Sword of Fire

by Katharine Kerr

  “What now?” Cavan said. “I’ve no idea how long Alyssa will be.”

  “Might as well go back to the meadow.”

  “You’ve visited the place, right? Why are there so many pages around?”

  “They’re being trained here as healers. Most are the sons of merchants and the like, but there’s usually a younger son or two from a noble family, one with too many sons for their oldest brothers to trust.” Benoic sighed and looked away. “I came here because I was part of the escort for my lord’s lady. Back when I was still an honorable man.”

  “Was she very ill?”

  “She died here. She should have come much sooner, they told my lord.” Benoic shrugged with an uneasy twist of a shoulder. “She had stones growing inside her. I don’t know where.”

  Cavan made a sympathetic noise and led the way outside.

  After the dim light in the stables, the sun outside made him blink and almost stumble. A flock of ravens flew from the stable roof with a flash of black wings, glinting bluish in the bright sun. As they passed overhead, they called out in a chorus of squawks. Cavan shuddered.

  “Ill omen!”

  “Not here,” Benoic said. “Ravens are sacred to the spirits of the island. I don’t know why.”

  Let’s hope it’s a good omen for me, Cavan thought. Maybe Rommardda’s ridden on, and I won’t have to face her. But the first person Cavan saw as he and Benoic returned to the lawn by the gates was Cathvar, lounging on the sunny grass. The leopard glanced their way, then rose, stretching with a flick of his tail.

  “There’s my friend,” Benoic said. “He did me a good turn last year, he did.”

  “Bit Lord Aeryn’s arse?”

  “Better than that. Scared the bastard’s horse. His ever-so-noble lordship ended up arse over cock in a muddy ditch.”

  Cavan laughed aloud. Benoic had told him why he’d become a silver dagger, thrown out of another lord’s warband when Aeryn had falsely accused him of theft. Some might have doubted the tale, but Benoic was the kind of man you could believe—he’d shown that more than once in the time Cavan had known him.

  “Here,” Benoic continued. “You told me you know Rommardda. Why does a beast like this one obey her?”

  “Oh, she’s got a kind way with animals.”

  Benoic rolled his eyes heavenward. “You can do better than that, Cavvo!”

  “What makes you think I’d know?”

  “True. Well and good, then.”

  As if he knew that they were discussing him, the leopard started to stroll over to join them. Some yards away the flock of ravens settled onto the grass. Cathvar saw them, stopped walking, and crouched, his behind high, his foreparts low to the ground. His muscles bunched. He leaped, pounced on the grass beside the flock, and dashed among the birds. With weary-sounding squawks they all flew safely away. As if he were proud of himself, the leopard came prancing over to Benoic.

  “Well met,” Benoic said to him. “It gladdens my heart to see you again. I’ll wager your mistress is here, too.”

  Cathvar turned his head and looked toward the guesthouse. An elderly woman, wrapped in loose gray dresses held in with a plain blue kirtle, came out of the front door and hurried down the path. The Rommardda tended to look like a lively bundle of laundry, being as she was short, plump, and gave no thought whatsoever to womanly things such as what she wore. Her messy gray braids sat off-center on her head looking all the world like a handle on the laundry basket. Despite her obvious age and enveloping dresses, she came trotting over to them with plenty of energy to spare. Cavan bowed to her, and she smiled at him.

  “Ah, Cavan of Lughcarn!” she said. “So you’re here, are you? Good. We’ll have a nice long talk while Goodmaid Alyssa gets the arrangements settled.”

  “If you say so, honored one.” Cavan tried to sound pleased, but even to his own ears his voice sounded like mourning. “I’m sure you have much to say to me.”

  She smiled and turned to Benoic. “It gladdens my heart to see you again, lad.”

  “My thanks, good dame. I’m surprised you’d still be here.”

  “Oh, I’ve gone and come back more than once since last I saw you. There is so much lore here! Well worth a trip to a healer like me. What happened to your friend? I fear me I’ve forgotten his name.”

  “Ddary? He’s riding in the Otherlands. We saw some hard fighting up in Cerrgonney.”

  “How very sad! My heart aches for you and him both.”

  “That’s what happens to silver daggers, sooner or later.” Benoic dismissed the sympathy with a shrug.

  Indeed, Cavan thought, and one day my wyrd will take me, too. Just as well, truly. Just as well.

  * * *

  Alyssa had met Rommardda but only briefly, as she and the page went into the guesthouse. The lad introduced them, then hurried her along a corridor to a small chamber, paneled in some pale wood. At the big windows, filled with good glass, a tall young woman, dressed in the pale blue and white of Haen Marn, sat at a narrow table that was scattered with pieces of parchment and scribes’ tools. She looked up and smiled.

  “Lady Perra will be here in a moment.” She waved vaguely at the wall to her right. “There are chairs.”

  “My thanks,” Alyssa said and sat down.

  She would have asked the scribe’s name, but the lass returned to her work with a little frown of concentration. She was Bardekian, from Orystinna to judge from the rich dark brown of her skin and her curly black hair, as glossy as a raven’s wing. She looked familiar, though only vaguely so, with her deep-set dark eyes and generous mouth, but she gave no sign of recognizing Alyssa. Alyssa had seen many Bardekian merchants, some of them women, in Aberwyn, had in fact sold plenty of them bread and cakes when she still was a child working in her father’s shop. Perhaps this young woman had once been a customer.

  In but a moment, indeed, the door opened, and a woman of indeterminate age swept into the room accompanied by a pair of pages. She wore her pale hair, mostly blonde, partly gray, twisted up in a messy bun, and her blue dresses, unlike Rommardda’s, were both clean and neatly arranged under her tartan kirtle. Alyssa rose and curtsied.

  “So, young Alyssa,” Perra said. “It gladdens my heart to see you again.”

  “And mine to see you, my lady. I have so much to thank you for. My life at the collegium has been wonderful.”

  “Good! What brings you to me?”

  “I’ve come to fetch a book that the collegium lent to Haen Marn. Have you heard about the trouble in Aberwyn?”

  “About the courts and the gwerbretion? I have. It’s not just in Aberwyn. All of the western provinces are boiling over with it.”

  Alyssa caught her breath. “I hadn’t realized, my lady.”

  “These are complicated times.” Perra smiled with an ironic twist of her mouth. “Now, speaking of time, I have a good many things to do today, so we’ll talk more on the morrow. I’ll have you brought over to the manse—on the island, that is—as soon as I have a spare moment.” She beckoned to the pages. “Honored Scholar Alyssa and her guards will sleep in the guesthouse. Show her to a chamber upstairs, and give the two lads cots in the servants’ quarters. Alyssa will eat at the students’ table, and her guards with the servants.”

  “Er, my lady?” Alyssa said. “I have the guards because we’ve been threatened. Could they sleep closer to my chamber? We’ve got bounty hunters chasing us.”

  Perra raised startled eyebrows.

  “Gwerbret Ladoic set the bounty,” Alyssa continued. “Just on one of the silver daggers at first, but I’m all mixed up in it, too. I was speaking out in the marketplace, you see, when—”

  Perra raised a hand for silence. “We need to have a long talk on the morrow. But as for the bounty men, you’ve got nothing to fear. Haen Marn has some guards now. They’re new since you were here last. I’d feel sorry for anyon
e who crossed them.”

  One of the pages chuckled, and the scribe looked up with a grin and a nod of agreement.

  “Very well, then,” Alyssa said. “My thanks.”

  Alyssa’s chamber turned out to be small but nicely appointed, with a comfortable narrow bed, a carved chest for her belongings, and a cushioned chair. The window gave her a view of the lake and the island. For some while after the pages left, she leaned on the windowsill and looked out, studying the manse, a long wooden building set around with apple trees. Over the roof of the manse and between the trees she could just see the top of a stone tower. A pleasant place, it looked in the afternoon sun, and yet, the more she saw of it, the stranger it seemed. If she glanced away to look at something else, then back again, she could have sworn the manse had moved—just slightly, a bit to the left, or perhaps the tower seemed taller than she remembered. The apple trees, however, always appeared exactly as she’d seen them previously.

  Finally she gave up looking rather than risk a headache. During her previous visit to Haen Marn, some years before, she’d been too worried about her father and too involved in his care to pay much attention to the manse. She began to wonder if some of the wild rumors about Haen Marn and the mysterious forces of the dwimmer could possibly be true.

  Someone knocked on the chamber door, then walked briskly in. A young maidservant had brought her a china basin and a bucket of warm water.

  “Oh, lovely!” Alyssa said. “I could use a wash before dinner.”

  “So I thought, good maid.” The lass set the basin down on the wooden chest and the bucket on the floor beside it. “Our house matron told me to tell you that you’re free to walk around where you’d like outside. Dinner will be in a bit. There’s a gong they ring.”

  “Right. I remember that from when I was here before.”

  The lass curtsied and left. Alyssa washed, then put on her last clean tunic and her scholar’s skirt to go out and about. Haen Marn had a wash house, she remembered. On the morrow she could bundle up her filthy clothes with those from her silver daggers and pay to get them done. She still had some of the money left that Dovina and the others at the collegium had advanced her, though she’d need to use the draft to pay her two guards.

  Alyssa left her chamber and hurried down the wide staircase that led to the front door of the guesthouse. Benoic was waiting for her at the foot.

  “Where’s Cavan?” she said.

  “Talking with a woman named Rommardda. She knew him from his Lughcarn days,” Benoic said. “He wasn’t too happy at being dragged off for a private chat. I guess she’s got some authority there in the iron trade and all.”

  “He probably doesn’t like being reminded that he’s an exile.”

  “Could well be that. But he looked so hangdog that there must be more to it.”

  Alyssa hesitated, but her scholar’s curiosity nagged and itched. “Benoic, I don’t suppose you’d tell me why Cavan carries the dagger?”

  “You’re quite right, my lady. I won’t.” He smiled to take the sting out of the words. “We don’t spread tales like that.”

  “I know, I know. I just wonder. Well, I’d really like to know because—” She stopped herself from saying more.

  Benoic looked away with a thoughtful twist of his mouth, just as if he understood her unspoken thought, “because I’m rather sweet on him.” Finally he nodded, as if agreeing with himself.

  “I can tell you this much,” he said. “It was none of the usual reasons. There were lies told about him. I truly doubt if he deserved the dagger at all.”

  “My thanks. I’ll not ask you again, I promise.”

  “Then my thanks to you.”

  He’d told her enough. She’d been afraid that he was some horrible criminal, hiding his crime under his good manners. But if someone had lied, if he didn’t truly deserve his exile, she could lay that fear aside.

  * * *

  As he followed Rommardda across the complex, Cavan stripped off the fake bandages Alyssa had wound round his head and shoved them inside his shirt for want of a pocket big enough to hold them. Cathvar trotted over to join them when they reached a long, low stone building out beyond the kitchen. Glazed windows lined the wall that, as far as Cavan could tell, faced north.

  “The scriptorium,” Rommardda told him. “I spend so much time here that I’ve been given a private chamber. There are so many books to copy! The guild’s given me coin to hire a pair of scribes and to pay for the binding, but I like to keep my hand in myself on a short treatise or two.”

  Tall wooden desks stood in a row under the windows. Each had a narrow ledge for scribal tools, a rack to hold the material being copied, and a big writing board that could be propped at a steep angle for the actual writing of new pages. Behind each desk stood a pair of low shelves where leather-bound volumes stood upright, each attached to the bookcase but on a chain long enough for the book to reach the desk. As they walked the length of the room, Cathvar ran ahead, then stopped right in front of them. He sat down and scratched his neck with a hind foot.

  “Fleas, I suppose,” Rommardda said. “The days are growing warmer.”

  At the far end of the chamber, Rommardda opened a door and led Cavan and the leopard both into a wood-paneled room just large enough to hold two chairs, one on either side of a low table. A large rather dirty blue cushion lay under the table. Cathvar claimed that, and Rommardda took one chair and gestured at the other.

  “Sit,” she said. “I’ve not seen you since you were exiled. I’m wondering what’s brought you here.” She paused in an ominous manner. “Among other things.”

  Cavan sat.

  “First,” Rommardda said, “about that sentence of exile. I gather he drew first, or you would have been hanged. I should have thought you had the right to defend yourself.”

  “He did draw first, but there was a man at the hearing who claimed I did.”

  “Your charming younger brother, was it?”

  “It was. You know how he’s always hated me, the rat-faced little snot. And he’s our father’s favorite, so of course his lie carried weight.”

  “But they didn’t hang you.”

  “The other witnesses all denied it. But they did claim I goaded him into it.”

  “Did you?”

  Cavan winced. He knew from experience that lying to Rommardda was stupid. “I did,” he said. “He was insulting me. So I called him a coward who wouldn’t have the guts for a real fight. It was the honor of the thing.”

  “Ye gods, I am so sick of men prattling about their honor! Well, you’ve got none left now to worry about.”

  Cavan found no answer to that.

  “But I wonder,” she continued, “just what started the whole affair.”

  “It was that little tavern up on the hill in Lughcarn, a clean, decent place run by decent folk. The daughter was serving that night, and this ugly—” He paused to think of a substitute for “chunk of horseshit.” “This ugly vermin wouldn’t leave her alone. Finally he pawed her when she was trying to take a flagon to someone’s table, and he called her names I won’t repeat when she drew back and asked him to stop. So I got up and tried to teach him some manners.” He paused again, remembering. “It got out of hand, thanks to my wretched temper.”

  “I see. You’ve always been a gallant man around women. It’s other men that bring out the worst in you.”

  Her voice, the look in her eyes, her posture, even, had all softened.

  “True spoken,” Cavan said. “I’ll not deny it.”

  “Good. You might think about it a bit. I’ll admit, lad, that I don’t know what to do about you. I’ve always thought you had great promise to do summat important with your life, but, as you say, your wretched temper.” She shook her head. “I suppose you’ve been expelled from the Iron Brotherhood.”

  “I have. That’s the worst shame of al
l.”

  Rommardda leaned back in her chair and considered him for a long moment. “You valued the Brotherhood highly, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Oh, I know we mostly gathered coin and gave alms.”

  “Valuable work, in itself. The injured iron men appreciate every coin. Those accidents at the smelters!” She shuddered as if to cast off the memories. “Why dismiss all that?”

  “A lot of men, outsiders I mean, made fun of the rituals and the like. I fear me I’ve gotten into a few fights over their sneers, too. But truly, I always felt there was summat more there.”

  “More? Like dwimmer?”

  “Just that.”

  “You’re not a fool, I’ll say that for you, but you’re a hot-tempered man, Cavan, and the dwimmer may not be for you because of that.”

  Cavan had been afraid of just that for years, but her words still felt like a slap across the face.

  “However,” Rommardda continued, “there’s always hope. Learn to control yourself. Consider the iron, when the blacksmith hauls the bloom from the smelter. Is it pure?”

  “It’s not. It’s full of bits and grains of slag.”

  “And when he beats the bloom on the anvil, all those impurities break free and fly upward, little glowing sparks.”

  “They do, truly.”

  “Your nature is the bloom, hot from the fire. Purify it, and then perhaps we’ll talk more of dwimmer. But that temper! You could turn it into steel, fit for working, but it might take a long time on the anvil.”

  “My thanks.” He was stammering, floating on a tide of sudden hope. “Truly, I’ll do my best. I regret what I’ve done, I truly do.”

  “No doubt, but what’s past is past, and can’t be undone. Now, tell me why you’ve come to Haen Marn.”

  He needed to swallow several times before he could speak. The grief he knew well, but this hope! It took an effort of will for him to gather his wits.