The Medusa Plague (Defenders of Magic) by Mary Kirchoff

Author:Mary Kirchoff [Kirchoff, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780786963492
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2012-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

When Kirah heard the knock at her door, she thought it must be Dilb with some wood for her fire. With Bram gone to parts unknown, the baker’s son was the only one she would trust to enter her little room. Still taking no chances, Kirah opened the door slowly and slightly, then pressed her right eye to the crack. Her breath abruptly caught in her throat, and her heart skipped a painful beat.

It could not be him. After all these years, and all her wishes, it could not be Lyim. The world was too big a place, her dreams too inconsequential, for Lyim to arrive to help her twice in a lifetime. And yet there he stood on her stoop, beyond the crack in her door.

“Hello, Kirah,” the mage said. “Is this how you welcome an old friend, peering at him like he’s a robber in the night?”

Kirah primmed her mouth in superior fashion, then spoiled the effect by laughing girlishly. “Yes—I mean no! I mean, hello and come in!” she managed at last, flustered beyond all reason. Kirah opened the door with one hand and pulled closed her ragged wrap with the other, suddenly self-conscious. It had been so long since she’d been expected to behave like anything but a crazy hermit.

As Lyim walked into her room, Kirah noticed that something about him was different, yet she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. It wasn’t just the simple, oversized brown robe that seemed to engulf him, or the odd leather mittens, although they were uncharacteristic. His face and hair were essentially unchanged, no early gray at the temples. Maybe it was the eyes, she thought, looking for the sparkle of humor she remembered there and not finding it. Perhaps it was the man’s stride, slower and more contained. His was no longer the strut of a peacock proud of his plumes.

Unlike Lyim, Kirah had never cared what she looked like. Until this minute, anyway, when a recent memory of her visage in a street puddle made her shiver. Her unwashed hair was dull gray instead of blonde, and flat against her head, as if she wore a cap. Kirah felt well enough, but her eyes and cheeks were sunken so that she appeared far older than her nineteen years. She looked beyond bony in the sacklike dress and wrap the baker’s robust wife had given her some months ago when her previous raggedy shift had disintegrated at the shoulders.

Kirah made herself as small as possible in a reed-backed chair by the hearth. “Have you come to save the village again?” she asked more caustically than she’d meant. “There’s a plague here.”

“I know.” Lyim removed his left mit and set it on the small table by the door, as if he had done so for years. “That is why I’ve come. I was hoping you’d know where Guerrand is.”

She looked up, mildly surprised. “You’ve come to the wrong place, then,” she said. “Guerrand came to see me just after we prevented the Berwick siege, but I haven’t heard from him since.

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