A Time of War. Katharine KerrЧитать онлайн книгу.
over his harp, in case his lord should ask him to sing. Across the great hall the riders’ tables were mostly deserted, and a few servants sat yawning by the empty hearth. Jill hesitated in the doorway for some moments. She’d been hoping that she’d find his grace alone. Matyc at least was gone. Although she herself had nothing against Matyc, she trusted Rhodry’s judgement in such matters. If he said he smelt festering meat, then doubtless something had died under the stairs. On the other hand, no one had ever said a word against young Gwinardd, and she refused to keep silent and send Meer and his boy back to the dungeon for the night.
When she approached the table, Cadmar greeted her with a smile and a wave, calling for a servant to bring up another chair so that she could sit nearby without displacing Gwinardd from his honoured position. The lord rose, bowing her way, then sitting down again rather than leaving. As usual, Gwinardd looked puzzled at the honour in which his grace held this common-born old woman, even though he knew that her herbcraft had saved the gwerbret’s life the winter past. She wondered if he suspected her other skills as well.
‘Well Jill,’ Cadmar said. ‘Have you spoken with those prisoners yet?’
‘I have, Your Grace, and it’s about them, in fact, that I’ve come. Spies they’re not, as you might expect with one of them blind. That Gel da’Thae is a bard and here on a tragic errand indeed. I’d like to treat them as guests – well, guarded guests, if you take my meaning – and put them in a chamber here in the broch. Is that possible?’
‘And have I ever turned away a man who deserved my hospitality? But –’
‘I’ll explain, Your Grace,’ Jill went on. ‘When these raiders first showed up in your lands, I thought they were after the usual sort of booty. Do you remember the talk we had about that, what they wanted, I mean, after you tracked down and destroyed the raiding party?’
‘I do, not that you told me much in the way of hard fact.’ Cadmar allowed himself a smile. ‘You were starting to get a different idea, you said, but you didn’t tell me what you meant.’
‘Well, my apologies, but my idea sounds far-fetched, you see, so much so that I’m still not sure of it. I do think, though, that Meer can tell me what I need to know, that he’s got the missing piece of this puzzle, somewhere in his stock of bard lore. But if we don’t treat him well and show him some trust, he’s not going to trust me enough in return to tell me one word of what he might know.’
‘That’s quite true.’ Cadmar snapped his fingers at a serving girl. ‘Run fetch the chamberlain. Tell him that we have a guest to accommodate and him a travelling bard at that.’
The lass curtsied and hurried away. Gwinardd was staring, as shocked by this ready acquiescence as young Jahdo had been by her dweomer light.
‘My thanks.’ Jill rose, nodding his way in lieu of a bow, since she was wearing brigga and thus had no skirt to curtsey with. ‘May I have your leave, Your Grace?’
‘Of course. But where is this sudden guest, then?’
‘With Rhodry and Yraen. Look. Here he comes now, across the hall. The lad will have to stay with him, of course, not be quartered with the other servants.’
‘Of course. I’ll have the chamberlain tend to it.’
‘My thanks, Your Grace. I thought that if you received him here in the open hall, everyone would know he’s your guest now, and the threats against him and his kind would stop.’
‘No doubt, Jill. They had better.’
When the gwerbret and his vassal turned to look at Meer, Jill slipped away. Although no dweomerworker can make herself truly invisible, despite what the old tales may say, Jill could gather her aura so tightly about her and move so silently and smoothly that she could pass unnoticed unless someone happened to be looking straight at her. Wrapped in these shadows she hurried up the staircase to her chamber. Judging from what she’d heard about this mysterious raven, she had to keep a close watch on Cengarn and the countryside round about, and for that she needed to fly.
For all that Meer hated and feared mazrakir, the process by which a dweomerworker takes on animal form is really only an extension of the perfectly ordinary procedure of constructing a body of light, in which the magician makes a thought-form in human or elven shape as a vehicle for his or her consciousness out on the etheric plane. Although at first he has to imagine this form minutely every time he wishes to use it, eventually a fully-realized body, identical to the last one, will appear whenever the dweomermaster summons it, out of no greater dweomer than ‘practice makes perfect’. This happens in exactly the same way as a normal memory image, such as the memory-house a merchant uses to store information about his customers, becomes standardized after a long working with it. A shapechanger starts with the same process, substituting an animal form for the human, although, of course, the mazrak does take things a fair bit farther.
That evening Jill followed her usual practice. First she look off all her clothes, because not even the mightiest dweomermaster can transform dead matter like cloth, and opened the wooden shutters at the window. She laid her hands far apart on the windowsill and stared up at the starry sky, letting her breathing slow and her mind clear as the cool night air swept over her. She felt power gather, invoked more, until it flowed through her mind like water. In her mind, as well, she formulated the image of a grey falcon, but many times life size, and by a mental trick sent this picture out through her eyes until she saw it perching on the windowsill. Now, at this point the falcon image existed only in Jill’s imagination, though an imagination that had been highly trained and disciplined by years of mental work, and it was only in imagination that she transferred her consciousness over to the bird until she seemed to perch on the sill herself and look down at the ward below through the bird’s eyes.
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