The Gold Falcon (34 page)

Galla’s face fell. “You’re doubtless right.” Her voice wavered slightly. “I do hope she’s well.”

“Well, how about this?” Cadryc said. “We won’t be all that far from her husband’s wretched dun. Mayhap we can ride north after the wedding and pay her a visit.”

Galla and Branna both beamed at him. “We’ll have Neb write her a letter,” Cadryc said, “once we’re in Cengarn, and it’s a shorter ride for the messenger.”

“My thanks,” Galla said. “Now I can truly enjoy myself at this wedding.”

“I suppose,” Mirryn said, “I’ll be left behind here.”

“Someone has to hold fort guard, lad.” Cadryc paused to smile at him. “Here, you’re the one who’ll be in the most danger this time. I’m entitled to an escort of twenty-five for the wedding, but I think I’ll take fewer men than that, so I can leave you more. I wouldn’t put it past the cursed Horsekin to try to siege the place while I’m gone.”

Mirryn bit back angry words, took a sip of ale, and then managed a brief smile. “True enough,” he said.

Still, they glared at each other, and the mood hung over the table like a swarm of angry bees. Branna leaned forward and changed the subject.

“Ridvar’s betrothed—what’s she like? I’ve never even seen her. Have you, Uncle?”

“I’ve not.” Cadryc shrugged his shoulders. “Doesn’t much matter. He can always blow the candle out.”

The men all laughed, but Lady Galla and Branna exchanged a sour smile.

“She’s a good-looking lass, actually, my lord,” Neb said. “I used to see her, riding with her father through our town. Eldidd-dark hair and dark blue eyes, and she’s slender though not dainty.”

“Good.” Cadryc turned to him. “I forgot you come from Trev Hael. Well, it gladdens my heart that the lad’s marrying, but I’ll admit I was hoping for news of that blasted gerthddyn. Call me daft if you want, but I just keep thinking he’s on to some important thing that will help our gwerbret change his mind.”

“Let’s pray so,” Mirryn said.

“You don’t sound convinced, lad.”

“I’m not.” It was Mirryn’s turn to shrug. “But he’s the only hound in our pack that’s picked up any scent at all. Might as well let him follow it down.”

Salamander may have been on the trail of a metaphoric scent, but he was also hopelessly lost. If Rocca was following any sort of marked trail, he couldn’t tell what it was or if they were on it. He needed to do more than just reach the Horsekin dun. He needed to be able to lead an army back to it. During the odd moments when he could contact Dallandra, he would describe whatever bit of the wilderness they had camped in, but he doubted if anyone was going to be able to tell one clearing among trees from another. Finally, after they’d gone straight west for some hours only to turn south to avoid the evil spirits in a particular ravine, he grew exasperated enough to ask her point blank if she were lost.

“Lost? Me?” Rocca laughed in her usual merry way. “Your eyes yet cannot find the marks along this trail, Evan, but truly, they be there, blazed by
her
as plain as Deverry cairns for those with eyes to see.”

“Well, if you say so,” Salamander said. “I know that I’ve only begun to learn
her
ways.”

“There be ahead a stream we call the Galan Targ, the home border. Once we do cross that, our way will lie straight before us. All of Vandar’s evil traps will lie behind us then. And it be not far. Fear not!”

Indeed, they reached the Galan Targ late that afternoon, a wide but shallow stream running over clean sand. On either bank someone had cleared away the underbrush, and big stones marked out the ford. Salamander offered to let Rocca ride on his horse for the crossing, but she refused.

“You do ride over, and then I’ll be a-following after,” she said. “There be a need on me to bless the waters as I pass through.”

Salamander’s horses crossed easily, as the water ran only a few feet deep. On the far bank he dismounted and waited, watching, as Rocca raised her arms into the air and intoned a short prayer. Perhaps the stream wasn’t in the mood for a blessing, however, because as she stepped into it she slipped, falling to her knees. She got to her feet only to stumble again, falling headlong into the water. Her hair lost its bone pins, and the long strands spread out in the water around her head. Salamander started into the stream to help her, but she scrambled up, soaking wet but laughing, to wave him back.

“Stay dry!” she called out. “I did step on a sharp pebble or suchlike under the sand, but no harm done! Here, there be a need on me to find those hairpins, though. They be all I have.” She knelt in the water and groped around the sand for a moment, then stood up, frowning. “They be gone, sure enough.”

“I can whittle you some more,” Salamander said.

“My thanks, then.” Her smile returned in a blaze of good spirits.

She came splashing up on to the bank and shook herself like a dog, smiling all the while. Her thin linen shift, somewhat cleaner than before, clung to her body, and her wet hair, freed from the pins, draped over her breasts and hung nearly to her waist. Salamander turned away and concentrated on slacking his horse’s bits so they could drink.

“We shall camp here tonight,” Rocca said. “Safe at last, and your beasts will have good grass as well as sweet water.”

Salamander busied himself with tending his horses as well as gathering firewood. He’d begun to think like a true neophyte, he realized, a change he’d not noticed until that moment. He was honestly ashamed of himself for looking lustfully upon a priestess, but there was no denying that he was. Her linen dress shrank as it dried, pulling tight across her breasts as she sat cross-legged by their fire, as unself-conscious as a child. She was concentrating on combing out her wet hair, a mass of snarls. Judging by its appearance she’d not washed or combed it in years.

“I could help you comb that out,” he said. “Round the back, like, where you can’t reach.”

Rocca burst out laughing. “You be new to our ways, Evan. You know not what you did just say.”

“My apologies, Your Holiness. Was it a wrong thing?”

“Not wrong, but unknowing. Among us a man will try to comb a woman’s hair when he wishes to marry her. If she does allow him, then married they are.”

“Ah, I see.” Salamander had the loathsome feeling that he was blushing—his face burned with embarrassment.

Rocca cocked her head to one side and considered him for a moment. “There be a need on you to know that never shall I marry,” she said at last, “nor shall I ever have aught to do with a man in matters of love.”

Salamander made a strangled little noise that might pass for “of course not.”

“It be a rule of our priestesses, that never shall we lie with a man for fear of getting a child,” Rocca continued. “Why would we wish to bring more souls into Vandar’s evil world? Would that not be cruel, to trap souls here for him to torment?”

“It would, Your Holiness. I’m truly truly sorry—”

“Oh, grovel not! Am I not a woman, too, and flattered?” Rocca paused to smile at him. “But I have no wish to leave
her
service.”

“What would happen to a woman if she betrayed our goddess with a man?”

“Naught, but that she would have to take him in marriage, were he able to marry, or go back to her old life with her family were he not.
She
be a woman, too, and demands no punishment or the like. But a priestess the sinner would never be again.”

“So a woman who’d been with a man could never become a priestess?”

“Nah nah nah, naught so harsh, just so long as she were no priestess at the time. No vow taken, no vow broken. She may forswear her love and take then the holy vows.”

“You know, that seems a truly decent law. In Deverry things are harsher.”

“I do hear that they bury any priestess alive who does break her vows.”

“Oh, that’s not true. They make her leave the Moon Temple, that’s all. The man, though, they hang.”

“That’s a dreadful thing, to punish someone for a thing they can’t help but do! What more can one expect from men, but—ah well, let me not ramble and say mean things. Let us pray together. I promise you, Alshandra will fill your heart with more joy and comfort than ever I could.”

The threat of hours of prayer would be even better than hanging to prevent men from falling into sin, Salamander decided. Although he tried to pay strict attention to Rocca’s words, he eventually fell asleep where he knelt, sagging over like a half-empty sack of grain. He woke to her gentle laughter and a boyish punch on his shoulder.

“My apologies,” he stammered.

“None needed,” Rocca said, smiling. “You be new to the faith and not yet tempered in your soul. Do go to sleep, Evan. Tomorrow we shall reach the holy shrine if naught impede us.”

The Horsekin had chosen the location for their new dun well. Thanks to Rocca’s roundabout path, Salamander could only guess at how many miles west of Cengarn they’d traveled—a good long way, he figured, at least a hundred—distant enough to make supplying an army difficult even if the high king should send one. Eventually, they came to a river that led them south into a part of the world he’d never seen before. First they left the hills behind, then the deep forests, until they traveled through scrubby, rocky grasslands, not quite flat and not quite hilly either. Off to the west Salamander saw dark smudges along the horizon—clouds, he thought at first, but when they never rolled in or away he realized that he was seeing the fabled mountains of the far west.

“Those mountains.” He pointed them out to Rocca. “That’s where Taen—your city, I can’t remember its name—but that’s where it lies, isn’t it?”

“It does lie in the mountains,” Rocca said, “but you have a fine pair of eyes if you can see them from here.”

“Oh, I’ve always been gifted that way.”

Salamander could only be grateful that she lacked concrete information about Vandar’s spawn. From now on, he reminded himself, he would have to be more careful.

The river cut its channel out of a reddish sandstone. As they followed a well-marked path along its western bank, the cut grew deeper and deeper, until finally it became a canyon. On their last night out, they camped at the top of a thirty-foot cliff while the river rushed by below.
And how
, he wondered,
are we going to get an army across without a bridge?

“We’ll reach Zakh Gral on the morrow,” Rocca said.

“Good,” Salamander said. “My heart longs to see our goddess’ holy shrine.”

On the morrow he caught his first glimpse. They had tramped along the canyon’s western rim all morning when Rocca suddenly laughed and pointed straight ahead.

“There!” she said. “You can just see the fortress.”

Salamander shaded his eyes with his hand and studied the view. For hundreds of yards around, the forest cover had been cleared down to the ground. In the midst of rock and weeds he could see a tower rising above walls.

“It be still made of wood,” Rocca said. “Getting enough stone here from the quarries—they do lie in the foothills a fair bit west, you see, and it be far more difficult, fetching the blocks, than the builders did think at first.”

Thank the real gods for that!
Salamander thought. Aloud he said, “Well, it looks grand anyway, wooden or not. It’s so big.”

“It be so, truly. It will house hundreds of our folk when they do finish it.”

As they drew closer Salamander got a better look. While the fort might well be grand when finished, at the moment it spread a scrappy sort of mess along the edge of the cliff, which fell away in a sheer drop to the river. Wooden walls, patched in places with blocks of stone, surrounded a wooden tower, some fifty feet high. Salamander noticed little windows at the top and assumed that it was some sort of watchmen’s post. Over the walls he could see the roofs of scattered wood buildings and, here and there, parts of half-finished stone structures.

Even in this partial view the layout struck him as somehow familiar. As they drew near, he realized why. The Horsekin had modeled their fortress on the dun of their old enemies in Cengarn. He dismounted and led his horses while Rocca walked a little ahead. She was hurrying to the open gates, made of timber bound with iron bands and iron hinges. A wooden palisade of roughly-hewn logs surrounded a jumble of buildings also made of logs, some low and crude, others built more stoutly with more attention to windows and proper doors and the like.

Off to one side, however, lay an uneven circle of open ground, approximately a hundred yards across, and in its midst stood a small building made of polished and precisely cut stone. Slate tiles covered its peaked roof, and over the door he could see a carving of a bow and arrow. On either side of its door stood two young trees, protected by fences made of narrow boards.

“That must be the shrine.” Salamander put excitement into his voice. “It’s beautiful.”

“The Inner Shrine it be, truly,” Rocca said. “We did finish it first, as was right and proper for our goddess.”