“How is it?” Wistala asked. Oh, the inadequacy of words, even tuneful Elvish! If he were a dragon, she could let him feel her concern. Let him know . . .
“I can’t move my legs, Wistala. The pain isn’t bad at all—if anything I’m cloudheaded. But such wounds . . . if I should succumb, you must bring Lada to Mossbell, look out for her until she is of age to run the place. I’ve told Mod Feeney, and I’ve told Jessup—” He sank back into the cushions again.
“What happened to that priestess?” Wistala asked.
“She rode ahead,” Jessup said from his seat. “Hammar has a healer more skilled than she.”
It would be hard to say who heard the pursuing hooves first, the horses or Wistala. Both startled.
“Jessup, try to get a little more out of the horses,” Rainfall said. “Whip them if you must.”
He turned his gaze on the drakka. “Wistala, if they catch up to the wagon, jump on Stog and take that bag of gold to Mod Feeney. She’ll see that a judge and a high priest come before the thane and restore Lada to her home.”
As dawn came up, some of the men began to run toward the bridge. Home stood just on the other side of the canyon. A more clear-headed one jumped on the lead wagon horse and urged it on.
As they came down the road—the incline helped speed the wagon—Wistala saw the first rider appear behind. Others, ten or eleven in all, came down in a long straggling line. She saw no sign of the bird-banner.
She looked ahead. A group of people stood on the bridge. She recognized Mod Feeney by her odd hat.
Behind, Vorl drew his sword and waved it forward, calling to his men.
Rainfall looked at the coming riders, moving at a pace to catch the wagon before it even crossed the bridge.
“Wistala, on Stog, now!” he gasped.
“No. Wait,” Wistala said, seeing the group ahead. What sort of warriors had Mod Feeney gathered at the thane’s borders? They seemed dreadfully undersized.
The wagon rattled past Feeney’s gathering, the horses’ hooves thundering on the wooden planks that bridged the central arch in the ancient masonry. The apron- and tunic-clad assortment were mostly women and children. Wistala guessed them to be families of those in Rainfall’s ill-fated expedition, from the way they waved and called to each other.
Jessup halted the column well across the bridge.
The men dismounted and embraced their wives and children. Many of the latter shrieked as they circled the cart with streamers tied to sticks. Curly-tailed dogs barked, adding to the happy chaos.
Wistala peeped at it all through gaps in the wagon-boards. Some of the dogs barked at her.
“For the last time, Wistala, take Stog and go!” Rainfall said. “Look, Vog’s armsmen come.”
“Your Feeney’s building a wall to stop them,” Wistala said, watching the activity behind.
Rainfall lifted himself a little higher. “What’s this?”
A strange sort of barrier was stretched across the bridge, mostly the women and children holding hands. Their men ran to their families, and Mod Feeney pointed them into place.
“Don’t let go of each other. Even if they ride straight for you,” Mod Feeney said over the clatter of the approaching hooves.
The riders slowed their horses, pulled up.
“What’s this supposed to be,” Vorl snarled.
“You’ll do no murder in our thanedom,” Mod Feeney shouted back.
“Then we’ll retrieve that elf and hang him from thane Vog’s high lintel,” Vorl said. “He stabbed my lord in the back.”
“I was there—it was Vog who did the backstabbing,” Mod Feeney said.
“Ha! Out of my way, or we’ll ride you down,” Vorl said. “Stirrup to stirrup now, my men.”
“Is it come to this?” Mod Feeney said back, her voice a little more high-pitched. “One Hypatian Thanedom riding down the children of another? High honors to carry home, the blood of babes on your horse’s hooves.”
“Enough, Vorl,” said the compatriot Wistala recognized from her oak-limb perch above the road. “Buy your way into the thane’s hall with different coin.”
“And Thane Vog not cold yet!” Vorl said. “How dare you—”
“How dare you lie to the men of House Gamkley. Beware, men. He lied to you about Vog’s death. He died a scoundrel. I should have spoken then, but I’ve been a fool. A fool drawn by promises and unearthed gold.”
Vorl brought his horse around, pointed it straight at Mod Feeney. His heels went out, and his spurs turned inward.
Wistala nerved herself to jump from the wagon. If Vorl rode through the line of people, she’d turn him into a pyre of burning cloak and horsehair. Nothing would reach the wagon but the stench of charred flesh—
The man who at last spoke the truth to Vorl’s company rode up and seized his horse by the throat latch. “Enough, Vorl. Remember the battles of our boyhood. Thanedom against thanedom at Ciril and Starkhollow. Would you see that repeated? Hammar has the friendship of barbarians and more besides, and he’s rich enough to hire mercenaries. Let us put away sword, bury Vog, and take counsel.”
“Elvish bewitchment, taking the heart out of you!” Vorl shouted, turning his horse south. “You’re all under it! I’ll call none of you my friends again.”
The others gave short head-bows to Mod Feeney and turned for the south end of the bridge.
The man who had grabbed Vorl’s horse looked at the linked-arm assembly and smiled. “My compliments on your battlements, Mod,” he said. He rode off.
Mod Feeney sank to her knees. “I should have turned to candle-selling and book-copying long ago,” she sighed.
“I’ll see her a high priestess if it’s my last act,” Rainfall said, falling back into his feedsack chair. A long brown leaf dropped from his hair. “Jessup,” he called. “Take me to Mossbell, that I might die clean in my bed.”
Chapter 16
Rainfall did not die.
As he recovered from the blood loss, it became clear to all that he would never walk again, barring some kind of miraculous healing. At first Wistala wondered if it was best that he had lived beyond his wounding (though she later looked back on that sentiment with shame). He could not walk, and he made a rather pitiable sight being hauled around like an arrowed deer over the shoulders of Forstrel, Jessup’s nephew.
The only time he moved as she remembered him was upon Stog, for he rode the mule about Mossbell’s lands, offering advice—that’s how it sounded to Wistala. He was far too polite to issue anything that sounded like an order to the new tenants. And at table, he presided from his chair with his former charm.
To help him in the house and on the grounds, the Widow Lessup and her whole family moved into Mossbell. With Rainfall unable to so much as work the handle of his well-pump, he needed a good deal of assistance.
Wistala helped him up and down stairs. She regularly wore her game harness, and Rainfall sat atop her back gripping it as she negotiated the tight, winding stairs of Mossbell.
“I should flood the place and pole about, as they do in Wetside,” Rainfall said. She’d heard stories of its famous water gardens before.
Mossbell’s old ferry-call rang thrice for dinner, forestalling another tale of spiced shrimp and tuna. The Jessup and Lessup clans trooped in from the fields in answer.
Yari-Tab had her litter of kittens in an old laundry basket upstairs, and Jalu-Coke followed with a fresh litter of her own in the barn. Thanks to Mossbell’s odd hole-and-corner architecture and rich gardens, the kittens had no end of places to explore, and the older cats feasted upon the mouse and rat population. The inside cats took to following the Widow Lessup about, for she was constantly moving the remaining pieces of furniture and ordering her daughters and sons to clean, polish, and organize, and the curious kittens had learned that explosions of startled insects or mice could result every time a wardrobe was pulled out.
“A hundred years of dust in this house, if it’s a day,” the widow said. “Len-boy, fetch fresh rags from the washroom and tell your sister she’s falling behind on the laundry again!”
Rainfall could only spread his hands and apologize when the widow found a pile of ancient crockery under a chair in the morning-room, or spider-sacs thick as peas in a pod under his bed, until Wistala wondered who was truly the master of Mossbell now.
“Carpentry and cooking are the only indoor work I’ve ever been able to manage,” he said, after another astonished outburst when she awoke a family of raccoons napping out the day in the upstairs linen armoire.
Wistala had become something of a public figure on the estate. The Lessup boys brought their friends, and they’d watch her napping in the sun, not knowing that dragons often cracked an eye as they slept, nerving themselves for an approach. Eventually they’d come up to her in tight little groups of two or three, and one would reach out his grubby hand and run a fingernail across her scales. She’d lift her fringe and drop her griff and bring round her head with a piping dragon cry, and they’d run away shrieking as though expecting to be roasted.
