"What ails you?" asked Vanora sharply. 'Tell me not that the weight of that jar has unmanned a strapping fellow like you!"
"No, my dear young lady. It's just that I haven't eaten in three days."
"Great Zevatas! We must remedy that." She rummaged in the bread box, the apple bin, and elsewhere.
"What shall I call you?" asked Jorian, setting down his crossbow and his pack. "It seems not meet to refer to one who has saved one's life as 'Ho, you!'"
"I haven't saved your life."
"You will have, when you get me something to eat. Well?"
"My name is Vanora." As Jorian looked a question, she added: "Vanora of Govannian, if you like."
"I thought I knew the accent. Is Rhithos your father or uncle?"
"He, a kinsman?" She gave a short, derisive laugh. "He is my master. Know that he bought me as a bonded maid-of-all-work in Govannian."
"How so?"
"I had stabbed my lover, the worthless vagabond. I know not why, but I always fall in love with drunken louts who mistreat me. Anyway, this oaf died, and they were going to chop off my head to teach me not to do it again. But in Govannian they let outsiders buy condemned criminals as slaves, provided they take them out of the country. If I returned to thither, they'd have my head yet."
"How does Rhithos entreat you?"
She set down on the counter a plate bearing a small loaf of bread, a slab of smoked meat, a wedge of cheese, and an apple. Standing close to him, she said: "He doesn't—at least, not what you'd call 'entreat.' So long as I obey, he pays me no more heed than a stick of furniture—not even at bedtime, for he says his magical works require celibacy. Now he's in his smithy, fiddling with Daunas' new sword; won't put his head out of the shed until supper time."
She looked up at him from close by with half-opened lips and swayed so that her full breast rubbed gently against his arm. He could hear the faint whistle of her breathing. Then his eyes strayed to the laden platter.
"If you'll excuse me, Mistress Vanora," he said, reaching around her, "what I need right now is food, ere I drop dead of starvation. Where would you like me to eat it?"
"Food!" she snapped. "Sit at yon little table. Here's some cider. Don't gulp it down; it has more power than you would think."
"I thank you, Mistress." Jorian bolted several large mouthfuls, then cleared his mouth long enough to say: "Do I understand that Rhithos is making a magical sword for the Grand Bastard?"
"I can't linger for light talk, Master Jorian. I have work to do." She strode out of the kitchen, the heels of her boots banging.
Jorian looked after her with a smile curling his stubbly new beard. Now what, he thought, is she angry about? Is it what I suspect? He ate heartily, drank deeply, and wandered back into the cluttered living room. Here Rhithos the smith found him hours later, rolled up in a bearskin on the floor and snoring.
The faint sound of the opening door roused Jorian. As the smith entered his house, Jorian scrambled to his feet and bowed.
"Hail, Master Rhithos!" he said. "Your servant is humbly grateful for your hospitality."
The smith was shorter than Vanora, who entered after him; but he had the widest shoulders Jorian had ever seen. The huge hand on the end of his long arm had a grip that made even Jorian wince. The face under his tousled gray hair was seamed and wrinkled and brown, and out of it a pair of heavy-lidded, cold gray eyes looked without expression.
"Welcome to my house," rumbled Rhithos, "I regret that your arrival was delayed by a trifling misfunction in one of my protective spells. Vanora tells me you arrived half-starved."
"True. I exhausted the provender I had with me and sought to kill some game to replace it. I'm not altogether incompetent with the crossbow; but not so much as a hare did I see."
"The silvans must have driven the beasts out of your way. They guard them from hunters—not for sentimental love of the creatures, but to hunt themselves. Sit down there, Master Jorian. For the evening you may take your ease, although tomorrow I shall find ways for you to earn your keep whilst you tarry here."
As Vanora poured wine, Rhithos continued: "Now tell me how you got into this strange predicament."
"It began five years ago," said Jorian, glad of a chance to talk after the long silence of the forest. "But I must go back further yet. My father was Evor the clockmaker, who passed his last years in Ardamai."
"Where is that?"
"A village of Kortoli, near the capital. He tried to apprentice me in the making of clepsydras. But my hands, while steady enough on bridle, sword, plow, or tiller, proved too big and clumsy for such fine work. I mastered the theory, but the practice eluded me. He gave up at last, albeit not before I had traveled with him to several of the Twelve Cities where he had contracts to install water clocks.
"Next, he apprenticed me to Fimbri the carpenter, in Ardamai. But after a month Fimbri sent me home with a bill for all the tools that I, not having yet learnt to control my strength, had broken.
"Then my father apprenticed me to Rubio, a merchant of Kortoli. This lasted a year, until one day I made a bad error in adding Rubio's accounts. Now Rubio was a bitter and hasty man, and things had lately gone badly for him. So he took his rage out on me, forgetting that in the year I had been with him I had grown from a stripling to a youth taller than he was. He laid into me with his walking stick, and I took it away and broke it over his head. It only stunned him; but I, thinking I had slain the man, fled back to Ardamai.
"My father hid me until it transpired that Rubio was not seriously hurt. Then he got me into the house of a childless peasant, one Onnus. He told me that, if I moved my draughtsmen aright, I might inherit the farm, since widower Onnus had no known kin. But Onnus was a skinflint who would try to sell the squeal of a pig when he butchered it. He worked me sixteen hours a day and nearly starved me. At last, when he caught me sneaking off from work to spark a neighbor's girl, he laid into me with his horsewhip. Of course I had to take it away from him—"
"And flog him with it?" said Rhithos.
"No, sir, I did not. All I did was to throw him headfirst into his own dungheap, so hard he came out the other side, and went along home."
Warmed by the wine, Jorian became gay, speaking rapidly with animated gestures. "My poor father was in despair of finding a livelihood for me. My older brothers had grown up to be good, competent clockmakers, and my sisters were married off, but what to do with me? 'If you had two heads,' quoth he, 'we could charge admission to see you; but you're only a great, clumsy young lout, good only for clodhopping.' So we bethought us of Syballa, the local wise woman.
"The witch put herbs in her pot and powders in her fire, and there was a lot of smoke and flickering shadows with nothing visible to cast them. She went into a trance, muttering and mumbling. Then at last she said:
'Jorian, my lad, meseems you're fit only to be either a king or a wandering adventurer.'
'How so?' quoth I. 'All I want is to be a respectable craftsman, like my dear father, and make a decent living.'
'Your trouble,' she went on, 'is that you are too good at too many things to push a plow handle or to sweep the streets of Kortoli City. Yet you are not so surpassingly good at any one thing that it is plainly the work wherefor the gods intended you. For such a one, if he be not born to wealth and rank, the only careers are those of adventurer and ruler. Betimes the one leads to the other.'
'How about soldiering?' said I.
'That is classed with adventuring.'
'Then soldiering it shall be,' I said.
"My father sought to dissuade me, saying that I had too much brains for so routine a career, which would prove nine parts insufferable boredom to one part stark terror. But I said my brain had so far availed me little and set out natheless. Kortoli rejected my application; I think Rubio must have put in a bad word for me.