At noon there was an inn that sold wine and golden cheese. Peaches ripened on the walls. A blind dog sunned itself, and whined when Parl Dro’s shadow slid over its back.
In the afternoon, the road shifted to the south. A thread of track beat on eastwards, but faded in a molasses-coloured wood as the sun began to wester. When he emerged from the wood, the land sloped down to a loop of one of the misty rivers. A ruined fortress stood dreamily in the loop, melting into the sky as sunset condensed the air. A village lay along the river’s edge. It had the usual wide street, supplemented by a couple of others almost as wide. The sewage-dispelling water courses appeared to discharge into an area of marsh that strained out of the river to the north. A dab of smoke coiled from the roofs. Some fishing boats lay, themselves like spread fish, side by side on the shore.
The premonition he had been having, inchoate but persistent, was now so strong Dro avoided the village completely. He walked instead diagonally, clipping the marsh. A causeway of pleached bricks went through mud and strips of water, out onto the baked meadow in the loop of the river where the fortress was.
The outer walls had crumbled. The inner had a lovely smoothness, sanded down by the elements. Some earl or princeling had lorded it here one or two hundred years ago, master of the river. Nobody much came here now. No paths were worn across the meadow. Not even goats or sheep had been pastured, for the grass was virgin and proud. Probably the village reckoned the fortress to be haunted. It had that look to it, secretive, smoky. Only a ghost-killer like Dro could have told for sure that there were no ghosts. It was just an empty shell.
A wind blew up along the river, and the chill came back with the dusk. Dro set a fire inside the lee of the inner wall, where a staircase went up into a vault of sky. A wild apple tree had rooted in the earth by the stair, with precocious green fruit on it. He put a couple to bake out their sourness in the ashes around the fire.
A huge owl, soundless, like a paper kite, sailed over the meadow to its hunting.
Parl Dro sat against the wall. He had only to wait awhile. He was alert, but very still. It was a knack of his, one of many disciplines, to be able to turn off awareness of time, and all superfluous senses, resting them, as he rested the crippled leg. Every day of walking on the roads was a day of fighting that pain, and every respite brought a dizzying relief. Done in, he paid little attention to either condition or cause.
Then, through half-closed eyes, he saw a woman mantled in gold hair, leaning to his firelight. She was very real, but when he raised his lids, no longer there.
The child at the farm had triggered certain memories, one familiar and crucial. He thought about it, turning the past over in his mind, as he waited for the present to catch up to him.
His father had been a soldier in some small border war big enough to kill him. Parl Dro’s mother had died a while later, when he was about four years of age. The local landowner kept a house where homeless children might grow up in reasonable conditions. When he was ten, Dro was already working in the fields. But, because he had shown some aptitude for learning, the landowner, much fairer than most, sent him twice a week into town, to be schooled.