The Red Wyvern

  What if somehow her mother had found and kept it? Perhaps it really was in that chamber, where she’d seen it in vision. Toward the middle of the morning, when she was sitting in the great hall, she saw her mother and Bevyan both in attendance upon the queen. No doubt the three of them would go to the royal women’s hall and be busy there for some long while. Although she felt foolish for doing so, Lilli hurried upstairs.

  In her mother’s chambers she found not the doll but Brour, sitting sideways by the window so that the sunlight could fall upon the pages of an enormous book, about as tall as a man’s forearm and half-again as wide, that he’d laid upon the table. With his lower lip stuck out, and his big head bent in concentration, he looked more like a child than ever. When she walked in, he shut the book with some effort. She could smell ancient damp exhaling from its pages. Grey stains marred the dark leather of its bindings.

  “I can’t read, you know,” Lilli said. “You don’t have to worry about me seeing your secrets.”

  “Well, that’s true.” Brour smiled briefly. “Are you looking for your mother, lass? She told me that she’d be waiting upon the queen all day.”

  “Ah, I thought so. I just wanted to see if I’d left a little thing here.”

  “Look all you please.” Brour waved his hand vaguely at the chamber.

  Feeling more foolish than ever Lilli walked around, glancing behind the furniture, opening the carved chests, which held nothing but her mother’s clothes. Brour clasped his book in his arms and watched her.

  “You don’t see my head in there again, do you?” he said at last.

  “I don’t, and may the Goddess be thanked. That was truly horrible.”

  “I didn’t find the omen amusing, either.” His voice turned flat.

  Lilli shut the last chest, then leaned in the curve of the wall to watch him watch her. His short, thick fingers dug into the leather bindings of his book.

  “It must have scared you,” she said.

  “A fair bit, truly. What do you think the meaning was?”

  “I’ve no idea. My mother never tells me how to interpret the things I see.”

  “No doubt.” Brour made a little grunt of disgust. “She treats you like an infant, doesn’t she? You should be learning how to use your gifts.”

  Lilli laid one hand at her throat.

  “Does that frighten you?” Brour went on. “A pity, if so.”

  “I never asked for any of this. I hate doing it, I just hate it.”

  Brour considered her for a moment, then laid his book on the table.

  “You hate it because you don’t understand it. If you understood it, you wouldn’t hate it.” All at once he smiled at her. “I’ll make you a promise about that.”

  Lilli hesitated, then glanced at the door. She could leave, she should just leave, and find some of the court women to keep her company.

  “By all means, go if you want,” Brour said. “But don’t you even want to know what it is you’re doing, when you scry at your mother’s whim?”

  “I’m seeing omens,” Lilli snapped. “I know that much.”

  “Ah, but where are you seeing them?”

  The question caught her. She’d so often wondered just that.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”

  “I do indeed.” Brour smiled again, and he seemed much kinder than she’d ever thought him to be. “Come now, won’t you sit down? Explaining where portents come from is no short matter.”

  Lilli took a step toward the table, then stopped.

  “If my mother finds out about this, she’ll beat me.”

  “Then we’d best make sure she knows nothing.” Brour pointed at the chair across from his. “Haven’t you ever wondered why Merodda doesn’t want you to learn dweomer?”

  “I have, truly.”

  “She wants to use your powers for herself, that’s why. When you learn about your gifts, you’ll be able to use them for yourself, and she won’t be able to force you to do what she wants.”

  Lilli walked over and sat down. Brour smiled and opened his book.

  “There’s a picture in here that I want to show you,” he said. “It shows what the universe looks like.”

  Circles within circles, drawn in black ink—at the center sat the Earth, or so Brour called it, and each circle around it bore a name.

  “This is Greggyn lore,” Brour said. “It came over with King Bran during the Great Migration. The sphere—that’s what these circles represent, spheres—above and surrounding the sphere of the Earth belongs to the Moon. The next one belongs to the Sun. We’ll learn about those higher ones when it’s time. There’s too much for you to remember all at once.”

  “That’s certainly true.” Lilli put her elbows on the table and leaned forward to study the picture. “It gives me such an odd feeling, seeing this.”

  “Ah, no doubt the knowledge is calling to you.”

  In truth the feeling was more like terror, but she decided against telling him that. She listened carefully as he explained how the matter of each sphere interpenetrates the one below it.

  “Only on the earthly world do all the others exist,” Brour finished up. “Here they reach completion. And that means from here you can reach all the others. That’s what you do when you go into trance. You leave your body and go to one of these other worlds.”

  The terror stuck in her throat. That’s what people do when they die, Lilli thought. They leave their bodies and go to the Otherlands.

  “Now, omens of the future exist in the upper astral,” Brour pointed at a circle. “That’s where your mother sends you.”

  “My mother sends me there? I thought you were the one who did that.”

  “Not I, child. Your mother knows as much about these things as I do.” Abruptly he looked away.

  In the hall, a noise—someone walking, several people, all talking at once. Lilli leapt to her feet. Brour shut the book. The sounds grew louder—and went on past. Lilli let out her breath in a long sigh and realized that Brour had lost the color in his face.

  “You’re scared of her, too, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I can’t deny it.”

  Lilli stared. She’d never thought to see a man frightened of a woman, not anywhere in her world.

  “I’d best go.” She moved toward the door. “I don’t dare have her find me here.”

  “Just so. But come back when you can, and I’ll tell you more.”

  Lilli ran out of the chamber, slammed the door, and raced down the hall. At the staircase she paused to smooth her hair and catch her breath, then decorously descended to the great hall below. I’ll never go back, she told herself. I’ll never look at that book again.

  At dinner that evening she sat next to Bevyan, whose warmth drove all thoughts of dangerous magic from her mind. They discussed Lilli’s dower chest, which she’d started filling while she was still at Hendyr, although, as she admitted, she’d been lax of late.

  “Well, dear, Sarra and I are here to help,” Bevyan said. “The first thing we’ll want to do is the wedding shirt for Braemys, and then the coverlet for your new bed.”

  “We should have all summer,” Sarra put in. “They won’t be holding the wedding till the campaigning’s done.”

  “That’s true.” Lilli felt oddly cold, and she rubbed her hands together. “I hope naught ill happens to Braemys.”

  “Ai!” Bevyan shook her head. “You’re a woman now truly, aren’t you, dear? You’ve joined the rest of us in worrying about one man or another.”

  That night, as she lay in bed and tried to sleep, Lilli was thinking about Braemys. She’d always liked her cousin, who had also been fostered out to Peddyc and Bevyan. Whether or not they married, she certainly didn’t want him to die in the summer’s fighting. And now, if he did die, whom would she be forced to marry in the autumn? Nantyn or some other old and drink-besotted northern lord like him. Uncle Tibryn would never allow his mind to be changed a second time; the miracle was that he’d allowed
it once.

  Her mind like a traitor turned up Brour’s image, saying: you could use your gifts for yourself. What if she could read omens about Braemys’s wyrd? What if she could know what was going to happen to her, instead of feeling like a twig floating on a river, twisting this way and that with the current beyond her power to break free? She sat up in bed and wrapped her arms around her knees. Through the window she could see a slender moon, rising between two towers, enjoying all the freedom of the sky.

  In the morning, when Lady Merodda announced a hawking party, Lilli feigned a headache and stayed behind, moaning against her pillows like an invalid. As soon as she could be sure that they were well and truly gone, she got up, dressed, and hurried to Lady Bevyan’s suite. She needed advice, even though she could never mention dweomer to Bevyan. Merely being around her foster-mother would help her think, Lilli decided. Bevyan would give her a kind of touchstone to judge the worth of these strange things. But Sarra met her at the door.

  “Oh, Bevva’s not here.” Sarra paused for a triumphant smile. “She was invited to go hawking with the queen.”

  “She was?”

  “She truly was, and I’m ever so pleased. It’s such an honor!”

  Of course, but Lilli was wishing that Bevyan had been honored on some other day. She went downstairs, hung around the great hall for a miserable while, then found herself thinking again and again of Brour’s book and the secrets it held. At last, with a feeling of surrender, she returned to her mother’s chambers.

  Brour was sitting at the table by the window, but instead of his book, parchment and ink lay in front of him.

  “Ah,” he said, grinning. “You came back.”

  “I did. Did you really mean what you said, about how I could use my gifts for myself?”

  “I did. I’ll swear that by any god you like. Now, I’m just writing a message for your uncle, telling his son that you and he will marry. When I’m done, I’ll take it back to Lord Burcan, and then we can look at my book again.”

  Lilli sat down, elbows on the table, and watched him write, forming each black letter carefully on a parchment used so many times that it had been scraped as thin and flabby as cloth. The scribe who lived in Burcan’s dun would be able to look at those marks and turn them into speech again—Lilli shuddered, but pleasurably. It seemed a dweomer of its own.

  “My congratulations, by the by.” Brour paused to pick up a little pen knife. “Or is the betrothal a bad one?”

  “It’s not, but one I’m well pleased with.”

  “Good.” He smiled, and it seemed to her that he was sincere. “I’m glad of that. Some day you’ll be able to use your gifts to help your husband, then, as well.”

  “I’d like that. I just hope my mother doesn’t find us out. She can always tell when I’m lying, you know. Is that dweomer?”

  “It is, most certainly.”

  Lilli caught her breath.

  “Ah,” Brour went on, “but what you don’t understand is that dweomer can be countered with dweomer. I’ll teach you how to defend yourself against your mother’s prying.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’s a beginner’s sort of trick but a useful thing to know.”

  Lilli smiled.

  “I’m beginning to think I’ll like these studies.”

  “Oh,” Brour said, solemn-faced, “I’m sure you will. I truly am.”

  After a morning’s desultory hunt, the queen’s party rode down to the grassy shore of Lake Gwerconydd for a meal. While the pages bustled around, spreading out a cloth and opening baskets of food, the women turned their horses over to the men of the queen’s guard and their hawks to the falconers. With Merodda and Bevyan in tow, the queen ran down to the water’s edge, where small waves lapped on clean sand. She threw herself down on her back in the thick grass and laughed up at the sky while Bevyan and Merodda sat more decorously beside her.

  “It feels so good to be out of the dun,” the queen said. “Don’t you think so, Lady Bevyan?”

  “I do, Your Highness.” Bevyan paused for a hurried glance back—the men were all staring at the queen. “It’s a lovely sunny day.”

  “Perhaps Her Highness might sit up?” Merodda said, smiling. “She has a great many men in her retinue, and dignity is never amiss.”

  Abrwnna stuck out her tongue at Merodda, but she did sit, smoothing her white riding dresses down over her knees.

  “I’m quite sure my guards know their duty,” the queen said. “And they’re all very loyal to the king. Well, to your brother, my lady Merodda. He picked them, after all.”

  “My brother acts purely in the king’s interests,” Merodda said. “Any loyalty paid to him is loyalty paid to our liege.”

  “Oh please!” Abrwnna wrinkled her nose. “You don’t have to pretend around me. We all know who really rules the kingdom.”

  A page was approaching. Bevyan laid a warning finger across her lips.

  “Your Highness?” the boy said. “The meal is ready.”

  “Very well.” Abrwnna rose and nodded his way. “Shall we go, my ladies?”

  While they ate, with the pages hovering around in attendance, Abrwnna kept the conversation to court gossip. Her maidservants supplied her with every scrap of scandal in the dun, apparently, to augment what she gleaned herself. She ran through various love affairs or the possibility of them as if she were reciting the lists for a tournament.

  “So you can see, Bevva,” Abrwnna finished up, “all sorts of things happened this winter while you were gone.”

  “Indeed,” Bevyan said. She reminded herself to tell Peddyc about this use of her nickname. “Long winters do that to people, and with so many widows sheltering here under your protection, I suppose things might get a bit complicated.”

  “Very, and I haven’t told you the best bit yet. Lady Merodda’s brother was the biggest prize of all. The regent might as well be a nice fat partridge, for all the hawks that are set upon him.”

  Merodda, who was buttering bread, smiled indulgently.

  “Well, Your Highness,” Bevyan said. “He has access to the king, and that does make a man attractive.”

  “Just so. The worst thing happened though. It was right before the thaw. Two of the court ladies were fighting over Burcan, just like dogs fighting over scraps of meat. It was Varra and Caetha.”

  “Caetha? I’d heard she left us for the Otherlands.”

  “She did, and here’s the thing. It looked like she was gaining the regent’s favor—everyone said he was much taken with her—when suddenly she died. Everyone said Varra poisoned her, it was so sudden. And then Varra left court and went home to her brother, which makes me think she really did do it.”

  “Oh, my dear liege!” Merodda looked up with a little shake of her head. “I doubt that very much. Here—it was at the bitter end of winter, and we all know what happens then to the food, even in a king’s dun.” She glanced at Bevyan. “The poor woman died after eating tainted meat. It was horrible.”

  “But she’s not the only one who ate it.” Abrwnna leaned forward. “Merodda had some, too.”

  “And, Your Highness, I was quite ill.” Merodda shuddered as if at the memory. “Caetha wasn’t strong enough to recover, I’m afraid. It happens.”

  “Indeed, it does happen, and a sad sad thing,” Bevyan said. “There’s really no need to talk about poisoning people.”

  And yet, despite her sensible words, Bevyan found herself wondering about Merodda’s herbcraft. If she could wash her face with ill-smelling water and keep her skin as smooth as a lass’s, what other lore did she know? No doubt the queen had no idea that poor dead Caetha’s real rival had been Lord Burcan’s sister.

  Since it was the queen’s pleasure to ride, the women returned to the dun late in the afternoon. Side by side Merodda and Bevyan walked into the great hall, where the men were already congregating for the evening meal. They watched the queen and her maidservants flit through the crowd like chattering birds and chase each other, giggl
ing, up the stone staircase. Bevyan could just see on the landing a handful of young lords, each marked as a member of the queen’s fellowship by a twist of green silk around their right sleeve. They bowed to the ladies and walked with them up the stairway and out of sight.

  “Bevva?” Merodda said suddenly. “You don’t suppose Abrwnna has a lover, do you?”

  “It’s one of my fears, truly. She talks of little else.”

  “Just so. Being married to a child is a difficult thing for a lass like her.”

  They exchanged a grim glance, for that moment at least allies.

  Later that evening, Bevyan remembered to ask Lilli about the lady Caetha in the privacy of her suite. Lilli repeated the story of the tainted meat and added that Caetha had died clutching her stomach in agony.

  “How terrible!” Bevyan said. “I take it that your mother was ill as well.”

  “She was. She’d eaten from that same meat.” Lilli considered with a small frown. “But she wasn’t anywhere as ill as poor Caetha, though she threw up ever so much and told us all how much pain she was in.”

  “That’s an odd way of putting it, dear. Do you think she wasn’t in pain?”

  “Oh, my apologies. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.” Lilli laid a pale hand at her throat. “She was; of course she was. It was awful to hear her moan and not be able to do anything for it.”

  “No doubt. You poor child! Well, I’m so sorry about poor Caetha.”

  “Oh, indeed. We all were.”

  Yet once again Bevyan wondered.

  Often over the next few days Lilli found herself drawn back to her mother’s chamber and Brour. She felt as if she were living the lives of two different girls. In the afternoons, she would sit and sew with Bevyan and the other women, talking over the news of the royal dun while the embroidery grew thick on the pieces of Braemys’s wedding shirt. But in the morning, she would watch her mother to get some idea of Merodda’s plans, and once they were established—a country ride, perhaps, or a session in the queen’s chambers—Lilli would slip upstairs for a lesson. Oddly enough, Brour always seemed to know that she was coming and would be waiting for her.

  “Is that dweomer?” she demanded one morning. “The way you know I’m coming?”