The meal proved barely edible, perhaps as repayment for what the innkeeper considered ylvin troublemaking. The soldiers endured it glumly. The Cyncaidh, by contrast, was grim, not glum. From his aura, Varia surmised that he was irked with her for putting the ylver in a bad light.
The rain still poured thick and cold when they left the building, but as the two girls ran through it, Hermiss laughed in a sort of high glee. She’d eaten little but the bread and cheese, trimming the mold off, and had had a single mug of ale. Varia decided the girl’s mood was more an aftereffect of the initial excitement than of drink.
The storm-dimmed daylight had graded through dusk into twilight. Someone, probably a stable boy, had hung a lantern inside the stable’s front entrance. A clutter of old single-trees, eveners, pack saddles and the like was piled outside a box stall, cleared from it to make room for the two of them.
A soldier entered the stable carrying a stack of large coarse blankets provided by the innkeeper. He took off the piece of canvas protecting them, then came over and handed a pair to Varia. She looked at them with more than her cat vision, then began to pass her hands over them.
“What are you doing?” Hermiss asked.
“Killing the vermin.”
“Really?”
“Certainly.”
“What kind of vermin?”
Varia paused, concentrating. “Let’s see. There are lice—and fleas. No bedbugs.”
Hermiss giggled. “You’re fooling.”
Varia shrugged and made her final passes, then spread the blankets side by side on the thick hay. The air was pungent, but not unpleasant, with horse urine and manure blending with the smell of hay—clover and timothy. From their cubby she could hear the low easy talking of the half-ylvin soldiers, the sound somehow comforting as they climbed the ladder into the hayloft. There are worse places than this to be, she told herself.
Earlier a soldier had brought their oiled leather bags from a horse pack and hung them on harness pegs. She pulled dry clothes from hers and changed into them, draping her wet breeches and socks on the edge of the manger, and her tunic over a horse collar still hanging on its peg. Her wet boots she stood near the stall’s entrance. Hermiss followed her example.
Then they lay down on their blankets. Varia willed the girl to be quiet and go to sleep, and lay quiet herself, her eyes closed, waiting for the drumming rain to still her mind, a mind beset by unwanted thoughts. Of Idri. Of Liiset, who’d abandoned her. Of what Tomm had said about Sarkia’s plans for her. Of how far they were now from where she wanted to be. Interrupted by the sound of a man running in through the stable door—a man alone—bringing her out of herself. Cyncaidh, she decided. He’d probably been talking with the innkeeper. She closed her eyes again.
“Were you fooling about killing vermin?” Hermiss murmured. The question almost made Varia jump; she’d thought the girl was sleeping. Looking at her, she shook her head.
“I really wasn’t. Fooling, that is.”
Somehow this brought giggles from Hermiss, followed by a question in, for whatever reason, a conspiratorial tone: “What did you do to that man who tried to kiss you? Really do.”
“Our term for it is shock fingers. I gave him shock fingers in his crotch.”
Hermiss almost burst, trying to control the giggles bubbling out of her. When she’d calmed again, she murmured, “He had it coming.”
“True. But I shouldn’t have said what I did. Then he might not have.”
“They were all whistling and saying things before you ever said anything.”
“True again. But I still shouldn’t have. Especially when they were whistling and yowling like that.”
There was a moment’s silence. Varia lay back and closed her eyes again.
“What do you think would have happened if you didn’t know how to do shock fingers? And the soldiers hadn’t come in?”
Varia sighed, answering without opening her eyes. “Nothing. Because I’d have turned around and gone back out as soon as the whistling started.”
“Do you think they’d have raped us?”
Hermiss, you’re a blockhead, Varia thought, but said nothing. Hermiss interpreted her silence, and this time her words were soft, quiet.