Garric returned to the inn at early evening with the shovel on his shoulder. The stars were barely visible in the east; an early day for a field laborer, but Getha had insisted he'd done as much as two men already and paid him in full.
Getha was a widow with her eldest son only ten. The family could handle most of the farm's chores, but grubbing the drainage ditches meant levering up rocks that might turn out to be the size of a sheep. Getha and the children had helped as they could, but Garric had indeed done more than a man's work.
Chickens clucked peevishly as Garric walked across the courtyard to the stables. For the most part the hens fended for themselves, but Lora tossed a handful of grain into the yard at evening to train the fowl to come where they could be caught and killed at need. Oats spilled when horses were fed in the stable served the same purpose, but there were no guests at the inn at present and no coach in as long as Garric could remember.
Garric hung the shovel on its pegs against the sidewall. The tool was shaped from close-grained hickory but the biting edge of the blade had a shoe of iron. Garric felt the metal critically. It was worn to the wood at one corner and should be replaced the next time a tinker made his rounds through the hamlet.
He heard water slosh and stepped out of the stables. His father was pouring a bucket into the stone wash trough beside the well in the center of the courtyard.
"I saw you come in," Reise said. "You took care of the widow?"
"Yes, sir," Garric said. "She'd let the ditches go too long, so the storm made the lower field a bog. I think we drained it soon enough that her oats'll come through all right."
He plunged his arms to the elbows in cold water and rubbed his hands together. He had the good tiredness of a task that worked all the muscles and had been accomplished fully. He'd been bragging, really, with the amount of work he could do in front of a woman and her four children. The last boulder Garric moved would likely have broken bones if he'd let it roll back from the top of the ditch—and that had almost happened.
Reise handed Garric a loofah to scrub himself with. The gourd's dried interior was harsh on skin that wasn't armored with callus.
"The woman you found is going to be all right, Sharina says," Reise said. "I suppose the hermit told her. Her robe is silk. I don't recognize the cut, but it's of higher quality than this inn has ever seen before."
He paused, then went on, "Why did you ask about Yole, Garric?"
Garric looked at his father. It would have been hard to describe Reise or-Laver in any fashion that didn't make him sound average, but for all that he stood out in Barca's Hamlet like silver plates in a cowshed. Reise was the same height as most of his neighbors. He wasn't slender, not really, but beside him local men looked somehow rugged. Compared with them his hair had been a paler brown before it went gray, his face was slightly foxlike instead of a rectangle with a strong chin, and the sun turned his cheeks rosy instead of deep tan.
Reise had lived in Barca's Hamlet for seventeen years, and in Haft's capital, Carcosa, for six before that. The locals still referred to him as "the foreigner from Ornifal" when they spoke among themselves.
"Well, she thought that's where she was," Garric said. "At least that's what I heard."
Reise shook his head in irritation. "She's an educated person to have been able to say that," he said, "but she was clearly out of her mind. I only hope she becomes lucid enough to tell us who to send for to collect her and pay for her keep. Her clothing's expensive, all right, but she didn't have a purse or any jewelry that she could sell."
Garric grimaced, though he knew that if his father had been another sort of man he'd never have been able to make a go of an inn in this remote spot. Reise wouldn't refuse charity to a castaway, but he'd grudge it and make no secret of the fact.
"Can I see her?" Garric asked.
"I don't see why not," Reise said. "She's in my house, isn't she?"
Garric walked inside. Behind him his father muttered, "The roof's leaking in a dozen places from the storm, and now I've got a madwoman to care for as well!"
Garric had laid the castaway on a truckle bed in the common room. There were smaller rooms upstairs for drovers and merchants with a bit of money, but he'd been afraid of bumping her on the steep, narrow stairs. She was still there; with no guests at the moment, there was no reason to move her.
Nonnus knelt beside the bed of rye straw plaited into thick rope and coiled higher on the edges to keep the sleeper from rolling out. Lora and Sharina were both in the kitchen from the sound of voices. One wick of the hanging oil lamp was lit to provide light to add to what still leaked through the mullioned windows.
"She said her name's Tenoctris," the hermit offered. He spoke in the slow voice of a man who spent most of his time alone. "I think she'll be all right."
Garric squatted. He didn't remember ever being this close to the hermit before. Nonnus' face and arms were ridged with scar tissue emphasized by shadows the lamplight threw.
Garric heard his sister come out of the kitchen. "She looks terrible," he blurted.
Tenoctris wore a woolen shift; one of Lora's worn castoffs, Garric thought. Her breathing was weak, and her skin had a sickly grayish sheen that Garric hadn't noticed when he brought her from the sea.
Nonnus smiled dryly. "Her main trouble was dehydration and sunburn," he said. "She drank as much buttermilk as I thought she could keep down, and I covered the exposed skin with ointment. Also I added lettuce cake to the milk to knock her cold until tomorrow morning."
Garric grimaced. Now that he'd been told, he recognized the smell of the lanolin that was the basis of the hermit's salve. No wonder Tenoctris' skin looked slick.
"Lettuce does that?" Sharina said.
"Oh, yes," Nonnus said. "The juice boiled down to a solid. The sunburn isn't dangerous, but it can hurt bad enough to make you forget an arrow through your thigh."
Garric stood up. "Do you want to move her upstairs?" he said.
Nonnus shook his head. "Your father says she can lie here overnight," he said. "Your sister will stay with her. When she wakes up she'll be able to walk short distances. With the Lady's help."
Garric looked—really looked—at the muscles of the hermit's limbs. Now he felt doubly a fool for suggesting that this man couldn't have carried the castaway himself if he'd wanted to.
"We gave her clothes to Ilna to clean the salt out of," Sharina said. "They're lovely fabric, Garric. Did you notice them?"
Garric shrugged. He'd never been particularly interested in clothing, but he knew that Cashel's sister, Ilna, was the finest weaver in a day's journey. She was the obvious person to take care of cloth of any sort. "How long has she been in the water?" he asked Nonnus.
"A day, a day and a half," he said. "Not long, I think. Her skin's too fair for the sun not to have raised blisters if it had been much more than that."
"Father says she can't have come from Yole," Garric said. "He says Yole sank a thousand years ago."
The hermit smiled minusculely but didn't speak. Garric's words hadn't been a question, though he'd certainly hoped for an answer.
"Have you heard of Yole, Nonnus?" Sharina asked.
"I've heard that it's far to the east," Nonnus said as he rose to his feet. "And that it sank long ago, yes. But I haven't been there, so all I know is what others say."
He nodded to Garric, then turned to Sharina with an expression that didn't change but somehow became softer. "If she surprises me and wakes up in the night, give her more buttermilk—as much as she wants. I'll be back in the morning."
From the doorway—without turning around—Nonnus added, "And I'll pray, of course."