Barrenlands (The Changespell Saga) (23 page)

"I thought you might want to find a surgeon, if you have the coin. Or that leg's going to take an awful long time to heal."

A complete healing would cost more than he had. Much more. "Maybe Sevita can get her hands on another one of those healing stones."

"Ansgare's asked her to look."

"Ansgare's an honorable man," Ehren said.

Laine leaned against the raised tailgate of the wagon, resting his arms along it and settling his chin on his fist in a contemplative air. "What then, Ehren? What are you looking for?"

You and your family
. The sudden clear thought sprang up in the midst of Ehren's fog.

It didn't mean acting on what he found. He didn't have to trigger the ring right away. He could think about it.

"Ehren," Laine said, sounding amused.

Right. Laine had asked a question— but not one Ehren wanted to answer out loud. At least, not truthfully. "Even if we find a healing stone, it's going to be a while before I'm road-worthy. I need to find a place to hole up. If you're headed home, I wondered…"

"You want to come with us?" Laine said, raising his head as wariness infused his face and posture; he closed a doubtful eye.

"Not if it's a problem," Ehren said, sensing that to push would only increase resistance. "Maybe Dajania and Sevita will let me stay here... do they work out of an inn while they wait?"

"I'm not sure," Laine said. He grinned. "I'm sure they'd love to have you stay, no matter their working arrangements. I have to tell you, life got a lot easier for me once they had you to work on."

Ehren looked around the interior of the wagon. It was a comfortable place, with small homey touches that had initially surprised him. "They're not as tough as they make you think," he said. "If you agreed to pay for a night with one of them, you'd ruin all their fun."

"Could be. All the same..." Laine shook his head. He gave his head a decisive shake. "Leave you with them? I'm not sure I could do that to you. Unless you want me to, of course," he added, making Ehren laugh.

Ehren just shook his head— no matter that it had been too long. He thought of Jada— she would have tendered an invitation, he thought, if he'd spent a day or two more in Kurtane the last time through. And before Benlan's death, there'd been another Guard...

Of course, just like all the others, she had been killed with Benlan. And now he had work to do.

"By the way," Laine said, "Ansgare said someone was asking about you, up at Vitia's wagon. Ansgare told them to ask questions somewhere else until we got the caravan straightened out. But I thought you'd want to know."

But no one knew he was here. Or no one
should
. A wizard could certainly track down a specific individual, given the general area and a personal acquaintance— or at least a belonging— with which to narrow the search. But did Varien really distrust him that much?

If so, there was no doubt just as much reason to distrust Varien.

"Ehren," Laine said, his voice both patient and amused— again. "We're not used to visitors…it'll take a bit for my parents to accept you. But... it's a good place to heal. A safe place."

Ehren thought the words
a safe place
held more significance to him— for Dannel and Jenorah— than Laine would have liked, had he known.

But he didn't.

Ehren looked at Laine's open, honest face and then turned away, feeling a pain that had nothing to do with his leg.

~~~~~

Laine set a significantly slower pace than usual on the way home.

The healing spell allowed Ehren to ride without reopening his wound, but it left him far from whole; he drank the pain-slip without comment when offered, and that alone told Laine more than he wanted to know.

Shette walked near Ricasso, never repeating her mistake of reaching for the horse's head— but never far away, either. While Laine set up camp each evening, Shette made sure Ehren had what he needed... and furthermore, she managed to do it without an excessive amount of chatter.

Not the Shette he was used to.

The avalanche.
She had grieved for their mules, and for Ehren— first for the death she thought was imminent, and then for his hurt. She watched Laine face the loss of the caravan— and she reached out to comfort him.

Definitely not the Shette he was used to.

Not that the caravan had been officially disbanded. No one wanted to take the road; no one wanted to sever their connections to the lucrative route. Finally, Ansgare threw his hands in the air and sent them off home with a promise to send word before the summer was over. Perhaps they'd do another run on their own, rechecking the route. There was some hope that the wizard's death meant the end of trouble.

Laine tried not to think of it as he led Shette and Ehren homeward, into Loraka.

They traversed the pass, a zig-zagging trail that climbed sharply, peaked, and then dropped off nearly as sharply. Over the next day, the landscape gentled, and that evening they stayed in a tiny inn near Valleydwell. The small town rested in a wide, hilly valley between two steep ridges, where the surrounding homesteads were carved out of the highly mounded foothills; Laine's family had settled far beyond the town, in the cleft where the two ridges of the valley were joined.

On that final morning, they paused in Valleydwell to pick up some goods for the homestead— and then, with equal parts anticipation and trepidation, Laine took them home.

~~~~~

Ehren declined a noon dose of the pain-slip, for he wanted all his senses about him when he first met Dannel and Jenorah.

Laine led them down a narrow game trail, followed by Ehren on Ricasso and trailed by Shette, who led Nell and her packs.

The small copses through which they traveled spoke of what this land had been before man tamed it and turned it to pasture and slanted fields. Small shy creatures skittered away from the trail; the high air came scented with the warm trees. The sun hung high in the long summer day, creating sharp shadows that rippled over the grassy ground.

Ehren thought he should enjoy the simple beauty of it all— Laine obviously did— but he was hot and exhausted by pain, and irritated at his own weakness.

Laine finally looked back at him and said, "Just over this rise, Ehren— you look terrible."

"Thank you." Ehren said, didn't bother to hide his general irritation or the rasp in his voice.

"Well, you do. Don't worry. A few more minutes and we'll have you off that horse and drinking something cool." His words were meant to be reassuring, but beneath them, there was worry.

"Your family won't be that happy to see me, will they?" Ehren brushed away a deerfly as it settled on Ricasso's shoulder.

"Well-l-l..." Laine dropped back to talk more easily, and admitted, "Probably not." He rubbed the heel of his hand above each eye, wiping off sweat, and said, "Don't be surprised if it takes them a minute to get used to the idea. They're just private people."

Ehren looked pointedly around the remote area. "This doesn't come as a surprise, Laine."

"Don't worry about it. They'll like you. It just may take them a moment to realize it."

At this point, Ehren didn't care if Dannel and Jenorah hated him on sight. He simply needed to sit somewhere cool and quiet and not moving. Just for a few moments.

They crested a rise, and Laine hesitated there. Ricasso stopped with no cue from Ehren, having grown used to the ways of their own little caravan, and it was only Shette who was taken by surprise. Ehren heard her muffled comment— a word she wasn't supposed to use, he was sure— and after a moment she joined Laine in the widened path.

"Home," he said to her. "Always gotta take a minute to look at it, Shette."

"I've seen you," she said, as they both looked down at the yard and the little log house built into the hill behind stacked split rails. It had one story in back and two in front, with the front door on the second floor by way of a front porch on stilts. The lower floor had a big solid door, securely barred from the outside.

There was little extra décor— no flower plots, no ornamentation, just a large vegetable garden to the side and an air of neatness and care. But the as they emerged from the copse at the crest, they were surrounded by waist-high field flowers along the path, and swallows swooping in over the fields, and it seemed more than enough.

Laine looked back at Ehren and grinned. Then he started them moving again, down the hill and into the yard. They hadn't reached the weighted gate before Ehren heard the distant, commanding bark of a herding dog and the rustle of a horse in the trees behind the house. About the time a tall man on a small, Nell-like horse emerged from the trees, traveling recklessly down the sharp pitch of the slope, the door on the upper level of the house opened and a woman ran out.

"We're home!" Laine called unnecessarily, and winked at Shette, who dropped Nell's halter rope and shoved through the gate to meet the woman as she came down the stairs. They embraced in a solid hug as the man's pony scrambled to a stop in front of Laine. "Da," Laine said, and the grin still showed in his voice.

Ehren could only stare at the man.
Benlan
.

But not. Not at all.

Dannel dismounted and met his son with a brief if crushing hug. "You're late," he said, as they parted. But he was looking at Ehren.

"We had some trouble," Laine told him. "You're not going to believe some of it... but let me tell you now— for once, Shette won't be exaggerating."

Ehren still held the man's gaze over Laine's shoulder. "My name is Ehren," he said. "I met Laine on the caravan route."

"
On
the route?" Dannel said, his voice even but his expression unwelcoming; he glanced at his son.

"We had some trouble," Laine repeated. "Ehren was badly hurt... he needs a place to heal." Laine pitched his voice as a request…one growing less certain by the moment.

"If he's your friend, and he's hurt, of course he may stay until he's able to travel easily." The words were formal, and if they were grudging, it didn't show. But Dannel's eyes never left Ehren's, even as Laine cast his gaze back and forth between the two of them, his expression puzzled with the growing tension.

Dannel, it was clear, knew he'd been found.

~~~~~

It took both of them to get Ehren dismounted. Jenorah came down, then, her arm still over Shette's shoulder— looking like an older version of Shette, though age had done little but pad her frame and turn her black hair silver. Dannel introduced her as Jenny and himself as Dan.

But Ehren discovered that his feet weren't exactly firmly on the ground. He held Shaffron while Laine pulled the packs off, and then, too much in the sun and too long in the saddle, he wavered. Laine caught him up with a grunt and Dannel came up to take his other side, and Ehren had the merest impression of dragging his feet up wooden stairs and into a room that was cool and shaded and smelled of spicy wood. He fell instantly asleep, with Shette's voice in his ear urging him to drink the drugged wine.

It was waiting there for him on the small bedside table when he woke. A table carefully crafted, rubbed with an oil that brought out the beauty of the grain and made with the same painstaking skill that characterized the rest of the solid little room.

A room Dannel had made.
Benlan's older brother
. It didn't yet seem real.

The table, on the other hand, was definitely real. And so was the sweat dried on his body, and the smell of the clothes he'd worn since he was hurt.

A sound alerted him to the arrival of some at the door, but the figure within its rectangle of light was shadowed to obscurity.
Too tall and rangy to be Laine, too familiar to be anyone but Benlan's brother.
Briefly, Ehren rested his hand over the ring on his chest; the thing was beside itself with excitement.

Dannel entered the room, coming right up to the bed; he leaned over Ehren and opened the shutters at the small, unglazed window. Quiet light flooded the room. He retreated to sit on the chest on the short wall opposite the foot of the bed. From there he watched Ehren for a time; Ehren's honor feather in his hand. At last, he said, "My son trusts you."

Ehren didn't answer the unspoken question.
Are you about to betray that trust
? He said instead, "Your brother Benlan was my liege... and my friend."

Dannel absorbed that. "But Benlan didn't send you here."

"No." Ehren drew himself up in the bed. He sat against the wall and brought his good knee up, resting his elbow on it. "Benlan..."

"Is dead. Yes, I know. And his son rules in his stead."

"More or less," Ehren said, his mouth crooked in a humorless smile. "He didn't send me, either."

"Who did?" Dannel said. Blunt words, untempered.

"Varien."

Dannel straightened. "Since when does Varien order the king's men about?"

"Since recently, it seems." In Dannel, Ehren saw features were quieter than Benlan's had been wont to be, more contemplative. His hair had greyed from brown, and his eyes were a lighter shade of Laine's blue eye. Ehren thought he saw the strong texture of Laine's hair, and perhaps the slant of jaw, but it was no wonder he hadn't immediately recognized Laine as being born of Benlan's line— all his other features belonged to Jenorah. "Laine doesn't know, does he?"

"Neither of them have been told. Nothing could come of it but trouble— and Jenny and I had no wish to be found. "

"You've done well with that, for good and long."

"But no longer," Dannel said heavily. "Isn't that right?"

Ehren shook his head once, for some reason not ready to answer that— though three days before he'd thought his answer was an inevitable
yes
. "I don't understand how no one ever realized... "

"You think someone should have put Dan and Jenny together with the lost royal lovers?" Dannel asked, somehow seeing humor in the question. "Ehren, the people in this valley…half of us have escaped our past in this place. We all respect that. It's certainly possible that someone knows who we are, although we traveled the Trade Road for years before we settled down here. But if anyone
does
know, they simply don't care. I raise quality hill cattle and provide half the meat and leather the valley uses.
That's
what they care about."