“It’s true, Parl Dro,” the elderly boy said. “Two herders found her in the morning when they were taking the cows up to graze.”
“Cilny was lying at the bottom of the stream, she was,” said the first man dolefully, “but the water’s so clear in the spring you could see straight through. One of the boys is a bit simple. He thought she was a water spirit, lying there in her nightgown, with a wreath of flowers on her head and fish swimming about in her hair.”
“What do you think of that, eh, Parl Ghost-Killer?”
Dro removed his hand from the cup and let the boy fill it again. The crowd had got itself well into the informative stage, anxious to elicit a response from him. They had commenced pressing rumour and snippets of memory on him like gifts, waiting for him to crow. But the King of Swords merely sat and brooded, letting them heap the platter.
They were putting great emphasis on the stresses of the girls’ two names, telling him now how Sidd-dayy and Sill-nee had been, loving and near one hour, at each other’s throats the next. Once or twice, one sister might look at a village man, and then the other sister would go wild, shrieking that such a wooing, let alone marriage, was beneath the Soban blood. When Cilny had made away with herself the previous spring, nobody had dropped down in a fit of surprise. When Ciddey demanded the corpse be burned not buried and the ashes delivered to her in a stone pot, not even the priest had had much to say. The Sobans had always been a pagan tribe, amoral and unstable. Since the death of Cilny, Ciddey was rarely seen. Sometimes, someone might spot her by night, walking along the slopes below the mountain, or up in the tower window, staring out. In her pig-headed way, just like her father, she expected the village to put food and other essentials at her gate, free of charge, its tithe to her house. With a self-deprecating amused grimace, between shame and pride, the village admitted that it did so. Nobody had actually considered whether drowned Cilny might come back to haunt. But now that they did consider, they would not be amazed if she had.
Dro sipped from the third cup.
The stream-death might explain the ambience at the well, the pulse of supernatural force linked to water. The pot of cremated ashes was significant. It was coming time to reward the crowd with a reaction, and then to damp their fire. As he sat, picturing the flower-wreathed water maiden stretched under the glassy stream, he became aware that the musician had moved from the hearth, and was after all stealing closer. He slid through and into the crowd with a very practiced ease, attracting small notice. Intrigued but not astonished, Dro kept still.
“What do you say, Parl Dro?” the boy in the apron asked.
“I say there’s a ghost at the leaning house,” Dro said, virtually what he had said at the start, but a little eddy of satisfaction drifted up. The musician, instrument across his back now, was filtering through the throng like a curl of colour-stained steam.
“What’ll you do?”
“Oh, I think I’ll go to bed. That is, if you have a room here I can use.”
Confounded, the crowd muttered. They had expected him to leap at once out through the door again, no doubt.
“But aren’t you going to call on Ciddey Soban?”
“Apparently not,” he told them. He rose, paying no heed to the blazing chord that was struck in his crippled leg. The musician had halted, about a foot away, moulded exactly between two burly labourers, just as if he had grown there from a tiny seed planted in the floor. He was only an inch or two shorter than Dro, but lightly built as a reed.
Dro regarded the boy in the apron. “The room?”
“I’ll show you. What about Cilny deadalive?”