I don’t know why, but I was convinced she was leaving to meet Jarek Mace. Taking her advice, I stripped off my clothes and stretched out on the bed, pulling the goose-down quilt over my body.
Sleep came swiftly and I dreamt of a lost swan, circling and calling in the sky above an ice-covered lake. I knew he was searching for something, but I did not know what it was. And then I saw, beneath the ice on the water, a second swan, cold and dead. But the first bird kept calling out, as he flew on weary wings.
Calling . . . calling.
There are, it seems to me, two kinds of pride. One urges a man to disguise his shortcomings for fear of looking foolish. The second spurs him on to eliminate those shortcomings. Happily I have always been blessed with the latter.
I set to work during the winter months to learn those skills that would make me a valuable asset to my neighbours. Despite my loathing of carcasses and blood, I taught myself to gut, skin and
prepare meat for the table. I learned to tan hides, to make tallow candles, to identify medicinal herbs and prepare infusions and decoctions.
And I laboured with axe and saw to supply Megan with firewood aplenty.
The villagers also taught me something valuable – how to live together in harmony, each man and woman a link in a chain, each dependent upon the other for food, clothing, shoes, bows, medicines. There was only one piece of communal property – a large, cast-iron oven. It had been bought in Ziraccu and carted into the forest, where it was leased to Garik the Baker. The rest of the huts made do with field-ovens, bricks of clay erected over tiny trenches. Garik would make bread and cakes for the villagers, in return for meats, hides and home-brewed ale. Megan earned her living by supplying herbs and curing meats. Wulf, the hunchback, brought in venison and boar meat. Each person had developed a skill that enhanced the lives of the other villagers.
Even Owen Odell found his niche. Each week, on the Holy Day, I played my harp in the village hall, creating new vigorous melodies so that the villagers could dance. I was not popular, you understand, for I was an Angostin amongst Highlanders, but I was, I believe, respected.
In my spare moments, which were few, I sat and watched the village life – observing my neighbours, learning about them, their fears and their hopes. Highlanders are a disparate people, a mixture of races, and the ancestry of many could be seen in their faces and build. Garik the Baker was a short, powerfully-built man with flat features, a jutting brow and a wide gash of a mouth. It took no .great imagination to see him dressed in skins, his cheeks painted blue in -the spiral patterns of his Pictish ancestors. There were several like Garik, whose bloodlines ran from the earliest human settlers; they were dour men, hard and tough, men to match the mountains. Others, like Orlaith the Cattle-herder, were taller, their hair tinged with the red of the Belgae, their eyes dark, their souls fiery and passionate. A few showed Angostin lines -long noses and strong chins – but these admitted to no Angostin heritage. This was hardly surprising since the Angostins were the most recent invaders, a mere few hundred years before. And Highland memories are long indeed.
My reputation among them was raised several notches when I used a Search-spell to locate a missing child. She was Wulf s youngest and had wandered off into the forest during a cold afternoon. Wulf and a dozen of his fellows set off to look for her, but the temperature was dropping fast and most of the men knew the child could not survive for long.
A Search-spell is not difficult to cast when one lives in a forest and people are few, though only the very best magickers could cast a successful Search-spell within a city. This one was slightly more difficult for me because I blended the spell with one of Warming. Even so, an apprentice could have cast it.