hair rising along her suddenly cold arms and the back of her neck. She ran all the way back to the light of the fire.
The bard was lying asleep next to Evan. Morwen considered waking him to tell him about the strange woman, but her life had taught her that no one but Lanmara had ever cared about what she may have seen or done. Besides, her stories about the Wildfolk had got her beaten for a liar too many times as a child to risk telling a peculiar story now that she’d finally found people who treated her decently. Evan looked so comfortable that she decided to try leaving him with his father. She lay down on her own blankets and fell asleep straightaway, but she woke at intervals, listening for Evan. Somewhere in the middle of the night she heard him just starting to cry. As soon she got up and fetched him, he quieted right down.
Much to her great relief, she had no dreams of maiming and killing all night long. In the morning when she woke, she remembered the woman, but the more she thought about the experience, the more it seemed to her that she must have dreamt it. No one but Lanmara had ever cared about her dreams. She put the incident out of her mind and set about feeding Evan his breakfast.
Gwairyc found himself painfully