Sword-Maker(105)

Del just shook her head. “I feel something in my bones.”

I arched unsubtle brows. “Getting along in years?”

She slanted me a glance. “One of us certainly is.”

“Here.” Lena handed clay bowls around with bread and mutton stew. “With the tribes coming in, we should have mutton enough to spare. And all the merchants, too; we could live here for months.”

I thought it unlikely they’d have to.

“I could set snares,” Del offered, and instantly Felka and Fabiola wanted to accompany her.

It reminded me of something. For a moment I was swept away somewhere familiar, and yet unknown; abruptly the feeling died, and I realized what I remembered. Del offering to set snares while a tow-headed Borderer boy asked to help her. Massou, Adara’s son, who had hosted a Northern demon and nearly destroyed us all.

Loki. It was enough to make me shiver. Thank the gods for the Cantéada, who had sung them into a trap-circle and freed the Borderers.

“Later,” Del promised the girls. “We’ll see first if it’s going to storm.”

Lena cuddled the baby against her breasts. “At least this little one need not concern herself with where her meals are coming from.”

Alric’s eyes glinted. “Nor I, if it comes to it.”

A gust of wind blew into the room, scattering handfuls of dust. A cool, damp-tasting wind, hinting at coming change. After months spent in the North, I knew the promise well.

Del looked at me. “Rain.”

Well, it was the border. A day’s ride south of here and rain was almost an unknown thing.

“Maybe.” I drank amnit.

“Rain,” she said again, mostly to herself.

Alric looked overhead. Two blankets tied to rotting timbers, and the weather tasted of rain.

Lena shifted uneasily. Southron-born and bred, rain was not to be trusted, or understood very well. “Maybe we should look for a house with a roof.”

Alric’s blond hair swung against shoulder blades as he shook his head, still staring into the sky. “No roofs for people like us … the tanzeers have claimed them all.”

“All?” I asked. “There aren’t that many people here—and there can’t be that many tanzeers. Not yet.”

Alric shrugged. “I looked. All the decent dwellings were claimed. We took the best we could find.”

I set the bota aside. “Tell you what … I want to take a little walk anyway, just to check things out. I’ll see what I can find in the way of better shelter. If there is to be a storm, we might as well be prepared.”

Alric rose. “I’ll go to the merchants and buy more blankets, some skins … we can put up a makeshift roof.”

Del shook her head as I glanced her way. “I’ll stay and help Lena.”

It surprised me a little. Del is not a woman for women’s things, as she has so often been at such pains to tell me. But neither is she a woman to ignore the needs of others; Lena had her hands—and belly—full with four children. Del never shirks assistance if she can offer any.

Well, it was fine with me. I didn’t think Del would approve of me talking to a swordsmith about another blade.

I left them all behind and headed out toward the circles. More wind kicked up as I walked, gusting down through narrow alleyways and curling around corners to snatch at my burnous. Grit stung my face; I blinked to clear my eyes.

“Sandtiger? Tiger!”

I stopped, squinting, and turned. From out of a broken doorway stepped a Northerner, blond braids hanging to his waist. And a scar across his top lip.

“Garrod,” I said, on a note of disbelief.

He grinned as he approached, blue eyes bright. “I never thought to see you again, once you and Del left the Cantéada and went north.” He sobered, recalling the reasons. “Did Del settle her trouble?”

“Yes and no,” I answered. “What are you doing here? Iskandar isn’t exactly Kisiri.”

He shrugged, hooking thumbs into a wide belt. His braids swung; dangling colored beads rattled in the wind. “We started for Kisiri. Got about halfway there—but then we heard about Iskandar; that people were coming here. I didn’t know anything about any Oracle, or this promised messiah—at least, not right away—but I’d picked up a string of horses along the way. Since trading is my business, I wanted to go where I could buy or sell. Only a fool would ignore such an opportunity, and I’ve never been a fool.”

Not lately, maybe. I hadn’t been so sure before, when we’d briefly ridden together. Garrod was a horse-speaker, a man who had a knack with horses. He called it a kind of magic. He claimed he could talk to them, understand them, the way a man understands a man. I wasn’t so certain that was true, but he did have a way with them. I’d seen it in the stud.