Dreamer's Pool by Juliet Marillier Page B

staying. I thought of things I could say, brutally true things, and discarded them one by one. He’d asked me for help, that night in the woods. He’d said he had nowhere else to go. If I didn’t want seven years to become eight, I had to be careful.
    ‘That makes it all the more important to get on quickly,’ I said. ‘If Conmael thinks I can set up as a healer at Winterfalls, then I suppose I can, one way or another. Maybe this prince what’s-his-name will dispense some largesse. Though that’s doubtful. I imagine there’s a court physician for him and his nobles, and my job will be tending to the folk the prince’s healer thinks himself too good for.’
    Grim gave me a look, but said nothing.
    ‘What?’ I snapped.
    ‘Got a low opinion of yourself.’
    ‘Did I say that?’
    ‘Didn’t have to.’ He drew breath. ‘You don’t want to start believing those things, you know. What they used to say, in that place. The names. The . . .’
    I waited.
    ‘It’s all lies. You know that. But when they keep on saying it, over and over, when they make you say it yourself, when they . . . It’s hard not to believe it. It’s hard not to think you’re the lowest of the low. For some of us, maybe it wasn’t lies, maybe it was the truth. But it was never true for you.’
    For a bit, I couldn’t think of anything to say.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Grim. ‘Shouldn’t have talked about it.’
    ‘You can’t know that,’ I said, setting down my cup and holding my hands out to the fire. Why was it so hard to get warm? ‘You know nothing about me. I might be all those things they said.’
    ‘I do know.’
    At least he hadn’t invited me to share my life story. If there was anything he and I had in common, it was the understanding that we wouldn’t trespass on that forbidden ground. ‘Your faith in me is without any basis in fact,’ I said.
    ‘Faith’s faith,’ said Grim.
    It was too dark and cold to do anything but sleep, so we slept, or I did anyway. Grim wasn’t much of a sleeper. Freedom hadn’t changed that. In that place, he’d catnapped during the day, when the guards were elsewhere, though he’d always woken when they were coming. His uncanny awareness had alerted him even when he was asleep. At night we’d talked, sometimes, and when we weren’t talking he’d gone through his routine. I’d fallen asleep to the sound of him breathing hard as he performed some impossible exercise, and when I’d woken, whether it was morning or still night, he’d always been awake before me. Sometimes standing at the bars, as if he was waiting for me. Sometimes lying on his pallet staring at the roof. But never sleeping.
    We’d become used to waking fast in there. Mostly, at night, they left us to ourselves. But sometimes Slammer would take it into his head to come in and stir us up, and it didn’t pay to get caught off guard. Times like that, Grim would shout to warn us and we’d scramble up and get to the back of our cells.
    Still, I wasn’t expecting to be shaken rudely awake now, out in the middle of nowhere in a thunderstorm. I jumped up, but my mind was still half-trapped in the dream I’d been having, a bad one involving Mathuin of Laois.
    ‘What?’ I growled, clutching the blanket around me. Danu save us, it was cold!
    ‘Someone down there.’ Grim was almost swallowed up by the darkness. The fire was down to ash-coated coals; his knife caught the last of its light, gleaming in the shadows. ‘In the woods.’
    My common sense fled. My mind filled with Mathuin, his men-at-arms, his thugs here to make an end of us and rob me of my last slim chance to see justice done.
    ‘Step out and show yourself!’ I shouted, before Grim grabbed me and clapped his big hand over my mouth. For a moment I fought him – a pointless exercise – and then a light appeared in the woods below our camping spot, and another, and a third, and it became plain that our visitors were not Mathuin’s folk but Conmael’s.
    Grim let