Dreamspinner by Lynn Kurland

to what he suspected would be months of absolute hell.
    He wished—absently, lest he think about it overmuch and grieve—that his sister Mhorghain hadn’t chosen it as her habitation for so long, which led him to feeling that if he could save another wench the horrors of the work inside, he should.
    “He wouldn’t be interested in anything you had to say,” Rùnach said.
    She tried to elbow him out of the way. “I am a lad, just as any other. Why would he let you in and not me?”
    “I have a sword?”
    She opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly. Rùnach left her thinking on that and pushed her aside to put himself between her and the gate. It opened without haste, which he had expected. He steeled himself for the first test, grateful that in that, at least, he had been prepared by his sister and her husband as to what to expect—
    Though it would have helped, he supposed, if he’d had a sword to hand.
    His sword, as it happened, had been filched from his side with remarkable swiftness. He watched, Iteach’s nose on his shoulder, as a woman who had no business even looking at Gobhann faced the gatekeeper and brandished that pilfered sword.
    The gatekeeper rested his sword against his shoulder and scratched his cheek absently with his other hand.
    “Well,” he said, finally.
    Rùnach couldn’t have agreed more. The lad—er, woman, rather—holding his sword with both hands and struggling to keep it aloft might have done a fair amount of damage with it if she lost control and had it nick some poor fool as it fell toward the ground. But use it for its intended purpose?
    Not anytime soon.
    “Which way to the lord of Gobhann?” she said, her voice quavering dangerously.
    The gatekeeper blinked. “I beg your pardon?”
    “I must talk to Scrymgeour Weger
today
.”
    The gatekeeper, who was reputedly named Odo, looked at her as if he couldn’t quite understand what he was hearing. “Today?”
    “Before midnight, at least,” she said.
    Odo frowned. “I think you might be better served if you were to turn around and retreat back out the gate.”
    She put her shoulders back and fixed a look of determination on her face, a look she turned and favored Rùnach with very briefly. “I
will
go forward. If either of you stands in my way, you’ll pay a very steep price.”
    Rùnach looked at Odo. Odo only shrugged, then gestured toward the stairs. The woman glanced at those stairs—empty ones, thankfully—then looked back at the gatekeeper.
    “Thank you. I’ll speak highly of your good sense to your master.”
    “Well, thank you, ah—”
    “No need to exchange names,” she said. “I just need an hour to speak to your master, then I will be on my way.”
    Odo frowned but didn’t stop her as she walked unsteadily past him. Rùnach watched her reach the stairs, then looked at Odo.
    “Master Odo,” he said, inclining his head.
    Odo lifted his finger and flicked it backward, indicating that Rùnach should remove the hood of his cloak. Rùnach supposed there was no point in delaying the inevitable flinching he would have as his reward. Why Miach of Neroche couldn’t have attended to his face while he’d been about that bit of repair work at Seanagarra, Rùnach couldn’t have said. Then again Rùnach hadn’t asked. He had wanted hands that worked, which he had gotten,for the most part. Anything else had seemed just too frivolous. He suppressed the urge to take a deep breath, then reached up and lifted the hood back off his head.
    Odo studied him for a moment or two, then leaned over and had a quiet word with one of the pair of lads who waited at his heels. The lad scampered off and up the stairs, bypassing the woman carrying Rùnach’s blade. Rùnach watched for a moment, then looked at Odo.
    “She’s absconded with my sword.”
    “That one’s trouble,” Odo agreed, then he blinked. “Did you say—”
    “I meant
he
has absconded with my blade,” Rùnach said hastily. No sense in subjecting the gel to