‘Ninny?’ Farnor’s jaw jutted.
Gryss interposed himself between the two antago-nists. ‘We were looking for Rannick, Marna,’ he said. ‘We haven’t seen him for quite a time and were getting worried. What have you come here for?’
Marna’s truculence faded. ‘The same,’ she said.
‘Since when have you been interested in Rannick?’ Farnor taunted.
Marna rounded on him. ‘For mercy’s sake, Farnor, don’t be so…’ She flailed about for a word. ‘Dense,’ she decided, after considering several less charitable alternatives. ‘I’ve no great liking for the man, but he doesn’t normally disappear for this length of time, does he? He could be lying injured somewhere, for all we know. Ye gods, we’d be more bothered about a missing sheep! I came here because I thought I should…’ She shrugged her shoulders and her anger fizzled out. ‘… do something.’
Gryss gave Farnor a look of amused reproach, but Farnor could only manage one of injured indignation.
‘You put us both to shame, Marna,’ Gryss said, put-ting a hand on her arm. ‘But I think I can set your mind at rest, or at least partly so. Apparently some of the gatherers met Rannick when they were exploring up past the castle.’
Marna’s eyes widened. ‘Past the castle!’ she ex-claimed, in some alarm. ‘What was he doing up there?’
Gryss shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he replied. ‘But I think perhaps you needn’t concern yourself about him any more. At least he’s not lying hurt somewhere, and if he’s survived this long he’s not going to starve to death.’
‘I suppose so,’ Marna said. ‘I needn’t have bothered then, need I?’ She gave an awkward little smile. Gryss was about to commend her again for her concern when she frowned and wrinkled her nose. The state of the room had begun to impinge on her. ‘This place is disgusting,’ she announced. ‘I’ve seen cleaner stables.’
‘Yes, well, I think we’d better leave it as we’ve found it, don’t you?’ Gryss said, turning her towards the door. ‘We shouldn’t really be here at all.’
Marna followed his gentle urging out of the cottage and towards the broken gate. Suddenly she stopped, causing Gryss to stagger.
‘What are you two doing here, anyway?’ she asked forcefully, returning to her original question.
Not having a clear answer, Gryss, a lifelong bache-lor, made a mistake. He ignored the question in the hope that it would go away. ‘How’s your father, Marna?’ he said, looking purposefully towards the gate. ‘I haven’t seen him for some time, I…’
Marna’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s going on?’ she de-manded. ‘Rannick wandering about beyond the castle for weeks on end. And running into gatherers. And you two skulking about his cottage…’
‘We were not skulking,’ Gryss protested. But Marna raised scornful eyebrows by way of reply and deliber-ately allowed an embarrassing silence to develop until another thought occurred to her.
‘And how did you know that the gatherers had seen him?’ she asked.
Gryss capitulated and briefly told her of Nilsson’s visit the previous evening, confining himself to the simple facts and omitting any references to the slaughtered horse and Nilsson’s concern about Ran-nick’s ‘strangeness’.
‘What did he want to look at Rannick’s cottage for?’ Marna asked, when he had finished.
Gryss took refuge in his ignorance. ‘I’ve no idea,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened when his men met Rannick, and he didn’t say. He just asked me to show him where Rannick lived, so I did.’
Marna set off for the gate. ‘It wasn’t very polite, was it?’ she said, incongruously.
Gryss agreed with some relief. ‘But he is a soldier and he does have the King’s authority for anything he does.’
Marna sniffed. ‘I shouldn’t imagine the King’s so ill-mannered,’ she said.
Gryss could not help but laugh at this observation and its solemn utterance.
‘How’s your father?’ he tried again, as they walked back down the pathway.
‘He’s well, thanks,’ Marna replied off-handedly. Then she stopped again abruptly, and her face clouded. ‘I don’t like any of this, Gryss,’ she said, her voice uncharacteristically anxious and urgent. ‘I didn’t like the look of those gatherers when they rode in, nor what I saw of them when they came to collect the tithe. Now there’s this business about them wandering around the top of the valley and finding Rannick there, of all people. It all feels wrong. No one ever goes up there, Gryss. Not ever. And why should that wretched captain be sniffing about Rannick’s cottage? And why you two as well?’
She looked at Gryss squarely. He reached out to put an arm around her shoulders then thought better of it.
‘Just changing times, Marna,’ he said gently. ‘Chang-ing times.’ He pointed towards the mountains. ‘We live a good life here, very sheltered, very secure. But out there, over the hill, there’s another much bigger world full of all sorts of strange people and strange things, a lot of them not particularly nice and some downright bad. Believe me, I’ve been there. It’s not for no reason that we’ve developed our way of living here through the generations. Now a little of the outside world has come into the valley and unsettled everything. If we keep our wits and our manners, these gatherers will probably forget about us completely after they’ve left and things will soon be back to normal.’
Marna shook her head. ‘You can’t unbreak a pot,’ she said, simply. ‘What’s gone is gone and can never be the same, and there’s no point fretting about it.’
Momentarily, Gryss looked distressed at this stark verdict, not least because he knew it to be accurate. He searched for words to soften its impact, but none came. And, in any event, he realized, Marna needed no comforting about the implications of her own conclu-sion. But there was need in her manner, without a doubt.
‘I feel so… vulnerable,’ she said, unexpectedly.
Gryss tried again. It was just change… The King must need the tithe for something… Everything would settle down again… more or less…
But Marna swept the answers aside.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Something’s wrong.’ She looked at Gryss squarely, her dark eyes concerned but deter-mined. ‘I don’t think those men are tithe gatherers at all.’
Chapter 18
‘Hold!’ Nilsson shouted to the gate guard as he started to run down the stairs that led to the courtyard.
A few swift strides carried him to the gate where he was intercepted by the man who had been on sentry duty on the wall above the arch. He, too, was breathless from his own reckless descent of the stairs.
‘He came out of nowhere, Captain,’ he protested before anything was asked of him. ‘I was listening to you, but still on look-out, honestly. I don’t know where he came from. He just…’
‘It’s all right,’ Nilsson said, as he pushed him aside, almost gently. The man turned to others standing around him, with a desperate, pleading expression, as if the need to justify his apparent lapse had to run the course he had plotted for it in his dash down the stairs. It spluttered to a halt only when he registered the fact that his captain intended no summary punishment for him. Puffing out his cheeks he wiped his brow, then quietly slipped back up to his post.
Nilsson had thrown open the wicket door and stepped outside.
Rannick stood there. His gaunt face and unkempt black hair testified to some neglect, and he was dressed like any of the farm labourers in the valley with his rough shirt and soiled and patched trousers. But his demeanour was quite different. He stood erect and relaxed, exuding an assuredness that was far beyond either mere confidence or brittle arrogance. And his narrow eyes were bright and piercing, as though lit from within by some awesome fire.
Nilsson’s own eyes narrowed at the sight of him, as if he were looking at a bright light, or at something that was a long way away. It seemed to him for a moment that although Rannick was motionless, some strange, other-worldly breeze was tugging at him, ruffling his hair. He blinked and the image was gone, but the weight of Rannick’s presence remained. He felt it now in the clear daylight just as he had in the starlit darkness of the previous night. He was in the presence of one who could use the power.