A Time of Omens

  “Er, well, you’re no better. If I hadn’t come in…”

  The laughter stopped, and the men began to study the ground or the tables or the wall, looking at anything but his sad and patient face. With a sigh the priest sat down, smoothing his long gray tunic under him, the dogs settling at his feet.

  “After you finish that stew, lass, you’d best come with me. You’ve picked the worst tavern in all Arcodd for your dinner.”

  “So it seems, Your Holiness.” She was surprised that she could speak at all. “You have my humble and undying thanks. May I stand you a tankard?”

  “Not so early in the afternoon, my thanks. I’ll have a drop of ale of an evening, but truly, these days, it doesn’t sit so well in my stomach.” He sighed again. “Er, well, um, what is your name?”

  She debated, then decided that lying to a priest and a rescuer was beyond her. Besides, her ruse was torn already.

  “Carramaena, but call me Carra. Everyone does—did—people who know me, I mean. I’ve been trying to pass for a lad and calling myself Gwyl, but it doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Um, well, it isn’t, truly. Gwyl? The dark one?” He smiled in a burst of surprising charm. “Doesn’t suit you. With your yellow hair and all Now my name does suit me. Perryn, it is.”

  “You don’t seem foolish in the least.”

  “Ah, that’s because you don’t know me very well. You probably never will, seeing as you must be going somewhere in a great hurry if you’d ride with only a lie for company.” He paused, frowning at the far wall. “Have to do somewhat about that, you traveling alone, I mean. Are you going to eat that stew?”

  “I’m not. I’m not hungry anymore, and I’ve already picked one roach out of it. Will the dogs want it?”

  “Mayhap, but it’ll make them sick. Come with me.”

  When he got up and headed for the door, Carra grabbed her cloak from the bench and hurried after, her head as high as she could hold it as she passed the men by the fire. Outside, drowsy in the hot spring sun, her horse stood tied to the hitching rail in front of the round tavern. A purebred Western Hunter, he was a pale buckskin gelding.

  “It was the horse that made me go in,” Perryn said. “I wondered who’d have a horse like that, you see. You shouldn’t just leave him tied up like that in this part of the world. Um, well, he could get stolen.”

  “Oh, he’ll kick the demons out of anyone but me who comes near him. I’m the only person who could ever touch him, much less ride him. That’s why he’s mine.”

  “Ah. Your father give him to you?”

  “My elder brother.” Try as she might to hide it, bitterness crept into her voice and tightened it down. “He’s the head of our clan now.”

  “Ah. Then you are noble-born. I, er, um, rather thought so.”

  She felt her cheeks burn with a blush.

  “Truly, you’re not much of a liar, Carra. Well, fetch your horse and come along. Do you like dogs?”

  “I do. Why?”

  “I’ve got a pair to give you at home. If they like you, and I truly do think they will, they’ll take care of you on the road.” He sighed in a profound melancholy. “I’ve got such a lot of them. Cats, too. We always had cats, my wife and I. She’s dead now, you see. Died over the winter.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “So am I. Well, I’ll be joining her soon, I hope, if Kerun wills it. He should. I really am getting on in years. No use in outstaying your welcome, is there?”

  Since Carra was only sixteen, she had no idea of what to say to his melancholy and busied herself with untying her horse. He stood staring blank-eyed up the street, as if he were talking to his god in his mind, while the dogs wagged quietly beside him.

  The priest’s house lay just beyond the village. He pushed open a gate in an earthen wall and led her into a muddy farmyard, where chickens scratched in front of a big thatched roundhouse. Cats and puppies lolled in every patch of shade: under the pair of apple trees, under a watering trough, under a battered old wagon. With a cheerful halloo a stout, red-faced woman of about forty came out the front door.

  “There you are, Da. Brought a visitor? You’re just in time for your dinner.”

  “Good, and my thanks, Braema.” The priest glanced at Carra. “My youngest daughter. She’s the only… well, er, ah, only truly human one of the lot.”

  At that Braema laughed in gut-shaking amusement. Carra dutifully smiled, suspecting some hoary family joke.

  “There’s lots of sliced ham and some lovely greens, lass, so come right in. Oh, wait—your horse.” She turned in the door and bellowed. “Nedd, come out here, will you? Got a guest, and her horse needs water and some shade.”

  In a moment or so a young man slipped out of the door behind her and stood blinking in the sun. As slender and lithe as a young cat, he was just about five feet tall, a good head shorter than Carra, with hair as coppery red as a sunset, and a pinched face dominated by two enormous green eyes. When he yawned, his intensely pink tongue curled up like a cat’s.

  “Braema’s lad, my grandson,” Perryn said with a long sigh. “And, um, well, fairly typical of the lot. Of my offspring, I mean.”

  With a duck of his head Nedd glided over and took the buckskin’s reins. Carra reached out to stop him, but the gelding lowered his head and allowed the boy to rub his ears without his usual rolling eye and threat of teeth.

  “His name’s Gwerlas.”

  The lad smiled, a flick of narrow lips, and led the gelding away without so much as a glance in her direction. Gwer seemed so glad to go that Carra felt a jealous stab.

  “Now come in and eat.” Braema waved Carra in. “You look like you’ve ridden a long way, eh?”

  “Long enough, truly. I come from Drwloc.”

  “All the way down there? Ye gods! And where are you going, or may I ask?”

  “I don’t know.” For a moment Carra nearly wept.

  The priest and his daughter sat her down at a long plank table in the sunny kitchen, scattered with drowsy cats, and loaded her up a trencher with ham and greens and fresh-baked bread, the first real meal she’d had in days. After she stuffed herself, she found herself talking, partly because she felt she owed them an explanation, partly because it felt so good to talk to someone sympathetic.

  “I’m the youngest of six, you see, three sons and three daughters, and my eldest brother’s head of the clan now, and he’s a miserly rotten beast, too. He gave Maeylla—that’s my oldest sister—a decent dowry, but it wasn’t anything for a bard to remember, I tell you, and then Raeffa got a scraped-together mingy one. And now it’s my turn, and he doesn’t want to spend on a dowry at all, so he found this fat old lord with half his teeth gone who’ll marry me out of lust and ask for naught more, and I’d rather die than marry him, so I ran away.”

  “And I should think so,” Braema said with a firm nod of her head. “Do you think he’s still chasing you?”

  “I don’t know, but I wager he is. I’ve made him furious, and he hates it so much when anyone crosses him, so he’s probably coming to give me the beating of my life just on the principle of the thing. I’ve got a good lead on him, though. I worked it out with a friend of mine. I went to visit her and her new husband, but I told my brother that I’d stay a fortnight, while she told her husband I’d leave after an eightnight. And in an eightnight leave I did, but I rode north, not home, and my brother wouldn’t even have suspected anything till days and days later. So as long as I keep moving, he can’t possibly catch up to me.”

  “Um, well, I see.” Perryn pursed his lips and sucked a thoughtful tooth. “I know how purse-proud noble-born kin can be, truly. Mine always were.”

  “Ah, I see. I was thinking of going west.”

  “West?” Braema leaned forward sharply. “There’s nothing out there, lass, nothing at all.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. You hear things down in Drwloc. From merchants, like.”

  The woman was staring at her in such puzzlement that Carra
felt her face burning with a blush.

  “You could starve out there!” Braema sounded indignant. “Your fat lord would be better than that!”

  “You haven’t seen him.”

  When Braema opened her mouth to go on, her father silenced her with a wave of one hand.

  “You’re hiding somewhat, lass. You’re carrying a child, aren’t you?”

  “How did you know? I only just realized myself!”

  “I can always tell. Sort of an, um, well… trick of mine.”

  “Well, so I am.” She felt her eyes well tears. “And he—my lover, I mean—he’s, well, he’s…”

  “One of the Westfolk!” Braema’s voice was all breathy with shock. “And he deserted you, I suppose.”

  “Naught of the sort! He said he’d come back for me before the winter rains, but he didn’t know I was… well, you know. And my brother doesn’t know, either, which is why he was trying to marry me off, but I didn’t dare tell him.”

  “He’d have beaten you half to death, I suppose.” Braema sighed and shook her head. “Do you truly think you’ve got a chance of finding this man of yours?”

  “I don’t know. I hope so. He gave me a token, a pendant.” Lightly she touched the cool metal where it hung on its chain under her shirt. “There’s a rose on it, and some elven words, and he said that any of his people would know it was his.”

  “Humph, and I wonder about the truth of that, I do! Easy for the Westfolk to talk, but what they mean by it …”

  “That’s enough, Braema.” Perryn cut her off with a small wave of one hand. “Can’t meddle in someone else’s Wyrd, can you? If she wants to go west, west she’ll go. She seems to, er, well, know her own mind. But, um, well, I want to give you those dogs.” This to Carra. “Come out to the stable with me, will you?”

  The stables were round back and a good bit away from the house. Out in front of the long wooden building Nedd was watching Gwerlas drink from a bucket.

  “Your Holiness? Most people think I’m daft because I want to ride after my Daralanteriel.”

  “Mayhap you are, but what choice do you have?”

  “None, truly. Not unless I want to get myself beaten first and married off to Old Dung-heap second.”

  The dogs turned out to be a pair of males, more than half wolf, maybe, with their long sharp faces and pricked ears, and just about a year old. One was gray and glowering, named Thunder, and the other a pale silver with a black streak down his back who answered to Lightning. When the priest introduced them, they sniffed her outstretched hand with a thoughtful wag of their tails.

  “They like you,” Perryn announced. “Think they do, Nedd?”

  The boy nodded, considering.

  “I’m going to give them to Carra. She’s riding west, you see, and she’ll need them along to protect her.”

  Nedd nodded again and turned to slip back into the stables. He didn’t walk, exactly, so much as glide along from shadow to shadow, there one minute, gone the next.

  “Uh, Your Holiness, can he talk?”

  “Not very well, truly. Only when he absolutely has to, and then only a word or two. But he understands everything. Um, right, that reminds me. I’ve taught this pair to work to hand signals, and I’d best show you what they know. They’ll come to their names, of course.” He squatted down and looked at the dogs, who swiveled their heads to stare into his eyes. “You belong to Carra now. Go with her. Take care of her.”

  For a long, long moment they kept a silent communion, while Carra decided that contrary to all common sense, the dogs understood exactly what he meant. Nedd came whistling out of the stable. He was leading a nondescript bay gelding, laden with an old saddle, a bedroll, a woodsman’s ax, and a pair of bulging saddlebags. Perryn rose, rubbing his face with one hand.

  “What’s this? You’re going, too?”

  Nedd nodded, glancing this way and that around the farmstead.

  “You’ll have to ask Carra’s permission.”

  The boy swung his head around and looked at her.

  “You want to come west with me? Look, if my brother catches us, he’ll hurt you. He might even kill you.”

  Nedd considered, then shrugged, turning to stare significantly at his grandfather.

  “No use dying to keep someone who doesn’t want to stay, is there?” the priest said. “But you take care of the lady. She’s noble-born, you see. Don’t cause her a moment’s trouble, or Kerun will be livid with you. Understand?”

  Nedd nodded a yes.

  “Well and good, then. Run up to the house, will you? I’ll wager your mam is packing up a bit of that ham and bread for Carra to eat on the road.”

  Nedd grinned and trotted off. Perryn turned to her with an apologetic smile.

  “Hope you don’t mind him coming along. He won’t trouble you. Might even come in handy, because he likes having someone to do things for. Poor lad, it makes him feel useful, like. And he can show you how to work the dogs.”

  “All right, but here, won’t his mother be furious that he’s just… well… leaving like this?”

  “Oh, I doubt that. He’s like me and his uncles. We mostly come and go as we please, and there’s no use in trying to stop us.” He sighed again, deeply. “No use in it at all.”

  Yet even so, they left by the back gate and circled round to hit the west-running road out of sight of the house. Carra took the lead, with the dogs padding along either just ahead or to one side of her as the whim took them, while Nedd rode a length behind like her servant, which he was now, she supposed, in his way. She only hoped that she could take care of him properly, and the dogs, too, though she suspected that they were feral enough to hunt their own food if need be. She had a handful of coins, copper ones mostly, stolen from her brother in lieu of her rightful dowry, but they weren’t going to last forever. On a sudden thought she turned in the saddle and motioned Nedd up beside her.

  “You must have heard tales about the Westfolk, too. That they’re very odd but kind to strangers?”

  The boy nodded, his hair glinting like metal in the strong spring sun.

  “Do you think they truly are kind?”

  He grinned, shrugging to show his utter ignorance, but excited nonetheless.

  “I hope they are, because I don’t know how we’re going to find Dar without some help. He told me that he wanders all over with his tribe and their horses, you see, but I’m not truly sure just how big this ‘all over’ is.”

  “North with the summer. South with the rains.”

  He spoke so softly, so lightly, that she barely heard him.

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  He nodded a yes.

  “Is that how the Westfolk travel? Well, it makes sense. It’s more than I’ve had to go on before. But maybe we should be riding south, then, to meet them as they come north. Or due west. But they may have already passed us up, like, if they left their winter homes early or suchlike.”

  Nedd nodded, frowning.

  “So let’s head north,” Carra went on. “That way we’ll either meet up with them or be in the right place to wait for them.”

  For the rest of that day and on into the next one they traveled through farm country, but although they stopped to talk with the locals along the road, everyone heaped scorn on the very idea of going off to look for the Westfolk. Arcodd province is still on the very edge of the kingdom of Deverry, and in those days it was a lonely sort of place, where little pockets of settled country dotted a wilderness of grassland and mixed forests. And more wilderness was all, or so they were told, that could possibly lie to the west—except, of course, for the wandering clans of the Westfolk, who were all thieves and ate snakes and made pacts with demons and never washed and the gods only knew what else. By the third day Carra was disheartened enough to start believing them, but turning back meant her brother, a beating, and the pig-breathed Lord Scraev. At night they camped out in copses near the road, and here Nedd showed just how useful a person he was. Besides insisting on
tending the horses, he always found firewood and food as well, hooking fish and snaring rabbits, grubbing around to find sweet herbs and greens to supplement the bread her coin bought them in villages.

  In his silent way, he was good company, too, patient as he taught her how to command the dogs with subtle hand gestures and a few spoken words. Sleeping on the ground meant nothing to him; he would roll up in a blanket with Thunder at his back and go out while Carra was still tossing and turning, trying to sleep with a patient Lightning at her feet. Although she was used to riding for long hours at a time, either to visit her friends or to ride with her brother’s hunt, sleeping on the hard, damp ground was something new, and she began to ache like fire after a few nights of it, so badly that she began to worry about her unborn child, still a tiny knot deep within her but as real to her as Nedd and the dogs. When, then, on the fourth night they came to a village that had an inn, she was tired enough to consider spending a few coins on lodging.

  “And a bath,” she said to Nedd. “A proper hot bath with a bit of soap.”

  He merely shrugged.

  From outside the inn didn’t look like much: a low roundhouse, heavily thatched, in the middle of a muddy fenced yard, but when she pushed open the gate and led her horse inside, she could smell roasting chickens. The innkeep, a stout and greasy little man, strolled out and looked her over suspiciously.

  “The common room’s full,” he announced. “Ain’t got no private chambers.”

  “Can we sleep in your stables?” Carra gave up her dream of a hot bath. “Up in the hayloft, say?”

  “Long as you don’t go bringing no lantern up there. Don’t want no fire.”

  The hayloft turned out to be long and airy and well supplied with loose hay, a better night’s lodging, she suspected, than the inn itself. After the horses were taken care of, Carra and Nedd, with the dogs trotting busily behind, headed for the tavern. In the half round of the common room, set off from the innkeep’s quarters by a wickerwork partition, were a couple of wobbly tables. At one sat a gaggle of farmers, gossiping over their ale; at the other, two men, both road-stained, both armed. Carra stopped in the shadowy curve of the wall by the door; when she snapped her fingers and pointed down, the dogs sat and Nedd fell back a step or two. In the smoky light of a smoldering fire she could see the pair fairly clearly: warriors, by the easy arrogant way they sat, but their stained linen shirts bore no blazons at the yokes or shoulder. One, blond and burly with a heavy blond mustache, looked young; the other, sitting with his back to her, was more slender, with wavy raven-dark hair. When the passing innkeep threw a couple of handfuls of small sticks onto the fire, it blazed with a flare of light, glinting on the pommel of the knives that the men wore at their belt. Three distinctive little knobs. Silver daggers, little better than criminals if indeed they were better at all, or so she’d always been told. Behind her Nedd growled like one of the dogs.