“Sorry to lose the company of your friend, there,” the man said, indicating the goat, as he came up beside Sebastian.
Jennsen scratched Betty’s ears. “I appreciate her care.”
“Not much care. The night isn’t over.” The man’s gaze shifted from Sebastian to Jennsen. “Why do you two want to leave in the night, anyway? And why do you want to buy horses? Especially at this hour?”
Jennsen froze in panic. She hadn’t expected to have anyone question her and so she had no answer prepared.
“It’s my mother,” Sebastian said in a confidential tone. He let out a convincing sigh. “We just got word that she’s taken ill. They don’t know if she’ll last until we can get there. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t…Well, we’ll just have to make it in time, that’s all.”
The man’s suspicious expression softened with sympathy. Jennsen was surprised at how credible Sebastian sounded. She tried to imitate his look of concern.
“I understand, son. I’m sorry—I didn’t realize. What can I do to help?”
“Which two horses can you sell us?” Sebastian asked.
The man scratched his whiskered chin. “You going to leave the goat?”
Sebastian said “Yes” at the same time Jennsen said “No.”
The man’s big dark eyes looked from one to the other.
“Betty won’t slow us down,” Jennsen said. “She can keep up. We’ll make it to your mother just the same.”
Sebastian leaned a hip against the rail. “I guess the goat will be leaving with us.”
With a sigh of disappointment, the man gestured to the horse Jennsen was scratching behind the ear. “Rusty, here, gets on well with that goat of yours. I guess she’d be as good to sell as any of the others. You’re a tall girl, so she would fit you well.”
Jennsen nodded her agreement. Betty, as if she had understood every word, bleated hers.
“I have a strong chestnut gelding that would better carry your weight,” he said to Sebastian. “Pete’s down the way, there, on the right. I’d be willing to let you have him along with Rusty, here.”
“Why’s she called Rusty?” Jennsen asked.
“Dark as it is in here, you can’t see so well, but she’s a red roan, about as red as they come, all except that white blaze on her forehead.”
Rusty sniffed Betty. Betty licked Rusty’s muzzle. The horse snorted softly in response.
“Rusty it is,” Sebastian said. “And the other, then.”
The stableman scratched his stubble again and nodded to seal the agreement. “I’ll go get Pete.”
When they returned, Jennsen was pleased to see Pete nuzzle a greeting against Rusty’s shoulder. With danger close on their heels, the last thing she wanted to have to worry about was handling bickering horses, but these two were friendly enough. The two men hurried at their work. A mother lay dying, after all.
Riding with a blanket on her lap promised to be a welcome relief from traveling on foot. A horse would help keep her warm and make the night ahead more tolerable. They had a long rope for Betty, who tended to get distracted by things along the way—edible things, especially.
Jennsen didn’t know what Sebastian had to pay for the horses and tack, nor did she care. It was money that had come from her mother’s killers, and would get them away. Getting away was all that mattered.
With a wave to the stableman as he held the big door open for them, they rode out into the frigid night. Both horses, apparently pleased at the prospect of activity, despite the hour, stepped briskly along the street. Rusty turned her head back, making sure that Betty, at their left, was keeping up.
It wasn’t long before they passed the last building on their way out of town. Thin clouds raced before the rising moon, but left enough light to turn the snow-covered road to a silk ribbon between the thick darkness of the woods along each side.
Betty’s rope suddenly jerked tight. Jennsen looked over her shoulder, expecting to see the goat trying to nibble at a young branch. Instead, Betty, her legs stiff, had her hooves dug in, resisting any progress.
“Betty,” Jennsen whispered harshly, “come on! What’s wrong with you? Come on.” The goat’s weight was no match for the horse, so she was dragged down the snowy road against her will.
When Sebastian’s horse stepped over, jostling Rusty, Jennsen saw the trouble. They were overtaking a man walking down the road. In his dark clothing, they hadn’t seen him at the right side, against the dark of the trees. Knowing that horses didn’t like surprises, Jennsen patted Rusty’s neck to assure her that the man wasn’t anything to be frightened of. Betty, though, remained unconvinced, and used all the rope available to swing a wide arc.
Jennsen saw then that it was the big blond man from the inn, the man who had offered to buy them a drink—the man she thought, for some reason, should dwell only in her dream life rather than in her waking life.
Jennsen kept an eye on the man as they passed him. As cold as she was, it felt as if a door opened into the infinitely colder eternal night of the underworld.
Sebastian and the stranger exchanged a brief greeting in passing. Once beyond the man, Betty scampered ahead, pulling at her rope, eager to put distance between her and the man.
“Grushdeva du kalt misht.”
Jennsen, her breath caught fast at the end of a gasp, turned to stare wide-eyed at the man walking down the road behind. It sounded like it had been he who’d spoken the words. That was impossible; those were the strange words from inside her head.
Sebastian made no notice of it, so she didn’t say anything lest he think her crazy.
With Betty’s agreement, Jennsen urged her horse to pick up the pace.
Just before they rounded a bend and were away, Jennsen looked back one last time. In the moonlight she saw the man grinning at her.
Chapter 13
Oba was throwing a hay bale down from the loft when he heard his mother’s voice.
“Oba! Where are you? Get down here!”
Oba scurried down the ladder. He brushed hay from himself as he straightened before her waiting scowl.
“What is it, Mama?”
“Where’s my medicine? And your cure?” Her glare swept across the floor. “I see you still haven’t gotten the mess out of the barn. I didn’t hear you come home last night. What took you so long? Look at that stanchion rail! Haven’t you fixed that, yet? What have you been doing all this time? Do I have to tell you every little thing?”
Oba wasn’t sure which question he was supposed to answer first. She always did that to him, confused him before he could answer her. When he faltered, she would then insult and ridicule him. After all he had learned the night before, and all that had happened, he thought that he might feel more confident when he faced his mother.
In the light of day, standing back in the barn, with his mother gathered before him like a thunderhead, he felt much the same as he always did before her storming onslaught, ashamed, small, worthless. He had felt big when he came home. Important. Now he felt as if he were shrinking. Her words shriveled him.
“Well, I was—”
“You was dawdling! That’s what you was doing—dawdling! Here I am waiting for my medicine, my knees aching me, and my son Oba the oaf is kicking a rock down the road, forgetting what I sent him for.”
“I didn’t forget—”
“Then where’s my medicine? Where is it?”
“Mama, I didn’t get it—”
“I knew it! I knew you was spending the money I gave you. I worked my fingers to the bone at spinning to earn that, and you go wasting it on women! Whoring! That’s what you was doing, whoring!”
“No, Mama, I didn’t waste it on women.”
“Then where’s my medicine! Why didn’t you get it like I told you to!”
“I couldn’t because—”
“You mean you wouldn’t, you worthless oaf! You only had to go to Lathea’s—”
“Lathea is dead.”
Ther
e, he’d said it. It was out and in the light of day.
His mother’s mouth hung open, but no words rained out. He had never seen her go silent like that before, seen her so shocked that her jaw just hung. He liked it.
Oba fished a coin from his pocket, one he had set aside to return so she wouldn’t think he’d spent her money. Amid the drama of such a rare silence, he handed her the coin.
“Dead…Lathea?” She stared at the coin in her palm. “What do you mean, dead? She went ill?”
Oba shook his head, feeling his confidence build as he thought about what he had done to Lathea, how he’d handled the troublesome sorceress.
“No, Mama. Her house burned down. She was killed in the fire.”
“Her house burned…” His mother’s brow drew together. “How do you know she died? Lathea isn’t likely to be caught unawares by a fire. The woman is a sorceress.”
Oba shrugged. “Well, all I know is that when I went to town, I heard a ruckus. People were running toward her house. We all found the place ablaze. A big crowd gathered around, but the fire was so hot that there was no chance of saving the place.”
That last part was, to a degree, true. He had started to leave town, headed home, because he figured that if no one had spotted the fire, maybe they wouldn’t until morning. He didn’t want to be the one to start yelling “fire.” In light of history, that might look suspicious, especially to his mother. She was a suspicious woman—one of her many peevish traits. Oba had planned on simply telling his mother the story of what he knew was bound to happen anyway, the blazing ruins, the charred body found.
But as he had been walking home after his visit to the inn, not long after that Jennsen woman and the man with her, Sebastian, passed by leaving town on their journey to find Althea, he heard people yelling that there was a fire down at Lathea’s place. Oba ran down the long dark road with the rest of the people, toward the orange glow off in the trees. He was just a bystander, same as everyone else. There was no reason to suspect him of anything.
“Maybe Lathea escaped the flames.” His mother sounded more like she was trying to convince herself than him.
Oba shook his head. “I stayed, hoping the same as you, Mama. I knew you’d want me to help her if she was hurt. I stayed to do what I could. That’s why I was so late.”
That, too, was partly true; he had stayed, along with the crowd, watching the fire, listening to the talk. He had savored the crowd’s anticipation. The gossip. The speculation.
“She’s a sorceress. Fire isn’t likely to catch such a woman.”
His mother was starting to sound suspicious. Oba had figured on this. He leaned a little toward her.
“When the fire burned out enough, some of us men threw snow down so we could get in over the smoking rubble. Inside, we found Lathea’s bones.”
Oba pulled a blackened finger bone from his pocket. He held it out, offering it to his mother. She stared down at the grim evidence, but folded her arms without taking it. Pleased with the effect it had, Oba finally returned the treasure to his pocket.
“She was in the middle of the room, with one hand lifted above her head, like she had tried to make it to the door but was overcome by the smoke. The men said that a fire’s smoke was what put folks down, and then the fire got at them. That must have been what happened to Lathea. The smoke got her. Then, laying there on the floor, reaching toward the door, the fire burned her to death.”
His mother glared at him, her mean little mouth all pinched up, but silent. For once, she had no words. He found her glare, though, was just as bad. In the daggers of that glare, he could tell that she was thinking he was no good. Her bastard boy.
Darken Rahl’s bastard son. Almost royalty.
Her arms slipped from their sullen knot as she turned away. “I have to get back to my spinning for Mr. Tuchmann. You get this mess scooped off the floor, you hear?”
“I will, Mama.”
“And you had better get that stanchion fixed before I come back and see that you’ve been loafing away the day.”
For several days Oba worked at the frozen muck on the floor, but made little headway. The weather had stayed bitterly cold, so the frozen mound, if anything, had only hardened. His efforts at wearing it down seemed interminable, like trying to chip away granite ledge. Or his mother’s stony disposition.
He had his other chores, of course, and he couldn’t let them go. He had fixed the stanchion and a broken hinge on the barn door. The animals had to be attended to, along with a hundred other small things.
In his head, as he worked, he planned the construction of their fireplace. He would use the back wall between the house and barn, since it was already existing. Mentally, he stacked stones against it, creating the shape of the firebox. He already had his eye on a long stone to use for the lintel. He would mortar everything all together properly. When Oba set his mind to doing something, he put his all into it. He didn’t do any job he started just halfway.
In his mind’s eye, he pictured how surprised and happy his mother would be when she saw what he’d built them. She would recognize his worth, then. She would finally acknowledge his value. But he had other work to do before he could begin to build a fireplace.
One job, in particular, loomed before him. The surface of the mound of frozen muck in the barn showed the scars of the battle. It was now pocked with holes, places where he had been able to find a weakness, a place with air or dry straw underneath that had allowed him to break out a chunk. Each time a piece went “pop” and came lose, he was sure that he had at last found a way into the formidable tomb of ice, but each time had been a false hope. Chipping away with the scoop shovel was slow going, but Oba was not a quitter.
The worry had come to him that perhaps a man of his importance should not be wasting his time on such menial labor. Frozen manure hardly seemed the province of a man who was in all likelihood something akin to a prince. At the least, he now knew he was an important man. A man with Rahl blood in his veins. A direct descendant—the son—of the man who had ruled D’Hara, Darken Rahl. There probably wasn’t a single person who had not heard of Darken Rahl. Oba’s father.
Sooner or later, he would confront his mother with the truth she had been keeping from him—the truth of the man he really was. He just couldn’t figure how to do it without her discovering that Lathea had spilled the news before she spilled her blood.
Winded from a particularly spirited attack on the frozen mound, Oba rested his forearms on the shovel’s handle while he caught his breath. Despite the cold, sweat trickled down from his matted blond hair.
“Oba the oaf,” said his mother as she strode into the barn. “Standing around, doing nothing, thinking nothing, worth nothing. That’s you, isn’t it? Oba the oaf?”
She glided to a stop, her mean little mouth all puckered up as she peered down her nose at him.
“Mama. I was just catching my breath.” He pointed around at the chips of ice littering the floor, evidence of his strenuous efforts. “I’ve been working at it, Mama. I have.”
She didn’t look. She was glaring at him. He waited, knowing she had something more on her mind than the mound of frozen muck. He always knew when she was on a mission to trouble him, to make him feel like the muck he stood in. From the dark crevices and hidey-holes around the barn, the rats watched with their little black rat eyes.
With her critical gaze locked on him, his mother held out a coin. She held it between her thumb and first finger, not simply to convey the coin itself, but its importance.
Oba was a little bewildered. Lathea was dead. There was no other sorceress anywhere close, none that he knew of, anyway, who could provide his mother’s medicine—or his cure. He obediently turned his palm up, anyway.
“Look at it,” she commanded, dropping the coin into his hand.
Oba held it out to the light of the doorway, scrutinizing it with care. He knew she expected him to find something—what, he didn’t know. He turned it over as he cautiously stole a gl
ance at her. He carefully inspected the other side, but still saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Yes, Mama?”
“Notice anything unusual about it, Oba?”
“No, Mama.”
“It doesn’t have a scratch along the edge.”
Oba puzzled that over for a moment, then looked again at the coin, this time carefully inspecting the edge.
“No, Mama.”
“That’s the coin you gave back to me.”
Oba nodded, having no reason to doubt her. “Yes, Mama. The coin you gave me for Lathea. But I told you, Lathea died in the fire, so I couldn’t buy your medicine. That’s why I gave you your coin back.”
Her hot glare was murderous, but her voice was arrestingly cool and collected. “It isn’t the same coin, Oba.”
Oba grinned. “Sure it is, Mama.”
“The coin I gave you had a mark on the edge. A mark I put there.”
Oba’s grin withered as his mind raced. He tried to think of what to say—what he could say—that she would believe. He couldn’t contend that he put the coin in a pocket and then pulled out a different coin when he gave it back to her, because he never had any money of his own. She knew very well that he didn’t have any money; she wouldn’t allow it. She thought he was no good, and that he might waste it.
But he had money, now. He had all the money from Lathea—a fortune. He remembered hurriedly gathering up all the coins that had spilled from Lathea’s pocket, including the coin he’d only just given her. When he later set aside a coin to return to his mother, he hadn’t known that she had marked the one she’d given him. Oba had the bad luck of returning a different coin than the one she had originally given him.
“But, Mama…are you sure? Maybe you only thought you marked the coin. Maybe you forgot.”
She slowly shook her head. “No. I marked it so that if you spent it on drinking or on women I would know because I could go look for it if I had to, and see what you had done.”