Lord of the Isles by David Drake Page B

lowering his foot flat. He was embarrassed to have the older people discussing him as though he were a funny cloud formation. “Can’t we pay you something? The least you’ve done is saved my leg and I know it.”
    â€œThe folk of this borough didn’t run me out as others might have when I settled in the woods here,” Nonnus said. “There’s nothing else I need—”
    The smile again, there and gone like a rainbow.
    â€œNothing material, at least. If I can set a few bones or cool a fever, that’s small enough recompense for what the community has given me.”
    He nodded toward Tenoctris and added, “Besides, she’s the one responsible for you being able to walk already. Well, I never denied that wizardry was real. Healing’s a better use for it than others I’ve seen.”
    â€œYou’re from Pewle Island, aren’t you?” Tenoctris said. “They hunted seals there in my day.”
    Nonnus nodded. “They hunted seals in my day too,” he said without intonation. “And still do, I hope. It’s an honest life.”
    â€œThe young man with the procurator is a wizard,” Tenoctris said without a transition. She glanced toward Garric to include him in the conversation, but it was obviously the hermit’s
viewpoint that she sought. “He’s powerful, and he’s frighteningly ignorant of the forces he’s working with.”
    â€œHow do you tell?” Nonnus said. He had the interest of a craftsman for another’s specialty. “Has he been working magic here?”
    â€œHow do you tell when a seal’s about to rise?” Tenoctris replied. “How does Garric tell which way the tree he cut will fall? Power trails after Meder like the hair of a comet filling half the night sky.”
    â€œThen he knows you’re a wizard too?” Garric said. “Have you talked to him about it?”
    A sailor wandered through the courtyard with a pair of villagers. In a loud, slurred voice he said, “—and the folk on that island didn’t wear anything but necklaces of bones. They made me a king, like enough, they did, and that only because I’d saved a silver mirror from the wreck.”
    There was a pause as a bottle gurgled. Villagers murmured respectfully. The voices moved out the gate.
    Garric stepped back from the stable doorway, drawing the others with him. The hanging lamp would deter folk looking for privacy to do things they weren’t quite drunk enough or desperate enough to do under the eyes of the community.
    Nonnus dropped into a squat, his haunches against the brick base of one of the posts. They and the beams they supported were ancient oak, so black with the grime of ages that only touch could tell their grain.
    â€œMeder bor-Mederman thinks I’m somebody’s maiden sister if he thinks anything about me,” Tenoctris said. Her smile reminded Garric of Nonnus’ expression when he was talking as much to the past as to his companions. “He doesn’t really see the forces he works with, much less notice that I attract them also. And of course by Meder’s standards, I’m not really a wizard at all.”
    â€œMistress …” Garric said. He didn’t know how to treat Tenoctris. On the one hand she was a penniless castaway with manners and tastes as simple as those of a Haft shepherd—perfectly willing to sleep in the stable when the inn was full
of paying customers. But she was also educated beyond even Reise’s standards, a noble and courtier as surely as these two from Valles, and besides that a wizard. The parts were unfamiliar, and the way they fit together was as puzzling to Garric as a river running uphill.
    â€œIf you brought yourself here from so far away,” he stumbled on, “you’re—you must be really powerful. All that kid did”—Meder was some years older than Garric, but he was a wispy