“Where are they from?”
“His Rodship Hammar, the Thane of Nure and the Illembrian Foothills.”
“Is that like a king?” Wistala asked, using the only human title she knew other than Dragonblade.
“It may as well be, for Hypatia has no more knights to send to keep his ambitions in check in these dark days.
“I must teach you Parl, the Hypatian vernacular, so that you might climb up one of my chimneys and listen. Though you’d fall asleep at their discourse and drop down the chimney like Old King Yule himself. And your appearance would bring no Solstice merrymaking.”
“Correct me if I err. Hypatia is all the lands between the Inland Ocean and the mountains?”
“Once it was much more. It ringed all the Inland Ocean like a necklace. But the necklace’s caretakers let it fragment, and others have grasped at the loosened jewels. Most are gone now, and even the chain is breaking. Once you were a Citizen of Hypatia first, and only a man, elf, or dwarf second. But tribalism has taken over since then, between the conniving Wheel of Fire and that madman Praskall howling up his humanist mobs in the Varvar lands. I fear I’ll live to see the last few jewels of Hypatia torn and stolen.”
“Is Mossbell a jewel?”
“Nothing so grand. But Mossbell does have charge of a link in that precious chain. Tomorrow I’ll show you.”
The next day Rainfall put a light sort of woven saddle on the irascible horse—Avalanche was his name, and a stallion still, she learned as Rainfall spoke to him—and rode out with Wistala trailing along. First he cantered the horse a few times around the buildings to warm him and take the edge off. Only after this would Avalanche walk down the cobblestones to the Road.
The Road impressed Wistala, once it had been explained to her. Fully wide enough for two carts to pass and space for outriders beside, it was raised up and paved with fine stones, smashed so as to give them teeth that allowed wheels and horseshoes to grip, keeping mud down and dry surface against wheel, boot, or sandal. Or so Rainfall said.
“In my grandfather’s time, fully six hundred and forty years ago, he’d done his duty to waxing Hypatia in the Battle of the Sword-grass to the south. His skill in battle won him much renown. As a reward, the Imperial Directory awarded him this estate and charged him with keeping the roads and the bridge. He named it Mossbell for an ancient gong he found at the site of the old ferry. A light duty, one would think.”
“Bridge?”
“We’re coming to it shortly. Happily, it’s the cause of our meeting.”
The trees grew close about the road here, and it seemed little traveled. Rainfall continually watched and listened to the west side of the road. “If you hear a crashing, or deep and whistling breathing from these woods, hide yourself as best you can.”
“Is there something to fear?”
“Rarely in the daylight. There’s a pestilence dwelling on the banks of the river south of here in the form of a troll.”
Wistala wasn’t sure what a troll was, other than that they were more ravenous than a brood of hungry hatchlings.
Rainfall continued: “None dare settle flock or cot here. Much of my grandfather’s estate is now the troll’s stomping ground. Once many sheep and cattle, even horses, were raised here, along with the best four-season trail oxen in the northlands, if you’ll forgive my pride.”
“Is there no way to be rid of the troll?”
At this, her host blinked and set his mouth, as if barring a gate to keep the words in. “It’s been tried.”
They arrived at the bridge, and Wistala stood still in wonder until her eyes could comprehend it.
The gorge here yawned far wider if a bit less high than around Father’s retreat, still so steep-sided that a hominid could climb it only with a careful choice of path and much use of hands. Naked rocks and broken timber filled the river, flowing hard but without the bank-to-bank froth.
The bridge crossed the river in four arching leaps, columns of shaped and angled stone like towers bearing the road. There had once been a fifth arch in the center, but it had fallen and been replaced by wooden planking under an arch of its own. A stout stone bridge house stood at the Mossbell end. Wistala would hardly have noticed it, except that Rainfall slipped from the horse and went to the door.
“I was attending to the lock here when I saw you. Oddest thing I ever saw, a condor was circling close over you, but not stopping to eat. You were just there,” he said, pointing to a black length of shattered timber sticking out into the river, “lying atop that grandfather bole. Even at the end of your strength, you managed to pull yourself out of the river. I had to pry your tail from one of the knots.”
“What did the condor do?”
“Flew off mountainways.”
“You climbed all the way down there to inspect a half-drowned drakka?”
“And more. I used my balagan to get you up.”
“What is a balagan?”
“A device for lifting things, using ropes and blocks. Another word for it is crane. It allows one to lift the weight of three.”
“Whyever would you trouble yourself?”
“Curiosity. Dragons are seen only rarely nowadays.”
“And if it weren’t for you, they’d be rarer.”
Chapter 12
Rainfall was a fountain of information about everything but his Rown misfortunes. Only through numerous questions could she piece together his story. She tried asking Avalanche, but he was a simple, literal fellow, and at the slightest head-bob, griff-rattle, or harsh syllable would become enraged and threaten her with a stomping. And most of what Avalanche did know related to the quality of the hay, or displeasure at not being put out to pasture with the chance of meeting females.
So she spent most of her time with Rainfall, his diverting conversation limited to lighter topics.
Other than his grandsire, the only time he talked about his family was in the portrait gallery. Elves, evidently, had a “study” done of themselves once they reached maturity.
A study didn’t use paints or inks, but instead bits and pieces found outdoors—tree bark and colored sands being the two most common media. Done in life size, the “portraits” were remarkable once you got away from the odd textures. Rainfall’s certainly captured his gentle expression, warm eyes depicted with carefully polished and carved stones.
“And at the end we have my wife, son, and granddaughter,” her host said.
Did elves not keep their family about? “I’d like to see them in person to compare with these likenesses,” Wistala finally said. “Will I meet them?”
“An impossibility with Nyesta and Eyen, my wife and son. They are dead.”
His wife had a softness to her features, done in colored sand and painted shell. “I hope she had a peaceful passing,” Wistala said.
“Age and infirmity took her too soon, as it does all humans. But we had many years of comfort together. I met her when she passed through with Old Nightingale’s Circus, now under Ragwrist—though, like everything else these days, much reduced in scope and splendor. She left me comfort in my son, transitory though it was; he had something of his mother’s temperament and my father’s courage.”
She looked at his portrait. Some manner of sash was woven about the harness that held his sword. His eyes challenged, as if daring the portraiteer to capture him.
All that served to remember his granddaughter was a sketch. A simple charcoal depicted her; Rainfall apologized that he had no skill with formal portraiture. The girl-child had overlarge eyes compared with the others, but perhaps hominid youth accounted for that, for if the sketch was life-size, she was a good deal younger when drawn than the others. The elf blood came through strong in her cheek-bones and delicate ears.
“She still lives?” Wistala asked. Curiosity about her host made her stop in front of the drawing.
“Yes, but Lada’s been away from me these eight years.”
“With her mother?”
“We never knew her mother. Or I should say, I never knew her. Some sport of her father in one of the taverns of Quarryness or Sack Harbor, I expect. She arrived on my doorstep as an infant, bearing a note my son burned rather than show to me. She was my comfort after her father’s death. Since—since—please excuse me.”
Rainfall turned his face to the wall, and after a last look at the charcoal portrait, Wistala crept out of the room.
As the leaves turned color and dropped, Wistala explored the broken houses at the base of the two hills, pulling nails and hinges from the ruins to satisfy her hunger for metal. She’d come terribly close to stealing a small silver candleholder from a side table on one of her passes through the house and decided to hunt metal on her own.
When she returned, all her claws counted thrice worth of horses were standing in the field beyond the barn under the care of two boys who occupied themselves by throwing rotten apples at each other from opposite sides of a stone wall that held the saddles.
She circled the house to get downwind of it and found a yew tree to climb, where she spent an uncomfortable night. The riders left in haste the next morning—she saw only the backs of cloaks and a few gamboling dogs of the ordinary sort, not the huge savage brutes she’d pulled over the ledge.