Darkspell

by Katharine Kerr

  By then the Cerrmor men had caught up, and in a howling charge they swept toward the prince. Gweniver could see the white horse, rearing and bucking under its helpless rider. Swords flashed, and she heard Ricyn’s war cry as she charged into the mob.

  “Ricco! Dagwyn!” she yelled. “I’m here!”

  It was ridiculous, maybe, but Dagwyn yelled back a war cry and fought like a fiend. Nose to tail, he and Ricyn were parrying more than cutting, desperately trying to stay mounted in a mob of Eldidd swords. Gweniver slashed one enemy across the back, swung in the saddle, and barely parried a strike from the side. She heard Cerrmor voices behind her, around her, but she thrust on, laughing, always laughing, swinging hard, feeling blows glance off her mail, striking in return, until she’d fought her way to Ricyn’s side. His horse was dying under him, and his face ran with blood.

  “Get up behind me!” she yelled.

  Ricyn threw himself clear of the saddle as his horse went down. She blindly slashed and fended as he scrambled up behind her, the horse snorting and dancing under them. An Eldidd man charged in, then screamed, twisted, as a Cerrmor strike got him from the rear. Swearing at the top of his lungs, Dannyn shoved his way through the mob and grabbed the reins of the prince’s white horse. The little eddy of death ebbed as the Cerrmor men chased the last of the raiders down the road.

  Suddenly Gweniver felt the Goddess leave her. She slumped in the saddle, looked dazed around, then wept like a child who falls asleep in its mother’s lap only to wake up alone in a strange bed.

  “By the hells!” Dannyn snapped. “Are you cut?”

  “I’m not. One minute the Goddess had Her hands on me, but the next, She’d gone.”

  “I saw Her,” Ricyn said, his voice faint. “When you ride into a fight, Gwen, you are the Goddess.”

  She twisted around to look at him. He had one hand pressed over the bloody cut on his face, and his eyes were narrow with pain. The quiet conviction in his voice was frightening.

  “I mean it,” Ricyn said. “You are the Goddess to me.”

  Some four weeks after she’d ridden out untried, Gweniver came back to Dun Cerrmor a warrior. Since he wanted to keep most of the army on the Eldidd border for a while, Dannyn had sent her and her warband back as an escort for their royal prize, who turned out to be Prince Mael of Aberwyn, the youngest son of the dragon throne. When she rode into the ward and looked at the towering broch complex, she realized that she belonged there. It was no longer overwhelming, because its splendor meant nothing more than a place to live between campaigns. She acknowledged the swarm of servants and pages with a small nod, then dismounted and helped Ricyn cut the captured prince’s ankles free from his saddle. Just as Mael was dismounting, Saddar the councillor hurried over and bowed. The prince stood stiffly, looking at both councillor and dun with a small, contemptuous smile.

  “Our liege is in his reception chamber, Your Holiness,” Saddar said. “We received your messages, and his highness is most anxious to see the prince.”

  “Good. I’ll be glad to get rid of him, I tell you. He was rotten company on the road.”

  Four of Glyn’s guard led them into the echoing reception chamber inside the main broch. At one end was a small dais, spread with carpets and backed by two enormous tapestries, one depicting King Bran founding the Holy City, the other showing the same king leading a battle charge. In a high-backed chair waited King Glyn, dressed in ceremonial clothes: a pure-white tunic, richly worked, a golden sword at his side, and the royal plaid, fastened at the shoulder with the enormous ring-brooch that marked him king. Freshly bleached, his pale hair swept back from his face as if he were looking into a private wind. He acknowledged the entrance of Mael and Gweniver, both filthy and tattered from the road, with a small wave of a ringed hand. When Gweniver knelt, Mael remained standing and looked steadily at Glyn, who was, after all, no more than his equal in rank.

  “Greetings,” the king said. “Although I disclaim and dispute your clan’s claim on my throne, I’m quite mindful of your right to yours. I assure you that you’ll be treated with every courtesy during your stay here.”

  “Indeed?” Mael snapped. “Such courtesies as your rough court can offer, anyway.”

  “I see that the prince has a strong spirit.” Glyn allowed himself a small smile. “I’ll be sending heralds soon to your father’s court to formally announce your capture. Do you wish any messages to go along with them?”

  “I do, a letter to my wife.”

  Gweniver was honestly surprised. Although it was common practice among the blood royal to marry their heirs off young, he looked like such a lad, standing there in his dirty clothes, that it was hard to believe him married. Mael made her a bow.

  “My wife was due for her childbed when I rode away, Your Holiness. Perhaps such things would be of no interest to you, but her well-being weighs heavily upon me.”

  “My own scribe will come to you later,” Glyn said. “Tell your lady what you wish.”

  “Simple pen and ink will be enough. The men of my house know how to read and write.”

  “Very well, then.” The king smiled again. “I’ll be informing you now and again of the progress of the negotiations. Guards.”

  Like a hand clasping over a jewel, the guards surrounded the prince and marched him away.

  Up at the top of the central broch, the prince’s chamber was a large round room with its own hearth, glass in the windows, a Bardek carpet on the floor, and decent furniture. Whenever Nevyn visited him, Mael would pace round and round like a donkey tied to a mill wheel. The guards told Nevyn that he paced that way half the night, too. Although the dweomerman visited him first to tend his broken wrist, as the month wore on, he kept coming out of simple pity. Since the prince could read and write, Nevyn brought him books from the scribal library and lingered to spend an hour or two discussing them. The lad was unusually bright, with the kind of wits that might develop into wisdom if he lived long enough. The prospect for that, however, was doubtful, because under all of Glyn’s courtesy lay the real threat that if Eldidd didn’t ransom his son, Mael would hang. Since he himself had once been a third and thus superfluous prince, Nevyn doubted that Eldidd would humble himself unduly when it came to saving Mael’s life. Mael had his own doubts.

  “I wish I could have killed myself before they captured me,” he remarked one afternoon.

  “That would have been a shameful thing. A man who flees his Wyrd has a harsh reckoning to make in the Otherlands.”

  “Would it have been any harsher than hanging like a horse thief?”

  “Oh, come now, lad, your father might ransom you yet. Glyn’s not inclined to be greedy over the price, and your father would feel shamed if he just let you die.”

  Mael flung himself into a chair and slouched down, his long colt’s legs stretched out in front of him, his raven-black hair a rumpled mess.

  “I can bring you another book,” Nevyn went on. “The scribes have a copy of Dwvoryc’s Annals of the Dawntime. It has some splendid battles in it, or would reading about the war ache your heart?”

  The prince shook his head and stared out the window at the blue sky.

  “You know what the worst thing was?” he said after a moment. “Being captured by a woman. I thought I’d die of shame when I looked at her and saw she was a woman.”

  “Well, not just any female, Your Highness. There’s no shame in being captured by a Moon-sworn warrior.”

  “So I’ll hope, then. But truly, I’ve never seen anyone fight like her. She was laughing.” Mael paused, his mouth slack with the memory. “It truly was like seeing a goddess come over the field, the way she was laughing and cutting. One of her men called her the Goddess, and you know, I believed him.”

  Nevyn felt sick at the thought of her being so bound up in battle lust.

  “Good sir, you seem wise,” the prince went on. “I thought it was impious for a woman to take up arms.”

  “Now, that depends on which priest you choose to listen to.
But it’s an act of piety to Lady Gweniver’s Goddess. Every man she kills is a sacrifice to the Dark of the Moon.”

  “Indeed? Then her Goddess must have been glutted after that fight, and her holy battle ravens, too.”

  “No doubt. Now, back in the Dawntime there were other battle maidens, all sworn to the Dark Moon, though I don’t suppose the cult was ever what you’d call widespread. The Rhwmanes thought it impious, but then, all their women did was sit and spin.”

  “You mean back in the Homeland, then, before the great exile.”

  “Just that, long before King Bran led his people to the Western Isles. But once they were here, cut off from the Homeland, well, I suppose a childbearing woman was simply too valuable to risk in battle. I don’t truly understand it, but the cult of the Dark Moon died away. There’s somewhat about it in that book I mentioned.”

  “Then I’d truly like to read it. It makes it better, knowing I wasn’t captured by the only one.”

  That very same day heralds came in from Eldidd. The court was abuzz with gossip, wondering how much the foreign king was offering for his son, and if Glyn would take it. The eager ears did hear one bit of news straightaway, that Mael’s wife had been delivered of a fine, healthy son. Nevyn wondered how much the king would care about Mael now that he had still another heir, but that answer, as it turned out, was quite a bit. Nevyn heard the tale from the king, when Glyn summoned him to his private chambers that night, as he’d grown accustomed to doing, just to hear the long view that the dweomer could offer him.

  “Eldidd’s promised me a cursed large amount of gold,” Glyn said. “But I don’t need coin as much as I need a quiet border. I’m planning on dragging the negotiations out as long as possible, and I’ve warned him that his son will hang if he raids while I have him.”

  “Doubtless he’ll respect that, my liege, at least for a time.”

  “So I hope. I’d hate to actually hang a helpless prisoner. After all, Eldidd can press his claim to the throne by attacking Cantrae lands. They share a long border to the north.” The king smiled gently. “Let Slwmar see how it feels to be a morsel of meat between a pair of jaws.”

  One of those jaws was, of course, Dannyn and King’s Guard, who were raiding up in the north. Every time a messenger returned, Nevyn questioned him for news of Gweniver, and every time the man said in awe that not only was she well, but an inspiration to the entire army. God-touched, they called her. Nevyn supposed that most people would see her that way, one of those fortunate few whom the gods directly favor with power and luck. He, of course, saw it differently, because he knew what the gods are: vast centers of force in the Inner Lands, which correspond to part of either the natural world or the human mind. For thousands of years worshipers have built up the images of the gods and poured power into them, until they seemed to be persons in their own right. Anyone who knows how to build the appropriate mental images and chant the correct sort of prayers—the exact wording doesn’t matter—can contact the centers of force and draw off power for their own use. The priest contacts those centers in blind faith; the dweomerperson, cold-bloodedly, knowing that he creates the god more than the god creates him; Gweniver had stumbled into a dark corner of the female mind that women had been forced to bury for the past seven hundred years. Without a temple of the Dark Rite to teach her, she was like a child who tries to pick up a burning fire because it’s pretty, and he worried.

  Yet even though he knew that her true Wyrd lay with the dweomer, he was forbidden by his vows to interfere boldly in her life. All he could do was win her confidence, make casual hints, and hope that someday she would ask him the right questions. If, of course, she lived long enough. He could only pray that the winter would come early that year. Once they were all in the dun together, with the campaigning over for the season, he would have a chance to become her friend.

  For a month more the Cerrmor raiders struck with impunity along Cantrae’s southern border, because Slwmar was forced to siphon off troops to march west and deal with the new threat from Eldidd. Every now and then they faced a sizable army, but Dannyn generally withdrew before battle, preferring to bleed Cantrae’s sources of supply rather than lose men of his own. Finally, though, Slwmar was desperate enough to force battle, backing Dannyn’s men up against the Belaver by some shrewd maneuvering. Although the outcome was technically a Cerrmor victory that sent Slwmar’s men rushing back north toward the Holy City, the losses were high.

  As he walked through the battlefield that evening, where his men were still working at finding and bringing in the wounded, Dannyn knew that another pitched fight would destroy them. With him walked Gweniver, as filthy and sweaty as any man there, with blood spattered on her face and shoulders. As they walked, she looked on the slaughter with an indifference that frightened him. For all that he loved battle glory and combat, he hated to see his men killed. His ideal of battle would have been something out of an old saga, where the noble-born challenged each other to single combat while their troops cheered them on.

  “We’re going to have to withdraw,” he said abruptly.

  “Whatever you think best, as long as we come back.”

  “We might, we might not. With Eldidd in this truce, I could maybe strip Dun Cerrmor of the fort guard, but I’m not sure I want to. The king will have to make the final decision, of course.”

  She turned her head to look at him in exasperation.

  “Her holiness had best remember that we need men to send against the Boar this fall. There’ll be more slaughter then, maybe even enough to glut her.”

  With a toss of her head at the insult, she left him, striding away to her warband. For a moment he watched her go and wished that he could find her repellent, could stop thinking of her as a woman at all, as her holy vow should have made him do. Although he was far from a pious man, Dannyn believed in the gods, and he knew that he was risking their wrath by wanting a sworn priestess in his bed. Yet at times she would smile at him, or simply walk by, and his lust would be so strong that he would find it hard to breathe for a moment. He promised himself that if ever the time came to field two armies, he would make sure that she was in one, and he, the other.

  He would have found his longing easier to forget if it weren’t for Ricyn. At times, during their slow march south to Cerrmor, he would notice the way that she and her captain talked together, so intimately, so closely, that he wondered if perhaps she’d already broken her vow, and with a common-born rider at that. The jealousy ate at him until he started hating Ricyn, a man he’d always liked before, admired even, for his steadiness, his calm courage, his easy way with the men beneath him. Now he at times had long daydreams of sending Gweniver’s captain out to certain death on a hopeless charge.

  Once they were back in Dun Cerrmor, without even the distraction of battle, Dannyn found his feelings for her even harder to ignore. He did his best to avoid her, but there remained their lessons in sword craft. Although he mocked his feelings for her, telling himself that he was nothing more than a stallion in rut, he honestly loved her enough that the thought of her eventual death terrified him. He was determined to teach her every trick he knew to compensate for her lack of weight and reach.

  Every morning they sparred for several hours. Although they were using only blunt blades and wicker shields, at times the contest turned into a real fight. Something would set her off, and rather than scoring light touches, she would go berserk and start landing hits, hard slaps of the blade that set off his fury to match hers. For a few minutes they would battle, then break off by some semiconscious mutual consent and resume a more civilized lesson. Although he always won those fights, Dannyn never felt that he was mastering her. He could give her bruises all morning, but the next day she would start it again, pushing him over the edge with a hard blow. He was beginning to think that she was determined to master him.

  Being back in the dun also made it hard for him to ignore Ricyn. Often he saw them together, laughing at some joke, Ricyn leaning close to her as t
hey strolled in the ward, even dicing for coppers like a pair of riders. At times Ricyn would come watch them spar. He’d stand at the edge of the practice ground like a chaperon, saying nothing, then escort her away when they were done. Since he had no justifiable reason to order away the captain sworn to another noble, Dannyn had to put up with it.

  Dannyn was furious enough one afternoon to go over and join them when they were out by the stables. He simply didn’t like the way Ricyn was smiling at her and strode over in time to overhear an odd jest about rabbits.

  “Good morrow,” Dannyn said. “What’s all this about rabbits, my lady?”

  “Oh, Ricco’s good at snaring them with these wires he always carries, so I was just saying that maybe he can snare me a few Boars.”

  Dannyn liked hearing her use Ricyn’s nickname even less.

  “Somewhat that you learned on the farm?” he naapped.

  “It was, my lord,” Ricyn said. “You learn a lot, being a farmer’s son. Like how to tell a purebred horse from a nag.”

  “And just what do you mean by that?” Dannyn laid his hand on his sword hilt.

  “Just what I said.” Ricyn did the same. “My lord.”

  With an oath Dannyn drew. He saw a flash of metal; then his wrist burned, and his sword was flying from his hand. Cursing, he stepped back just as Gweniver slapped Ricyn’s arm down with the flat of her blade. She’d out-drawn them both.

  “By all the gods, not just mine,” she said, “I’ll kill the first one of you that starts this up again, even if I hang for it. Do you both understand me?”

  Ricyn turned and ran, heading back for the barracks. Dannyn rubbed his aching wrist and scowled at his retreating back until Gweniver tapped his chest with the point of her sword.