She pulled the plug on the bath, too upset and tense now to relax. The water flowed out smoothly, with scarcely a gurgle as she climbed out. She seized the waiting square of cloth and jerked it from the hook beside the tub, then toweled herself dry, rubbing hard, as if to rub those unkind, untrue accusations out of her mind.
Unkind, untrue, and unfair. She stalked out of the bathing chamber and flung herself down on her bed, seething. I’m not the one that went pelting up the trail, leaving tracks and traces a child could read! I’m not the one that decided he knew what was happening without bothering to consult his partner! I’m not the one that decided to divide the party—he wanted me to go downstream while he went up!
She turned over onto her back and stared at the ceiling. The more she thought about Warrl’s little lecture, the angrier she became.
What gives him the right to sit in judgment over me anyway? What gives an overgrown wolf the right to dictate what I should and shouldn’t have done? How could he possibly understand? He isn’t even human!
She was still simmering when exhaustion finally caught up with her and flung her into sleep.
Daren appeared the next morning at the common room; breakfast was a self-serve aifair she sometimes shared with Tarma and her grandmother. Daren sported sunken cheeks and enormous dark circles under his eyes. Since she didn’t have a mirror, Kerowyn couldn’t have said if she looked the same, but she was very much afraid that she did. It had not been a restful night, to say the least.
“Well, you look like hell,” Kero greeted him over the buffet table, handing him a piece of hot bread.
“Thank you,” he replied. “If you’re curious, it’s mutual. Where in hell does she get all this food? I haven’t seen a single servant since I got here.”
“Magic, I suppose,” Kero replied. “Although ... you know, not that much of it has to be cooked. Just the bread and the oat porridge. Everything else could be set beside the bread ovens to warm. I’ve never seen the kitchen; it could be just on the other side of that wall. I have no idea how they’d vent ovens this deep in the cliff—that would be magic, but I’ve seen stranger things in this place.”
“Like the bathing chambers?”
“Hmm.” She eyed the table; the ham and bread would reappear at dinner, the fruit and cheese at lunch, the hard-boiled eggs would keep for quite a while, and the oat porridge would be gone at this meal. All four of them liked a good big bowl of it, laden with sugar and swimming in cream.
“One cook and two helpers could take care of all this and more, and still have time for the helpers to double at light cleaning and laundry,” she said. “We all clean our own rooms, that means the only places a servant would have to clean would be the common rooms.”
Daren blinked at her in surprise. She dished out her own bowl of porridge, loading it down with maple sugar and sweet raisins, leaving just enough for him. “How do you know all that?” he asked.
“All what? Household nonsense?” Tarma and her grandmother had evidently just finished; they were disappearing together through one of the doors that was always kept locked. Kero knew what was on the other side of that one, though—her grandmother’s magic workroom. She’d visited it once, and had no desire to do so again.
Daren completed his selection and followed her to one of two small tables beside the hearth. “I thought you said you weren’t interested in marriage and a family.”
“I’m not. I took care of the Keep for five years after Mother died, and for most of two years before that.” She made a face, and cut a careful bite out of her ham slice. “I hated it. But I learned it anyway. Why do you look like you spent the night tossing?”
“Because I did,” he replied. “Rotten dreams.”
She put her knife and fork down. “You, too?”
He nodded, then stopped in mid-chew to stare at her. Finally he swallowed, and asked, “Were you in the middle of some kind of battle? In a scout group? And you went off looking for something in a party of about six?”
She nodded. “And you were there, and we had an argument about something?”
“Yes. And then?” He leaned forward.
“Then—you wouldn’t listen to me, or I wouldn’t listen to you; I can’t remember which. But the party split, and we both missed something really important, because when we got back, we’d lost half the scouts, and we discovered that the enemy had cut around behind us—”
“And everyone on our side was dead.” He sagged back in his chair, his eyes closed. “Oh, gods. I thought it was just a dream—”
“It was just a dream,” a new voice entered the conversation. Kethry’s. Daren jumped, then tried to leap to his feet.
“Sit,” Kethry ordered him; she was in russet today, the color Daren’s cloak used to be, but as if to underline what Kero had told him earlier, she was not wearing a gown, she was in breeches and a long tunic. “If it had been a prophetic dream, certain warnings would have been triggered, and I would have known.”
“If it wasn’t prophetic,” Kero asked hesitantly, “What was it?”
Kethry smiled, as if she had expected exactly that question. “A warning,” she said. “This place—seems to trigger things like that. It’s happened perhaps a dozen times since we moved here. It’s not showing any possible future so far as I’ve been able to tell—it’s showing you the general outcome of a negative behavior pattern.”
“So what we saw isn’t going to happen to us?” Daren asked hopefully.
“No, not likely,” Kethry repeated, “and you won’t dream it again unless you continue the pattern.”
“But if we do, we get the same dream over and over?” At Kethry’s nod, Daren grimaced. “Pretty effective way of getting someone to break the pattern.”
“Evidently the builders of this Tower thought so.” Kethry patted him on the shoulder in a very motherly fashion, turned and vanished back through the heavy wooden door leading to her workroom.
Daren sighed, and turned back to Kero. “Will it help to say that I’ve been a blockhead and I apologize?”
She considered him with her head tilted to one side for a moment. “Will it help to tell you I’ve been just as pigheaded as you?”
He smiled. “It’s a start.”
“Good,” she replied. “Let’s build on that.” Then she laughed, feeling a burden lifting from her mind. “Besides, I’d do a lot more than just apologize to avoid another two days like the past two!”
But Warrl was destined to have the last word, although he was nowhere in sight.
:It’s about time,: said a sardonic voice in her mind. Humans!:
If Daren wondered why she was choking on her porridge, trying not to laugh, he was too polite to ask.
Kero studied the sand-table, the terrain laid out in miniature, the tokens that stood for civilians, stock, fighting men and women. Bloodless warfare, she thought to herself. All the fighting reduced to numbers. Is that how generals see us?
Had it been a year since that quarrel with Daren? It must have been, since it was winter again. Tarma had gradually begun teaching them other things; strategy and supply, tactics and organization. Every daylight hour was spent in some kind of study; from their weapons’ practices to reading the fragmentary accounts of the wars of the ancients. Even their “leisure” hours usually had something to do with their studies.