When Darian wandered in, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand, Lord Breon himself was in earnest consultation with Snowfire, with townsfolk standing awkwardly about, still looking dazed and bewildered, though most of them had cleaned themselves up and found more presentable clothing. They formed a sad contrast with their once-respectable selves, however, and looked rather as if they had grabbed whatever would fit with little regard for the sex or size their garments were originally intended for.
Snowfire spotted him and hailed him with relief. “Here! Little brother! Your command of the tongue is better than mine, come and help me with this!”
Not at all reluctant, Darian ignored his bruises and aching bones, and trotted to Snowfire’s side, feeling flushed,with pride. When Snowfire was at a loss for words, he translated. Lord Breon, a neat and handsome gentleman of middling age and height, clothed in a businesslike suit of riveted armor, brown of hair and eyes and beard, took the Hawkbrothers completely in stride. But Darian’s fellow villagers started every time any one of them moved suddenly, and kept circling warily around the birds. To Darian’s relief, he caught sight of Huur, Hweel, and an awkward-looking youngster dozing on the rooftree nearest Snowfire, where they had evidently been most of the night, with Daystorm’s bondbird corbies keeping the natives at a respectful distance.
“My Lord Snowfire,” Lord Breon said when they were finished, a look of profound respect in his eyes, “you have certainly kept things well in hand here. I am sure that the Queen herself will want to thank you eventually.”
Snowfire shrugged. “We are allies, are we not?” he pointed out. “And if you had not intercepted the foot troops before they returned, we should probably have been forced to defend ourselves from them as we marched these folk toward your holding and safety. Now they need no longer seek shelter among your people.”
“Beggin’ your pardon!” Lutter spoke up, interrupting him. “But we need to know what we’re to do now.”
The man was a far cry from his former, prosperous self. He had changed his clothing, but it hung on him loosely, and his middle-aged face bore signs of both fresh and not-so-recent bruises in purple, black, green, and yellow.
“What are you to do?” Lord Breon looked at him askance. “Why, pick up your lives, man, what else?”
“Pick up our lives?” he replied, aghast. “What are you talking about? How can we pick up our lives? There’s nothing left here! The barbarians took it all - what they didn’t eat, they destroyed! We’ve no crops, no food, no herds or flocks, how are we to get through the winter?”
Dorian snorted with contempt, and all eyes turned toward him. Snowfire looked at him curiously, Lord Breon with surprise, and Lutter with astonishment turning to anger at having been interrupted by the village scapegrace.
“I’ll tell you what you’ve got!” Darian said hotly, amazed at their stupidity. “You’ve got your homes back, you’ve got a pile of weapons and armor that ought to be worth something. You’ve got a dozen or more real warhorses that are each worth the price of a good house, and you’ve got a whole lot more regular horses, too! You’ve got mules and two wagons, whatever was in those wagons, and you’ve got the whole Peligiris Forest to hunt dye-fungus in. You can buy food again, you don’t have to grow it! What are you complaining about?”
“And you’ve got this.” Lilly, the barmaid, came up dragging someone’s once-fine coverlet, made into a crude bag, across the ground. She let the comers fall, revealing a mixed pile of coins and jewelry. “I couldn’t tell whose was whose,” she continued. “So I just piled them all together, but I know that most of this didn’t come from Errold’s Grove.”
It certainly couldn’t have, since a great deal of the jewelry was of gold. No wonder the bundle had been too heavy to carry!
“Shcar had all this in his room,” she continued. “And I thought that when you get done picking out the bits that belong to you, Lord Breon could arrange to sell the rest and buy new stock for everybody who lost beasts and fowl.”
“What about the stuff you’re wearing?” asked a woman, shrilly, and only then did Darian look up to see that Lilly was bedecked with several heavy gold bracelets, chains, and odd-looking pendants.
Lilly flushed, but looked angry. “This is mine,” she replied fiercely. “I earned every bit of it!”
“Oh, earned it, did you?” the woman snarled. “At your ease, in comfort, while the rest of us sweated out in the fields? Earned it, did you?”
For once, Lilly stood up for herself, pulling herself up tall and staring the woman down. “Yes, earned it! Earned it by waiting on Shkar day and night, doing things I don’t even like to think about, keeping him and his bullies looking at me and thinking about me instead of you, making sure that every time their eyes started wandering toward your pretty little daughter, Stella Harthon, that they got pulled back toward me. How did you think it happened? By magic? I fought for all our sakes with the only weapon that I knew would work against them! And now I’m keeping what I earned from them, I’m taking it, and I’m going to go and buy a real inn someplace else where nobody is going to look down her long petty nose at me again!”
Darian flushed with anger as he saw sour and angry faces among the women still, in spite of the fact that the pile of loot in the coverlet was vastly more valuable than what Lilly wore. How greedy can they be? he wondered.
But Lutter coughed, and said to Lilly, red-faced, “You’re right, girl. You’ve earned it. And you’ve earned the right to take it and yourself someplace else if you want to. But if we’re going to get the dye-trade going again, we’re going to need a real inn - “
Lilly interrupted him, shaking her head, though her demeanor softened. “No. If I go elsewhere, I’ll be Lilly, the respectable innkeeper. I can never be that if I stay here. I’m leaving. Besides,” she chuckled weakly, “when I leave, it’ll give your wives a bad example to show their girl-children.”
“I would like to ask you some questions about your time among those men,” Lord Breon said with delicate tact. “You knew the name of one of the leaders, for instance.”
“Shkar,” she said, and shrugged. “I didn’t learn much of their tongue. They didn’t need me for language lessons, and what they wanted they could get by pointing.”
“Nevertheless, you may know more than you think you do,” Lord Breon persisted. “If you’d care to come back with me, after I’ve learned what I can from you, I’ll gladly provide an escort to wherever you choose.”-
“That suits me.” She turned abruptly arid went to stand among Lord Breon’s men, who, after a stern look from Lord Breon, did not leer or make suggestive comments but simply made a place for her.
“In the meantime, the woman is right,” the Lord continued, surveying the pile. “Between the loot there, and the horses, you will have more than enough to rebuild what was lost. I’ll trade ten cattle or twenty adult hogs for each warhorse this minute, sight unseen, for instance. Or you can take them to the horsemarket and try your luck there.” He raked his eyes over the crowd. “You’ll have to agree on equal shares, as you all suffered equally, so far as I can see. It will take a great deal of work, but in the end, Errold’s Grove will be as prosperous as it was before.”