after a few minutes, and Talon paused. The grass was nearly waist-high, pale yellow-green from the summer sun and ample rain.
He quickly unslung his bow and tapped Caleb on the shoulder with it. He motioned with his left hand, and Caleb looked to where he indicated. They made their way into the meadow, noting how the grass had been parted and some of it broken and crushed. Talon knelt and looked for prints. In a depression in the damp soil, he found one.
Softly he said, ‘Bear.’ He reached out and tested the broken blades. They were still moist at the break. ‘Close.’
Caleb nodded. ‘Good eyes,’ he said softly.
They began to follow the bear’s trail, until they had crossed nearly half the meadow. Caleb held up his hand and they halted. Then Talon heard it. In the distance, the snuffling sounds of a bear, and a dull thump.
They crept along until they reached a small brook. On the other side stood a large brown bear, busily rocking a dead tree trunk and ripping at it with its claws in an effort to expose a hive of bees, which were swarming futilely around the animal. The bear tore open the dried wood and revealed the rich comb inside while the bees stung ineffectually at its thick hide, one occasionally finding the only exposed part of the animal, its tender nose. Then the bear would hoot in outrage, but after a moment it would return to its task of getting to the honey.
Talon tapped Caleb on the shoulder and motioned towards the bear, but the older man shook his head and motioned back the way they had come.
They moved silently away from the scene and after a short distance, Caleb picked up the pace and led them back towards the road.
Nightfall found the two hunters returning to the inn, a deer across Caleb’s shoulders and Talon carrying a pair of wild turkeys tied together at the feet.
Robert waited at the gate. When they got there, Gibbs appeared and took the turkeys from Talon. Robert looked at Caleb.
Caleb said, ‘The boy can hunt.’
Talon watched Robert’s face and saw a flicker of satisfaction. He wasn’t sure what had been said, but he was certain it had to do with more than merely hunting game in the woods.
Caleb followed Gibbs around the side of the inn, towards the kitchen door.
Robert put his hand on Talon’s shoulder. ‘So, it begins.’
TALON STRUGGLED.
He followed Lela up the hill from the stream that ran through the woods, carrying a large basket of dripping-wet laundry. For the previous week, he had been put in her charge, essentially providing an extra pair of arms and legs for her.
The one oddity had been Robert’s insistence that she speak only the language of Roldem to him, answering him only when he asked a question correctly. A few of the words in that language were used in the Common Tongue, but Common was mainly the hybrid of Low Keshian and the King’s Tongue, developed by years of trading along the border of those two vast nations.
Still, Talon discovered he had an ear for language and quickly picked up the language from the constantly cheerful girl.
She was five years his senior, and had come to Kendrick’s by a circuitous manner, if her story was to be believed. She claimed to have been a serving girl to a Princess of Roldem, who had been en route to a state arranged marriage with a noble in the court of the Prince of Aranor. Depending on his ability to understand her language and the frequency with which her story changed, she had either been abducted by pirates or bandits and sold into slavery, from which she had been freed by a kind benefactor or had escaped. In any event, the girl from the distant island nation across the Sea of Kingdoms had found her way to Kendrick’s where she had been a serving girl for the last two years.
She was constantly happy, always quick with a joke, and very pretty. Talon was becoming quickly infatuated with her.
He still ached inside at the thought of Eye of the Blue-Winged Teal, lying dead somewhere with the rest of her family. Left unburied for the carrion-eaters. He shoved the image aside and concentrated on lugging the huge wicker basket he carried on his back.
Lela seemed to think that because he was assigned to her she was freed from the need to make several trips to the stream to clean the clothing. So she had found a basket four feet high and had rigged a harness so he could haul it up the hill on his back. Taking the clothing down to the stream was the easy part of the morning; carrying the sopping-wet garments back up to the inn was the difficult part.
‘Caleb says you’re a good hunter.’
Talon hesitated for a moment. He had to think about the words before he answered. ‘I’ve hunted my life for all.’
She corrected his sentence structure and he repeated what she had said. ‘I’ve hunted all my life.’
Talon felt considerable frustration as Lela prattled on; half of what she said was lost on him even though he listened hard, and the other half was mostly gossip from the kitchens, about people he had barely glimpsed.
He felt lost in a lot of ways. He was still sleeping in the barn, though alone now that Pasko had vanished on some errand for Robert. He saw Robert only rarely, glimpsed him through a window of the inn, or as he was crossing from the rear of the inn to the privy. Occasionally, the man who had saved his life would pause and exchange a few idle pleasantries with Talon, speaking in either the Common Tongue, or in Roldemish. When he spoke the latter, he also would only reply if Talon spoke in that language.
Talon was still not allowed inside the inn. He didn’t think that strange; an outsider wouldn’t have expected to be admitted to an Orosini lodge, and these were not the Orosini. Since he was a servant now, he assumed his sleeping in the barn to be a servant’s lot. There was so much about these people he didn’t understand.
He found himself tired a great deal. He didn’t understand why; he was a young man, usually energetic and happy, but since he had come to Kendrick’s, he found himself battling black moods and almost overwhelming sadness on a daily basis. If he was set to a task by Robert or Pasko, or when he was in the company of Caleb or Lela, he was distracted from the darker musing he was prey to when he was left alone. He wished for his grandfather’s wisdom on this, yet thinking about his family plunged him deeper into the morbid introspection which caused him to feel trapped within a black place from which there seemed to be no escape.
The Orosini were open amongst themselves, talking about their thoughts and feelings easily, even with those not of the immediate family, yet they appeared stolid, even taciturn to outsiders. Gregarious even by the standards of his people, Talon appeared almost mute to those around him. Inside he ached for the free expression he had known in his childhood, and though the edge of that childhood was only weeks earlier in his life, it felt ages past.
Pasko and Lela were open enough, if he asked a question, but Lela was as likely to answer with a prevarication or misinformation as Pasko was likely to dismiss the question as being irrelevant to whatever task lay at hand. The frustration Talon experienced as a result only added to his bleak moods. The only respite from this crushing darkness was to be found in hunting with Caleb. The young man was even more reticent than Talon, and often a day of hunting would go by with less than a dozen words spoken between them.
Reaching the stabling yard, Lela said, ‘Oh, we have guests.’
A coach, ornate with gilded trim on black lacquered wood and with all its metal fittings polished to a silvery gleam sat near the barn and Gibbs and Lars were quickly unhitching from the traces as handsome a matching set of black geldings as Talon had ever seen. Horses were not as central to the mountain tribes of the Orosini as they were to other cultures in the region, but he could still appreciate a fine mount. The