29. Before Sunrise
Before Sunrise
Kain rose before the sun the next morning. It sat far below the horizon still, but he had slept little, his head full of the recipe, and he saw no use in lying there waiting on it.
He skipped breakfast, fed Roan, and started up toward town.
Tillamore lay quiet when he rode up, the sun beginning to warm the eastern sky without yet breaking over it. He swung down at the Kettle, lashed Roan to the rail, and went to the front door, which stood unlocked.
He could hear Matthew fussing in the back room, but Sasha hadn't come out yet. He slipped into the kitchen, found a heel of ham and cheese left from the night before, and put together a sandwich while he waited.
It was stale and it wasn't much, but it did the job. As he swallowed the last of it, he thought of Darien's note that he would eat anything, and allowed the man might have had a point.
He was still sitting there when Sasha came out, Matthew crawling along the floor behind her. The boy caught the corner of a cabinet and set to hauling himself up, got partway, and dropped back onto his rear, and Kain knelt down to his level.
"He's so close to it." Sasha shook her head. "A little more and he'd have it. I half think he could already, if he had the mind to."
"Same could be said of most small children, I expect." Kain watched the boy. "He's not really a baby anymore, is he."
"He's a baby until he walks. After that he can be a toddler, and not before." Sasha held up a finger. "And I'm not ready for him to be growing up yet."
"Thought you'd be glad to see the back of the sleepless nights," Kain said.
"I am. He's still my baby, though, and he's already growing." Sasha crossed her arms. "Now. What are you doing here?"
She crossed to the stoves, lit a fire under one of them, and took down sausage and eggs. Out in the tavern a few folk had begun to come down from their rooms, and Kain raised a hand to them.
"We'll be with you shortly," he called, then turned back to her. "You know this country well, don't you. The lay of the land."
"Well enough. I've cooked off these hills my whole life, so I know where the berries come up and where the foragers bring the mushrooms in from. You learn the country, feeding a town." She glanced over. "Why?"
Kain drew out the receipt and handed it across. She frowned down at it. "This is your shopping. Salve. Nails."
"Other side," Kain said.
She turned it over and read. "I'll ask again. What is this?"
"A recipe," Kain said.
"What manner of recipe wants nightcap mushrooms?" The sausages had begun to spit in the pan, and she turned back to them, flipping them, then cracked eggs into a second pan.
"The sort that might slow a gryphon enough for a man like me to kill it."
The words sat in the warm kitchen air, and Sasha turned to face him. For a moment Kain said nothing, and his hand went to his hip out of long habit, found the sword wasn't there, and fell open again.
"You think you're ready for that?" Sasha asked.
"No." Kain shook his head. "But I didn't scout the way out of a job because I expected it to go bad.
I did it so I could get out when it did.
I don't want to use this. I don't know that it would do a thing, or that I could even manage it.
" He held up his hands. "What I know is I haven't got much choice.
If this thing is coming down on us, somebody has to be ready, and this is the one edge I can find against it. "
"So you're not about to ride off and play the hero," Sasha said.
"No."
Sasha's shoulders came down, for she had been turning over the worry that he would go straight out after the beast.
"Help me feed the early risers, and I'll help you," she said.
Kain nodded and went out to the bar, where two men sat and a third was coming down the stairs. "What'll you have?"
"Breakfast and coffee." One of them slid two coins across the counter. Kain took them, counted back the change, and dropped the coins in the till. The second man nodded and handed over a fistful of copper.
"Coming right up."
He went back and put a pot of coffee on, then took down two plates. Sasha spooned sausage and eggs onto them, and Kain carried them out.
For a while he took orders and ran plates, and the work sat easy on him, near as easy as the farming was starting to. Before long he had everyone at the bar and the tables fed and content. When the room had settled to its eating, Sasha went into the back.
She came out with a wide sheet of butcher paper, knelt, and spread it on the floor, then took a pencil to it.
The sheet ran two feet to a side, and on it she drew a small building at the center and marked it Tillamore, then ran the roads out south and north and west, set in a few houses for the size of things, and sketched the rolling hills nearest the town.
After that came the forests and the ridges, a cluster of close lines for the high ground, with small notes along the edge of the trees.
"I spent half my growing up wandering this country," Sasha said as she worked. "There was a time I could have drawn every stick and stone of it from memory. You'll have to make do with a rougher map than that. I hope it serves."
"I'm grateful for it," Kain said. "I've seen wolfsbane around here already." He started to ask after the rest of it, and she cut him off.
"Hush." She didn't look up from the paper. "Patience."
She drew on a good while longer, and Matthew crawled out onto the map once. Kain lifted him clear, and the boy crawled straight back and sat down on it with a huff.
"Come on, now, Matthew," Sasha said. "This isn't the time for it."
Kain scooped the boy up and carried him back to the bar. With Matthew on one hip he poured a few drinks, gathered the plates of those who had finished, and stood through the cheek-pinching of a pair of women who couldn't let a baby be.
A couple of travelers asked was he married to Sasha, and when he said no and nothing after it, they found somewhere else to look.
Sasha finished and carried the map up to the preparation counter, where she laid it flat on the wood. Kain set Matthew down on the floor and leaned over it.
"It's not to scale, but it'll serve." Sasha set a finger on it. "Go by the big landmarks and they'll keep you right."
"Wolfsbane grows near everywhere, so if you can't turn up wolfsbane I don't know what to tell you.
The recipe wanted bittersweet berries. There's raspberry along this crick north of town.
" She tapped a thin waterway in the trees that Kain had never marked before.
"They won't be ripe, which may be the very thing you want.
Same with the blueberry that used to grow about here.
The nightcaps, now, you'll look up this way. "
"I didn't think they grew in these parts," Kain said.
"They do. Not thick, but they're here if you know the ground.
" She moved her finger along the map. "Folk have been poisoned over the years taking them for morels.
The biggest stand of them is right here, the south side of the ridge, in among some little caves and gullies.
Go looking just after a rain. Mind they don't touch your skin, and if you're not baking them into something the same day, dry them quick.
Whatever you do, don't boil them. Cook them and you cook the poison right out of them. "
"Got it." Kain turned it over in his head. He would want a sack for the mushrooms, for one thing. "How heavy do you figure that gryphon runs?"
"You'd know that better than me," Sasha said.
"Heavier than it looks, with bones like the guide says, hard as iron.
" Kain frowned at the map. "Call it eight hundred pounds.
We'll work from a thousand to be safe. The recipe likes too much better than too little.
That's a thousand split ten ways, so a hundred ounces it has to take in. What's a hundred ounces in pounds?"
"Sixteen ounces to the pound," Sasha said.
Kain turned the paper over and worked the figures on the back.
A hundred ounces came to a bit past six pounds, and that was only what the gryphon had to swallow.
To be sure that much went down in bait, he would have to put out three or four times it, which meant making a good twenty pounds of the stuff.
He thought about how many nightcaps it would take to make twenty pounds of anything, and it was a great many.
"My father would have gone after this thing himself, were he still living. He never was one to wait on another man to handle his trouble."
"I know." Kain took up the paper and folded it. "I'll see to it."
"Kain." Sasha fixed him with a hard look, her jaw set tight. "Get this thing for me."
"I'll do everything I can," Kain said.