“Hate to see you lose your bet,” said Leif, sitting down on the side-step of the cart, out of the way. For a couple of minutes he just sat and watched Wayland finish hammering the horseshoe. Wayland plunged it into a bucket of water nearby; the water boiled and hissed in a rush of steam. The horse flicked its ears back and forth, unconcerned. “Man wants to make a living,” Wayland said casually, “you’ve got to go where the business is going to be.”
“You think there’s going to be business here?”
“Oh, aye,” said Wayland, fishing with the tongs in the bucket to get the horseshoe out. “Plenty of business soon, I think.” He glanced in the direction of the city gates, up and over the walls, eastward down the long valley. “Going to be fighting around here before long.”
He lifted the draft horse’s right forefoot, caught it between his knees, and turned his back on Leif for the moment. “Who would you say?” Leif said.
For a moment Wayland didn’t say anything. He glanced over his shoulder — rather hurriedly, Leif thought — and then down to his work again. Leif looked over his shoulder, the way Wayland had looked, and saw, past the various people still walking in the marketplace, past the beef carcasses, a strange little shape go by. A strange small man, less than four feet high. Not, as correctness would have it, a small person, but definitely a dwarf. He was dressed in noisy, eye-hurting orange and green motley, with a scaled-down lute strung on a baldric over his shoulder.
The little man passed out of view for a moment. “Duke Mengor has come visiting,” said Wayland, apropos of apparently nothing.
“Visiting Lord Fettick?”
“Aye, aye.” Wayland put the first of the nails into the first of the holes made for it in the horseshoe, drove the nail in halfway, and then started beating what was left of it upward and outward, clenching it up and around the edge of the shoe. “Been here a day or so, talking about whatever high lords do talk about. Nice dinner last night up at the High House.” He glanced sidewise up at the modest little castle that sat inside the city’s innermost ring. “Some talk about Fettick’s daughter being of marriageable age.”
“Is she?”
Wayland’s face worked, and he spat. “Well, she’s fourteen. Might be marriageable down south, but…” He raised his eyebrows. “Well, no accounting for foreign ways.”
“Do you think this marriage will come off?”
“Not if something else does first,” said Wayland, very softly. “Someone’s trying to save his skin.”
Leif dropped his voice right down too. “This wouldn’t have anything to do with Argath, would it?”
Wayland gave Leif a sidelong look, and spat into the fire: an old mountain gesture suggesting that some words were better not spoken at all, let alone too loudly. After a few seconds, he spoke. “Heard someone say that his armies were gathering. Not sure where they are this moment, though.”
Leif nodded. “Heard, too,” Wayland said, barely above a whisper, “that someone who should have brought him to fight, and beaten him…didn’t manage it.”
“Elblai,” Leif said, in a matching whisper.
“Saying is,” Wayland said, “she got bounced.” And he spat in the fire again.
Leif thought quietly for a second, watching Wayland go back to clenching down the nails of the horseshoe. He finished the last one, then dropped the hammer and picked up a big rough file, and started rasping the edges of the nails down. “Wayland,” Leif said, “would you have time to talk a little later?”
“Surely,” Wayland said after a moment. “Why not?”
“Somewhere quiet.”
“You know the Scrag End down in Winetavern Street? Between the second and third walls, going sunward from the gates.”
“The place with the beehive outside it? Yeah.”
“After dark, then?”
“Fine. Two hours after sunset be all right?”
“Fine.” Wayland straightened up from his work. “Well, then, youngster…”
Leif raised a hand in casual farewell, and walked away through the market, looking idly at the few things still laid out on the stalls: bolts of cloth, a last few tired-looking cheeses.
He was glad to have run into Wayland. The man was a noticing type, worth knowing. Leif had known him for quite a while, since his first battle in Sarxos after picking up the healing-stone. They had in fact met in a field hospital, since farriers, skilled with hot metal and the cautery, were much in demand on battlefields where magic-workers couldn’t be found. Wayland had been surprisingly gentle with the men he had been treating, for all that the treatment itself was brutal. He missed little of the detail of what was going on around him, and had a phenomenal memory. At the moment, Leif was glad of the possibility to talk over Sarxonian matters with someone besides Megan. A variety of viewpoints never hurt.
He wandered back out in the direction of the cookshop. And his heart jumped inside him as someone tapped his shoulder from behind.
He spun away from the tap, as his mother had taught him, and came around with his hand on his knife.
It was Megan.
She gave Leif a wry look. “I thought you said you were going to meet me inside the cookshop.”
“Oh…sorry. I got distracted. I ran into somebody I knew.”
“You mean you haven’t been in to pig out on the chili yet?”
His stomach abruptly growled. “Chili,” he said.
Megan grinned. “Come on,” she said — and then paused at the sound of a voice raised in peculiar song on the other side of the market stalls.
“What the frack is that?” Megan said. The voice was accompanying itself on something very like a ukelele.
Now I will sing of the doleful maid,
And a doleful maid was she,
Who lost her love to the merman’s child
In the waves of the great salt sea—
The owner of the voice, if you could call it that, came wandering out among the awnings and the tables, trailed by the raucous laughter and catcalls of some of the stall-keepers as the song got ruder. Its source was the dwarf in the noisy motley. He paused by one of the stalls, a fruit stall in the process of being packed up, and began strumming rather atonal chords one-handed, while trying to snatch pieces of fruit with the other. The fruit-seller, a big florid woman with a walleye, finally lost her temper and hit the dwarf over the head with an empty basket. He fell over, picked himself up again, and scampered away, laughing a nasty little high-pitched laugh reminiscent of a cartoon cockroach.
Megan stared after him. “What was that?” Leif said to the fruit-seller.
“Gobbo,” said the fruit-seller.
“Sorry?” Megan said.
“Gobbo. That’s Duke Mengor’s poxy little dwarf. Some kind of minstrel he is.”
“No kind of minstrel, madam, not with that voice,” said one of the butcher’s men who was going by with a quarter beef-carcass on his back.
“Some kind of jester, too,” said the fruit-seller. “And some kind of nuisance. Always running around, picking and thieving and looking for trouble. Getting under people’s skirts…”
“You’re just jealous ’cause he didn’t want to get under your skirt, madam,” said another of the stall-keepers who was packing up.
The fruit-seller rounded on the man and began to assail his ears with such a flow of language that the stall-keeper hurriedly vanished behind someone else’s stall. Leif chuckled a little and turned back toward Attila’s. Megan stood there a moment, gazing off toward where the dwarf had vanished.
“I don’t know why,” she said to Leif, “but he looks familiar….”
“Yeah….” Leif looked where she did, and then said, “I’ll tell you why. You saw him in Minsar.”