The Wanderer Read Online Free PDF Page B

course,” said Hem Duro, dryly. “Druda Strawn, pray take your place here at my side. We are come to a most interesting part of this strange affair. Your two recruits must describe the two men who tried to attack my father.”
    Jehane went first and although they had hardly spoken together of these things Gael found her description agreed almost perfectly with Gael’s own picture of the two assassins. Then it was her own turn. She might have wished herself in the midst of battle rather than speaking so long before this company. Yet she spoke up as clearly and truthfully as she could, for the honor of poor Coombe and for Druda Strawn, who had chosen her for a kedran.
    “A hood … ?” queried de Reece. “The younger man wore this closely woven woolen hood?”
    Gael screwed up her eyes in an effort to retrieve the scene.
    “No Sir,” she said. “Not woven—it seemed to me that the hood was knitted. And I particularly noticed the color of the thick-spun thread. It must have come from a black sheep.”
    There was a moment of complete silence around the table, then de Reece, Hem Duro, and young Valent all cried out at
once, with oaths ranging from “By the Warriors!” to “Blood and Fire!” Druda Strawn gave a bark of laughter.
    “Well said, Gael Maddoc!” he exclaimed. “And I charge all you gathered here to see that this is not a tale I have told. She uttered the words quite innocently.”
    He gave Gael a smile and went on: “The Black Sheep are a band of rebellious souls who farm tracts of land and do their own magic. It is said they are refugees from the island of Eriu, formerly a feof of ancient Eildon, now held firm in the iron hand of the Kingdom of Lien.”
    “Eildon? They have their magic of Eildon?” Gael spoke aloud in her surprise, impressed by the Druda’s erudition. Eildon-across-the-sea was old and its ways were strange. She had heard magic was much used there, but all spoke that it was magic of a glamor kind, a pretty—or treacherous—illusion played by the Priest-King’s court, deep opposed to the country-bound Chyrian style of magic. Even so, if these black sheep used magic, it was not surprising that they should find themselves Lienish castaways. From what little she knew, Lien, Mel’Nir’s neighbor to the north, was a kingdom where magic was held in even greater public distrust than in Knaar of Val’Nur’s domains.
    “But in truth,” the Druda said softly, as he looked again toward the prince, “it seems to me that this use of magic, together with Gael Maddoc’s sighting of the knitted hood, is a blessed gift, for it tells us that the question here today is whether or no Knaar of Westmark has dealt fairly with some refugees living rough upon his own land, and does not, Goddess be thanked, touch anything greater. Wronged farmers are a safer enemy than a land whose gaze has slowly turned outward to its neighbors’ fields.”
    Hem Duro’s eyes glittered dangerously, and he did not answer. For a moment Gael could not believe that the Druda had really aired a fear that Lien itself might have been responsible for today’s attack on Lord Knaar, but the prince’s next words left her with no doubt that she had properly understood the Druda’s meaning. “It is not fit that we should speak ungently of our northern neighbor,” Duro snapped. “Lien may have taken
Mel’Nir’s fair Balbank into its own realm, but there its outward push has ended. Neither my father nor any of his kin will stand for such words to be spoken.”
    Yet, whatever the diplomatic content of Duro’s words, a look of unhappy understanding flashed between the Druda and the prince. Gael could see a concern shared between them. De Reece shuffled his papers, interrupting with some small question. The moment of unease was past and gone.
    And that was all the sense the kedran were able to get out of their long ordeal. No more questions were put to them, and this matter of Eriu, or perhaps of Lien, was not aired to