Daggerspell

by Katharine Kerr

  “So be it. It’s not my will, anyway, but the will of the light.”

  Fortunately he had too much work on his hands to sit and brood. He gathered up his supplies and went for a look at Cullyn, whom he found awake, lying propped up on pillows. A servant had lit the candles in the silver sconce on the wall.

  “Nevyn,” Cullyn snapped. “I just heard—ye gods, how could you lie to me that way?”

  There was only one thing he could mean.

  “Who told you she’s with the army?”

  “The cursed chirurgeon. Ye gods, he’s cursed lucky I’m too sick to stand, or I’d have taken his head for this. How could you lie to me?”

  “There wasn’t anything else I could do. She was determined to go, and I didn’t want you upsetting yourself.”

  Cullyn growled under his breath. He was close to tears.

  “Did our fat-mouthed chirurgeon tell you of the prophecy, too?”

  Cullyn nodded a yes.

  “She’s most likely going to kill Corbyn,” Nevyn went on. “The whole thing has the ring of Wyrd to me, and she’s your daughter, after all.”

  “She’s never been in a battle. How could Rhodry—I save his cursed life, and this is how he repays me. I swear it, if she dies, I’ll kill him. I don’t care what his ugly clan does to me for it. I’ll kill him.”

  What might have been a boast from another man was the simple truth coming from Cullyn of Cerrmor. Nevyn felt trouble sweeping over them all like a breaking wave.

  “I thought I liked the lad,” Cullyn went on. “I was fool enough to think I honored him.”

  “Hush! You can’t do anything about it now, and you’re just upsetting yourself.”

  “Hold your tongue, old man! I don’t give a pig’s fart if you’re dweomer or not. Just hold your tongue.”

  At that moment he sounded so much like Gerraent that Nevyn nearly slapped him. Sharply he reminded himself that Cullyn was no more Gerraent than he was still Prince Galrion.

  “I’m going to look at that wound whether you like it or not.”

  “Go ahead. Just hold your tongue.”

  Cullyn closed his eyes and pressed the side of his face down hard into the pillow. As Nevyn opened his sack of supplies, he was thinking about the coming trouble. Sooner or later, Cullyn would realize that Rhodry and Jill were besotted with each other. Would he fly into a rage and kill the most important man in Eldidd? And what of Jill? Would he keep her from the dweomer? Would his honor fail someday the way Gerraent’s had?

  “Well,” Cullyn snapped. “Get on with it, will you?”

  “I will. Just getting out a clean bandage.”

  It was then that Nevyn was faced with severest temptation, the bitterest test of his entire dweomer-touched life, which had tested him so many times before. When he took the chirurgeon’s clumsy bandage off the wound on Cullyn’s side, he saw immediately that infection was setting in. The signs were so very small—just the slightest swelling at the edges of the torn flesh, just the slightest unnatural redness—that only he would have noticed. Obviously the chirurgeon hadn’t. He could ignore it if he chose. He could ignore it for just this one night, and by the morrow, when the chirurgeon came round again, the infection would have spread so far that not even Nevyn would be able to check it. He could stand there and let Gerraent die. His desire was like a burning in his whole body.

  “By the hells,” Cullyn snarled. “Get on with it!”

  “Hold your tongue! You’re in a bit of danger. I don’t like the look of this wound. Did that chirurgeon remember to wash his stinking hands?”

  And the moment was over, but Nevyn would remember it for years, the time when he had nearly broken every solemn vow he had ever sworn.

  “He didn’t,” Cullyn said. “Not that I saw, anyway.”

  “Those cursed dolts! Why won’t they believe me when I tell them that foul humors linger on their filthy paws! I’m sorry, lad, but I’m going to have to take the stitches out and wash the whole thing with mead.”

  Cullyn turned his head to look at him and did the last thing Nevyn would ever have expected—he smiled.

  “Go ahead. The pain will take my blasted mind off Jill.”

  “Wonder how long they’re going to stew in there, eh?” Sligyn said. “They should just surrender or sally, curse them.”

  “Corbyn will never surrender,” Rhodry said. “He knows I’m going to hang him from his own gates.”

  Sligyn nodded and stroked his mustache. They were sitting on horseback at the edge of the camp, looking up at the dun, where the green pennant flew in a stiff morning breeze.

  “I hope to every god that Nowec takes my offer of pardon,” Rhodry went on.

  “If the filthy sorcerer will let him, eh? Here, Aderyn tells me he’s keeping some kind of watch on the dun. Says he’ll know the minute that Corbyn’s men start preparing for a sally.” Sligyn shook his head in angry bafflement. “And then he had a jest on me, too. I say to him, how will you know, a scrying stone or suchlike? Oh, not that, says he, the Wildfolk will tell me. Eh! That’s what you get for questioning wizards.”

  Rhodry forced out a brief smile. He didn’t care to tell Sligyn that the Wildfolk were real enough. He wanted to believe that Aderyn and Jill had been only having a jest on him, but he’d felt something pull his hair. As he thought it over, it also occurred to him that Aderyn had sworn a vow never to lie, which meant that it was the simple truth that the Westfolk were the Elcyion Lacar of legend, and that he himself was half kin to them. Elven blood in Eldidd veins. At the moment, Rhodry hated the old proverb.

  The slow, hot day passed without Corbyn making a sally. At dinner the noble-born ate together and wondered why Corbyn kept postponing the inevitable. There was only one answer, that he hoped his sorcerer would eventually pull him out of this particular fire. For all they knew, Loddlaen might be able to send Rhys a message by magic.

  “Aderyn would stop him,” Rhodry said.

  “One hopes,” Edar said gloomily. “Who knows what the dweomer can do or not?”

  Somehow no one volunteered simply to ask Aderyn, and in an uneasy silence, the council of war broke up. Rhodry got a clean shirt and went downstream from the camp to bathe. In the starlight he walked surefooted, then stripped off his clothes and plunged into the cool water. Getting reasonably clean soothed his nerves somewhat, but as he was dressing, he saw the two men of the Westfolk coming, as surefooted in the dark as he was. Calonderiel hailed him with a laugh.

  “As clean as an elf, too, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, by the hells! What did Jill do? Open her big mouth and spill the tale?”

  “Of course,” Jennantar joined in. “We’re the ones who put her up to it. I’ve noticed a thing here and there, and I’ve been wondering about you, lad.”

  Rhodry looked him over carefully. In the starlight Rhodry was color-blind like any ordinary man, and small details were blurred and lost, but he could see enough to find a certain kinship in the narrow build and long fingers he shared with Jennantar. Although both of them were heavily muscled, they were built straight from shoulder to hip, just as he was.

  “Does it ache your heart, finding out there’s wild blood in your clan?”

  “I can’t lie and say it doesn’t,” Rhodry said. “But I mean no insult to you.”

  “None taken,” Calonderiel said. “Here, I’ve been searching my memory, and if I’ve got the tale right, one of our womenfolk ran off with a Maelwaedd lord named Pertyc.”

  “That was the first Maelwaedd to be Gwerbret Aberwyn,” Rhodry said. “And it was a cursed long time ago, too. I wish now I’d listened better when the bard was reciting all those tales and genealogies about my ancestors. It doesn’t seem so tedious, all of a sudden.”

  They both laughed, and Calonderiel gave him a friendly cuff on the shoulder.

  “Come back to our fire with us,” Jennantar said. “We’ve been hoarding a skin of our mead, but this seems like a good time to break it out.”

  “And I’ll wager
you’ve always been able to drink any other under the table,” Calonderiel put in.

  “I have at that. Is that another thing I share with you?”

  “It is, and one of the best traits of the Elcyion Lacar, too. If you ask me, anyway.”

  Elven mead turned out to be twice as strong as the human variety, and cleaner tasting, too, so that a man could drink more of it. The three of them sat by the campfire and passed the skin around silently while Rhodry decided that he liked his newfound kin. All his life he’d known that he was somewhat different from the men around him, and now at last he knew the reason. It was comforting to find out that there was a reason.

  “Where’s Jill?” Rhodry said at last.

  “Standing a turn on the night watch,” Calonderiel said.

  “Oh, by the hells, she doesn’t have to do that!”

  “She insisted,” Jennantar put in. “It’s not a silver dagger’s place to lounge around like a lord, she tells me.”

  “And soon, no doubt,” Calonderiel took it up. “The lord cadvridoc will be inspecting the night watch, just to make sure none of them have fallen asleep on duty.”

  “Hold your tongue,” Rhodry snapped. “Unless you want another knife fight.”

  “After all the mead we’ve drunk, we’d doubtless trip right into the fire. Just a jest, and my apologies.”

  The meadskin went round again in a companionable silence. And what of Jill? Rhodry asked himself. What if he did manage to seduce her, what then? He could never marry her; she would end up pregnant like Olwen, and there would be another woman whose life he’d ruined. This time, the woman would be someone who was risking her life in his service. Perhaps the mead helped, but he saw it quite clearly, that he loved her too much to dishonor her that way, that he loved her enough to let her go. He would have to treat her like a sworn priestess of the Moon, so far beyond a man’s lust that it meant death to touch her.

  Yet, when Rhodry was walking back to his tent, he saw Jill coming in from the watch. For a moment his lust was so strong that he couldn’t breathe. Although he’d always scorned those bard songs that told of men dying for a woman’s love, that night he almost believed them. He made himself turn away and walk into the darkness before she saw him. He was afraid of what he might do if she gave him one word of encouragement.

  There comes a point in any illness when the sufferer realizes not that he’s mending, but that at some point, he will mend, if not soon, then eventually. Cullyn reached that point that evening, when he woke to find his mind clear for the first time since he’d been wounded. The pain had receded, as if his slashed side stood a little ways away from the rest of him, and his broken arm was merely sore under the splints. For the first time, too, he truly noticed the luxury that surrounded him—a private chamber, a bed with embroidered hangings, a carved chest where someone had laid out his sword and silver dagger as if he were a lord. It was all because he’d saved Rhodry’s life, he supposed. He lay very still and tried to decide if he were sorry now that he’d done so.

  Eventually Nevyn appeared with his sack of medical supplies.

  “Will you have to wash that cut again?”

  “I hope not.” Nevyn gave him a thin smile. “I’m beginning to understand why you have so much glory. You’re the first man I’ve ever tended who didn’t scream when I poured mead on his open wound.”

  Cullyn sighed at the memory. Keeping silent had cost him every scrap of will he possessed. Nevyn poured him water from the silver flagon by the bedside.

  “Do you remember cursing me last night?”

  “I do, and you have my apologies for that. It’s not your fault Jill went off to the godforsaken war. Here, I can hold that goblet myself.”

  “Good. You need to start moving to get your strength back.”

  “So I do.”

  Cullyn heard the venom in his own voice. When Nevyn gave him the goblet, he raised one bushy white eyebrow in a questioning sort of way.

  “I meant what I said about Rhodry. That wasn’t just a sick man’s temper.”

  “I never doubted it for a minute. May I humbly suggest that you wait to see if she’s killed before you start brooding your revenge? She might very well kill Corbyn. I wouldn’t have let her go if I didn’t think she could.”

  Cullyn took a couple of greedy gulps of water. “How long before I can fight again?”

  “Months. You’ll have to get your shield arm back in shape after it mends.”

  “Ah, horseshit. And how long before I can get out of this bed and fend for myself?”

  “Oh, much, much sooner. Tomorrow I’ll have you walk a few steps just to see what that does.”

  “Good. As soon as I can, I’m leaving Rhodry’s hospitality. I don’t want another cursed favor from him. I wish by every god that they’d dumped me in the barracks with the other men.”

  “Oh, ye gods, Gerro! I swear you’re the most stubborn man alive.”

  “What did you call me?”

  There was certain grim pleasure in seeing a dweomerman look utterly flustered. Nevyn’s cheeks even turned a bit pink.

  “My apologies,” Nevyn said. “I’ve tended so many men today that I can’t seem to tell one from the other.”

  “No doubt. It’s not like I took any insult, mind.”

  Much to Cullyn’s relief, Nevyn pronounced the wound free of infection when he changed the dressing. The old man sent a page to fetch bread and milk, then stood by while Cullyn ate it.

  “Answer me somewhat,” Cullyn said. “I’m really surprised that Rhodry’s honor would let Jill do his fighting for him. Why did he take her along?”

  “The dweomer of the thing. And Jill herself. Once she heard that prophecy, it would have taken the Lord of Hell himself to have kept her out of the army. She wants battle glory as much as any lad, my friend. You might think about that before you take Rhodry’s head off his shoulders.”

  “There are times when Jill can be a little dolt. Ah, ye gods, what did I expect, dragging her along with me? Oh, well and good, then. I’ll think about it, but if she’s killed—” He let the words hang there.

  Nevyn raised his eyes to the heavens as if calling the gods to witness Cullyn’s stubbornness, then packed his supplies and left without another word. Cullyn lay awake for a long time, hoping that the siege would be a good long one. Maybe he would heal enough to ride there and pull Jill out before it came to battle. For all his rage, it would ache his heart to kill young Rhodry. Cullyn winced when he remembered how hard Rhodry had tried to pull him out of the mob—him, a rotten, lousy silver dagger. Many lords saw a silver dagger’s death as a convenient way out of paying him his hire and nothing more. And yet if Jill were killed—the thought made him weep, just a quick scatter of tears that he saw as shameful.

  The letter from Rhys was brief and maddening.

  “My lady,” it ran. “I understand that your cadvridoc still holds the siege of Dun Bruddlyn. Since Lord Talidd has brought me proof of Lord Corbyn’s continuing treachery, I will let you settle the matter by the sword if you prefer. Let me warn you that even your eventual victory may not quiet all the grumbling against you as long as Rhodry is your heir.”

  Lovyan crumpled the parchment into a little ball. She was tempted to throw it into the messenger’s face, but after all, it wasn’t the young rider’s fault that his lord was an arrogant, pig-headed fool.

  “I take it my lady is displeased?” Nevyn said.

  With a little snort Lovyan smoothed the parchment out and handed it over.

  “You may go,” she said to the messenger. “Have some ale with my men. I’ll have an answer for you soon.”

  The lad scrambled up and made his escape from her wrath. Nevyn sighed over the message, then handed it back.

  “Rhys is dead wrong about the grumbling,” Nevyn said. “Rhodry’s proven himself in this war.”

  “Of course. He just wanted to infuriate me to salvage some of his wretched pride, and he’s done it quite successfully, too.”

  They we
re sitting in the great hall, which was peculiarly silent. Only ten men, some of the recovering wounded, sat in a room fit for two hundred.

  “Do you think I should ask Rhys to intervene?” Lovyan said. “It aches my heart to think of more men dying over this.”

  “Mine, too, but if Rhys does disinherit Rhodry somehow, then all the men who’ve come to admire him will start grumbling. It might lead to another rebellion, and even more men will die in that.”

  “True spoken.” Lovyan folded the parchment up neatly and slipped it into the kirtle of her dress. “I’ll calm myself, then send Rhys an answer, saying his intervention will not be required.”

  Up at Dun Bruddlyn, the besiegers slipped into a routine that crawled by, tense and tedious at the same time. Since Corbyn might have sallied at any moment, everyone went armed and ready, yet there was nothing to do but polish weapons that were already spotless, ride aimless patrols to exercise the horses, and wager endlessly on one dice game or another. Although Jill tried to leave Rhodry strictly alone, it was impossible to avoid him in so small a camp. At times she would go to draw rations only to find him among the carts or come face to face with him as she walked back to camp after tending Sunrise. At those chance meetings he said very little and made no effort to keep her at his side, but every now and then, when they looked at each other, she would feel that she was drowning in the blue of his eyes.

  By the seventh day of the siege, Jill felt that she just might go mad from this endless waiting for battle. As she admitted to Aderyn that night, she was quite simply afraid.