am no turncoat.”
You spoke the word, not I, Ilbran thought.
The herald again cried their attention. “Felon-freed, a girl of six summers and six winters. Madness, danger, sorcery!”
Syresh frowned. “That would be the youngest escaped, not quite a woman yet, but old enough to be betrothed. May she find some refuge.” He looked at Ilbran. “Good that it is Festival, truce time. Those words might be my death if they were spoken to one of my own kind.”
“I would not betray you. But what is this talk of sorcery?”
“I do not know. Some herald’s lively embellishment, to give some reason that they wish to take her—besides the true one.”
The herald cried details of face and dress, and gave warning again of madness, of danger. “Blood price and shelter death! The death of pitch and fire.” They paid him no heed. Others joined them, a baker, a lord’s servant, a traveler from the forest lands. They talked of news and rumors, speaking more freely after the soldiers had gone.
Bells rang at evening time to call the people to the great dance, but Ilbran ignored the forming circles, and turned toward his home. He had had enough of freedom.
He threaded his way through a maze of rich men’s dwellings, built of huge stones that must have been raised by sorcery. The buildings lay low to the ground, slanting roofs tiled with split stone, blank walls shown to the street, windowed only on the inside court. Only the tall bell-towers rose high into the air. Once, when he was younger, Ilbran had climbed one, to look west far across the city out to sea, and east beyond the stone roofs of the city to see the blaggorn plains that fed them all, and the dim blue of the mountains beyond.
His home lay to the west, near the sea-cliffs. As Ilbran neared it, the streets became narrower and dirtier, the houses not so wide and long. The stone houses built by other men’s hands came to an end, and the mud-brick cottages began, dotted along the edge of the cliffs.
His home was one of the poorest of those. He looked at it with newly critical eyes, having spent a day away from it. The roof would need re-thatching with blaggorn straw when the autumn harvest was done. The mud walls did not give enough protection from the summer’s heat, so he had bought shelter in the city, in the cellar of a stone house. That had used up the last of his winter’s savings.
“Kare Maya,” he called, and his mother came out of the house to greet him, with the black courser that he had tamed for her bounding behind her. Kare was fair-haired, tall, and smiling always; he had gotten his looks from her, but he feared he had not learned her gentle ways.
He knelt and asked her blessing. “So you returned so soon from festival?” she asked.
“No sooner than you, Maya,” he said, knowing she had scarcely left the house that day.
She laughed. “The sky will dance its changes without us to guide it in the dance.”
“Are you blaspheming? After you taught me so well!” he teased her. “Ha, Fel!” and he greeted the courser as it sprang into his arms to greet him, its dagger claws sheathed in its tiny velvet-soft forepaws. Then the courser twisted away, and its claws raked at the edge of his robe. “Fel, what would you?” he asked.
The courser loped some paces away, and turned to stare at him, impatient at his slowness. He followed it curiously. Coursers, the long-legged hunters of the plains, were wise, in their way. If they could speak, he thought that they would show themselves wiser than many men.
He followed the courser down the cliff path, down to the beach. It led him to his boat, where he had dragged it high on the beach and propped it on stones, upside down, so he could oil the stiff sea-courser hide, dried out by the long summer.
Ilbran looked at it in perplexity. He had no enemies to harm his work, and the boat seemed unchanged. But Fel pranced around him as though proud of some great achievement. Ilbran looked doubtfully at the gap underneath the boat—large enough for anything to hide.
Like all of his kind, Fel feared nothing, and could not understand that men might have fears of their own. Ilbran had no wish to corner a sea-courser, though it was near impossible that one would be found on shore this soon after