“Yes, Kehf-rey! What are you grinning about?” Vik snapped as well.
“What are you grinning about, Vik?” Herfod retorted.
Behind him, Pola gasped and then began to laugh. She hooted in wicked delight.
Keth glared at her and then at Herfod and Vik. Both men eyed him with blatant amusement. “What are you grinning about?” Keth snarled.
For answer, Vik pronounced the next line of the passage. He quoted in perfect Winfellan. His brother piped up with an exact Ulmeniran rendition. Vik proceeded on to the next line, to which Herfod chimed a translation. Keth, his eyes like moons, turned bright red and howled in embarrassment.
Herfod smirked and guided the cart around a huge ditch in the centre of the worn road. Now the entertainment wouldn’t be poetry, but the fireworks of an out and out lover’s spat. Pola knew it as well and piped down to watch. Now this! This was entertainment!
“Bastards!” Keth shrieked. “Buggering bastards! Foreign tripe stuffed with maggot-ridden cocks! How was I to know Vik Canell is Ihmelvik?”
“But it’s a secret, Keth. You weren’t to know at all.”
Keth tossed the book at the author. Vik caught it and unwisely grinned. On cue, Keth blew up. It took two hours to appease the mortified man, aided by the promise of some unpublished, very torrid verse to be uttered in privacy. Pola was immensely entertained.
Kehfrey, Herfod, translator, monk, thief, assassin, saint, he sat on the driver’s seat and listened to the argument, for once not filled to the core with desolation. He didn’t know if it was the journey, the love he witnessed between Keth and Vik, or simply the sharp mountain air, but he couldn’t feel perfectly unhappy today.
He looked ahead at the road winding down the hill and on up again, and he smiled. He was glad to be here just now. He was content.
***
Water dripped, the sound eternal. He considered it might drive him mad, when he thought to notice. The droplets were his only clock in this obscure world, for he floated in blackness. He was frozen within it.
He could think. He could hear. But not feel.
No. Not feel. The icy chill was a comfort to him. He was a buoy on an invisible sea, held aloft by … something. He could not tell what; too frozen, too weak, too debilitated.
He was at one with the dark surrounding him. But for the dripping, his world was timeless. But for the caretaker the Ancient Power had sent him, he was utterly alone.
The water shifted suddenly. He knew it by the change in his motion. He waited expectantly.
A tenuous touch, then a slow tug; he was pulled toward the invisible shore. Silence but for the dripping water, his breath, the breath of the one who had come.
Clawed fingers fluttered over his skeletal face. Wet fur touched his tender skin. He opened his mouth with an effort. The fingers, gentle despite the long claws, verified that his withered lips were indeed open. A warm muzzle touched him. He was fed.
The caretaker regurgitated into his open mouth and pushed him back into the freezing water before the heat of foreign touch brought him pain. He swallowed the mouthful. Minutes, perhaps hours later, the caretaker pulled him in for another feeding.
He had no idea how long he had been there, in this deep place of refuge. The droplets plinking down into the black womb counted only the time between feeds, not the long periods between the caretaker’s visits. Those drips, they went on too long to count.
He didn’t care. He would remain in the black womb, forever with the maddening patter of slow underground rain. He wanted the darkness. He wanted nothing else. Nothing.
His mouth betrayed him. Unwelcome, his hoarse, unused voice broke the silence of his haven. The single word fought with the ceaseless dripping. The name of his want echoed back at him for what seemed ages.
“Kehfrey!”
He listened and he felt pain, but the hurt was in his soul where glacial water could not numb it.
***
The Soulstone Chronicles continue in The Gryphon Taint: Volume One.
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Bound in Stone 3 Page 49
