The Dark Ferryman (33 page)

One of the stable lads came out with a barrel of muck and stopped. His face curved in a smile. “Fair mornin’, m’lady Rivergrace. Out for a ride this early?”

“Before all the talking and the memorial begins seems the best time to go. Have you anyone for me that isn’t turned out?”

“Oh, I’ve a handful or so still in their stalls, impatient and stamping the ground.” He appraised her. “I imagine you want a sweet-tempered sort, with a good gait and stamina. You’re not the kind to go racing after the hounds and hawks.”

She smiled. “That would do me just fine.”

“I’ll get Long Shanks, then. Be back in just a bit.” He muscled his steaming cartload of pungent muck off to the far side of the yards, to be spread and herbed and dried before it would be turned into the fallow fields. The stink lingered after him and Rivergrace rubbed at her nose, trying to stave off a sneeze.

She was not expecting an elegant-lined tashya horse to be led out to her, but when the lad reappeared, he had a tawny, black-pointed gelding by the halter, with head held high and ears flicking back and forth as though deciding what to make of her. Long-legged and groomed within an inch of his life, his hide shone like a newly minted gold coin. His forelock was so long, the gelding had to tilt his head a little to eye her, and he did it with a slightly vain cast that reminded her so much of the handsome Lord Bistane that Grace had to put her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing at her thought. The sun, peeking in and out of the clouds, set his tawny hide to looking like bronze, well polished and rich. The lad brought out the tack, finished his grooming quickly, and began to equip the horse for riding.

“Quite right not to laugh at him,” the lad said, his hands moving in fast, efficient blurs. “He’s a pretty one and he knows it, but it’s not his fault. We’ve all been telling him that for all of his years, and he listened. He’s got the smoothest stride of any horse in the queen’s stable, and he’ll take you as far as you want to go.”

“Oh, I’m not going far,” Rivergrace said. She tried to hide her daypack somewhat behind her riding skirt.

“I would, iffen it were me. The lords and ladies will come pouring in here soon enough, and their demands and airs and such, looking for a hard ride to chase away the grief. We’ve seen ’em all before. Begging your pardon if you’re friends with any of ’em,” he added, with a slight blush, as he tightened the girth and began to check the strength of the stirrups and other bindings. He both soothed with his hands and straightened, and the gelding leaned against him a little in affection, lipping at his sleeve.

“You can’t be calling him Long Shanks.” A name liked that belonged to a Dweller or Kernan mount, not befitting one of the sleek tashyas.

The lad chuckled. “No, m’lady, indeed not. His name is Barad, meaning in the Vaelinar tongue, well-struck.”

He translated easily for her as if she did not look Vaelinar enough to know the language, although the word was one she wasn’t familiar with. Even he could not tell her lineage other than she was a favorite of the Warrior Queen. Her cheeks stung a little as the lad pressed the horse’s reins into her hand.

“Shall I be tellin’ ’em where you’re off to?”

Rivergrace shook her head. “I’ll be back soon enough, and today is not a day for merrymaking, is it?”

“Indeed not, ma’am. Osten Drebukar left a mighty hole to be filled, that’s to be sure. The hunters came back from the hills late, their horses worn and blowin’ hard, but not a sign of th’ murderers had they found. So don’t be riding off far, now.” The lad looked vindicated as she swung up and slung her daypack from her shoulders. She fit her boots into the stirrups and let him shorten them a bit more for her and inspect them, making sure she would be comfortable. He patted Barad on the withers. “He’ll take you as fast as you want to go. He’ll run his heart out for you, but don’t be letting him, aye?” He cocked an eyebrow at her.

“I won’t.”

Satisfied, the lad slapped a hand on Barad’s rump, sending them clattering out of the stable yard and onto the open road. What he did not tell her was that he had sent Lord Sevryn out even earlier, when the dark purple cloak of night still hung heavily upon the skies, and he’d ridden out much quieter, and took a different road out of the stable yard. The lad watched her go much as he had the other, none the wiser for their missions nor even particularly curious as to what drove them on their way. Such curiosity, he’d learned, did not befit a mere lad of the stables.

Rivergrace deliberately did not take the lanes. She turned Barad’s head to follow the Andredia and so the gelding did, with a spring in his long-striding walk, and curious ears flipping back and forth as they startled birds and small animals from their path. He did not startle when they flushed and scurried out of the way, but he did let out a whicker now and then, or a chuff, as if to acknowledge they had both been surprised. The brief rain of the day before had left dew sparkling in the grass and the gelding’s hooves struck and scattered the drops like diamonds as he took her along the riverbed, the holdings of the Warrior Queen falling farther and farther behind them.

A flight of river birds took to the air at her back, and Grace turned in her saddle, watching them with a slight frown in the hazy sunlight. They were not the alna of her years along the Silverwing River, but a small, tender bird which sat in the reeds and bank grasses to eat the fat bugs along the muddy shores and hated to fly if it did not have to. Something akin to her and the gelding had set them off. She pulled rein and turned Barad into a stand of sturdy shrubs to wait and see what might be following.

In a handful of moments, she could see a beribboned straw hat, glossy amber hair tied back, and hear the trot of a stout mountain pony headed her way. A smile tugged at the corners of Rivergrace’s mouth. She waited until Nutmeg and her pony had clearly breasted the reeds nearby, dented chamber pot and saddlebags bouncing on the pony’s withers with every trotting step before pulling Barad out of hiding.

“And where is it you think you’re going?”

Nutmeg hauled back on her reins. “Wherever it is you are. Did you think I’d let you go without me?” Her pony plowed to a stop and promptly dropped its head to lip and chew on whatever flowers and blades of grass it could find, opportunities of this sort never to be neglected. Mountain ponies held different equine priorities than did the hot bloods.

“What about your nursing charge?”

“Him?” Nutmeg curled her lip. “If he was a fledgling, I’d have kicked him out of the nest long ago. Besides, he has another nurse now and one that will be far tougher than I on his sorry hide. She carries a whip. So where is it we’re going?”

“North,” said Rivergrace shortly, after gazing for just a moment at Nutmeg. “To Ferstanthe.”

Nutmeg seemed to let that sink in. “The library, eh,” she answered slowly. She pursed her lips in thought a moment before remarking, “I don’t understand it. You’ve got that look on your face, and you ride after a pile of books and scrolls.”

“That look?”

“Aye. The face you always made when Hosmer grabbed your hair ribbons off one time too many or Garner tricked us into doing chores and we found out too late we’d been taken. That look that says you’ve had enough and you’re ready to fight back. So, I ask myself, what’s in a book of Ferstanthe?”

The chill that had been inside Grace for days since nearly drowning in the embrace of the River Goddess felt as though it had finally begun to melt. She hadn’t quite known for sure what she intended from Azel d’Stanthe of Ferstanthe. Sanctuary maybe. A good listener with a bit of advice. Or, perhaps, something more. She straightened the reins in her hand. “I’ve lost the queen’s trust. Or maybe I never really had it. Perhaps queens take a good deal longer to decide on friendship.”

“Lariel wouldn’t know a prize apple if it fell on her head.”

“Be that true, I must find a way to convince her. She doesn’t think I’m Vaelinar, Nutmeg.”

“What? Is she blind? Do pointed ears grow everywhere like leaves on trees?”

“It’s more than the ears, I’m certain.”

“You’ve the eyes and you can make sweet water out of th’ most poisoned brew. What more does she want?”

“I don’t know.” Rivergrace shook her head a little. Her movement made her horse restive, and he pawed at the ground. “I have to know who I am, where I start and where I want to finish. I was unraveled, Meg, and then rewoven, but I have to know . . . I have to know what threads I’ve knotted within me, what soul is
mine
. And then, to fight, I have to know what I want. From her, from Sevryn . . .”

“He’s gone daft, aye.”

Not a question but a statement coached in confident Dweller tones. She looked up to meet her sister’s cinnamon eyes. “In a way,” Grace agreed. “They haunt us, Cerat and the River Goddess. They have their claws sunk in us, and they want . . . I don’t know. I thought we were done with them, but they aren’t done with us.”

“Touched by a God or Demon—it leaves its mark the way a dousing with pig slop leaves its stink, even after you wipe it away.”

Her nose wrinkled a bit as she knew from her childhood days on the farm and in the orchards just what Nutmeg meant, even as she forged ahead, adding, “But don’t you be thinkin’, Grace, that you haven’t got powers of your own. That Goddess wouldn’t have sunk herself into you, hiding behind you, if you hadn’t already been able to find sweet water and draw the poisons from it, and love the rivers the way you did. She didn’t bring that to you, you already had it.
You were born with it
. She couldn’t have survived in you without that.”

“I have to know who I am, to fight her. And to help Sevryn, if there’s any way to help. There has to be an answer somewhere.”

“In the books.”

“Why not? We live, we dream, we think, we die. Sometimes we take a moment to put all this down on a page, to puzzle it out or leave a map for those who follow behind us, to show them the way and the traps. Don’t you think?”

“ ’Twould be the wisest thing to do, but in my mood, I’m not about to admit there’s a man with a lick of common sense anywhere, let alone in a library. Still.” Nutmeg straightened her straw hat. “This cannot be the first time a Dweller and a Vaelinar have fallen in love, and I’d like to read the tales. I’m not all that sure a pretty word or two will help us in a fight, but it’s a place to start, and I’m right behind you if there’s a chance to set things right.” She put a heel to her pony and reined it close to Barad who snorted at the fuzz-hided beast all shaggy in his winter coat.

Grace smiled down at her. “He’ll be sorry, you know.”

“Tree’s root, he will! Who got to th’ villains first yesterday, eh? Me and my pot or that woman and her whip? He’ll be in a sorry state, and it’ll be his own doing.” Nutmeg settled herself in her stirrups and clucked to her pony to keep up as Rivergrace headed her horse out. They rode to the border and ridges of Larandaril, Nutmeg’s voice chattering in merry counterpoint to the thud of their mounts’ hooves. She had much more to say about dull-witted men who let their eyes be blinded with gilt and sparkles, be they Vaelinar, Kernan, Dweller, or Galdarkan, as her short-legged mount snorted and huffed to keep up with the longer-striding Barad.

Quendius halted his horse. “It’s time we parted ways for a bit.”

Narskap, blood clotted thickly over one ear, and with a sizable lump on his head, looked as if he wished to say something, but his thin lips remained shut.

Quendius touched his quiver of arrows. “One failed. Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call up Cerat and ask him.”

Narskap did not hold his words this time. “No,” he returned. “That I will not do. To invoke him, I will draw the attention of those we don’t want, and it might well loose the Demon beyond my control.”

“So you would trade a small failure for a great one.”

“I deem it the wiser course. You had two successes.”

Quendius regarded his hound for a long moment, flint-black eyes sparked with a great darkness. “I did, and I shall remember that.”

“I know.”

“Ride, then. I shall catch up with you.”

“They will be on the border, right behind us.”

“And this, I know. But they won’t find me, and they had better not find you. No, I want to sit in camp a bit and see what kind of hornet’s nest we’ve stirred up. Allow me my amusement.”

Narskap dropped his chin in agreement and turned his horse to the northeast. Quendius watched him go before he dismounted and then led his mount along the stony ridges, stopping now and then to brush away his tracks with a tree branch, and to scent the wind as if he, and not Narskap, were the hound. He camped in stealth and watched as hunting troops passed by, not catching sign or spoor of his passage and as they circled in frustration before heading back into the cloistered land of Larandaril. He preferred to be behind his troubles rather than in front of them, he thought, as he crossed the rugged land that made it near impossible to approach the favored country by more than single file, and on foot. It was naturally extremely difficult to invade except by the single broad pass at the river’s end, and that, of course, was always guarded. Yes, the Anderieon family had known well what it had done when it had taken up this country and made it theirs, defensible against not only those of the world they’d trespassed on but also easily held against those of their own kind. They had taken the spoils of their occupation and made a homeland for themselves.

It was during his slow and deliberate journey overland, looking for weaknesses, that two passed him on horse and pony, alert to their surroundings yet unaware of his presence as he pulled aside and pinched his horse’s nostrils to keep him quiet, and he gathered a destination from their chatter. That road would take him north, as he needed, and then he could turn east and south again to his own badlands. As they passed him by, speaking earnestly of their plans and hopes, it occurred to him that he had not been to Ferstanthe in many, many decades and that he might find some useful knowledge there, or even that what the library contained might well be as dangerous as one of the Demon-imbued weapons Narskap so carefully crafted for him. He should look into it.