Taking Flight (Ethshar) by Lawrence Watt-Evans

Author:Lawrence Watt-Evans [Watt-Evans, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Wildside Press
Published: 2010-11-24T05:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Eighteen

“Maybe it was her mother,” Asha suggested, “or her grandmother.”

Ezdral shook his head.

“But Irith is only fifteen,” Kelder pointed out. The thought that his intended bride was not just a Tintallionese runaway who had visited Shan as a child was deeply disturbing; the idea of his own Irith roaming the Small Kingdoms with another man, before Kelder had even been born, was intolerable, and he was groping for a way to deny it.

“Oh, yes,” Ezdral agreed, “she's always been fifteen.”

Kelder sat back and considered that, and considered Ezdral, as well.

He looked every day of his claimed sixty-two years, and then some—his hair and beard were long, white, thinning, and uncombed; his face was rough and lined, his eyes sunken and bloodshot. His lips were a pale, unhealthy color, his skin yellowish. He wore a tunic that hung loose on his sunken chest; the garment had once been brown, but was now blotched, stained, and faded, so that it was black here, grey there, and a washed-out tan elsewhere. His breeches were tanned leather, with large shiny patches on the knees—and probably, Kelder guessed, on the backside as well. They ended in tatters just below the knee, and from there down, his legs and feet were bare.

His hands were thin and bony, and stayed curled and claw-like at all times, apparently involuntarily; the nails were cracked and blackened, the hairs on the back white and wirelike. When he lifted a hand to gesture, it shook. His wrists were bone and tendon and loose skin, with no fat at all, no muscle tone. He wore no ornaments of any kind, and his garments had no trim or embroidery and were of the plainest possible cut—not only were they decrepit, they hadn't been much to start with. His belt was a twisted strip of rawhide, with a single pouch hung on it, a drawstring bag about the size of Asha's head.

It was very hard to imagine him as a strong young man, adventuring with Irith.

On the other hand, why would he have made up such a tale? And he spoke with an unquestionable sincerity.

But it couldn't be the same Irith as the one Kelder meant to wed. “Her grandmother, it must have been,” he said.

Ezdral shook his head. “I don't think so. She's magic, remember?”

“She's only fifteen,” Kelder repeated.

Even as he said it, though, he was remembering all the puzzles and peculiarities about Irith—how she claimed to have done so much since leaving her apprenticeship, even though that couldn't be more than a year or two; how she remembered an inn in Shan that had obviously been abandoned for years; all the other references to times and places and doings that she could scarcely have fit into fifteen years. The Tintallionese theory didn't explain it all; in fact, it hardly explained any of it, really.

If she were actually sixty or seventy years old, her youth and beauty magically preserved, that would explain it.

But it wouldn't explain her, Kelder thought. It wouldn't explain the person that Irith was.

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