The mockingbird perched on the dogwood continued its series of liquid calls even when Sharina rattled the clackers only ten feet away. It was a mild, brilliant morning, and the dogwood buds had opened to surround the bird in white profusion.
The weather had done something to lift Sharina's own mood, though it couldn't help cure her confusion. She skipped down the slope to the hut calling, "It's me, Nonnus. I need your help!"
The hermit stood at the creekside where he'd been smoothing an ash sapling held horizontal in a pair of forked stakes. Bark shavings patterned the ground and hung in the reeds at the margin of the creek. The water was no more than six inches deep except for the pool Nonnus had dug out and covered with a bed of colored stones, to make it easier for him to bathe and dip his copper kettle.
"Not because of your health, I trust, child?" he said as he wiped his knifeblade on the hem of his black tunic. He gave Sharina the craggy smile that she saw more often than anyone else in the hamlet. "No, not the way you're cantering along."
Nonnus viewed the edge of his knife with a critical eye, tilting it up and down to catch the light. Satisfied, he slipped it back in its sheath.
Every peasant on Haft carried a knife for a variety of tasks: cutting rope, prizing a stone out of a sheep's hoof, marking a tally stick—the myriad needs of an agricultural community. Peasants' knives were mostly forged by a local smith from a strip of wrought iron; their scales of bone, horn, or wood were riveted to a flat tang. The blade was typically six or eight inches long, its point rounded, and the edge sharpened at need on the nearest smooth stone.
The hermit's knife was unique, though it was no less practical a tool. Its blade was polished steel, over a foot long and the thickness of a woman's little finger across the straight back. The edge moved in a graceful curve, forming a deep belly near the point to throw the weight outward.
Nonnus used his knife for everything from skinning game to large projects for which the locals would have chosen an axe, a billhook, or a spokeshave. The blade had a working edge, sturdy enough not to bend on tough jobs but sharp enough to trim his hair and beard. Sharina had sometimes watched as the hermit chopped wood with the knife, using an effortless mechanical stroke that sent chips flying onto the far bank of the creek.
"Not my health, no," Sharina agreed. She jumped up, caught a branch, and chinned herself on a whim, then dropped to the ground again.
"Nonnus," she said bluntly. "They want me to go to Ornifal—Asera and Meder do. I want you to come with me because I trust you. And you've been in cities before."
Nonnus smiled faintly. "One way and another, yes," he said. "But I'm not a city man, Sharina. Your father is. He should go with you, or your mother should."
He reached into the creek and lifted a bucket of bark sewn with sinew and waterproofed with tree gum. It was full of birch beer; the hermit kept it almost submerged so that the running water cooled the drink on even the hottest days of August. Two bark cups dangled from the container's handle. He dipped them full and handed the white one—Sharina's cup—to her.
"If Reise or Lora came with me, it'd be for their own reasons," Sharina said morosely into the cup. "I need someone who worries first about me."
Nonnus turned, surveying his hut and garden. "Haft's been kind to me," he said. "I came here because it was as far as I could go without falling off the edge of the world—"
He fixed Sharina again with his eyes and gave her a grin like sunlight glinting from an iceberg.
"—which I was not quite ready to do. It's a long time since I was on Ornifal."
Sharina raised her eyes to the hermit's, then looked down again with a nervous twitch of her mouth. "Nonnus?" she said. "Reise and Lora aren't my parents. Count Niard and Countess Tera are."
Nonnus snorted with mild amusement. "You're a wise girl to be so certain about your parentage," he said. "I've never found it so clear a matter, nor have I ever seen it a useful question to pursue."
"There isn't any doubt," Sharina said. Part of her was irritated that the hermit took her revelation with so little concern. "Meder held a summoning rite. He's a wizard."
"A very powerful one, from what Tenoctris tells me," Nonnus agreed, "but I wouldn't stake my life on what a wizard said or did."
His voice was lightly musing at the start of the spoken thought but by the end the words cracked. The hermit's face had a wooden stiffness.
"Nonnus?" Sharina said. "I don't know anything about wizards. But I think this was real."
Nonnus hooked the cup back onto the bucket with the deliberation of extreme control, then deliberately faced away from Sharina. "Oh, I don't doubt the boy is real," he said in a thick voice. "His sort think they make the world turn with their spells. But they're wrong!"
Sharina held her cup in both hands, no longer drinking from it. She feared that any motion she made would further disturb the hermit in this unexpected mood, so she stood as still as the image of the Lady carved in the trunk of a living tree.
"The Earl of Sandrakkan had wizards on the high walls of his camp when he met King Valence at the Stone Wall," Nonnus said. His voice was a growl that could have come from a beast or out of a blizzard-driving wind. "The wizards sacrificed chickens and sheep as the armies advanced, cutting their throats so the blood ran down the walls. And they chanted, and the earth shook."
He glanced at the Lady's simple image and smiled minutely. Turning again toward Sharina, he resumed, "Their spell made the ground ripple like cloth in a breeze. What did that matter? Waves rise and fall a hundred feet when they smash Pewle Island every storm! But the Ornifal militia on the right wing panicked, and the Sandrakkan cavalry got through the gap to surround King Valence."
He was trying to speak normally, but emotion thickened his tongue and slurred the words. He looked at Sharina. Because she knew she had to speak she said, "But the Blood Eagles stood, Nonnus?"
"Oh, aye," he said in a thin, despairing voice like nothing she'd heard from a human throat. "They stood."
Sharina extended a hand toward the hermit the way she would have reached out to touch fabric of unimaginable fineness. He didn't meet her fingers, but he smiled. His staff leaned against a tree near where he'd been working. He took it in his hands.
"The nobles want to carry you to Valles," he said conversationally. "Do you want to go?"
Iron ferrules capped both ends of the hollywood staff. Nonnus looked at them critically, then laid the staff down with one tip on a flat stone.
"Meder tells me it's my destiny," Sharina said with embarrassment. Folk in Barca's Hamlet didn't have destinies, only lives. "Besides, I don't think they'd let me refuse. They have the soldiers, you know."
"So they do," Nonnus said in a tone she couldn't read. "But I asked you what you wanted."
He set the tip of a hardwood peg on the rivet holding the ferrule, then gave it a sharp rap with the butt of his big knife. The rivet head popped a quarter inch from the other side. Nonnus gripped the head and pulled the rivet out; he had enough strength in his fingers to straighten cod hooks.
"I think I want to go, Nonnus," she said. "I'm afraid because I've never been out of the borough, but I want to go."
Instead of replying immediately, the hermit twisted the ferrule off and walked into his hut with it. He returned with a slender package of oiled linen that Sharina had never seen before.
"" she said. "They're readying the ship today. They'll leave tomorrow morning."
Nonnus squatted and unwrapped the packet, holding it so that Sharina could see the contents. Within the linen was a socketed steel spearhead with two deep edges and two narrow ones. The point was needle sharp.
He fitted the head to the end of his staff, then looked up at Sharina. "I don't know anything about destiny, child," he said. "But I know about death, and I'll do what I can to keep death away from you."
He smiled gently. He'd always been gentle, with her and the other villagers. But she'd never confused gentleness with weakness.
"Go on back, child," the hermit said. "I'll be there when the ship's ready to sail."