Master Darian and Sional must have arrived. They would take the causeway. There was no reason not to-and every reason to be as open as possible.
Birnam itself could cause them any number of problems. None of them, other than Sional, had ever been there. The few Gypsies who had could give no real details about the place, and in any event, they hadn't been much past the border area. The fens were too tedious to cross, and in bad seasons, the causeway flooded. Once you crossed the fens, Birnam had no large faires; most commerce took place at weekly Markets instead. Goods moved through the auspices of the Trader's Guild. The Free Bards were not yet numerous enough to expand outside this kingdom, so Talaysen had no idea of what the lot of the traveling musician was like within Birnam.
Not terribly helpful, he thought sleepily, taking his turn at the reins while Gwyna dozed inside. Somehow young Kestrel was sound asleep-but perhaps, like a soldier, the young man had learned to take sleep when and where he could get it.
He and Rune were to drive while the moon was up, giving the mules light enough to see the road. Since it was a straight track across the downs, bounded on either side by hedgerows, there was small chance they'd get lost. The worst that could happen would be that the mules would stop, pull the wagon over to the side of the road, and proceed to gorge themselves or sleep in their harness until someone woke up and got them back on the job.
Even if something frightened them, they likely wouldn't bolt-or so Gwyna claimed, saying that was the reason the Gypsies preferred mules over horses as draft animals. She claimed that when startled, they would probably stand stock still and wait for whatever it was that frightened them to show itself to be either aggressive and dangerous, or not a threat after all.
'And if they do bolt,' she'd told him, 'Let them have their heads. If they run, they've either been hurt badly by something you can't see, or they've seen something they already know is dangerous. They probably have a better idea of what's safe to do when there's real danger than you do. Let them follow their instincts.'
As if he could do anything else! If they took it into their stolid heads to run off, he wasn't even sure he'd be able to hang onto the reins.
Rune climbed out of the back to sit beside him on the driver's bench. After a moment, she began massaging his shoulders, and he sighed with pleasure.
'I've been thinking,' she said. 'About magic.'
'So have I,' he replied. 'I know we don't know everything. I know Peregrine doesn't know everything, however much he likes to pretend that he does.'
'Exactly.' She nodded her head vigorously. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at her, and smiled.
'Can I say something gauche and male?' he asked. 'I think you look wonderful. The dress, your hair down, no leather hat hiding your face-'
'Oh, that's gauche and male, all right,' she grinned. 'But I like the compliment. I have to admit, sometimes I get a little tired of breeches and loose tunics. A pretty dress-well-Gwyna will probably tell you I was preening like a popinjay when we were going through the outfits the other women offered me and picking out the new clothing.'
He cautiously took his attention from the road for a moment to steal a kiss. She stole one back.
'Now, about magic-' she said. He sighed.
There was no getting her mind off business when she was determined. 'All right. About magic.'
'For every offense in everything else, there's always a defense. I can't believe that there's no defenses against this seeking-talisman those killers are using.' She braced herself against the swaying of the wagon over an uneven stretch of road, and waited for his response.
'I've been thinking the same thing,' he said. 'That was why I managed to talk Peregrine out of the one he took from the dead man. I was hoping we could find a way to fool it if we studied it long enough.'
He transferred the reins cautiously to his left hand, and fished the talisman out of his breeches pocket. 'Here,' he said, handing it to her, and taking proper control of the reins again.
She examined it as best she could by the illumination of the three-quarter moon. It wasn't very impressive by either sun or moonlight; there wasn't much there but a small copper disk with a thin lens of glass cemented over it, suspended from a copper chain. She peered at it.
'Is there something under that glass?' she asked.
She had better eyes than he did. 'Peregrine says it's a single strand of hair. He says that places where magic is used more openly tend to be very careful about things like nail-clippings and hair. We'd probably better assume that Birnam is one of those places. They'd probably been keeping every strand of hair he lost since he was a baby, and when they knew he was alive, they started making talismans to find him.'
Talaysen had no idea how the thing had been made, but the fact that it had survived the fire intact was remarkable enough. It didn't look at all damaged, in spite of the fact that it had been the actual focus of Peregrine's defenses, the point from which the fire sprang. A distinct disadvantage of having a magical object; unless you also had a magical defense-which Peregrine called a Shield-your object could actually call an offensive spell to it, simply by existing.
Once they'd figured out how to outwit this thing, Talaysen planned to sink it in a deep well.
'Does it still work?' she asked.
'Try it for yourself,' he told her. 'Hold it in your hand and tell yourself that you want to find Sional.'
She obeyed-and frowned. 'It still works, all right. Nasty thing.' She rubbed the hand that had been holding it against her skirt, although there was nothing physically there to rub off. Talaysen had done exactly the same thing after Peregrine had shown him the trick of working it.
'I haven't been able to figure out how it works,' he confessed. 'Though I have to admit, I haven't done as much with it as I might have if it didn't feel so-slimy.'
She agreed, grimacing distastefully. 'Still-I grew up working in an inn. I emptied chamber pots, cleaned up after sick drunks, mucked out the stables. It won't be the first time I've had to do something nasty, and so far, this doesn't make me feel any worse than one of those jobs. I'll see what I can do with it.'
She was quiet for a very long time, her brow furrowed, her eyes half-closed. After a while he began to 'hear,' with that strange inner ear, little snatches of melody and dissonance.
When she finally spoke, he wasn't ready for it, and he jumped, startled.
'Sorry,' she apologized. 'I guess I should have moved or something first.'
'It's all right,' he assured her. 'I was sort of dozing anyway, and I shouldn't have been. Have you gotten anything figured out?'
'Well, I think I know why Peregrine said nothing could be done about it,' she replied thoughtfully. 'This doesn't work like our magic-in fact, I'd be willing to believe that it wasn't made by a human at all.'
'Huh.' That made sense. Especially if you were doing something that you didn't want countered. There were pockets of strange races scattered all over the Twenty Kingdoms; it wouldn't be unheard of to find other races that worked magic. And unless you found another mage of the same race, your odds against countering what had been done might be high.
'That could be why it feels-and sounds-so unpleasant,' he offered. 'It's not operating by laws of melody that we understand, or even feel comfortable with. I've been told that there are some things living off by themselves in the swamps in the south that can make you sick by humming at you.'
She nodded vigorously. 'You know, that's really what's going on here; it isn't that it really feels bad, it's that it makes you feel bad. I had a chance to talk to a Mintak about music once; he said he couldn't stand human sopranos and a lot of human instruments because they were too shrill for him. And I couldn't hear half of the notes of a Mintak folk-song he sang for me.'
He bent his head down so he could scratch the bridge of his nose. One of the mules looked back at him, annoyed at getting a rein-signal it didn't understand.
'Maybe what we need to do is figure out the logic, the pattern in it-then and try and disrupt or block that pattern with something we can stand?' he offered.
'I don't know,' she replied, dubiously. 'That could be like trying to catch a Mintak with a minnow-net. Or a minnow in a snare. But I suppose that's the best we can do right now. You want to try?'
He took the charm with distaste. 'I don't want to, but I will. Besides, maybe some of this stuff Peregrine stuck in my head will help.'
'Maybe,' she replied. 'It couldn't hurt, anyway, as long as you remember we aren't playing by human rules
