Read Neveryona for Free Online Page B

tell your master, Gorgik the Liberator, that three brave fellows have come to pledge hands and hearts to whatever end he would put them!’
    With the blue eyes and frizzy blond beard of a barbarian – rare enough in northern Ellamon to cause comment when you saw one in the market – a guard stepped toward them, pushed up his helmet; and bawled back: ‘What names might he know you by?’
    ‘Tell your great and gracious master, Gorgik, that the Southern Fox –’ he gestured toward Pryn’s rider –’ andthe Red Badger – ’ which was, apparently, the bearded boy – ‘and myself, the Western Wolf –’ the thick hand fell against his own black rug of a chest – ‘have come to serve him! Ask him what he knows of us, and whether the tales of our exploits that have preceded us are sufficiently impressive to allow us to join his company! Let him consider! We shall return in a few hours to seek admittance!’
    The barbarian guard nodded toward Pryn, then said in a perfectly ordinary voice: ‘There’re four of you …?’
    In an equally ordinary voice the Western Wolf said: ‘Oh. I forgot the kid.’ He turned back to the gate, took a breath, and bawled: ‘Tell him that the Blue Heron is also among our number and to consider her for his cause!’
    Then Wolf, Badger, and Fox, with the Heron behind (thinking of Raven and capital letters), wheeled from the gate. Dust struck up from the road high as the horses’ haunches.
    As the great houses drifted by her behind high walls and palm clusters, what Pryn thought was: Here, I am suddenly in this world of men, made to ride when I want to walk, touched when I want to be left alone, and given a new name when I’ve just learned to write my old one, all under some fanciful threat of death because I
might
be a spy. (Just what tales, she wondered, had
they
been listening to?) I don’t like it at all, she thought. I don’t like it.
    As unclear as the shift between country and city had been, Pryn was equally uncertain – as she was thinking all this – where the change had come between suburb and center. But when the horses clattered across a paved and populous avenue to splash into a muddy alley of stone houses with thatched shacks between, she realized it had.
    They crossed another street.
    Down another alley water flashed between masts.
    They turned onto another avenue. Noise and confusion dazzled her. Living on the edge of a mountain town, without ever really considering herself part of them, Pryn had known the gossipings, prejudices, and rigidities of town life that had played through Ellamon’s quiet streets. But here, the hustle and hallooing made her wonder: How, here, could anyone
know
anyone?
    Twice in one block the Fox’s horse danced aside to avoid someone, first a woman who dashed from the crowds at one side of the street, a four-foot basket strapped to her back, to plunge among people on the other side; second, three youngsters chasing after a black ball. Pryn clung to the Fox’s twisting back. (The little girl, naked as Pryn’s rider and muddy to the knees, grabbed up the black pellet, which had ceased bouncing to roll a ragged course between cobbles. With a barbarian boy in a torn smock tripping behind, the children fled off down another side street.) The horses began to trot once more beside the hurrying men and women; one man hailed a friend across the road; another ran after someone just departed – to tell her one last thing.
    When the white-haired woman left the corner, she was deep in conversation with a younger, who wore a red scarf for a sash. A man and a woman servant behind held decorated parasols over them – or tried to. The sunlit edge kept slipping back and forth across the older woman’s elaborate coif and silver combs. Now she pushed bracelets and blue sleeves up her arms and turned to another woman in her party with short hair incongruously pale as goat’s cream. This one – not much more than a girl, really – wore leather straps