Dreamspinner (9 page)

Time wore on, and his patience wore thin. She didn’t seem to be preparing to leave the road and pick her way through the woods to her aunt’s house, so when the wood had ended, he stopped and looked at her.

“Don’t you have family in the area, then?” he asked, feeling rather exasperated.

“Nay,” she said, looking at him in confusion. “Why would you think that?”

“Then where are you going?” He gestured impatiently to his left. “There?”

She followed his pointing finger, then her jaw went slack. Rùnach followed her gaze and had to agree. It was one thing to think about Gobhann from the comfort of a decent seat in front of a roaring fire; it was another thing entirely to stand several hundred paces from the place and realize that there was nothing to it save unrelenting grey walls topped by unrelenting grey clouds. Did Weger attract that sort of weather simply by virtue of who he was, or was there a spell set over the place that cast it perpetually into gloom? Rùnach didn’t suppose he wanted to know, though he wouldn’t have been surprised by either.

Mhorghain had warned him it was a bit sparse, but his sister was obviously a master of understatement. At least at Buidseachd
there had been ample heat, an excellent kitchen, and a generously stocked library. He didn’t dare hold out any hope for any of the three inside what faced him. The walls were sheer, the front gates forbidding, and the general aspect enough to give one pause.

But if what lay within was the purchase price for the rest of a useful life, he would pay it gladly.

He looked at his companion, who had turned the color of her hair, which he discovered, thanks to a rapidly lightening sky, was so pale a yellow as to be almost white. She was filthy, as if she’d been rolling in the street and failed to find any sort of mirror to use in ridding her face of the smudges on her cheeks and nose. Her hair looked as if it had been much longer at some point and then cut carelessly with a knife. He started to suggest that she perhaps trot back the way she’d come when she turned and looked at him.

And then he, who hadn’t dreamed in a score of years, felt himself falling into a dream without any hope of saving himself.

He clutched at Iteach’s mane and was actually rather glad for his mount’s rather pointed snorting directly into his ear. He shook his head, looked at the beast in annoyance, then found himself helplessly looking into eyes that were neither green, nor blue, nor grey, nor any other color he could name. They were all those things, only possessing a sort of translucence that left him feeling as if he weren’t quite firmly settled inside his poor form.

Very well, so he couldn’t say she was beautiful, though perhaps that had to do less with the fairness of her face than with the fact that she looked to be under extreme duress. But nay, she wasn’t beautiful. Then again, in all his years before he’d gone with his family to the well, he had seen more than his share of absolutely breathtaking women. He supposed in the arrogance of his youth he had been well aware of the fairness of his own visage, the lure of his magic, and the appeal of his parentage. Beautiful women, elvish or not, had put themselves in his way, hoping to catch his eye. He had even considered coming to an understanding with one of them, a princess of Cothromaiche. It was possible that he had enjoyed those attentions perhaps more than he should have.

But at no time had he ever looked at a woman and—

He shook his head sharply. He was weary, that was it. Weary and frustrated and needing to have found a barn and slept the night before instead of having spent it walking. The wench was naught but a silly gel who would have been better served to have found a simple, unremarkable man to wed and settled down to making his suppers and providing him with sons.

“You can’t be in earnest,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Gobhann?”

“Aye,” she said, pulling his cloak more closely around her and lifting her chin. “I have business there that cannot be delayed.”

“The only business you should have, my
lad
, is taking up your place again behind your mother’s skirts. Now, why don’t you let me turn you around and set you on the right path?”

He reached for her, but she backed away.

“I don’t need aid.”

“I didn’t say you needed aid, I said you needed sense,” he said, reaching for her arm and taking hold of it. “Let’s go—”

“Look out behind you! There in the woods!”

He released her and turned around, drawing his sword as he did so. He braced himself, ready for anything, but fearing he would see there the man he had seen earlier that morning.

But he saw nothing.

His horse chortled, a particularly equine sort of snorting laugh that grated on Rùnach’s nerves. He took a deep breath and looked at Iteach.

“Are you trying to help?”

The damned horse only lifted an eyebrow and snorted again. Rùnach rolled his eyes, reached for his temper, and strode off across the muddy spring ground toward a place he was quite sure wouldn’t improve matters any. Whatever other failings his erstwhile companion might have had, the inability to sprint was not one of them. Whether she would make it to the gates before he did, however, was yet to be determined.

He dashed after her and contemplated what he’d seen in her face. If he hadn’t known better, he might have thought there was desperation in her look. Perhaps that had less to do with determination than it did with a desire to find somewhere warm to sit and
have something decent to drink. Obviously the task that lay next in front of him was to tell her that she would find neither inside Weger’s formidable gates.

At least his legs worked as they always had, which aided him in getting himself quickly to the gates before his companion. He knocked politely, then put himself in front of her when she tried to elbow her way past him. He shot her a warning look.

“Go home.”

“I must speak to Weger,” she said firmly.

He couldn’t imagine why. Obviously she had absolutely no idea what she was in for. Indeed, he couldn’t bring to mind a single reason why a woman would want to go inside those gates and subject herself to what he suspected would be months of absolute hell.

He wished—absently, lest he think about it overmuch and grieve—that his sister Mhorghain hadn’t chosen it as her habitation for so long, which led him to feeling that if he could save another wench the horrors of the work inside, he should.

“He wouldn’t be interested in anything you had to say,” Rùnach said.

She tried to elbow him out of the way. “I am a lad, just as any other. Why would he let you in and not me?”

“I have a sword?”

She opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly. Rùnach left her thinking on that and pushed her aside to put himself between her and the gate. It opened without haste, which he had expected. He steeled himself for the first test, grateful that in that, at least, he had been prepared by his sister and her husband as to what to expect—

Though it would have helped, he supposed, if he’d had a sword to hand.

His sword, as it happened, had been filched from his side with remarkable swiftness. He watched, Iteach’s nose on his shoulder, as a woman who had no business even looking at Gobhann faced the gatekeeper and brandished that pilfered sword.

The gatekeeper rested his sword against his shoulder and scratched his cheek absently with his other hand.

“Well,” he said, finally.

Rùnach couldn’t have agreed more. The lad—er, woman, rather—holding his sword with both hands and struggling to keep it aloft might have done a fair amount of damage with it if she lost control and had it nick some poor fool as it fell toward the ground. But use it for its intended purpose?

Not anytime soon.

“Which way to the lord of Gobhann?” she said, her voice quavering dangerously.

The gatekeeper blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“I must talk to Scrymgeour Weger
today
.”

The gatekeeper, who was reputedly named Odo, looked at her as if he couldn’t quite understand what he was hearing. “Today?”

“Before midnight, at least,” she said.

Odo frowned. “I think you might be better served if you were to turn around and retreat back out the gate.”

She put her shoulders back and fixed a look of determination on her face, a look she turned and favored Rùnach with very briefly. “I
will
go forward. If either of you stands in my way, you’ll pay a very steep price.”

Rùnach looked at Odo. Odo only shrugged, then gestured toward the stairs. The woman glanced at those stairs—empty ones, thankfully—then looked back at the gatekeeper.

“Thank you. I’ll speak highly of your good sense to your master.”

“Well, thank you, ah—”

“No need to exchange names,” she said. “I just need an hour to speak to your master, then I will be on my way.”

Odo frowned but didn’t stop her as she walked unsteadily past him. Rùnach watched her reach the stairs, then looked at Odo.

“Master Odo,” he said, inclining his head.

Odo lifted his finger and flicked it backward, indicating that Rùnach should remove the hood of his cloak. Rùnach supposed there was no point in delaying the inevitable flinching he would have as his reward. Why Miach of Neroche couldn’t have attended to his face while he’d been about that bit of repair work at Seanagarra, Rùnach couldn’t have said. Then again Rùnach hadn’t asked. He had wanted hands that worked, which he had gotten,
for the most part. Anything else had seemed just too frivolous. He suppressed the urge to take a deep breath, then reached up and lifted the hood back off his head.

Odo studied him for a moment or two, then leaned over and had a quiet word with one of the pair of lads who waited at his heels. The lad scampered off and up the stairs, bypassing the woman carrying Rùnach’s blade. Rùnach watched for a moment, then looked at Odo.

“She’s absconded with my sword.”

“That one’s trouble,” Odo agreed, then he blinked. “Did you say—”

“I meant
he
has absconded with my blade,” Rùnach said hastily. No sense in subjecting the gel to unnecessary attentions she was obviously trying to avoid.

Odo pursed his lips. “Then ’tis a good thing I’ve seen that
he
gets upstairs without incident.” He considered Rùnach for a moment or two. “You remind me of someone.”

“Do I?”

“Your sister, I imagine.” Odo drew his sword and handed it to Rùnach. “We’ll see if you make as good a showing as she did on her first day. Give that back later, if you’re alive to do so.”

Rùnach accepted the blade. “Thank you.”

“Well,” Odo said with a small smile, “you might not say the same a handful of hours from now, but then again, perhaps you might. That’s a mighty set of scars you bear.”

“They help me remember what not to become.”

“I daresay.” He looked over Rùnach’s shoulder. “I’ll see to your mount.”

“He would likely appreciate that.”

Odo waved him on. Rùnach would have thanked him yet again—he had decent manners, even in trying circumstances—but he suddenly found that whilst his companion had been waved through the gauntlet, he most definitely wasn’t going to be enjoying that same concession. The bellow of a war cry approximately two handsbreadths from his ear almost left him leaping out of his skin.

He turned and lifted his sword, hoping his attempt at reaching the uppermost courtyard wouldn’t end right there.

A
isling made her way up the stairs, finding it very difficult indeed to keep her filched sword upright. Thank heavens she had no intention of becoming a mercenary. Better that she consider something that didn’t require doing anyone in with a blade or being startled by the unexpected. She almost went sprawling thanks to a young lad slipping by her and racing up the stairs. Perhaps he was going to tell Weger he had guests.

She didn’t want to think too hard about how that set her heart to racing.

She climbed many long flights of steps, some broken in half by passageways that led to places she didn’t want to investigate, some briefly bursting out into courtyards only to wind back into darkened stairwells. She decided then that when she started her own life, she would begin a regimen of healthful trots about whatever village she settled on. She was wheezing already, and she was sure she had only climbed four or five flights of stairs.

But she climbed on because she had only until midnight to do
what needed to be done to save not only her country but her own sorry neck. She would have had more leeway, of course, if it hadn’t been for the inclement weather that had turned a three-day voyage on that rickety ship into almost six. Admittedly, she could have perhaps calculated amiss—

Nay, that wasn’t possible. She had counted the days as if her life had depended on it, which it did. The third se’nnight ended at the stroke of midnight that night. Her task was set out before her and the time appointed mercilessly.

That she had managed to get past the gate was heartening. Perhaps it would be easier than she thought to simply continue on until she could go no further, at which point she could only assume that she would come face-to-face with either Weger himself or one of his aides. She would ask for a private audience, state her business, then be on her way. Perhaps Fate would smile on her and she would find a mercenary desperate enough to travel to Taigh Hall with only the promise of a princely sum as inducement.