Rod just barely managed to restrain a surge of indignation. Old?!? Codger, okay—but, old? He diverted the impulse into suspicious fuming: Who was this bare-cheeked brat, to be asking him questions? Why, he was scarcely done suckling his mother’s milk!
He was gratified to see the young man redden a little—but the boy’s suspicion wasn’t quite finished yet. He ran a trained eye over Fess. “How comes a poor dirt farmer to have so fine a horse?”
Panic! Anxiety! The one thing that men might really blame him for. Rod had been caught. And hard on the heels of that emotion, came a surge of shame. He glanced at Fess. Eh, my wife was beautiful, ten years agone! Small wonder that Sir Ewing took notice of her…
He turned back to the young man. “Sir Ewing gave him to me, saying he was too old to bear an armored knight still.”
The suspicion was still there in the young soldier’s mind; it just changed direction. The young man was trying to find a flaw in the story. “Why would a knight give even a cast-off charger to a poor peasant?”
The shame again. Rod let it mount, burning. “Why, for… favors… we did him, me and mine.” Mostly ‘mine.’ There was a brief, lurid image of a strapping, tow-headed man in bed with a voluptuous young woman, with chestnut hair—not that you could see much else of her… and the vision was gone. But the shame remained, and rage mounted under it. “For favors.” Rod’s face had turned to wood. “Not that ‘tis any affair of thine.”
“ ‘Affair,’ is it?” The young man let a mocking grin spread. “Aye, thine ‘affair’ now, is only the selling of thy cabbages, I warrant.” He turned to the sergeant. “Why do we linger, wasting time on this peasant, Auncient?”
“Why, for that he hath not set his horse to going,” the sergeant growled. “Be off with thee, fellow! Get thy cart out from our station! Get thee hence to the market!”
“Aye—and I thank thy worships,” Rod said sourly. He turned away and slapped the reins on Fess’s back—but very gently, to avoid the metallic ring. Fess started up again, plodding away.
Rod kept a tight rein on his thoughts. It was such a huge, aching temptation to indulge himself in speculation! But he was certainly still in range of the young telepath, and would be for several miles at least—even if the kid’s powers were weak. And if they were strong… No, Rod kept a steady mental stream of embarrassment and anger seething. That the young bastard should have subjected him to such personal questions! What a filthy mind he must have! And where did such a low-born serf’s son get any right to be questioning him, old Owen, about his comings and goings?
Underneath that surface spate, in bursts of pure thought not encoded into words, boiled the host of questions. Interesting, that the ranker had asked the questions, and the sergeant hadn’t even seemed to notice that his authority was being usurped. Interesting, that the sorcerer’s sentries would pose as underlings; they had, at least, some craftiness in their disguises. That the young warlock was one of those who had volunteered to work for Alfar, completely willingly, Rod had no doubt; the youngster clearly had the inferiority complex and paranoia of the persecuted witchling grown to manhood—and the ambition that stemmed from it. Inwardly, Rod shuddered—if he’d been Alfar, he’d never have been able to sleep easily, knowing that his underlings would very cheerfully have sliced him to bits and taken his place.
On the other hand, the fact that they hadn’t indicated that Alfar was either an extremely powerful old esper, or was surrounded by a few henchmen who were genuinely loyal. Or both.
But the chance that telepaths were constantly running surveillance over the duchy, was just too high. Rod couldn’t afford to take chances. His concentration might falter at just the moment that one of the sentry-minds happened to be listening to the area he was in. He had to take more thorough mental precautions.
Accordingly, he let the tension from the confrontation at the border, begin to ebb away, and began to relax—as “old” Owen, of course. What does it matter, what the fuzz-cheeked brat said? I’m in Romanov—and I can sell my crop for that much greater price! But my, it’s been a long day! He’d been up before dawn, Owen had—as he always was, of course; but travelling was more wearying than threshing. His eyelids were sagging. How nice it would be, to nap for a bit—just a little bit! Maybe the half of an hour, or so. In fact, he was beginning to nod. It wasn’t safe, driving when he was so sleepy. Nay, surely he’d better nap.
So he steered the cart off to the side of the road, reined the horse to a stop, lashed the reins to the top bar of the cart, clambered over the seat into the back, and found himself a small nest among his baskets. The boards weren’t too much harder than his pallet at home—and at least he could lean back.
He let his head loll, eyes closing, letting the drowsiness claim him, letting his thoughts darken and grow still…
“Rod.”
Rod jolted upright, blinking, hauling his mind out of the fringes of the web of sleep. “Huh? Wha? Wha’s’a mattuh?”
“Did you intend to doze, Rod?”
“Who, me? Ridiculous!” Rod snorted. “Just putting on a very good act. Well… okay, maybe I got carried away…”
“As you wish, Rod.” Fess was peacefully nibbling at the roadside grass. Rod made a mental note to dump the robot’s wastebasket. For the time being, of course, Fess’s act was as necessary as Rod’s.
Of course, he did have to keep it an act. He lay back against a bran sack, closed his eyes, and let drowsiness claim him again, let the surface of his mind flicker with the images of Owen’s imaginary day.
Underneath, he tried to remember what had happened inside his head when he had first come to Gramarye, how it had felt.
He remembered the shock when he had found out that someone was reading his mind. He had been eyeing one of the teenaged witches with admiration, speculating about her measurements, when she had gasped, and turned to glare at him. He remembered how embarrassed he’d been, and the clamoring panic inside as he realized someone could read his mind. Worse, that any of the Gramarye “witches” could—and that there were dozens of them, at least!
But by the time he’d met Gwen, only a week or so later, she hadn’t been able to read his thoughts. For nine years, that had been the one mar on an otherwise blissful marriage. There had been spats, of course, and there had been the constant, underlying tension that always stems from two people trying to make one life together; but the loving reassurance she’d had every reason to look forward to, the warmth of being able to meld her mind with her husband’s, just hadn’t been there. That had put a continuing, unspoken strain on the marriage, with Gwen hiding feelings of having been cheated—not by Rod, but by life—and Rod trying less successfully to bury his feelings of inferiority.
Then, when the family had been kidnapped to the land of Tir Chlis in an alternative universe, Rod had encountered his analog, the alternate High Warlock, Lord Kern—who was very much like Lord Gallowglass, enough so to be Rod’s double. But there had been some major differences under the skin—such as Kern’s roaring temper. And huge magical powers—one of which was the ability to blend his mind with Rod’s, to lend him Kern’s powers. That had wakened Rod’s own slumbering esper powers—and afflicted him with a hair-trigger temper. Fortunately, it had also roused a mind reading ability he’d never suspected he’d had. And, suddenly, Gwen had been able to read his mind; he’d no longer been telepathically invisible.
So, if he had been open to mind reading when he came to Gramarye, but had been telepathically invisible when he’d met Gwen, his mind had probably closed itself off in that first panic of embarrassment, finding out that somebody could read his thoughts when he most definitely hadn’t wanted her to.