Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

“No point in boats here,” said Ram Odin. “There are falls not far behind us, and falls again after the lake a few dozen ­kilometers on. They’re not much for fish.”

“Humans need fish.”

“They grow the substitute vegetables,” said Ram Odin. “And by the way, let’s start speaking this language.” He switched to the one they had heard on the streets of the town the day before.

“They speak that here?” asked Rigg, in that language.

“Not at all, but they speak it somewhere in Yinfold and so if someone is hiding in the brush along the edges of the fields, they’ll hear us using a language from this wallfold.”

Sure enough, there were soon children darting out of cover and running down the track ahead of them. “I guess we don’t look too threatening,” said Ram Odin. “If the children are willing to run openly down the road ahead of us.”

“But they still ran.”

“To give news of our coming,” said Ram Odin. “We’re the most exciting thing in days, I’ll wager.”

Rigg remembered life in Fall Ford. The children there noticed the arrival of strangers, but didn’t run to tell. That’s because strangers came several times a week and always went to Nox’s boardinghouse for a meal and news and perhaps a bed. Then they would go up the stair beside the falls into Upsheer Forest, or along the road—much more of a road than this King’s Highway—that ran east and west below the face of Upsheer Cliff, to the other towns that lived in its shadow. He had thought Fall Ford an isolated, sleepy place, but now he saw it as a hub of traffic, compared to this.

Fall Ford was also five times as big. More houses. More tradesmen’s shops. Rigg wondered if they thought of themselves as a village or a town? There was an open square in the middle that might be a weekly market. Or might not. It could simply be the place where they hanged strangers.

Ram Odin was making it a point to nod—but not smile—at the faces peering out of windows. “These aren’t smiley folk,” Ram Odin explained. “In this region, a smile means you’re a liar.”

Rigg noticed that people weren’t peering through cracks in curtains. They were fully visible in open windows. They returned Ram Odin’s solemn nod, some so slightly as to hardly be visible, some sharply, clearly, as if putting a bit of punctuation at the end of an unspoken sentence.

People must have gone out back doors and made their way to the square, because as Ram Odin and Rigg stepped into the open space, so did about twenty people, mostly adult men but some women, coming from behind houses on both sides, but only one man and one woman from the far side, where they hadn’t walked.

“Good morning,” said Ram Odin, glancing at the sun to be sure it wasn’t yet past noon. “We’re hoping to earn a bit of bread and ale in this place, if you find us worthy. And if you have enough work for us, a place to pass the night.”

“That’s what you want,” said the man who had come from the far side of the square. “Why do we want you?” Rigg figured him to be the mayor or headman. He seemed to have authority. Or at least none of the locals thought it out of place that he spoke first.

“What’s wrong with the young one?” asked a woman.

“Two questions deserving of fair answers. May I answer the second one first, seeing how you’re all looking so curious at my grandson here?”

Ram Odin directed his question at the mayor, who gave him one of those sharp nods. It was an answer.

“The boy was a baby, not three days old, when the house caught fire. It was a thatchy roof and the whole thing was ablaze at once. Inside the house, too. My son was screaming in pain, but the mother, my daughter-in-law, she was from a strange folk. My son brought her into the village from afar, and she knew a blessing, I think, because she came to the window and she was also aflame, but the baby wasn’t burning, not a lick. She dropped him out the window. Nobody was close enough to catch him, the house was so hot afire, but the baby didn’t burn even though she did. My son screaming, but her making never a sound.”

So Ram Odin was a storyteller. Rigg saw how the people were spellbound. He also heard how Ram Odin was speaking the local language perfectly, but he was bending the vowels to be a little like the language in the town where they spent yesterday. So he sounded a little foreign, but they could understand every word.

“When the ruin of the house cooled enough to come close, I picked up the baby. Not burnt at all, not even the blanket he was wrapped in. Whatever she was, the boy’s mother was powerful. Not powerful enough to put out the fire, but powerful enough to spare his life.”

“If he didn’t burn, what’s wrong with his face?” asked the same woman as before.

“She kept the flame off him, but not the heat. Couldn’t kill him, but his face melted. I tried to push it back into place as best I could, but you can see I’m no master with clay. Did my best and the boy’s used to it, an’t you, boy?”

Rigg nodded.

“Can’t talk?” asked the mayor.

“Now it’s three questions, and me barely finished with the first,” said Ram Odin. “The boy can talk all right. But he’s shy and he’d rather talk to me, mostly, when meeting strange folk.”

There was a general recoiling at that, some murmurs.

“Oh, now, don’t take me amiss,” said Ram Odin. “I know that in this place, we’re the strange folk. But you’re strange to us, don’t you see, just as we’re strange to you. Only we come here of our own choice, so we mean nothing wrong by it. We hope to serve you, and that brings me to the original question, the first question, Question Prime, the question of questions.”

“What are you good for that we should feed you?” asked the mayor again.

“Well, I’m not good for much. Old but still strong for my age, but that says little. It’s the boy, you see. A bit of the mother’s blood in him. Never got no training and he don’t know no spells, so you’ve nought to fear from him. But he’s got him a way of finding lost things.”