Sword of Fire

by Katharine Kerr

  “Don’t! Someone’s coming.”

  Down the road ahead of them another dust cloud came hurrying. Silver horns sounded ahead and behind. Men yelled out the names of their gwerbretion: “Ladoic!” “Standyc!” Cavan urged his horse up next to Alyssa.

  “Get to the side of the road! If there’s a scrap, head into the field!”

  She followed him over.

  The Bear warband, close to home, could risk a brief burst of gallop on the wretched road, while Aberwyn’s men had to put their horses’ safety first. In a whooping, cat-calling mob, the Bear warband surrounded Alyssa and Cavan, then pulled up to an orderly halt. They were a scruffy lot, armed with broadswords in the old manner and wearing odd scraps of mail and plate, doubtless all they thought they’d need for a ride around their lord’s borders. A quick uncertain count told her that there were at least eighteen of them.

  The Aberwyn men were better armed on better horses, but there were only ten of them. Gwarl snarled and swore, but he had no choice but to yell, “Back off and retreat.” The Aberwyn squad stopped about twenty yards down the road and waited. Gwarl rode closer alone.

  “Now, lass,” the Bear captain said, “what’s all this?”

  “Oh, good sir, first of all, you have all the thanks and praise I can heap upon you.” Alyssa put a convincing quiver and snivel into her voice. “You see, my father’s an important guildsman back home, and he refused to let me marry Valyn here, the man I love above all else in the world.” She shot Cavan a love-sick glance. “So when we ran away, he must have gone to the gwerbret.”

  “Ah, to fetch you back again, like. Well, if you were my daughter, I’d have done the same, but since you’re not, it’s none of my affair.” He rose in the stirrups and called out to Gwarl. “Leave the lass alone! She’s done naught against the laws of your rhan or mine, my lord, and I know and you know that Gwerbret Standyc will take grave exception to using force on his roads.”

  “They were on Aberwyn roads when we first spotted them!” Gwarl called back. “And what, pray tell, were you up to? Planning to raid into our territory?”

  “We patrol the borders, my lord, regular-like.” The captain made him a half-bow from the saddle. “Just in case there’s trouble. Our gwerbret’s a peaceable man.”

  Gwarl stiffened at the implication, “unlike yours.” One of the older men in the Aberwyn warband urged his horse forward. He leaned in his saddle and whispered to Gwarl, who smiled.

  “Captain, look here,” Gwarl said. “The lass may be lying, she may not, but I can swear on my honor that this man has a bounty on his head. He’s wanted by the courts in Aberwyn. I’d say her father has good reason to want her taken and brought back to him.”

  “Oh, indeed?” The captain turned to Alyssa and raised an eyebrow. “Well, if that’s true, lass, you might be better off going with this lordship here. If he gives me a pledge as to your safety.”

  Alyssa noticed some of the men in the warband smirking. She was a dishonored woman in their eyes now. And Cavan would hang.

  “Good captain, I beg you! Don’t send me back! Lord Gwarl’s an honorable man, I’m sure, but—”

  “Hold!” the captain snarled. “Lord Gwarl, is it? The man who charged into the crowd in Aberwyn? Men died in that, lass.”

  The men behind him swore or muttered under their breath. Gwarl began backing his horse. Too late Alyssa realized what she’d done. One of those dead men was the younger son of Gwerbret Standyc. The Bear men all urged their horses a few steps forward, but the captain raised one hand, flat, palm outward. They held their position at that.

  “Oh, indeed?” The captain’s cold voice measured out each word as carefully as a baker measuring yeast. “Does the lass speak true, my lord?”

  Gwarl swallowed heavily. He’d gone a bit pale. If he were captured, Standyc would hang him without a moment’s worry for the inevitable war that would follow. The Bear’s men laid hands on sword hilts. So did the men behind Gwarl. Cavan turned to Alyssa and mouthed the words, “get ready to run.” She answered with a silent “you, too.” The captain noticed and gave her a curt nod of the head.

  “Get off the road,” he snapped, “and take your cursed silver dagger with you.” He turned back to Gwarl. “If his lordship will allow?”

  Gwarl was already reaching for his saber. Alyssa jerked her horse’s head around and kicked him to make him run. They darted into the meadow with Cavan right behind them. Out on the road yells exploded and the clatter of hooves as the two warbands met. Metal shrieked on metal and thumped on shields.

  “Don’t look back!” Cavan shouted to her. “Just ride! Over there through the grass!”

  He pointed across the meadow to a thicket of trees.

  Although Alyssa heard him, the horrifying noise behind her seemed to have cast a dwimmer spell. She sat transfixed on horseback and heard a man scream in agony. Swearing in a string of vile oaths, Cavan grabbed the reins from her with one hand and led her away as fast the horses could trot. Don’t look, she told herself, don’t look! But of course she did look back and saw a body lying in the road, a bleeding horse falling to its knees, another man, an Aberwyn man, retreating with his face blood-red. No one had had time to don their helms, she realized.

  “Lyss!” Cavan shouted at her. “Look at me!”

  She managed to do that, and the spell broke. As he led her into the safety of a copse of trees, she began to weep, a stubborn trickle of tears that persisted no matter how hard she fought them.

  “Here, here!” Cavan said. “What’s so wrong?”

  “My fault, and they’re dead.”

  “Fault? You saved us both. Don’t you know what Gwarl’s warband would have done to you on the way back to the town? You’d have been lucky to reach Aberwyn alive.”

  The tears stopped. She did know, had heard stories all her life about what men did to women they considered sluts and thus fair game.

  “Besides,” Cavan continued, “Gwarl’s gotten what’s coming to him. The Bear’s men will take his body back to their lord tonight, and young what’s-his-name will be avenged.”

  Her voice caught in her throat and choked her, but she stammered out a few words.

  “This means war, doesn’t it?”

  “It does.” Cavan sounded almost cheerful. “But here, don’t blame yourself. It would have happened anyway. What matters now is staying safe and getting to Haen Marn.”

  On the other side of the meadow they rejoined the road. Alyssa felt herself trembling beyond her power to stop. Her hands, her face, felt icy cold in the spring sunshine.

  “Cavan?” she said, and her voice shook. “Which of them won?”

  “I can’t tell from here, but I’d wager high it’s the Bears. Numbers always tell, always, despite what the bards sing in those old sagas. There were twice as many of them as there were Foxes. And none of the Fox men were wearing armor.”

  * * *

  Benoic caught up with them when the sun hung low in the sky. He was riding a black gelding instead of the chestnut, and he told them that the lord who’d given him the remount had been pleased to do so.

  “The chestnut was his, it seems,” Benoic said. “He’d given it to another messenger some while back.”

  “So he won’t be worrying about getting the black returned?” Cavan said.

  “I doubt it, but won’t we be going back that way?”

  “You might be, but Lyss and I won’t.”

  “And I’d be glad of your sword,” Alyssa said, “if you’d like to keep riding with us.”

  Inwardly Cavan sighed: would he never get a chance alone with her? He reminded himself that he was unworthy, but somehow, watching her lithe body and bright smiles, he was finding humility hard to come by. Still, he was a practical man in his way.

  “We need you,” Cavan said. “There’s no doubt about that.”

  “Then I�
��m on!” Benoic made Alyssa a half-bow from the saddle. “I’ll be glad of the hire, and truly, you’ll need another sword. Here, Cavvo, what’s going on? I rode past a place where there’d been a nasty scrap, from the look of the blood in the road and all. A couple of farmfolk were out, cutting up some dead horses for the meat, and they told me it was the Bear against some Western Fox men.”

  “It was that, all right.”

  “They said the Bear captain rode off with some lord’s head on the point of his sword.”

  “He did what?”

  “Took his head. The farmfolk swore to it.” Benoic grimaced with a little shudder. “I couldn’t half believe it at first! Ye gods, with all the laws and curses and the like against taking heads? I may be only a silver dagger, but it turned my guts, it did.”

  Alyssa went dead-white. Cavan leaned over in the saddle and grabbed her horse’s reins.

  “What’s all this?” Benoic said. “My apologies for rattling on like that.”

  “It’s ghastly, is all.” Alyssa choked out the words. “In this day and age!”

  “Most assuredly it’s that,” Cavan said. “Here, try to put it out of your mind. We’d best get to Haen Marn as fast as we possibly can. Standyc won’t give us grief, but we’ve got to get beyond Ladoic’s reach.”

  Benoic looked faintly puzzled.

  “That head,” Cavan continued, “most likely belonged to Lord Gwarl, Aberwyn’s younger son.”

  “By the Lord of Hell’s great scaly balls.” Benoic was whispering. “War. It’s certain now.”

  “True spoken.” Alyssa’s voice had steadied, though her face still was pale. “Haen Marn’s a sacred rhan, you know. No one dares draw a sword there. We’ll be safe once we reach it.”

  “If we do,” Benoic said. “Cavvo, you’ve got a broadsword hidden in your blankets, from the look of that roll. Change it now. That finesword won’t do us much good if things come to a scrap on the road.”

  “Or in a tavern, truly. Done, then.”

  Along this stretch of the canal, bordered by woodland, the towpath narrowed. Cavan put Alyssa in the lead to spare her the dust, and he and Benoic rode side by side behind. They stayed close to her, however, and loosened their swords in their scabbards. Once they came free of the woods, they rode three abreast with Alyssa safely in the middle. The path and canal ran through fields at first, but the farther north they traveled, the more they saw pastureland, dotted with white cows with rusty-red ears. Occasionally they saw fenced pastures sheltering solid-looking carthorses with rich brown coats and white markings. To distract her from brooding, Cavan pointed them out to Alyssa.

  “Probably bred for the canal boat trade,” he remarked.

  “Indeed.” Her voice still sounded thin and dry with fear. “The traffic to Haen Marn’s heavy in the spring and summer.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing the place.”

  “Huh,” Benoic said. “I wonder if that strange old woman’s still there.”

  “Who?” Cavan said.

  “A while past I got a hire guarding a healer of sorts who was going to Haen Marn to look for some kind of book. She had a cursed strange beast with her, a huge spotted cat, and I’m not having a jest on you, Cavvo, I swear it. The beast was as well trained as a lady’s lapdog.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Um, Rommardda, summat like that.”

  “What? You met the Rommardda? From Cerrgonney?”

  “That’s where she was from, true enough. But the Rommardda?”

  “It’s a title, not truly a name at all, though she uses it like one. We saw her in Lughcarn now and then, come to oversee a new smelter or bless a forge or suchlike.”

  “Bless? She’s a priestess, like, you mean?”

  Cavan cursed his own big mouth. He’d come close to revealing a secret of the iron craft. “In a way, truly, but she doesn’t live shut up in a temple.”

  “Well, she was traveling around, sure enough, her and her cat beast. Cathvar, his name was. I swear she knew—ah well—strange lore, but doubtless just a daft fancy on my part.”

  Benoic seemed to have already figured out that the Rommardda was a dwimmerwoman, but Cavan decided against confirming it. As the second son of Lughcarn’s gwerbret, he’d been sworn to the secret rites of metal-working as a lad. He might have dishonored his noble rank, but he refused to dishonor the Iron Brotherhood and his ritual position as the Sword of Fire. The Brotherhood, a Lughcarn tradition, stood halfway between a craft guild and a dwimmer lodge, though many thought their rituals were just for show, little fables and bits of lore and nothing more. Mostly the Brothers did charity work, helping the poor in Lughcarn, especially those injured in the dangerous craft of coaxing pure metal out of rock. Cavan had loved the work, the lore, and the rituals.

  Now he’d lost it all.

  As they rode north that day, Cavan found himself remembering the position he might have held in Lughcarn’s rich trade and craft, if only he hadn’t thrown everything away in a stupid brawl in a tavern. He might have been living in comfort as an overseer of dues and taxes, with plenty of coin to support an educated wife like Alyssa, or even running one of the law courts as other younger sons did—not that she would have let him handle matters in the traditional manner. He smiled at the thought of her facing down his blustering father with talk of justice and tradition.

  No hope for that now, he realized. He also realized something else: soon he’d be facing Rommardda. He choked back a groan of pure shame, that she would see him like this.

  “What’s wrong?” Alyssa turned in her saddle to look at him.

  “Ah, ah, naught.”

  “You’ve gone white as milk.”

  “Just, um, thinking.”

  “None of my affair if you don’t wish to tell me.” She returned to looking at the road ahead.

  And why, he thought to himself, have I met a woman like this now, when I can’t possibly have her? Part of my punishment, mayhap, for being such a cursed stupid fool.

  * * *

  From the south, the canal system ran all the way to Haen Marn, though it traveled no further north and only a short way to the east. That night, when Alyssa and her two silver daggers took shelter in an inn, Alyssa heard that Gwerbret Standyc did want to extend it, but he needed more coin to do so.

  “Not a lot of folk up here, lass,” a merchant told her. “So not a lot of dues and taxes. If he can open land to free farmers off to the west, well then, he’ll have the means.” He sighed and shook his head. “But the war with Aberwyn is going to throw a meat axe into that scheme.”

  “You think there’s bound to be a war now?” Alyssa said.

  “How can there not be? Lord Grif dead first, and now the Aberwyn lad?”

  “Some might say it balanced out, like.”

  “True, if there was anyone out here with the authority to say it.” He smiled with a twist of his mouth. “And if they listened to him. Damned arrogant, our local lords. The honor of the thing! Makes me sick, listening to them. Huh! Not worth a weasel’s stinking arse, if you ask me.”

  “But there’s the Westfolk behind all this.” Another merchant leaned forward and shook his table dagger in the air for emphasis. “I don’t trust ’em, I don’t, those cat-eyed bastards, out for everything they can get.”

  “Oh, come now!” the first merchant said. “They’re scrupulous fair traders, they are.”

  “Huh! Because they know we’re watching every move their cursed skinny fingers make!”

  The conversation died there.

  Although Alyssa had been thinking about finishing the journey by canal, the more she considered it, the weaker the idea seemed. Once they were on a boat they’d have nowhere to run if Standyc decided to take them for a bargaining point with Aberwyn. Benoic and Cavan both agreed.

  “The road’s a better choice,” Benoic said. “
We can always cut away from it to hide if we have to. Besides, we’ll be reaching Haen Marn soon enough.”

  After the meal, Cavan and Benoic left the inn to go sleep in the stables. Lantern in hand, Alyssa walked with them out into the stableyard for a private word. Over by the stable building three men were standing in a little group. Benoic swore under his breath. The three raised drawn swords and strolled over. She saw the gleam of dagger blades in their left hands.

  “All right, Cavvo,” one of them said. “You’re coming with us to Aberwyn. Alive or dead. Your decision.”

  “Curse you and your balls both!” Cavan slid his sword free of the sheath. “It’s the bounty, innit?”

  “You’ll have to get past me, too.” Benoic drew his as well. “Renno, I’m surprised at you, running a coward’s errand. And Wilyn, you mule’s cunt!”

  “Don’t be a fool, Benno!” Renno said. “Our quarrel’s not with you. Three against two, man! Think!”

  “Lyss!” Cavan spoke without looking away from the approaching danger. “Run! Get inside!”

  Good advice—she had no intention of following it. She knew that silver daggers settled their own quarrels, refused the aid of the laws, and all the rest of it. She cared not one whit. She held the lantern up and screamed.

  “Help! Murder! Rape! Help! Thieves thieves thieves!”

  Benoic and Cavan stepped in front of her as she screamed again with lungs grown strong from bardic training. The three bounty hunters hesitated just long enough. The inn doors behind her flew open with a spill of light. Men, a lot of men, rushed out yelling and waving weapons. Iron-bound cudgels, a meat cleaver, a couple of antique broadswords gleamed as her defenders ran through the spill of light from the open doors. Alyssa hurried out of the way and held the lantern high while she screamed again, wordlessly, this time, to add to the effect. The three bounty hunters shamelessly ran for the gates with the bolder members of the crowd in pursuit.

  The merchant she’d been speaking to at dinner trotted over to her. He carried a quarterstaff.