Barbara Hambly - [Darwath 06] - Pretty Polly by Hambly

Author:Hambly
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-07-14T05:00:00+00:00

*

This time, they made up parties of all the Guards in the Keep, including the private corps of Lord and Lady Sketh, Lord Ankres, and the red-clothed warrior-monks of the Church. The search started from the pool of blood – horribly splashed on walls and ceiling – that Rudy identified immediately as the missing boy’s. “What was he doing up here?” asked the Icefalcon, moving off down the short blood-trail with a glowstone in one hand, his sword in the other.

“He was always exploring,” said the boy’s uncle, one of the Weff weavers.

Nedra Hornbeam, the representative to the Keep Council from fourth south, added, “He didn’t want to stay home, I think. Not when his father was drunk.”

And the young man Kei added self-righteously, “That’s no reason for his mother not to keep a better hand on him.”

They followed the blood-trail. When it ended, the groups fanned out, torches flickering on the black ceilings, the grubby walls, cats darting away before them at the confusion and the noise.

Gil watched the glowing eyes vanish into the darkness. Thoughtfully, she turned back, and made her way alone back to the Aisle – not a great distance, from where the blood had been found – and crossed one of the narrow catwalk bridges, eighty feet above the dark floor and moving streams below, then descended by a ladder-like stair to fourth south.

Thinking about Pretty Polly.

Thinking about her dream.

She found Lysha Weff in the weaving-room among her friends – young girls in their middle teens, talking, whispering as they worked at the endless tasks of women in the Keep, spinning wool and flax accumulated during the short cold summers, for the long winter of confinement and darkness ahead. Lysha sprang to her feet when Gil came in: “Have they found anything?” Her eyes were red from tears. “Perik’s sister went out with the searchers—”

“What is it?” someone else pleaded. “They said they found blood—”

“Listen,” said Gil. “Did Tallia – your sister – have a place that she’d go to be by herself?”

The girls all glanced at each other.

“Or to not be by herself?” added Gil softly.

They looked at each other, looked away.

A girl with the fair hair of the old Felwood fiefs said, “Pretty much everybody around here goes to the Archway Room. It’s about two hundred feet beyond the Dog Fountain…”

“They’re supposed to not be able to find you there,” added an older girl, taller and pregnant. “I mean, if your Dad gets one of the wizards—”

“Wizards don’t go looking for missing daughters,” said someone else, and Tall Girl sniffed.

“My dad told them I’d been kidnapped.”

“Ah,” said Gil, remembering that occasion. “Did Tallia meet someone there?”

More traded glances. Lysha set aside her spindle and led Gil into the hallway, and – to be safe – a good dozen feet away from the door before she said, “She goes there to meet Kei.”

Gil frowned. “I thought she was engaged to Derron Dyerson.”

“She is,” said Lysha. “But he’s so—so grumpy. He’s Papa’s partner – they’re making spinning-wheels together… and he’s been in love with Tallia for just ages.

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