Free The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) by Melissa McPhail Page A

same girl as had watched him forlornly across windswept tides, for beneath the bruises her likeness was similar. But Trell knew it was too much to hope for, so he let the idea fade.   
    “You going to keep standing there gaping like a brainless carp,” Yara had grumbled, “or did you have a mind to help me save her life?”  
    Trell had jumped to help then, and together they’d reset her broken bone, splinted the arm and bandaged her wounds. Only once did the girl resurface, and then it was just to offer a brief glimpse of lovely amber eyes—however unfocused. The lass had retreated to unconsciousness the moment Yara set needle to the gash in her temple, which Trell supposed was just as well.
    When all was said and done, Trell and Yara had returned to the kitchen where Yara prepared czai tea for them. As they sat together at the scrubbed wooden table, Trell had time to consider the moment of his arrival and had asked, “Do you know this girl, Yara?”
    “ Pshaw ,” she said, dismissing his question as utter folly in that way women have of indicating with a simple wordless utterance how perfectly foolish men are in general.
    But Trell was not to be put off. “Why did you say, ‘it’s her’ when I walked in?”
    “What?” she protested, settling him a doleful eye. “I never said such a thing.”
    He arched a dubious brow. “You certainly did.”
    “Certain are you of quite a few things you aught not to be, Ama-Kai’alil,” she returned. She’d taken to calling him Man of the Tides since they spoke almost exclusively in the desert tongue, and in that language, the moniker was easier than using his name.
    With the image of the young girl on the beach still vivid in mind, Trell captured Yara’s dark-eyed gaze and pressed, “ Do you know this girl, Yara?”
    Returning his stare indignantly, she lifted her chin and ascertained, “I have never laid eyes on her before.”
    It wasn’t the answer he’d hoped for, but Trell admitted it was all he was likely to get. The wily old woman only ever explained what it suited her for a man to know, and that wasn’t a great deal—as the episode with Carian vran Lea had proved.
    But her affected indignation was hardly reassuring, and the memory was but one of the leaves circling his mind.
    Trell scratched at his dark beard, which was growing unkempt and itchy and probably needed shaving off. A wind off the river teased Trell’s hair into his eyes and the next curious leaf swept before his mind’s eye…another day, another mystery… 
    It was a day or so after her rescue, and the girl lay in a fevered sleep. She had not resurfaced since that initial foray into consciousness, so they remained in mystery about who she was and whence she’d come—save, lately, the river—or at least Trell had no idea. Yara merely said she didn’t, which Trell believed less and less as time progressed.
    But on that day, Trell had just arrived in the nearby town of L’Aubernay to gather supplies for Yara’s journey to Tregarion and beyond. As he was securing the wagon, his attention caught on a stranger who was conversing with the local tavern-keeper Jean-Claude, a big barrel-chested man Trell had come to know moderately well since his arrival at Yara’s. Trell was close enough to hear their discussion, especially since the stranger was speaking abominable Veneisean with a heavy northern accent and was attempting to compensate for his ineptitude by shouting.
    “…expected days ago but there’s been no sign of her coach,” the man was all but yelling. He was expensively attired, but his longish moustache and pointed chin-beard made him look somewhat akin to a goat and decidedly untrustworthy. Trell expected a man like that wouldn’t have much luck getting answers from the townspeople of L’Aubernay, who misliked Northmen in general and especially the ones who couldn’t be bothered to learn their language. “My lord will pay well for any news of her,” the man meanwhile