Somewhat stiffly she climbed down from the tree to hear Rainfall calling:
“Tala Tala Comeoutfree! They’re gone, and it is safe.”
He hurried to meet her as soon as she extended her neck above the bushes.
“More of the thane’s men?” she asked.
“Better and yet worse, at least for you. It was the Dragonblade and a party of hunters.”
Breath and death, the Dragonblade! Wistala couldn’t help but crouch at the name.
“He said a young dragon had escaped him, blamed the miss over the loss of his beloved pack in the summer. He has to go back to training pups for a while.”
“You fed him and his horses, then?”
“What could I do? He carries a Hypatian Knight-Seal. I’m old fashioned enough to bow to any who carries it, even if he hunts a friend. Though I felt no need to disclose your presence, especially as his line of questioning allowed me to keep my honor and your friendship.”
“What do you mean?”
“The description he gave was laughable. He got your size right, but had the color wrong—lots of talk of wolves’ hides and such. I could honestly say I’d not seen anything like that about the road.”
“Why the road?” she wondered. Of course, they first came upon my scent on the same road near Tumbledown.
“I gave his dogs as vast a meal as I could manage so they’d sleep rather than sniff around the barn. Same with the men. I fear our dinner tonight will be their leavings, little though there are.”
Wistala was grateful for a moment that she hadn’t been hidden in the barn or somewhere closer. There would be danger, yes, but temptation. Men were vulnerable when they took off their armor to sleep. She’d learned the knack of walking silently through the home without letting her claws touch the flooring to save Rainfall’s woodwork.
“Have they gone for good, or will they be back?”
“They’re hurrying south. They believe you to be heading in that direction, but on what evidence, I can’t imagine.”
“I may have left southbound marks crossing it from the old hovels beneath the twin hills.”
“Or perhaps the Dragonblade makes guesses to impress his men. A right guess is long remembered, and there’s always an excuse for a wrong one.”
Wistala spent another cold night in the yew tree that evening, just in case the Dragonblade doubled back.
Rainfall had her observe him carrying out his duties on the road, more as a mental diversion for her than anything else. For two active weeks as the temperature dropped, he and a dozen men went along the road, filling in holes; then they applied pitch to the timbers of the bridge to proof them against ice and snow. This part of the north saw frequent freezes and thaws and snow, thanks to the air currents of the Inland Ocean a few horizons to the west. Even once the labor was done, he bargained with the men a little extra to dig up vegetables and bring in hay and slaughter and salt some goats.
Payment was a problem, for Rainfall had little money. He gave away odds and ends from the vast house in return for their work, anything from candlesticks to cooking skillets. Wistala understood now why the place seemed so bare, save for his high room of books and basement of wine.
Then they settled in for the winter.
Wistala had been installed in what had once been what Rainfall called a “health-room,” a wooden enclosure of fragrant cedar wood, where stones heated in the furnace would be brought so that water might be dripped on them. It had a gutter in the center that made for easy cleaning, and she was happy to find hatchling scales on the floor each morning, with new ones coming in fast and thick owing to a supply of tarnished brass plates and drinking vessels she smelled out buried in the dirt floor of one of the abandoned houses.
Wistala asked about hominid commerce one night over dinner, and Rainfall did his best to explain it. “A dwarf would make it simple, I’m sure. I’ve not much of a head for additions and subtractions and excises and taxes.”
The last in the list seemed to be his chief worry. As she understood it, twice a year he owed his thane an amount of money that had been set at a time when the estate was prosperous, and though Mossbell had the misfortune of having a troll appear and pillage the lands, he was still expected to produce the same sum. No amount of pleading with the thane could alter it.
“What do you get in return for these taxes?” Wistala asked.
“The thane’s protection.”
“But not from trolls.”
Rainfall poured himself a little more wine. “He has posted a reward, in the form of a small sum and relief from all taxes and excises for five years. But few are willing to take the challenge. What happened to Eyen is still fresh in many minds.”
“Your son tried to kill the troll?”
“His death is my fault. The bundle containing Lada had just arrived, and I’d engaged a wet nurse. He and I argued about his scattering bastards around the thanedom. Elf blood passes down an alliance of aspect and tongue that human females find pleasing, and he took advantage of manner and countenance. I . . . I challenged him to perform some useful duty. I meant that he seek gainful employment to defer the cost of his daughter, but he rode out on Avalanche, the last of his grandsire’s line of mighty warhorses, to solve all our difficulties on the point of his lance.” Rainfall struck the table with his elbows so hard, the plates and goblets jumped. Then he concealed his face with his long-fingered hands.
Wistala stood still, never having seen a violent move from her host before.
“I beg your pardon,” he said when he collected himself. “You’ve finished your salmon already. Would you care to dispose of mine? Having a drakka about so simplifies the clearing up.”
Wistala learned the cloudsign for snow, sleet, and rain that winter—what weather Mossbell saw depended on the direction of the wind. It blew mostly from the west, and if it veered farther south for a while, it grew warmer, but when it came out of the north, it became bitterly cold and made her alternately ravenous and torpid.
Father had hunted in this winter wind a year ago to feed his hatchlings?
Being indoors frustrated her, and on the first sunny day after the sun turned south again, she set out to walk the grounds of Mossbell.
It wasn’t an accident that she walked west, crossed the road, and plunged into the broken forests covering old grazing land. The ground was still snow-covered where the afternoon sun couldn’t reach, and what wasn’t snowy was wet. She found sign for wild pigs and roaming goats.
Finding troll tracks took a little time.
She found several troll-traps easily enough. It took a good deal of ear, nose, and eye-work to establish what they were. The troll would dig holes in the ground, perhaps her full body-length deep, and then cover them with a lattice of slight branches and growth, with fragrant berries in the center. It lined the bottom with flat rocks chipped and broken in the hope that a sheep or pig would blunder in and injure or trap itself.
She found bones at the bottom of one.
Then she cut across its tracks. The troll had huge three-toed feet, though the toes didn’t point in the same direction as they did with elves and dragons. Something like the mark of a horse hoof stood in the center, with the digits stretching out not quite in opposite directions, like widely spread bird toes. Here and there, similar, smaller versions of the tracks could be seen that she guessed were its hands.
She found a heap of droppings close to the river-cliff edge. They were like a rotten melon filled with little white worms left on a hillock. Her nostrils closed in disgust.
The ground here had a trodden-on look like a cattle wade, with a profusion of tracks and divots, and grubby prints on the rocks at the edge of the cliff.
Wistala couldn’t see her host’s bridge from this part of the river, and the twin hills near his estate were just bluish lumps. The river canyon stood so wide here that objects on the far side couldn’t be distinguished from each other.
White birds crisscrossed the river, looking for food. Another variety, gray with yellow beaks, poked around the rocks at the base of the cliff under all the marks.
Wistala craned her neck out as far as she dared, digging her tail into the crevice between two sturdy rocks like one of Rainfall’s fishhooks buried in a trout’s jaw.
A cave marred the fluted sides of the canyon wall, closer to the top edge than the base.
She could imagine what the birds at the base of the cliff were feeding on.
Instincts older than she took over as she evaluated the troll’s home. Fresh water would never be a problem. Enemies couldn’t reach it without a good deal of difficulty, it would take a huge climbing pole or ladder to reach the cave mouth from the river, and anything that walked on two feet would risk its neck climbing down from above. A dragon might like it even better: you could fly in through the river canyon at night, skimming the surface, and escape observation. She imagined there was usually food of one sort or another to be had near a big body of water as the Inland Ocean, just a horizon downriver.
Wistala examined the cliff until she found a ledge thick with mosses and ferns, downwind from the cave. She wanted to get a look at this troll. She climbed down and settled between the branches. It was cool, with the wind whipping up the river valley, but she’d spend nights in worse spots.
