Days of Air and Darkness

by Katharine Kerr

  “Silver Dagger?” the fellow called out.

  “I am, at that. Who’s looking for me?”

  For an answer, the rider charged straight for him. Caught off-guard, Rhodry flung up his sword in a clumsy parry that caught the other’s strike by luck alone. The roan danced and swung away barely in time to avoid the gray, who would have otherwise slammed straight into its flank. Swearing, Rhodry twisted in the saddle. A strike from the rear glanced off his mail but left a streak of pain behind. As he pulled his horse’s head round to face the enemy, Rhodry began to laugh. His enemy flinched in the saddle, a gesture that made his horse begin to back. With a curse of his own, the enemy threw his weight forward, halting the horse but leaving him off-balance.

  Laughter flowed of its own will as Rhodry risked a lean and a stab at his sword arm. The enemy caught it on his blade and pushed the thrust away, then circled the blade over and slashed. With no shield, Rhodry could only parry, a solid block, this time, that hung their blades together in a lock of brute force. Rhodry saw his face, lean and pale and as sharp as a knife blade, gray eyes as well. He howled and forced the man’s sword down, slipped his own free, and struck, a circling slantwise blow that caught him high on the chest, hard enough to make him grunt and sway. With a lean and a knee, he swung the gray round and left Rhodry no target but his shield. A red spiral twined on a blue ground.

  “Brin Mawrvelin!” Rhodry gasped.

  “It is, Silver Dagger.” He was panting for breath himself. “I’m Matyc’s brother.”

  Rhodry shrilled with laughter that he could no more have controlled than he could have stopped the sun in its course, but it seemed that Lord Tren heard it as mockery. With a bark of rage, he spurred the gray straight forward. As the roan danced to the side and past, Rhodry twisted and struck at his shield arm from behind the shield. Tren swore and let the shield dangle, then fall. He leaned and swung the gray round with his weight and his knees just as Rhodry struck again. This cut missed, and once more they faced other, Tren dead pale and swaying. His arm hung useless at a wrong angle.

  With a dangerous lean, Rhodry ducked under Tren’s weak stab and slapped the sword blade hard across the lord’s mouth. He reeled back in the saddle. On the backhand, Rhodry smacked the gray hard on the neck. When the horse reared, Tren tumbled off into the mud of the battlefield. Chortling under his breath, Rhodry dismounted and ran to him. In the slippery welter, Tren was trying to get up. He leaned on the broken arm, cried out, choked on the blood from his broken mouth, and fell back again. Rhodry wrapped both hands round his sword hilt and raised it high.

  “Yraen!” he cried out, then plunged the point into Tren’s neck.

  Laughter overwhelmed him. He pulled the sword free and stood beside the corpse, howling and swaying, until he saw, far above him, a raven, far too large to be an ordinary bird.

  “Come down!” Rhodry shrieked. “Come down, my lady raven! Come down, and we’ll have a fight of it on my ground.”

  With a long cry, she flew off, heading north into the hills. Rhodry felt the berserker fit leave him. For a moment, he stood panting for breath; then he wept in a brief scatter of tears. Without another glance at Tren’s body, he mounted the roan and rode off, back to a dying battle, still screaming behind him.

  When the battle began that morning, and all the men in the dun had gone down to the gates to wait for their chance to sally, Lady Labanna gathered all the women round her in the great hall, where they would wait, or so she announced, for the outcome. For some while, Carra dutifully sat in a chair near the lady’s own and waited with Lightning lying at her feet. Every servant and wounded man in the dun eventually drifted in to join them; as the hall filled up, it grew hot and the air heavy with the smell of the barely washed. News came only rarely, when one of the men up on the dun wall thought to climb down and relay to the lady what little he could see. Standing in the doorway, Jahdo did report the dragon’s flight over the dun, and briefly, everyone cheered. More waiting, no news; Carra decided to use her condition to her advantage.

  “My lady, I feel so faint,” she whispered. “May I go to my chamber and lie down?”

  “Certainly, child! Ocradda, will you help Her Highness?”

  Up in her chamber, Carra listened at the door until she could be sure that Ocradda had gone back downstairs, then crept out and hurried up to the roof. Passing through the landing where she’d seen Jill lying dead was no easy task, but remembering that Jill would have wanted her to be strong kept her climbing. Panting for breath and slightly dizzy from the climb, she hauled herself onto the roof among the heaped stones and bundled arrows, while Lightning whined below at the foot of the ladder he couldn’t climb.

  “I’ll be right down. I daren’t stay here long.”

  Carra walked to the southern edge of the dun and looked out, peering through the smokey air, only to find that she could see little and interpret less. Far below, like pieces on the board of some mad game, clots of men rode back and forth, met and swayed. She could pick out the shield squares, hear the drift of faint shouting, watch the smoke spread from the ruined camp. It seemed clear enough that Cengarn’s allies were winning through, but somehow she’d never considered that they would do otherwise. What mattered to her now was one thing only: would Dar live, would he reach her, would she ever see him again? She walked round the roof, fetched up eventually at the northern edge, and realized that by standing just right and holding her head at the proper angle, she could see the north gate.

  A ragged contingent of militia seemed to be waiting there. As she watched, she saw the gate swing open, and the pack trotted out, heading for the ruined camp. All at once, she realized that the lord and his men must have sallied from the south gate earlier, that the scavengers would never have left till the battle had gone their way. Yet, no matter where she stood on the roof, the south gate stayed stubbornly hidden behind hillside and house.

  “Carra!” It was Dallandra, climbing onto the roof. “Ye gods, you little idiot! What are you doing up here?”

  “Trying to see. Oh, please, Dalla, don’t be so vexed with me. I get so sick of it, shut up like a prize sow!”

  “I can sympathize, but you’ve forgotten the raven mazrak, haven’t you?”

  Carra went sick and cold. She had, at that. Scowling up at the sky, Dalla stood in the center of the roof and turned, looking all the way round the horizon.

  “Well, no sign of her,” the dweomermaster said at last. “She may have fled. With Alshandra gone, she can’t have much power or magic left. I swear it, she didn’t know one thing about what she was doing!”

  “What do you mean? How can you work magic if you don’t know how?”

  “A very good question indeed, Your Highness. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I think that our raven was drawing all her power from her false goddess, rather as if she were a waterspout leading rainwater down to a barrel.”

  Dallandra walked over to join Carra, then looked up again, studying the sky.

  “There!” At last she pointed. “Look to the north! Can you see that bird, up there?”

  Carra could just distinguish a speck, moving with the same motion as a bird flying fast and hard.

  “Is that her? How can you tell?”

  “Elven eyes are a fair bit better than human ones. Poor Carra! You’re about to learn many a strange thing about your husband’s people.”

  “Will you stop calling me ‘poor Carra’! I get so sick of that, too, everyone pitying me.”

  “Then stop acting so piteous. You bring it on yourself.”

  Carra felt her cheeks burning with a blush. The truth in Dalla’s words was like a slap across the face. Rather than answer, she walked a few steps toward the south and stared out. Far down below on the winding streets, a warrior was coming, trotting beside his foaming horse to spare it his weight as they climbed the last hill to the dun. His helm hung at the saddle-peak, and she could see his raven-dark hair. On his back he carried a slung bow.

  “Dar! Dar!” />
  He heard, looked up, laughed, and waved. Dallandra forgotten, Carra dashed for the ladder and went down so fast and clumsily that she nearly missed a rung, but she caught herself in time. With Lightning bounding after, she hurried down the staircase, spiraling round and round, bursting into the great hall, dashing past the startled women and out of the broch just as Dar raced into the ward, his near-foundered horse trailing behind. By then, both of them were so out of breath that they could only cling to each other and gasp, laughing when they had the air, staring into each other’s eyes when they didn’t.

  “You’re alive,” she gasped at last. “Thank the Goddess!”

  “Very much alive.” He bent his head and kissed her. “And so are you.”

  As they clung together, as she nestled into his arms, she realized at last what Jill and Dallandra had been trying to tell her, that she’d been in perhaps the worst danger of all. Around them the ward filled with servants, shouting and laughing, calling out to one another about the victory. Dar only held her the tighter and laughed, a crow of triumph, while she clung to him and laughed as well.

  With the fighting done, Rhodry turned the roan over to one of Erddyr’s men and walked into the Horsekin camp. It was a mad gesture, and he knew it, but he wanted to find Yraen’s body. The camp lay strewn, blood-soaked wreckage. In places, sheltered by an overhang or wagon, the fires still flickered among canvas and cloth; in others, smoke wisped above black slabs and tangles. Over everything hung stench—wool, hair, flesh, all charred and stinking wet from the unnatural rain of the night before. Corpses, both human and Horsekin, lay in pools of bloodstained mud. Here and there, dying horses staggered, trying to find their way home, or lay collapsed on the ground, struggling to rise.

  Some yards in, Rhodry came to a blackened tent crumpled over a smoldering wagon. Half-smothered in the soaked canvas lay a man, moaning and struggling to free himself—a Horsekin slave, judging by his iron anklet. Rhodry knelt down and pulled him free, turned him over, and looked into a face that was more a boy’s than a man’s, a blond lad, his narrow face covered with blood from a cut over one eye, his chest crushed by the blow of some heavy weapon. He looked so familiar that Rhodry found himself searching for his name. The lad tried to speak, then gulped for air and died. Rhodry laid him down, closed his eyes, and knelt for a moment, trying to remember where he’d seen him before. At length, he realized that the slave merely reminded him of someone he used to, know, Amyr, a man who’d ridden in his warband, back in the days when he’d ruled as gwerbret, back before the secret of his elven blood had deposed him. And where had Amyr died? He couldn’t remember—in some battle or another—along with plenty of other men who’d sworn to him, no doubt, men whose names he’d forgotten at this lapse of time.

  With a shake of his head, Rhodry got up. Above, the sky was clearing fast; a few white thunderheads piled and scudded, their towering palaces of cloud touched and turned golden by the late sun. He watched them for a moment, a promise of some paradise, forever unreachable, then walked on, hunting back and forth among the wreckage and the dead. The farther uphill he went, the less burnt the tents and the easier the hunting; he drew his sword and kept alert, because there were likely to be stragglers, hiding out and desperate. All at once, he heard someone call his name and turned to find Evandar, still dressed in his illusion of armor.

  “The gwerbret’s asking for you,” Evandar said. “He’s at the south gate.”

  Rhodry swore with every foul oath he could muster.

  “What’s so wrong?” Evandar stepped back out of reach. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

  “Yraen’s body.” Rhodry paused to run filthy hands through filthy hair. “You can call me daft for it, but I want to know how he died, and I want him properly buried.”

  Evandar sighed, leaning on a spear, whether real or an illusion, Rhodry couldn’t tell.

  “Do you know where he is?” Rhodry snapped. “I never know what you’ve seen or not.”

  “He’s dead.”

  “I mean his body.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know.” Rhodry felt himself tremble, turned half away and rubbed his eyes hard on the back of his sleeve. “I don’t even know.”

  “But it means much to you. Well, then. You go to the gwerbret. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Before Rhodry could answer, he disappeared. Rhodry stood for a moment, looking round, wondering if he dared trust Evandar. Whether he did or not, there was no disobeying a direct order from the gwerbret. With one last shake of his head, he headed for the south gate.

  Gwerbret Cadmar was sitting on the wet ground, his back to a broken wagon, with Drwmyc of Dun Trebyc kneeling on one knee beside him. Rhodry dropped to both knees before the lords.

  “You called for me, Your Grace?”

  “I did,” Cadmar said. “You’ve earned your hire ten times over, Silver Dagger, by fetching that beast. I wanted to thank you personally.”

  “His Grace is most generous to an outcast man.”

  “His Grace knows what’s fitting and due. At the victory feast, Silver Dagger, you’ll sit at my table.”

  Rhodry felt his eyes fill with tears beyond all his power to stop them. He could only shake his head and stammer until the gwerbret dismissed him out of sympathy.

  By then, the sun was sinking low in the sky. Although men searched for any friends they knew to be left behind on the battlefield, everyone was too exhausted, and too many lords and captains were dead, for the army to mount an organized hunt for wounded. Rhodry helped one man with a broken arm inside the city walls, then wandered up to the dun, his mad search for Yraen forgotten as the battle fever deserted him. All through the ward lay wounded men, dying men, dumped there by comrades who could do nothing more for them. Over by the main well, the chirurgeons had set up a surgery of sorts, using the back of a wagon to lay the wounded on while servants rushed round, bringing kettles of water and helping tear bandages from whatever cloth they could commandeer. Off to one side, Dallandra was measuring out herbs by the handful and brewing them up in the vessels that servants brought her. In this chaos, she would have not a moment for a word with him.

  Rhodry was about to go into the main broch and scrounge something to eat when he heard a boy’s voice calling his name. For a moment, Rhodry didn’t recognize the ragged child, his dirty face streaked with fresh tears, who came running across the ward. The boy stopped and stepped back as fast as if Rhodry had slapped him.

  “It’s Jahdo, Rhodry,” the lad said, gulping for breath. “Is it that you’ve forgotten me?”

  “What? I haven’t at that, lad. I wouldn’t say I’m truly myself now, that’s all. Where’s your master?”

  “You haven’t heard? He were slain. They did attack us, and he did go down to the walls to curse them, but the man with the longbow did kill him. He were a bard, a true bard, but the archer did slay him all the same.”

  “Oh, did he now?” Rhodry could hear his voice, cold, steady, a thing of pure hate. “Well, the archer’s dead, lad. I killed him myself, and not all that long ago.”

  Jahdo stopped crying. He started to grin, then let the expression fade into bewilderment, and finally turned away, trying to wipe his eyes but only smearing the dirt on his face with a dirtier sleeve.

  “What’s so wrong?” Rhodry said.

  “I know not. Truly it does gladden my heart that Meer be avenged. He were Gel da’Thae, and vengeance will make him sing, when they come to tell him in the Deathworld. Surely someone will tonight, there be so many men dead.”

  “That’s true enough, and the war not over yet.”

  “Not over?”

  “Well, lad, we have to harry the routed Horsekin. We don’t want them coming right back, do we now? We’ll be leaving in a couple of days.”

  “Oh. Rhodry, may I come with you?”

  “What?”

  “I could be your page, like, and learn to fight. It be needful that I find some kind of place.”

 
; “But lad, you’ll never make a warrior. You could be killed.”

  “Well, I do doubt that ever will I see my home again anyway, not with Meer gone, and me naught in everyone’s eyes.”

  “No man knows what another’s Wyrd has in store for him. Your tale’s a sad one, but there’s naught I can do to—hold a moment. Jill told me once that she’d promised Meer you’d get home.”

  “But she be dead, too, in the saving of us all.” Silent tears welled and ran. “And Meer be dead, and here I have naught and am naught, not like at home. This be a harsh place, Deverry, whether or no you do cut off people’s heads like the Slavers did. And so I thought, it be needful for me to learn to be harsh, too.”

  “Hush, lad! For her sake and Meer’s both, I’ll honor her promise. I’ll see what we can do about getting you home once the war’s over.”

  Jahdo grinned and stammered thanks in a joy that was the first clean thing Rhodry had seen all that long day.

  “How many men have we lost?” Garin said.

  “Seventy-some dead outright,” Brel Avro said. “We’ll lose a few of the wounded before morning, I’ll wager.”

  Garin swore under his breath, but only feebly. His legs were melting under him, it seemed, and his heart knocked against his lungs. He sat down hard on the floor and rested his head on his knees. With a grunt, the warleader knelt beside him.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No. Just weary.”

  “So we all are, so we all are.”

  They were sitting in the common room of the underground inn, which Brel had commandeered for a hospital and command post both. It held, just barely, all the wounded dwarves in its chambers and hallways. On a table near the hearth, by the leaping light of fire and torches, the chirurgeon they’d brought with them was still stitching wounds, whistling tunelessly under his breath as he did so. Garin felt like screaming at him to shut up.