Daggerspell

  “If you challenge Tanyc, he’ll win. Please, Gwerro, I beg you. Don’t. Just don’t. What good would it do me, if I had my honor and no husband?”

  “I’m not going to do anything of the sort! Do you despise me, think me a coward, and all because I can’t match him in a fight?”

  “Don’t be a dolt. I could have married lots of bloodthirsty men, but I never wanted anyone but you.”

  Gweran smiled as if he didn’t quite believe her. They were both trapped, she saw, caught by the customs that gave a man no recourse but to defend his wife with a sword. They would have to creep around the edge of Tanyc’s arrogance, the pride of a true-born warrior, which thinks it can win a woman with a sword in a world where other men secretly agree. Lyssa hated Tanyc more than ever: no matter what the end of this, her marriage would never be the same. She could only pray that Gweran would never slip over the edge into hopeless violence.

  The fear combined with the heat to give Lyssa a restless night of bad dreams. Finally she woke, deep into the night, and heard a strange sound outside the tower. As she lay awake, trying to place it, the two children came bursting into the chamber.

  “Da, Mam, it’s the wind!” Aderyn shrieked. “The wind’s here! It’s going to rain.”

  Just as Gweran woke with a muffled oath, Acern clambered onto the bed.

  “Clouds, clouds, clouds, Da.”

  Aderyn grabbed Lyssa’s hand and dragged her to the window. She could see storm clouds, piling up in the sky, scudding in front of the moon, and smell the cool heady scent of the north wind. The ward was full of noise as the household ran outside to laugh and point and gloat in the feel of the wind. Since there was no hope of getting the children back to sleep, Lyssa got them dressed and took them down to the ward and the blessed coolness. Close to dawn, there was a clap of thunder, and rain came, pouring down cold in great sheets of water. Grown men and women ran round and laughed like the children as it rained and rained and rained.

  Laughing, his yellow hair dripping and plastered down, Gweran scooped Aderyn up in his arms and held him up to see the dawn breaking silver through the rain.

  “There you go, Addo,” Gweran said. “The horse wasn’t wasted after all.”

  “It wasn’t the priests who did it. It was Nevyn.”

  At first, Lyssa thought he meant “no one,” but then she remembered the herbman.

  “Now, here! What could Nevyn have to do with it?”

  “I saw him do it. I dreamt it.”

  “Dolt,” Acern said, simpering. “Da, Addo’s a dolt.”

  “Hush!” Gweran said. “It doesn’t matter who started the rain. We’ve got it, and that’s what matters.”

  Lyssa gave him a grin: Blaeddbyr wouldn’t starve this winter. But as she turned to glance idly around the ward, she saw Tanyc, close at hand, watching her, while the water ran down his face and hair. All at once, she couldn’t breathe. She felt herself choking in what she could only describe as terror. She grabbed Acern’s hand tightly.

  “Time to go in. Let’s all get dry.”

  Too late. Gweran had seen Tanyc, too, and as he looked at his enemy, Lyssa knew that he was thinking of blood.

  It rained steadily for three days. Life moved inside the tower and centered itself in the great hall, where Lord Maroic drank with his warband and the bard sang to keep them all amused. Much to Cadda’s annoyance, Lyssa insisted on staying in her chambers, giving Cadda no choice but to stay with her. Finally, on the third day, Cadda’s boredom got the better of her subservience.

  “Oh, please, my lady, can’t we go down to the hall? We can listen to your lord sing.”

  “I’d rather not, but you can if you want.”

  “Oh, my thanks!” Gleefully, Cadda threw her sewing into the workbasket. “Are you sure you won’t come?”

  “I won’t. All the riders will be there.” Lyssa looked away. “It’s so noisy, and I’ve got a headache.”

  Cadda hurried down to the great hall and took a place in the straw in front of the servant’s hearth. One of her friends, Dwlla, was already listening while the bard sang sad tales of love, Cadda’s favorite kind. From where she was sitting, Cadda could see the riders at their tables and Tanyc’s broad back, only a few feet from her, but he might as well have been on the other side of the world. In her heart, Cadda cursed him and wondered how he could be so cold to her. Certainly plenty of other men told her she was beautiful. When Gweran paused to rest, Dwlla leaned over and whispered to Cadda.

  “Tanno was asking me where you were. Or where your lady was, but it comes to the same thing.”

  All at once, Cadda wondered if it did indeed come to the same thing. Whenever Tanyc came walking with them, he always spoke to the lady, not the maid. He wouldn’t dare meddle with the bard’s woman, she thought, and besides, I’m prettier than her. Yet as she gazed at Tanyc’s broad back, she wondered if any woman every really understood what men thought.

  When the next day dawned clear, Lyssa gave Cadda permission to take Aderyn down to the farm and visit her mother. While the lad worked with the herbman, Cadda spent a pleasant hour in her Mam’s kitchen and gossiped about her sisters, who were already married, much to Cadda’s great distress. It just wasn’t fair! She was the prettiest and still unmarried, while they all had men of their own. Brooding on the injustice of it all gave her an idea. She left the house and went out to the herbman’s hut, where she found Nevyn and Aderyn digging up a bit of ground by the wall for an herb garden.

  “Good morrow,” Nevyn said. “Is it time for Aderyn to go home?”

  “Oh, not truly. I just wanted a word with you about buying some herbs.”

  Nevyn took Cadda inside his hut and gave her the stool to sit on while he leaned against the wall. Cadda decided that his manners were ever so much nicer than Tanyc’s. She only wished she could tell Tanyc that and have him care.

  “I was wondering if you made love philters,” Cadda said. “I couldn’t pay much, but my mistress gives me a coin every now and then.”

  “A maid with your beauty should have no need of such trash, and trash they are. They’re impious things, and besides, they never work right.”

  Cadda’s heart sank. Though she didn’t care about the impiety, she saw no need to waste her coin on something useless.

  “Come, now,” Nevyn went on. “Is Tanyc as cold to you as all that?”

  Cadda wondered if he were dweomer or if she’d simply been obvious. When she decided the latter, her cheeks burned with shame.

  “Well, it’s a nasty thing to love a man who’ll never love you.”

  “No doubt it is. But Tanno would only make a bad husband even if you got him. He’s a hard man and a cold one.”

  “Oh, huh! He’s not as cold to some as he is to me.”

  “Oh, indeed? I begin to understand. There’s a bit of jealousy in this.”

  “Well, it’s rotten and unfair! There he is, hanging round a woman who’s already got her own man, and besides, she doesn’t even like him.”

  “Now, listen, lass. If Tanyc’s the sort of man who’d want a married woman, can’t you see that you could do better for yourself than him? I—” All at once, the old man hesitated, turning to her with an ice-cold stare. “Just what married woman? Your lady?”

  In panic, Cadda tried to think of a lie, but those cold eyes seemed to be boring into her very soul.

  “Well, it is. But truly, sir, she hates him. She’d never betray her husband with him. Truly. Oh, ye gods, don’t tell Gweran, will you?”

  “Rest assured. I’d never do anything of the sort. And listen, child, you hold your tongue, too. Hear me? For the life of you, not one word of tattling to Gweran.”

  Too frightened to speak, Cadda nodded her agreement. As soon as Nevyn turned away, she got up and ran out of the hut.

  The high Lords of Water had promised Nevyn another storm, which broke on schedule the following day, a nice gentle rain that would properly soak the fields. In spite of the weather, Nevyn bundled himself up in his c
loak and rode up to Maroic’s fort. It was time for him to sound Gweran and Lyssa out about taking Aderyn in a formal apprenticeship. Besides, he wanted to take a look at the nasty situation Cadda had so inadvertently described. As he rode into the ward, where the cobbles were running with rain, Aderyn came dashing to meet him with a cloak pulled over his head.

  “I’ve been watching for you. I just knew you’d come today.”

  “And here I am. Going to help me stable my horse?”

  Together they found an empty stall and tied Nevyn’s horse up out of the weather. While Nevyn took off the damp saddle, Aderyn leaned back against the wall and watched, his big eyes full of some question.

  “What’s on your mind, lad?”

  “I want to ask you somewhat. How did you make the rain come?”

  “Here! What makes you think I did?”

  “I saw you in a dream. You were sitting on the river-bank, and there was this big star around you. It was like fire, but it was blue. Then these Kings came to you, and you talked to them. There were four Kings. I saw the one who was dripping wet. Then it rained.”

  Nevyn sighed. His last doubt that Aderyn was his apprentice vanished.

  “I was invoking the wind and asking it to blow. The King of Air was quarreling with the King of Fire, and the King of Earth asked me to settle the quarrel. It’s like the High King of Deverry giving a judgment to warring lords.”

  “And are you the High King, then?”

  “I’m not. Just a way of speaking to make it clear.”

  “Were the Kings angry at us, too?”

  “They weren’t. Why did you think so?”

  “Because we could have starved if there wasn’t any rain. Da said so.”

  “Oh, Da was right, but the Kings of the Wildlands don’t know that, you see. Truly, I doubt if they’d care. They have so little to do with us that we look to them like the field mice do to us, say. If you found a starving field mouse, you’d feed it, but do you course the fields to see if mice need your help?”

  Aderyn laughed aloud.

  “Now, listen carefully,” Nevyn went on. “I’ve come to speak to your father. You need to decide if you want to come with me in the spring and learn all the things I know. It’s a big thing. Someday we’ll leave Blaeddbyr, and you won’t see your Mam and Da again for a long time.”

  “But will we come back someday?”

  “We will, for visits.”

  Aderyn balanced on one foot and twisted the other around behind it. He chewed on his lower lip, a skinny little boy, suddenly frightened. But when he looked up, a man’s soul—the man he would someday be—looked out of his eyes for the briefest of moments as the two levels of his mind merged to make the most important decision of his life.

  “I don’t want to go. But I know I will. I want to know things so much, Nevyn. It’s like wanting water when it’s all hot outside. You’ve just got to get some.”

  “So it is. Done, then.”

  The great hall was crowded and smoky with torchlight in the rain-dark day. At the front of the hall, Gweran sat cross-legged on a table, his harp in his lap, and sang with sweat running down his face. The men gazed up at him attentively while he recited a tale of a cattle raid and named member after member of the warband in decorated stanzas.

  “We’d better just go see Mam,” Aderyn said. “She’s upstairs.”

  As they went up the spiral staircase, Gweran’s pure liquid tenor followed them, chanting of glory. In the bard’s chamber, it was mercifully cool and quiet. One of the shutters hung open to let in a streak of gray light. Lyssa sat near it with sewing in her lap. Although she smiled as she greeted them, Nevyn saw that she was troubled—about Tanyc, he assumed. For a few moments they chatted idly, while he studied her with a real greed, not for her pretty body, but for the soul looking out of her eyes, for the company she would have been, the end to his loneliness.

  “Well, here,” Lyssa said at last. “Surely you didn’t come all this way to talk about the rain.”

  “I didn’t, but about Aderyn. He shows a real talent for the herbman’s trade, and I was wondering if you and your husband would consider apprenticing him to me.”

  “I want to go, Mam!” Aderyn broke in.

  “Hush! We’ll have to talk this over with your Da. Here, Nevyn, I know perfectly well this means he’d have to travel with you. I’m not sure I can let him go.”

  “Mam!” Aderyn wailed.

  “Out with you, then, if you can’t sit quiet. Go listen to your father for a while.”

  Whining, reluctant, Aderyn dragged himself out of the chamber and slammed the door behind him. Lyssa settled back in her chair and looked Nevyn over thoughtfully.

  “I’ve already lost one child. Two seems a bit much to ask.”

  “I know, but he’ll be leaving you anyway for some kind of apprenticeship, sooner or later. I doubt me if he’ll ever be a bard like his father. Here, do you doubt that I’ll take good care of him?”

  Lyssa considered, and as their eyes met, she remembered again, a little flicker of puzzled recognition.

  “Well, I don’t. But will I ever see him again?”

  “Of course. We’ll ride back regularly for visits.”

  “That’s some comfort, I suppose. Here, I’ll tell you somewhat, because you’re the only man I’ve ever met who might understand it. When Aderyn was born, I had the strangest feeling about him. I knew that someday he’d leave me for a truly strange Wyrd indeed. It was my first time, of course, and truly, I was so tired and sick, just glad it was over. So the midwife laid Addo to my breast, and he looked up at me with eyes that saw. Most babies are like puppies, nuzzling at your breast with cloudy little eyes, but Aderyn saw. I knew he knew just where he was, and he was glad of it. And I thought then that he was marked out for a strange Wyrd. Do you think I’m daft?”

  “I don’t. I’ve no doubt it’s the plain truth.”

  Lyssa sighed and looked out the window, where the rain fell soft and steady.

  “Herbs?” she said. “Is that all you’ll teach him?”

  “A bit more than that, truly. Tell me, what do you think of dweomer? A tale, fit for one of Gweran’s songs and nothing more?”

  “A bit more than that, truly.” Lyssa smiled as she consciously echoed his words. “So I thought. If that’s the truth of it, well, there’s no way I can stand between him and his Wyrd.”

  “It would be a harsh thing if you tried—for all of us.”

  Nodding, Lyssa stared at the rain.

  “Will you wait until spring?” she said, her voice catching. “He’s such a little lad.”

  “I will. And we won’t ride far the next summer. You’ll see him in the fall.”

  The tears ran down her cheeks. Nevyn wanted to kneel at her feet, to call her Brangwen and beg her to forgive him. He decided that he could stay in Blaeddbyr, never take her son away, never leave her. The dweomer-warning hit him like a slap. Just as he did, she had a Wyrd to fulfill that he could no more soften than he could his own. And what will happen if you stay? he told himself. You’ll hate Gweran for having her.

  “Shall I leave you alone?”

  “Please. My thanks.”

  Nevyn went down the spiral staircase and lingered in its shadow to watch the great hall. Over by the servant’s hearth, Aderyn was playing a game of Carnoic with one of the pages. Gweran was singing a ballad from the Dawntime, the sad tale of Lady Maeva and Lord Benoic and their adulterous love. Adultery. Nevyn felt the dweomer-warning and looked around for Tanyc, who was sitting with the riders and watching the bard with a tight, insolent smile. Every now and then, Gweran would glance his way with a smile of his own. Ah, ye gods, Nevyn thought, I’m too late—Gweran knows. Stanza after stanza reeled out until Gweran came to the climax: Benoic lying dead at the outraged husband’s feet. Tanyc got up and strode out of the great hall.

  With a sigh, Gweran set the harp down and wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve. He got off the table, took a tankard of ale from a waiting page, and wa
ndered over to Nevyn.

  “I need a bit of rest. Cursed smoky in here, and it affects your voice.”

  “So it must. You sing beautifully, bard, though I wonder about your choice of tales.”

  Gweran raised one eyebrow.

  “Lord Benoic’s sad end fell upon some ears that are doubtless raw from hearing it,” Nevyn said.

  “I only wish I could cut them from his head, if you mean the man I think you mean.”

  “It takes a great deal of skill with a sword to bring the falcon down as he flies, my friend.”

  “And that’s what all men think, isn’t it?” Gweran’s voice turned cold and flat. “That I’m to grovel in fear before this lout of a rider, because he can swing a blade and I can’t. I tell you, I’d rather die than be that kind of coward.”

  “I only pray your words never come to the test.”

  Gweran shrugged and had a long swallow of ale.

  “Now, here,” Nevyn said, “If you mentioned to Lord Maroic that Tanyc was sniffing round your woman, the lord would turn him out. Maroic honors a bard the way he should be honored.”

  “So he does, but that would only dirty Lyssa’s name. I can hear the old gossips wagging their heads and saying where there’s mud, there’s water below, and the stinking warband looking at her and wondering. What kind of a man am I if I can’t protect my own?”

  “A dead man protects nobody.”

  “Oh, don’t trouble your heart. I’ve no desire to die and leave my poor Lyssa a widow. This is all a warning, like, for our falcon. I truly think the lout didn’t know I knew. Well, he does now. It’ll put him in his place.”

  It was perfectly reasonable, but Nevyn knew, with an icy touch of dweomer, that somehow Gweran was lying.

  As he went over his stock of story songs, laid up in his mind where no thief could steal them, Gweran was surprised at just how many tales had adultery for a theme. It seemed to be a common pastime among the noble-born, like hawking, though with an even bloodier result. Every night, Gweran would sing one song about adultery and watch Tanyc when he came to the predictable doom at the end. From the tightness of his jaw and the cold flicker in his eyes, there was no doubt that Tanyc was listening. Tanyc wasn’t the only man with sharp ears. After a week of this sport, Doryn came up to Gweran one night for a private talk.