She jerked about and fled toward the door, provoking in him at that moment a sort of scornful amusement. And then, without warning, his head reeled and he staggered against the hearth as if drunk. An agony, bright and unbearable, pierced through his skull so that he let out a cry of pain. She halted in the doorway, staring at him, and in that moment he felt his mind touch hers.
Shaken, he leaned against the stone, gazing in her face almost pleadingly, but she had somehow shut him out. Next moment she turned and was gone out the door.
Orhvan and Ras came back at noon, having bartered all the baskets but three for provisions and a woolen shirt.
“Anici came and brought us eggs,” Orhvan said. “And how is my guest today? Did you see a white-haired girl?”
“Yes,” Raldnor said, but no more. He had sat before the fire a long while, lost in a dazed frustration after she had gone.
“No other visitors, I trust? No. As well. It’s better I deal with the Ommos when he comes.”
They ate some of the food Orhvan had brought, and the wolf gnawed delicately on a bone at Ras’s feet.
“This is how it is,” Orhvan said. “We sometimes take our wares across the border into Xarabiss, to Xarar or Lin Abissa. Ras’s carving fetches a good price, despite his modesty, and Anici is a cunning weaver. The profits are more than useful in the cold months. Now suddenly we find there is a new law—no Lowlander can leave the Plains without a permit signed by a Vis.” Orhvan’s face had, like his tongue, gradually fulfilled its early promise of expressiveness: he frowned. “There is a Vis merchant here in the city, an Ommos with his household. Oh indeed, a curious phenomenon. But, as you will unfortunately see, he uses largess to manipulate the city dwellers, for who has much pride when they’re starving? Now we have to ask him for a permit, in exchange for which he will take a commission on our sale amounting, as I understand it, to over half. I expect his steward today.”
Raldnor felt a stirring of anger, and these first intimations of racial sensitivity were strange to him.
“Why let him exploit you? Can’t the people here band together against him?”
“That isn’t our way, Raldnor. We Lowlanders are a passive breed. You perhaps may not quite be able to accept this.”
“Because of my mother’s blood? Maybe. I don’t dispute the fact that if a man strikes me in the mouth, I’ll strike him back with interest.”
“There you have it,” Orhvan said.
“Possibly it was your philosophy that frightened Anici away. She generally waits for us.”
It was the first thing Ras had said, though he had looked at Raldnor intently from time to time since they had come in. Raldnor met his deep-set shadowy eyes. In the depths of them he thought he glimpsed a love-haunting. With contempt Raldnor said: “She seemed a timid girl. No doubt well taught by example.”
“Anici is a child still,” Ras said quietly.
“And you are ambitious that she remain one.”
Orhvan spread his hands.
“Be still, my friends. You bring discord on my house.”
“I apologize,” Raldnor said stiffly.
“No need, no need,” Orhvan said, but his heart troubled him. “You are Vis,” he thought. “Like the chameleon, you have assumed some of the color of your situation, but under all, you are a dark man with black hair, and a package of lust and anger and arrogance in your soul.” And then he thought with compassion: “Poor boy, poor boy, to be pulled thus two ways at once. There is a look there too, the pain of the blind and dumb.”
“It is the Storm Lord who makes these permits necessary,” he said aloud, deliberately ignoring the brief disturbance in the conversation. “He has no love for the Plains people. I’m afraid we shall suffer for that.”
“Storm Lord,” Raldnor said, “the Vis High King.”
“Yhaheil says,” Ras murmured, “that he has the scales of a serpent on his arm because a snake frightened his mother as she carried him.” His impenetrable gaze leveled, “and he has, so Yhaheil says, an extra finger on his left hand. An irony you will appreciate, Raldnor.”
Raldnor felt the malice sting him. Before he could answer there came a loud knocking on the street door.
“Orklos,” Orhvan said softly, and rose.
The open door revealed two thin Lowland male children dressed as pages, and behind them the looming figure of the unwelcome visitor. He moved into the room and seemed to fill it up with his scented smell and his well-fed body, and the barbaric-colored cloth of his robe.
“Good day, Orhvan.”
His speech was curiously slurred by his thick Ommos tongue. A ruby glinted in an upper canine. His black eyes rolled languidly toward the unknown face.
“Who?”
“My name is Raldnor.”
“Indeed. I have a message for this house. From my master, Yr Dakan.” He yawned and glanced again at Raldnor. He saw the stunted left finger and pointed at it immediately. “You gave it to a god?”
“No.”
“No. Well, well. In my land it is customary for a man to dedicate something valuable to his gods. Often it is more precious than a finger, hmm?” Orklos turned as if remembering Orhvan. “My message. Tell Orhvan the basketmaker that he is invited to dine at Yr Dakan’s house tomorrow night.”
“Thank your gracious master. But I asked for a permit.”
“So, so. You will not refuse a dinner. The permit will be granted, perhaps, after the food. You are all welcome. The little pale girl also. And this young man too. The hour after sunset.”
Without waiting for an answer, Orklos turned and swayed through the street door, the two pages running after him.
Through the afternoon Raldnor walked about the streets in the grip of a desolate and panic-ridden anguish. At first he could think only of the girl Anici and how, in that astonishing instant, his mind had seemed open to hers. If only—ah, goddess, if only. Might Anici be the key for him? Yet as a leaden sunset darkened the sky, he began to think again, and with increasing distress, of his foster mother Eraz. He felt, in some irrational way, that he had abandoned her. “I must find her,” he thought and was unsure if it were Anici or Eraz he visualized.
He made a vow to leave his copper counters on Orhvan’s table and be gone, and then remitted the vow at once.
In the night he lay awake on the pallet and heard the dim dismal wailing of wolves which seemed often very close about the house. He remembered Orhvan’s warning that wild beasts ran into the city in the cold.
“Perhaps she’ll come in the morning, as today. Perhaps. Perhaps,” he could not help hoping.
Finally he left the pallet and went down to the hall. Mauh widened her opal eyes at him from her place by the hearth, and he scratched between her ears, still unable to quench his instinctive reaction to her ancestry. A polite reserve existed between them.
It was not for some time that he realized there was another in the room. As before, it was a faint, moth-soft movement that gave away the presence of Yhaheil the Elyrian.
The man was seated on Ras’s bench, his dark hair falling round a waxen face.
“Raldnor,” he said, and his voice was a whisper that shivered on Raldnor’s spine.
“Yhaheil.”
“I’ve seen strange pathways in the stars on this night. The man who knows fear, who will comfort him?”
Raldnor flinched at the unemphatic doom of the words, but he was also suddenly heavy with sleep.
“Predictions are subject to error,” he said, but Yhaheil ignored him.
“It’s her doing. Ashne’e. She reaches out of time and stirs the world.”
“He’s eccentric or else mad,” Raldnor thought, but was not convinced of this.