Changer of Days (11 page)

“That would be the tavern,” Kieran said. “Most of them offer a bed or two for the occasional traveller—although Shaymir doesn’t see many of those. Come on, we’ll try our luck.”

There was a room, with a single bed; if they were willing to share, the landlord was happy enough to provide an extra pallet if it was required—at a price. “I usually keep two rooms for hire,” the thin, stooped man told them, standing in the doorway with his long arms crossed across a concave chest, “but there’s a husband and wife in the other one, visiting singers. They arrived yesterday, and they’ve got next door…This room’s all that’s going.”

“We’ll take it,” Kieran said. “One more thing. Do you know of anyone who might have camels for sale?”

The landlord’s eyebrow rose a notch. “Bound for the desert, are you?” he inquired conversationally. “Well, I don’t know…old Borre might have one or two he might part with. But I’d be careful there if I was you. He’s a good trader, but I’m not sure if an entirely honest one.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Kieran said. “Where might I find the man?”

“Borre? In my common room right now, like as not,” said the landlord laconically, turning away. “I’ll get you the pallet. Anything else you need?”

Kieran shook his head, and the landlord went out, closing the door behind him.

“You’re different down here,” Anghara said.

Kieran turned his head toward her. “How?”

“I’m not sure…but you seem…a part of this place, somehow. Even your accent changes. I’ve never heard you speak in quite this voice before.”

“Just coming home,” said Kieran succinctly.

Quite suddenly she seemed to withdraw from him a little, her eyes veiled with memory. Stepping off the Kheldrini ship in the harbor…Roisinan in the rain…
I never had a chance to come home…

“I’ll have them bring up something to eat,” Kieran said, noticing the sudden weariness which cloaked her. “You take the bed; try and sleep, you look tired. I won’t be long.”

“Where are you going?”

“Just downstairs, to the common room,” he said. “I want to try and find this Borre.”

She was on the point of insisting that she go with him, but she was tired. More than physically weary—soul-tired, exhausted from trying to keep at bay something she had once so wholeheartedly embraced. The bed seemed like an excellent alternative to spending a night in a loud tavern common room redolent with ale fumes and the violent reek of coarse Shaymir tobacco, for which the Shay valley was well known. In the end she said nothing, letting him go. Alone in the small room, she gave herself to the embrace of a mattress softer by far than the ground which had been her bed these many weeks, and slept dreamlessly until the sun crept through the shuttered window.

The room was empty as she opened her eyes, but the door was opening even as she blinked to admit Kieran, with a freshly washed face and a striped cotton towel around his neck like some strange ornament.

“Good morning,” he said cheerfully. “I’m not sure he’ll remember after all the ale he put away last night, but I’m supposed to meet our friend Borre this morning and pick out three camels in exchange for the horses, if he liked what he saw—he was meant to inspect them this morning. Want to come?”

Anghara, after a quiet and peaceful night, felt fresh and rested, sharp, quickened. More alive, somehow, than she had felt for…for almost as long as she could remember. “I won’t be a minute,” she said. “Is there anything for breakfast?”

Kieran couldn’t hide his surprise, but it lasted only a split second, to be replaced by a smile of real pleasure. “I’ll have them prepare something downstairs,” he said, tossing his damp towel over the back of a fragile-looking chair which stood in the corner of their room. “I’ll meet you down there.”

Anghara combed out the tangled chaos of her bright hair with the comb a Kheldrini woman had given her, a long time ago, when she had woken to vision on a cool desert night. That, too, had been saved for her, tucked securely into the package Adamo had rescued from the wreckage of Calabra and her homecoming. Perhaps it was asking for trouble, using something so fraught with memories, but Anghara resolutely closed her mind to all but the most prosaic of the comb’s attributes. She washed her face, pulled her travelling dress straight at her waist, and went downstairs.

The common room was largely empty. Kieran was waiting with a dish piled with hot food, and she stopped in the doorway, laughing. “I couldn’t eat all of that even in the days when I could swallow a proper breakfast!”

“You mightn’t want it, but I do,” he said. “It’s for both of us. There’s hard bargaining ahead.”

Anghara giggled. She felt strange, light, as though she had shed years and was a little girl again. “What’s he like, our friend Borre?” she asked, mimicking Kieran’s own voice of earlier that morning.

Kieran thought for a moment. “A trader,” he said at last, lowering his voice, “to his marrow. I would not be in the least surprised if he hasn’t sealed a bargain or two with Khelsies in his time although I’m far from sure on which side of the mountains that was, and he’d die rather than admit to anything. Still, he seems to know something about a passage—it seems there’s a singing rock not too far north of here, and that’s where the pass starts…”

“A singing rock?” echoed Anghara blankly.

Kieran shrugged. “That’s what he said last night. He was quite drunk at the time, but he seemed to be making a bizarre sort of sense.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Not as far as I could smell him, although that’s probably quite a distance. But an old trader doesn’t offer his secrets on a platter. Still—it’s a beginning.”

They finished their breakfast and walked out into the morning; for all that it was still the dawn of spring, here on the edge of the Shaymir desert the trembling heat of summer already shimmered in the air. There was a corral at the far end of the village, partly shaded against the sun by a raised roof of thatch. Borre was bent over a camel’s foot, scowling furiously as he looked up at the sound of footsteps. The old trader schooled his face into what passed for a smile at his customers’ approach. This was a frightening sight; what teeth remained in his mouth, where they weren’t black with decay, were stained a poisonous yellow by a lengthy and intimate relationship with the strong Shaymir tobacco.

“Well, if it isn’t my young friend from last night,” he said, his accent the flattest Anghara had yet heard, leaving her on the edge of comprehension.

“Have you checked the horses?” Kieran asked, leaning casually on the corral fence.

“Aye, my man looked them over this morning,” Borre said. “Two are sound enough, but the third seems lame…it might have a bearing on the price…”

“It’s nothing a few days’ rest wont cure, and you know it. What have you to offer us?”

Borre glanced toward a knock-kneed beast drooping disconsolately in the shade of the corral’s thatched roof, but changed his mind abruptly as he noticed a sardonic expression cross Kieran’s face. The old trader cleared his throat. “The two yonder might do you,” he said, indicating a pair of animals standing together close to the bar of the corral fence, chewing placidly at a mouthful of fodder.

Kieran slipped underneath the fence pole and into the corral, and Anghara walked round on the outside until they were on a level. The camels watched Kieran’s approach with lofty disdain. “I haven’t had that much to do with bargaining for camels lately,” Kieran said in a low voice as he stopped before the two beasts. “I’ve long forgotten what I used to know about them.”

“The one on the left looks old,” Anghara said softly. “Look at their teeth…and be careful, some of them have a nasty habit of trying to take a piece out of you if you give them a chance.”

“This one has teeth as bad as yours,” Kieran called back to Borre after he had obeyed these instructions. “How long do you think he’d survive if you put a load on his back?”

“Oh, they’re hardy beasts…” Borre began.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Kieran. “Have you any others?”

It took a while, but eventually Kieran found himself the owner of three reasonably sound camels for the price of three horses and a further handful of Roisinani coppers. Borre wasn’t entirely happy, but he was content—he planned to go south soon, and he could unload the horses there for more than he could hope to gain on the handful of camels he had in hand.

“Where might you be going with these, then?” he asked after they had shaken hands on the bargain. “What might you be looking for in the desert with the summer coming on?”

“Nothing you could make a profit on, friend,” Kieran said with a laugh. He deliberately refrained from mentioning his conversation with the old trader in the common room the night before, waiting to see if Borre would bring it up.

“If you’re planning on running as far north as the Staren Pan, you’d best be warned—the wells are low this year,” Borre offered, his face studiously blank.

“There’s always water in the mountains,” said Kieran, countering this chess move with one of his own.

Borre nodded sagely, as though he understood everything. “Rock and stone,” he murmured, “rock and stone.” He patted the neck of one of his camels proprietorially. “They’ll be all right, as long as there’s sweet red sand waiting for them in the end.”

Anghara’s eyes flashed at this, and then she hooded them again, veiling them with her eyelashes. She had never seen the Shaymir desert, but to her red sand meant only one place, what al’Tamar had lovingly called Harim Khajir’i’id, the red desert of north Kheldrin. Once it would have been easy to hide her feelings, pulling a concealing cloak of Sight around her; now she had to fight her beating heart and will the color from her cheeks without the help of her gifts.

She turned away, hearing Kieran’s voice as if from a great distance as he made the arrangements for the camels to be delivered to the tavern when Borre’s man came to collect the horses and their tack. The joy of that morning had somehow gone out of her, replaced with…she couldn’t put a name to it, a sense of expectation, of dread, even fear. Without in any way being of it, it felt like…Sight.

“They’ll bring us saddles and bridles when they bring the camels, a straight exchange for our own tackle.” Kieran slipped out of the corral again beside her. “What is it? You’re so white…”

She took his arm. “I don’t know,” she said slowly, her eyes wide. “I can’t help feeling that something’s about to…”

“Kieran!”

“…happen!” Anghara finished, whirling in the direction from which the soft female voice had come.

Kieran had done the same, even more quickly, hand already on the pommel of his sword. But even as he turned there had been an incredulous recognition on his face. He knew that voice, although he hadn’t heard it for years…

“Keda?”

“Kieran…
Anghara
…I thought you were dead…”

Anghara’s eyes were wide and staring, but it was she who made the first connection. What was it the landlord had said…visiting singers in his other room…husband and wife…“The singers in the other guestroom in the tavern,” she gasped.

“You’re married?” Kieran asked softly, sadly, making the leap himself. “I didn’t know…”

“Oh, Kieran…” Keda’s eyes filled with tears. “I wanted to tell you…I wanted you at my wedding…having a brother for an outlaw isn’t easy. I know you vanish to make it difficult for Sif to trace you, but I lose you as well. There have been times I haven’t known if you were alive or dead…” She stepped up to her brother and folded him into a fierce embrace; Kieran buried his face in her hair, closing his eyes, and brother and sister stood for a moment in silence. Then Keda disentangled herself, keeping hold of one of his hands and tugging at him like a child. “Come on,” she said, and her voice was pure joy, “I want you to meet Shev…and you must tell me what you are doing here…” She turned and smiled at Anghara, reaching out with her other hand. “You’ve grown…but you’re so thin, so pale…When word came of what happened to Bresse, I mourned you, and the Lady Morgan…did she escape?”

“No,” said Anghara, dropping her eyes.

She heard Keda suck in her breath in sudden comprehension, in compassion, in pity. “Did you ever…go home?” she asked.

Kieran laughed, a short, harsh laugh. “Oh yes,” he said. “We found it rather hard to escape the hospitality of Miranei at the last.”

There was something deep here, and Keda sensed it, threw up her own guard. “Not here,” she said, squeezing the two hands she held, one in each of her own. “Come, let’s go back to the tavern. Shev will be waiting for me. It’s all right, you can trust him,” she added swiftly, noticing Anghara’s eyes quickly seek Kieran’s face. “Oh, come—we have to sing in the tavern tonight, it’s part of the bargain with the landlord—and there’s so much…How long are you staying?”

“We were hoping to leave within two days,” Kieran said, falling into step beside her.

“So soon…”

The next questions were obvious—what were the two of them, deposed queen and Roisinani outlaw, doing together here in Shaymir, and where were they headed? But Keda had already schooled herself against asking anything more here in the street. And Anghara, who had been desperately fighting to keep at bay a flood of old memories, finally failed. Her vision faded into a buzzing whiteout; she stumbled at her next step and would have fallen had Kieran, with some strange sixth sense, not reached out with a supporting hand. Here were the last three survivors of Anghara’s first wild brush with her power; there was a link somewhere, a link she could not deny, but one which carried oblivion in its wake—an oblivion rooted deep in Sight, whose touch was now so dangerous to her. She couldn’t seem to make her legs obey; walking was completely beyond her. Kieran lifted her up without another word and carried her back to the tavern.

Keda, Kieran’s true sister, flinched when Kieran mentioned their destination—was there nothing on this side of the mountains that could help Anghara? Were they sure? But, again like Kieran, once she accepted the necessity she did so in a deeply practical way. Her husband Shev hailed from the deep desert; Keda pumped him for any information which could help the two voyagers.