Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "comments" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+comments" bit from the end of the URL.
19 (part II) - Tal-Borin
Once again, the player was watching helplessly while the character got petrified with fear and anger. At least being petrified kept her from being rash! She did say rather the wrong thing at one point, but nobody seems to have noticed. I hope I can push her enough next time to make her do what needs doing.
I think Albetire Ilaini is somewhat like Indian English: speakers of it are convinced they’re speaking the real proper language, but it’s full of borrowings and idiosyncrasies so native “homeland” speakers have difficulty understanding all of it. For example, Venla probably counts partly or wholly in Iss-Peranian without realising. [ETA: and then I completely forgot to write what this referred to. Remedied.]
The next day we asked Veh to travel with us because we were all going the same way anyway. In the middle of the day Veh went off to hunt —to thank us for the food we’d shared with him, he said— but he didn’t come back! We couldn’t find him with our minds either. After a while Tao and Mazao set out to track him, while we stayed with the mule. She got restless— she wanted to be gone, after all this wasn’t a camp! I thought about making camp, but we didn’t know how long it would be and this was hardly a place to stay overnight.
Then we heard the sound of hooves and barking and hid in the wood. A rider appeared in the clearing, a pale-skinned man with a face spotted like Princess Ayneth’s, about twenty years old or even younger, wearing a large hat with a feather in it. There were dogs, too, who came and surrounded us. They were cheerful enough, tails wagging, but there were a lot of them and they seemed to think they’d caught us or something.
“What have we here!” the man exclaimed when he saw us. “Two beautiful girls! All alone in the forest? Won’t you come with me to the castle!” “No, thanks,” I said, “we’re waiting for our friends.” “But your friends are invited too, of course! Come, it’s getting cold and it will be dark soon.” He was right about that, but that still didn’t make me want to go with him. There was something creepy about him— I thought he might be with the Nameless but I wasn’t completely sure. “But I’m discourteous,” he said, “let me introduce myself. My name is Lyam astin Tavalyn.” We didn’t tell him our names, discourteous or not! It was certain now that this was one of the no-good people.
Then he grabbed Zendegî around the waist and pulled her on his horse. And at the same time he gave me a whack with his mind that made me reel. I think he expected it to knock me out, but that didn’t happen. I could see that Tao and Mazao were very close, out of sight in the wood, and tried to reach them but we hadn’t practiced actual talking yet. But then Mazao suddenly jumped at Lyam, and I pulled Zendegî off the horse, while Tao talked to the dogs to make them quiet.
Lyam fell off the horse too, of course, and he and Mazao fought really dirty. Mazao got a kick in the ribs, and when Lyam’s hand went to his knife Mazao pulled at the hand and made it crack. Then I tried to get the knife, but the fighters were both in the way and all that happened was that Mazao bruised my wrist with his knee. In the end Lyam scrambled up and held on to the reins of his horse —he couldn’t climb into the saddle— and made it go, letting it drag him. Tao was still keeping the dogs quiet, but they looked more and more uneasy. When he let them go they all ran after their master, barking.
Mazao was in a bad state: he had a cracked rib, and some of the bones in his foot were broken, and his left hand was hanging at a strange angle. “I’ll go and get help in the village,” Tao said, “you look after him!” Now it was useful that we were nurses, and that we’d thought of bringing bandage linen. We put a tight bandage around his body, but the hand was hard. “This is going to hurt,” I said. “Do I get to drink brandy?” Mazao asked, and we thought that wasn’t a bad idea, at least he’d be able to relax the arm. We gave him one sip and he pulled a face, but he did want another sip. It did make him relax, but even so little brandy made him roaring drunk. “You’re beautiful!” he said in a slurred voice. “Both of you are beautiful, as beautiful as Tao!” Then Zendegî pulled his arm straight while I tried to move the bones to the right position, mostly with my hands but a bit with my mind as well. And it worked! We splinted the arm with a stick. The foot we could only bind tightly, because neither of us knew about all those little foot-bones, but it did make it hurt less.
Then a small procession came through the forest: Tao, with a very large woman, three younger and somewhat smaller women and two young men, some of them leading horses. “This is Lava and Lava and Halla and Liei and Alin and Jelan,” Tao said. “Athal wanted to come too but he’s too small.” It turned out that the large woman was called Rava —Ishey can’t say ‘r’— and she was the village smith. The young men and women were her sons and daughters, at least some of them because when we got to the village there were three small children as well, two boys and a girl. The girl was about two, and she was licking an apple. “Not go to bed!” she said. “Apple not eat up!” “Didn’t you eat up your apples either?” I asked the two boys. “We can’t go to bed if she is still up!” the eldest said. This was Athal, who had wanted to come too. “Just like the king!” I said. “Yes,” he said proudly, “the king was here in Idanyas just when I was born. So they called me that.”
We were in a large barn attached to the smithy, There were people, and horses, and a straw pallet for Mazao to lie on (with his head in Tao’s lap). And someone was making lots of pancakes on the forge fire. “Welcome to the headquarters of the Guild of Anshen in Tal-Borin,” the smith said. “You speak good Ilaini for foreigners!” I told her that I was half-Valdyan and I’d grown up speaking Ilaini, but the way they talked here was very different from what I’d learnt at home.
Rava told us a lot about the castle: the old lord was too old to take an interest in anything, his son was always drunk, his daughter-in-law Lady Lyase was the real power, and the grandson was just plain evil. That must be the young man we’d seen, Lyam. I was even more glad now that I hadn’t accepted his invitation!
“Aren’t you two a bit young for Guild runners?” Rava asked when we’d told her we were on our way to take messages to the king. (How long will people keep asking that?) “And why didn’t you go by Essle?” Well, because we’d been warned against Essle, it was a very dangerous city! Rava laughed at that, “Don’t think it’s less dangerous here! But it’s a good thing you’re here, because there’s trouble at the castle that someone ought to investigate.” It turned out that people came in the night, groups with five or six horses, and left again in the morning with packs to go south. “On a boat?” I asked, because I suddenly remembered the woman in the Ishey town looking along the river. “No, boats can’t go on the Mera here, they have to go part of the way south with horses.”
Now if we hadn’t had the letters, I wouldn’t have been so eager to be off as soon as we’d found Veh and made sure he was all right— on the other hand, if we went to the king and told him they needed a Guild runner, it would be half a year before there was someone there! But I was much too tired and worried to think clearly, so I was glad that one of Rava’s daughters (Riei, I think) had a bath for us behind a curtain. She scrubbed our backs and washed our hair, and scolded her sister: “Halla’s given you my shirts!” But they were the only ones that weren’t much too wide, though they were much too long. Then we got a place to sleep, a bed in a cupboard (it was called a bedstead) on one side of a passage, and on the other side there was another bedstead where Mazao and Tao slept.
The next morning we got breakfast in the kitchen of the house, not the smithy but on the other end of the passage where we’d been sleeping. As we were eating porridge, a woman came in without knocking, two men with lances behind her. She was dressed in leather, with fur at her wrists and ankles, and her hair was as bright as Princess Ayneth’s, only curly. I’d probably have thought her beautiful if she hadn’t terrified me so, worse than the woman in town or even Master Orian. I felt as if I was rooted to the bench and my hands were stuck to the table. “Ah, there are your guests,” she said to Rava, and to us, “Your friend is at our castle, he had a run-in with a boar. Broken ribs, broken leg, we’re taking care of him.” Then she saw Mazao, “oh, did you meet a boar too?” “Yes, definitely a swine,” I said under my breath, but I don’t think anyone caught that. “Well, he’s looking forward to you visiting him. You can stay at the castle too, of course, it will be so much more comfortable.” “Thank you, we’re quite all right here,” Zendegî said. “Ah well,” the lady said, “come to visit, then. Oh, and Rava— my husband inquired about the lock.” “Yes, I’ll finish it,” Rava said, “but I’ll consider it part of the rent.”
When the lady had left, two of Rava’s daughters had to hold her hands so she couldn’t break things from rage. “That Lyase! Wants me to work for nothing, too!” From what they told us it had been like this for a long time— that was also why Riei couldn’t marry her young man: she didn’t want to be a smith, but a farmer, and her young man had a farm some way up the hill, but the lord and lady forbade him to marry the smith’s daughter but had found him another wife. “But that’s how it goes,” Rava said. “Surely not everywhere!” I said, “Jerna astin Rhydin would never do that. And I’m sure the king wouldn’t, either.”
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