TWO

The year 834. This was the year of the first omens of the coming king. A two-headed kid was born in a village near our temple. It died soon after, because a kingdom with two kings cannot live. In the sky we saw a vision of a great horse, running before a storm, and coming from the west. Although the omen was duly recorded, only later did we realize its import . . . 

—The Holy Chronicles of Lughcarn

Spring came too fast that year for Maddyn’s liking. Every morning, he would walk up on the hill and search the sky for weather omens. Although he would have to stay until the snows were well past, at the same time he had to be well away before the real spring, when the riders would be swarming on the Cantrae roads for the summer muster. First came the rains that melted the last of the snow and turned the world to brown muck; then the nights grew warmer until it seemed a hardy man could sleep beside the road without freezing. Yet he found excuses to stay until the pale grass began to come out in sheltered valleys. That very night, he rode down early to see Belyan.

When he climbed through her window, he found her still up, fussing over the fire in the clay stove. She gave him a distracted sort of kiss.

“Take off those boots before sitting on the bed, will you, love? I don’t want muck all over the blankets.”

Maddyn leaned into the curve of the wall and began to pull them off.

“Spring’s here,” he said. “Will it ache your heart when I ride?”

“It will, but not half as badly as seeing you hanged would ache it.”

“True enough. But, Bell, I wish I could stay, and all for your sake. I want you to know that.”

“It would be splendid, having you with us on the farm, but I don’t see how we could keep you hidden. A few of our friends already know I’ve got a man, and in a few months, the whole village will know.”

When he looked up, he found her smiling, her dark eyes as calm as always.

“Oh, by the hells, what have I done? Gotten you with child?”

“What did you think would happen after all the rolling around we’ve done? I’m hardly barren, am I? Oh, here, don’t look so troubled, love. I’ve wanted another babe for ever so long now. I’m just glad we had the time for you to give me one.”

“But I have to desert you! I don’t even have the wretched coin for the midwife.”

“Oh, the midwife’s a friend of mine, so don’t trouble your heart over that. I can tend a babe on my own, but I couldn’t have gotten one without a bit of help, could I?” She laid her hands delicately on her stomach. “Oh, I do hope it’s a daughter, but if it’s a son, shall I name him after you?”

“Only if you truly want to. I’d rather you gave him my father’s name. It was Daumyr.”

“Then Daumyr it is, if it’s a lad. Well, either way, I hope it has your curly hair.”

Maddyn hesitated with a troubling suspicion rising in his mind. He’d always known she didn’t truly love him, but he was beginning to wonder if he’d just been put out to stud.

“Bell? Will you miss me when I’m gone?”

Somewhat startled, she considered the question.

“Well, I will,” she said at last. “A bit.”

When Maddyn left that night, the air was warm with the moist rich smell of spring earth. At the hilltop he dismounted and stood looking out over the dark countryside, the glitter of streams in the moonlight, the distant mound of the sleeping village, and far away, the gleam of the lake where the gates of the Otherlands had almost opened to receive him. I’ve been happy this winter, he thought; ah, curse both false kings and their balls, too!

In the morning Maddyn led his horse down the gully one last time. Overhead, white clouds sailed by, sweeping their shadows over the pale grass on the muddy moorland. When they reached the foot of the hill, Nevyn handed him a worn leather pouch, jingling with coin.

“Take it without arguing, lad. I didn’t save your life only to have you starve on the road.”

“My thanks. I wish I could repay you for everything you’ve done for me.”

“I’ll wager you will. Your Wyrd brought you to me once, and I suspect it’ll do so again, but in some strange way that neither of us can understand.”

Although Maddyn wanted to head straight west and put Cantrae behind him as soon as he could, he was forced to turn south, because the hills between Cantrae and Gwaentaer province were still snowy this time of year. He went cautiously, avoiding the main road that ran beside the Canaver down to Dun Cantrae, sticking to winding farm lanes and what wild country there was. The only people he allowed to see him were farmers, who, like Belyan, cared less for the honor of war than they did for the coppers he spent for food. After four days of this careful riding, he was at the Gwaentaer border at a place roughly parallel with Dun Cantrae. Here the hills were low and rolling, dotted with small farms and the winter steadings of the horse breeders who roamed with their herds all summer in the pasturelands. This time of year, every house bustled with activity. Mares were foaling; hooves needed shoeing; gear needed repairing; food had to be packed against the first long spring ride. No one had time to notice or to care about a solitary rider with a warrior’s saddle but a farmer’s shirt.

Just at dusk one warm day Maddyn came to the pillar stone that marked the boundary between the two gwerbretrhynau. As he rode past, he let go a long sigh of relief. Although he was still an outlaw, his neck was a good bit safer now. Once, back in that peaceful and now near-mythical past, every gwerbret in the kingdom would have honored Tibryn’s decree of outlawry, but now in the midst of the long-bleeding wars, fighting men were too valuable for lords to go driving them away with awkward questions. For the first time in weeks he felt relaxed enough to sing. Two Wildfolk came for the song, the blue sprite perching on his saddle peak and showing him her pointed teeth, a gnarled brown gnome who was new to him dancing in the road beside his horse. Maddyn was so glad to see them that he almost wept. At least one small part of his magical winter would travel with him.

As it turned out, he soon had human company, and in a way that never would have expected. The morning after he passed the boundary stone, he came to the last of the hills and paused his horse for a moment to look down and over the vast green plain of Gwaentaer, the wind’s own country indeed, where the trees that the farmers laboriously planted soon grew leaning, as if they shrank in continuous fear away from the constant whistling of the wind. Since the day was sparkling clear, he could see for miles over the land, softly furred with the first green of grass and winter wheat, dimpled here and there with tiny ponds or the round steadings of the widely separated farms. He could also see a well-marked road running dead west, and on it, not more than a mile ahead of him, a solitary rider.

Something was wrong with the man. Even from his distance Maddyn could see it, because the fellow was riding doubled over in the saddle, and his horse was picking his own way, ambling slowly, pausing every now and then to snatch a tuft of grass from the side of the road before its rider would come to himself and get it back under control, only to slump again a few moments later. Maddyn’s first impulse was to ride on by a somewhat different route and not burden himself with anyone else’s troubles, but then he thought of Nevyn, risking his own life to heal and shelter an outlawed man. With a chirrup to his horse, he started off at a brisk trot. The rider ahead never heard him coming, or else he cared not a whit if he were followed, because he never turned nor even looked back the entire time that Maddyn was closing with him. Finally, when Maddyn was close enough to see that the entire back of the man’s shirt was thick with rusty-brown dried blood, the fellow paused his horse and sat slumped and weary, as if inviting Maddyn to have a clear strike at him and be done with it.

“Here,” Maddyn said. “What’s wrong?”

At that the rider did turn to look at him, and Maddyn swore aloud.

“Aethan, by all the gods! What are you doing on the Gwaentaer road?”

“And I could ask the same of you, Maddo.” His voice, normally deep and full of humor, was rasped with old pain. “Or have you come to fetch me to the Otherlands?”

Maddyn stared for a moment, then remembered that everyone in Cantrae thought him dead.

“Oh, I’m as much alive as you are. How were you wounded?”

“I’m not. I’ve been flogged.”

“Ah, horse dung and a pile of it! Can you ride any farther?”

Aethan considered this for a long moment. He was normally a handsome man, with even features, dark hair just touched with gray at the temples, and wide blue eyes that always seemed to be laughing at some jest, but now his face was twisted in pain, and his eyes were narrow and grim, as if perhaps he’d never laugh again.

“I need a rest,” he said at last. “Shall we sit awhile, or are you riding on and leaving me?”

“What? Are you daft? Would I run out on a man I’ve known since I was a cub of fifteen?”

“I don’t know anymore what men will do, and women neither.”

In a nearby meadow they found a pleasant copse of willows planted round a farmer’s duck pond, with the farmer nowhere in sight. Maddyn dismounted, then helped Aethan down and watered the horses while his friend sat numbly in the shade. As he worked, he was wondering over it all. Aethan was the last man in the kingdom that Maddyn would have expected to get himself shamed, flogged, and turned out of his warband. A favorite of his captain, Aethan had been a second-in-command of Gwerbret Tibryn’s own warband. He was one of those genuinely decent men so valuable to any good warband—the conciliator, everyone’s friend, the man who settled all those petty disputes bound to arise when a lot of men are packed into a barracks together. The gwerbret himself had on occasion asked Aethan’s advice on small matters dealing with the warband, but now here he was, with his shame written on his back in blood.

Once the horses were watered, Maddyn filled the waterskin with fresh drink and sat down next to Aethan, who took the skin from him with a twisted smile.

“Outlawed we may be, but we still follow the rules of the troop, don’t we, Maddo? Horses first, then men.”

“We need these mounts more than ever, with no lord to give us another.”

Aethan nodded and drank deep, then handed the skin back.

“Well, it gladdens my heart that you weren’t killed in Lord Devyr’s last charge. I take it you found a farm or suchlike to hide in all winter.”

“Somewhat like that. I was dying, actually, from a wound I took, when a local herbman found me.”

“Gods! You’ve always had the luck, haven’t you?”

Maddyn merely shrugged and stoppered up the skin tight. For a moment they merely sat there in an uncomfortable silence and watched the fat gray ducks grubbing at the edge of the pond.

“You hold your tongue cursed well for a bard,” Aethan said abruptly. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my shame?”

“Say what you want and not a word more.”

Aethan considered, staring out at the far flat horizon.

“Ah, horseshit,” he said at last. “It’s a tale fit for a bard to know, in a way. Do you remember our gwerbret’s sister, the Lady Merodda?”

“Oh, and how could any man with blood in his veins forget her?”

“He’d best try.” Aethan’s voice turned hard and cold. “Her husband was killed in battle last summer, and so she came back to her brother in Dun Cantrae. And the captain made me her escort, to ride behind her whenever she went out.” He was quiet, his mouth working, for a good couple of minutes. “And she took a fancy to me. Ah, by the black ass of the Lord of Hell, I should have said her nay—I blasted well knew it, even then—but ye gods, Maddo, I’m only made of flesh and blood, not steel, and she knows how to get what she wants from a man. I swear to you, I never would have said a word to her if she hadn’t spoken to me first.”

“I believe you. You’ve never been a fool.”

“Not before this winter at least. I felt like I was ensorceled. I’ve never loved a woman that way before, and cursed if I ever will again. I wanted her to ride off with me. Like a misbegotten horseshit fool, I thought she loved me enough to do it. But oh, it didn’t suit her ladyship, not by half.” Again the long, pain-filled pause. “So she let it slip to her brother what had been happening between us, but oh, she was the innocent one, she was. And when His Grace took all the skin off my back three days ago, she was out in the ward to watch.”

Aethan dropped his face into his hands and wept like a child. For a moment Maddyn sat there frozen; then he reached out a timid hand and laid it on Aethan’s shoulder until at last he fell silent and wiped his face roughly on his sleeve.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on her.” Aethan’s voice was a flat, dead whisper. “She did keep her brother from killing me.” He stood up, and it was painful to watch him wince as he hauled himself to his feet. “I’ve rested enough. Let’s ride, Maddo. The farther I get from Cantrae, the happier I’ll be.”

For four days Maddyn and Aethan rode west, asking cautious questions of the various farmers and peddlers that they met about the local lords and their warbands. Even though they sometimes heard of a man who might be desperate enough to take them in without asking questions, each time they decided that they were still too close to Cantrae to take the risk of petitioning him. They realized, however, that they would have to find some place soon, because all around them the noble-born were beginning to muster their men for the summer’s fighting. With troops moving along the roads they were in a dangerous position. Maddyn had no desire to escape being hanged for an outlaw only to end up on a rope as a supposed spy.

Since Aethan’s back was far from healed, they rode slowly, stopping often to rest, either beside the road or in village taverns. They had, at least, no need to worry about coin; not only did Maddyn have Nevyn’s generous pouch, but Aethan’s old captain had managed to slip him money along with his gear when he’d been kicked out of Dun Cantrae. Apparently Maddyn wasn’t alone in thinking the gwerbret’s sentence harsh. During this slow progress west, Maddyn had plenty of time to watch and worry over his old friend. Since always before Aethan had watched over him—he was, after all, some ten years Maddyn’s elder—Maddyn was deeply troubled to realize that Aethan needed him the way a child needs his father. The gwerbret might have spared his life, but he’d broken him all the same, this man who’d served him faithfully for over twenty years, by half beating him to death like a rat caught in a stable.

Always before Aethan had had an easy way with command, making decisions, giving orders, and all in a way that made his fellows glad to follow them. Now he did whatever Maddyn said without even a mild suggestion that they might do otherwise. Before, too, he’d been a talkative man, always ready with a tale or a jest if he didn’t have serious news to pass along. Now he rode wrapped in a black hiraedd; at times he didn’t even answer when Maddyn asked him a direct question. For all that it ached Maddyn’s heart, he could think of nothing to do to better things. Often he wished that he could talk with Nevyn and get his advice, but Nevyn was far away, and he doubted if he’d ever see the old man again, no matter how much he wanted to.

Eventually they reached the great river, the Camyn Yraen, an “iron road” even then, because all the rich ore from Cerrgonney came down it in barges, and the town of Gaddmyr, at that time only a large village with a wooden palisade around it for want of walls. Just inside the gate they found a tavern of sorts, basically the tavernman’s house, with half the round ground floor set off by a wickerwork partition to hold a couple of tables and some ale barrels in the curve of the wall. For a couple of coppers the man brought them a chunk of cheese and a loaf of bread to go with their ale, then left them strictly alone. Maddyn noticed that none of the villagers were bothering to come to the tavern with them in it, and he remarked as much to Aethan.

“For all they know we’re a couple of bandits. Ah, by the hells Maddo, we can’t go wandering the roads like this, or we might well end up robbing travelers, at that. What are we going to do?”

“Cursed if I know. But I’ve been thinking a bit. There’s those free troops you hear about. Maybe we’d be better off joining one of them than worrying about an honorable place in a warband.”

“What?” For a moment some of the old life came back to Aethan’s eyes. “Are you daft? Fight for coin, not honor? Ye gods, I’ve heard of some of those troops switching sides practically in the middle of a battle if someone offered them better pay. Mercenaries! They’re naught but a lot of dishonored scum!”

Maddyn merely looked at him. With a long sigh Aethan rubbed his face with both hands.

“And so are we. That’s what you mean, isn’t it, Maddo? Well, you’re right enough. All the gods know that the captain of a free troop won’t be in any position to sneer at the scars on my back.”

“True spoken. And we’ll have to try to find one that’s fighting for Cerrmor or Eldidd, too. Neither of us can risk having some Cantrae man seeing us in camp.”

“Ah, horseshit and a pile of it! Do you know what that means? What are we going to end up doing? Riding a charge against the gwerbret and all my old band someday?”

Maddyn had never allowed himself to frame that thought before, that someday his life might depend on his killing a man who’d once been his ally and friend. Aethan picked up his dagger and stabbed it viciously into the table.

“Here!” The tavernman came running. “No need to be breaking up the furniture, lads!”

Aethan looked up so grimly that Maddyn caught his arm before he could take out his rage on this innocent villager. The tavernman stepped back, swallowing hard.

“I’ll give you an extra copper to pay for the damage,” Maddyn said. “My friend’s in a black mood today.”

“He can go about having it in some other place than mine.”

“Well and good, then. We’ve finished your piss-poor excuse for ale, anyway.”

They’d just reached the door when the tavernman hailed them gain. Although Aethan ignored him and walked out, Maddyn paused as the taverner came scurrying over.

“I know about one of them troops you and your friend was talking about.”

Maddyn got out a couple of coppers and jingled them in his hand. The taverner gave him a gap-toothed, garlic-scented grin.

“They wintered not far from here, they did. They rode in every now and then to buy food, and we was fair terrified at first, thinking they were going to steal whatever they wanted, but they paid good coin. I’ll say that for them, for all that they was an arrogant lot, strutting around like lords.”

“Now that’s luck!”

“Well, now, they might have moved on by now. Haven’t seen them in days, and here’s the blacksmith’s daughter with her belly swelling up, and even if they did come back, she wouldn’t even know which of the lads it was. The little slut, spreading her legs for any of them that asked her!”

“Indeed? And where were they quartered?”

“They wouldn’t be telling the likes of us that, but I’ll wager I can guess well enough. Just to the north of here, oh, about ten miles, I’d say, is a stretch of forest. It used to be the tieryn’s hunting preserve, but then, twenty-odd years ago it was now, the old tieryn and all his male kin got themselves killed off in a blood feud, and with the wars so bad and all, there was no one else to take the demesne. So the forest’s gotten all overgrown and thick, like, but I wager that the old tieryn’s hunting lodge still stands in there someplace.”

Maddyn handed over the coppers and took out two more.

“I don’t suppose some of the lads in the village know where this lodge is.” He held up the coins. “It seems likely that some of the young ones might have poked around in there, just out of curiosity, like.”

“Not on your life, and I’m not saying that to get more coin out of you, neither. It’s a dangerous place, that stretch of trees. Haunted, say, and full of evil spirits as well, most like, and then there’s the wild men.”

“The what?”

“I suppose that by rights I shouldn’t call them wild, poor bastards, because all the gods can bear witness that I’d have done the same as them if I had to.” He leaned closer, all conspiratorial “You don’t look like the sort of fellow who’ll be running to our lord with the news, but the folk who live in the forest are bondsmen. Or I should say, they was, a while back. Their lord got killed and so they took themselves off to live free, and I can’t say as I’ll be blaming them for it, neither.”

“Nor more can I. Your wild men are safe enough from me, but I take it they’re not above robbing a traveler if they can.”

“I think they feels it’s owing to them, like, after all the hard work they put in.”

Maddyn gave him the extra coppers anyway, then went out to join Aethan, who was standing by the road with the horses’ reins in hand.

“Done gossiping, are you?”

“Here, Aethan, the taverner had some news to give us, and it just might be worth following down. There might be a free troop up in the woods to the north of us.”

Aethan stared down at the reins in his hand and rubbed them with weary fingers.

“Ah, horseshit!” he said at last. “We might as well look them over, then.”

When they left the village, they rode north, following the river. Although Aethan was well on the mend by then, his back still ached him, and they rested often. At their pace it was close to sunset when they reached the forest, looming dark and tangled on the far side of a wild meadowland. At its edge a massive marker stone still stood, doubtless proclaiming the trees the property of the long-dead clan that once had owned them.

“I don’t want to be mucking around in there when it’s dark,” Aethan said.

“You’re right enough. We’ll camp here. There’s plenty of water in the river.”

While Aethan tended the horses, Maddyn went to gather firewood at the forest edge. A crowd of Wildfolk went with him, darting around or skipping beside him, a gaggle of green, warty gnomes, three enormous yellow creatures with swollen stomachs and red fangs, and his faithful blue sprite, perching on his shoulder and running tiny hands through his hair.

“I’ll have to play us a song tonight. It’s been a while since I felt like music, but maybe our luck is turning.”

Yet when it came time to play, Maddyn’s heart was still so troubled that he found it hard to settle down to one ballad or declamation. He got the harp in tune, then played scraps and bits of various songs or practiced runs and chordings. Aethan soon fell asleep, lying on his stomach with his head pillowed on folded arms, but the Wildfolk stayed to the last note, a vast crowd of them, stretching out beyond the pool of firelight across the meadow. Maddyn felt awed, as if he were playing in a king’s court, the great hall crowded with retainers. When he stopped, he felt more than heard a ripple of eerie applause; then suddenly, they were gone. Maddyn shuddered profoundly, then put the harp away.

After he banked the campfire, Maddyn paced a little ways into the meadow out of restlessness and nothing more. He could see the forest edge, looming dark not far from them, and even more, he could feel its presence, like an exhalation of wildness. He was sure that more than human fugitives lived there. It occurred to him that while the long wars were a tragedy for human beings, to the Wildfolk they were a blessing, giving them back land that men had once taken and tamed. As he stood there in the silent meadow, it seemed that he heard faint music, an echo of his own. Again he shuddered convulsively, then hurried back to his safe camp.

On the morrow the blue sprite woke him just at dawn by the expedient method of pulling his hair so hard that it hurt like fire. When he swatted at her, she laughed soundlessly, exposing her needle-sharp teeth. Nearby Aethan was still sleeping, but restlessly, turning and stretching like a man who’ll wake any moment.

“Listen carefully, little sweet one,” Maddyn said to the sprite. “Somewhere in that forest are a whole lot of men like me and Aethan, warriors with swords. They’ll have lots of horses, too, and they live in a stone house. Can you lead me there?”

She thought for a long moment, then nodded her agreement and promptly disappeared. Maddyn decided that either she’d misunderstood or had simply forgotten, but as soon as they were ready to ride, she reappeared, dancing and leaping on the riverbank and pointing to the north.

“I don’t suppose that misbegotten tavernman gave you any directions to this place,” Aethan said.

“Well, he had a confused idea or two. I’ll try to lead us there, but don’t be surprised if it’s a bit roundabout.”

It was a good thing that Maddyn had put in his warning, because the Wildfolk’s idea of leading someone left much to be desired. As soon as the men started riding north, two gray gnomes appeared to join the sprite, but they kept pinching either her or each other and distracting her both ways from her task. Once they were all well into the forest, the Wildfolk disappeared, leaving the men to follow a rough deer track for several miles. Just when Maddyn had given up on them, they flashed back into being, perching on his horse’s neck and saddle peak and pointing off to the west down a narrow and rough track indeed. Although Aethan grumbled (and a welcome sign of returning life it was), Maddyn insisted on following it, and every time the path branched, he faithfully went the way she pointed. By noon, Maddyn was hopelessly lost, with no choice but to follow where the Wildfolk led. Hopping from tree to tree, they grinned, giggled, and pointed in various directions, but Maddyn always followed the blue sprite, who threatened to bite the gray fellows whenever they contradicted her.

“Maddo, I hope to every god and his horse that you know what you’re doing.”

“So do I. I’ve got the ugly feeling I may have gotten us lost in here.”

Aethan groaned with a drama worthy of a bard. Just as Maddyn was thinking that he’d spoken the bitter truth, the sprite led them to a big clearing, ringed round with stumps of trees. Out in the middle was a hut built of logs, piled up whole to form a square structure—a house different from any that Maddyn had ever seen. The roof was neatly thatched with branches, and a wisp of smoke trailed lazily out of the smoke hole in the roof.

“What in the three hells have you found?” Aethan sputtered. “That’s not big enough for a band of mercenaries.”

“So it’s not. More likely it’s some of those runaway bondsmen the taverner mentioned.”

At the sound of their voices, a man came out. He was one of the shortest men Maddyn had ever seen, not more than five feet tall, but he had broad shoulders and heavy arms like a miniature blacksmith, and his legs were in perfect proportion to the rest of him. His long black beard trailed past the round collar of the wool tunic he wore over brigga. He carried a long woodsman’s ax like a weapon. When he spoke, his voice was rough with a heavy guttural accent. “And just who are you, lads?”

“Naught but a pair of lost travelers,” Maddyn said.

“Thieves, more like.” The fellow hefted the ax. “And what brought you into these wretched woods in the first place?”

“We were looking for a mercenary troop,” Aethan broke in. “A tavernman in Gaddmyr said there might be one quartered in this forest.”

“All we want to do is see if they’ll take us on,” Maddyn said. “I swear it, we’re not thieves, and I don’t know what a hermit like you would have that’s worth stealing, anyway.”

The man considered with his ax at the ready. When Maddyn noticed the blade, he nearly swore aloud in surprise. Although the metal gleamed exactly like silver, it had an edge as sharp as steel by the look of it, and it carried not one nick or bite.

“Now, here,” Aethan said. “We’ll be more than glad to leave you alone if you’ll only show us the way out of these blasted woods.”

“Go back the way you came, of course.”

“Good sir, we’re lost,” Maddyn said, and quickly, because he didn’t like the black look on Aethan’s face.

“Indeed? You found me easily enough.”

“Well, I was following one of the . . . ” Maddyn broke off just in time.

As if she knew he was thinking of her, the blue sprite popped into existence, settling on his shoulder and kissing his hair. The fellow frankly stared and lowered his ax to lean on it like a walking stick. Quickly he darted a conspiratorial glance at Aethan, who of course had seen nothing, and then gave Maddyn a grudging smile.

“Well, perhaps I could take you to the old lodge after all, but your horses look worn out from all these wretched trees. There’s a spring over there, by that bit of stump. Give them a drink first. My name’s Otho, by the by.”

“And I’m Maddyn, and this is Aethan. My thanks for your help. Do you know this troop?”

“Somewhat. I did a bit of work for them this winter, fixing buckles and suchlike. I’m a smith, you see.”

It was Maddyn’s turn to stare. What was a smith doing out in the middle of a wilderness? Then it occurred to him that Otho might have some dishonor of his own behind him.

“Now, Caradoc—that’s their leader—isn’t a bad man, considering what he is,” Otho went on. “He wants me to ride south with him when they go. I’ve been thinking it over.”

While Aethan watered the horses, Otho went into his cabin, then reappeared wearing a leather vest over his tunic and carrying a different ax, one with a long handle banded with metal and obviously made as a weapon, which he used to good advantage for clearing brush and overhanging branches. The trail was so narrow and twisty that the men had to lead their horses. It was about the middle of the afternoon when they came into a vast clearing of some five acres and saw the high stone walls of what once had been a noble’s hunting lodge. The wooden gates were long since rotted away, letting them see the broch, still in reasonable repair, and a collection of tumbledown sheds inside.

As they walked up, Caradoc himself came out to meet them. Otho introduced him, a tall, slender man with the long, ropy arms of a born swordsman, and the high cheekbones and pale hair of a southern man. He seemed about Aethan’s age, in his mid-thirties, and for all that he was a dishonored, man, there was something impressive about Caradoc, the proud way he stood, the shrewd way he looked men over with eyes that seemed to have seen a lot of life.

“Since you’re looking for bodies to sell,” Otho said, ’”I brought you a couple.”

“Interesting.” Caradoc gave them each a pleasant smile. “Here’s Aethan with a Cantrae boar on his shirt, and Maddyn dressed like a farmer but carrying a sword. I looked, like the pair of you once. Left a warband down in Cerrmor a bit . . . well, sudden, like. Never did bid a proper farewell to my lord . . . I’ll wager, Aethan, that there’s scars on your back, judging from the stains on your shirt.”

“More than a few. Cursed, if I’ll tell you why.”

“I’d never ask. Now, here’s the terms, lads. I’ll take anyone on for a summer. If you can’t fight, then you’ll die in a scrap, and we’ll be rid of you. If you can fight, then you get an equal share of the coin. And remember: I’m the leader of this pack of dogs, You give me one bit of trouble, and I’ll beat the shit out of you. Scribe that deep into your ugly hearts: you ride at orders, or you don’t ride.”

It was obvious that Caradoc meant what he said as soon as they went into the dun. Instead of the banditlike pile of filth that Maddyn had been dreading, the camp was as clean as a great lord’s barracks. There were thirty-six men in the troop, and their gear was well tended, their horses good, healthy stock, and their discipline tighter, in fact, than that of Maddyn’s old warband. As Caradoc introduced the new recruits around, the other members of the band paid him such strict and respectful attention that Maddyn began to wonder if he were noble-born. Otho came along with them, listening to Caradoc and stroking his beard in thought, but he said naught a word until they all went outside again so that Maddyn and Aethan could unsaddle their horses and unload their gear.

“Well, Otho,” Caradoc said. “We’ll be pulling out soon. Coming with us to Eldidd?”

“I might, at that. I’ve gotten used to a bit of company, especially company that can pay a smith better than the stinking bondsmen in this forest.”

“So we can, and you’ll like Eldidd well enough once we get there.”

“Hah! I’ve got my doubts about that. They always say that there’s elven blood in Eldidd veins.”

“Not that again!” Caradoc mugged a doleful expression. “As much as I admire your craft, good smith, I have to say that your wits are a bit thin in places. Elves, indeed!”

“Mock all you want, but elven blood makes a man unreliable.”

“It’d make any man unreliable to have a myth in his clan’s quarterings.” Caradoc ran one finger down the silvery blade of Otho’s ax. “But talk about elves all you want, just so long as you keep working your witchcraft on metals. When we’re all as rich as lords and the most famous free troop in all of Deverry, you’re going to make us swords out of that warlock’s metal of yours.”

“Hah! You’d have to be a king to afford that, my friend. You’ll be blasted lucky if you ever get rich enough to have so much as a dagger out of it.”

After Maddyn and Aethan had their horses settled and fed in the stables, one of the men, Stevyc by name, came to help them carry their gear into the broch. When he picked up the big leather bag that held Maddyn’s harp, he broke into a grin.

“Which one of you is the bard?”

“I am,” Maddyn said. “But not much of one, a gerthddyn, truly, if that. I can sing, but I don’t have a true bard’s lore.”

“And who gives a pig’s fart who some lord’s great-great-great-grandam was? This is a bit of splendid luck.” Stevyc turned, calling out to Caradoc. “Here, Captain, we’ve got a bard of our own.”

“And next we’ll be eating off of silver plates, like the great lords we are.” Caradoc came strolling over. “But a bard would have come in handy this winter, with the pack of you causing trouble because you had naught better to do. Well and good, then, Maddyn. If you sing well enough, you’ll be free of kitchen work and stable duty, but I’ll expect you to make up songs about our battles just like you would for a lord.”

“I’ll do my best, Captain, to sing as well as we deserve.”

“Better than we deserve, Maddyn lad, or you’ll sound like a cat in heat.”

After a rough dinner of venison and turnips, Maddyn was given his chance to sing, sitting on a rickety, half-rotted table in what had once been the lodge’s great hall. He’d only done one ballad when he realized that his place in the troop was assured. The men listened with the deep fascination of the utterly bored, hardly noticing or caring when he got a bit off-key or stumbled over a line. After a winter with naught but dice games and the blacksmith’s daughter for entertainment, they cheered him as if he were the best bard at the king’s court. They made him sing until he was hoarse, that night, and let him stop only reluctantly then. Only Maddyn and Otho knew, of course, that the hall was filled with Wildfolk, listening as intently as the men.

That night, Maddyn lay awake for a long while and listened to the familiar sound of other men snoring close by in the darkness of a barracks. He was back in a warband, back in his old life so firmly that he wondered if he’d dreamt those enchanted months in Brin Toraedic. The winter behind him seemed like a lost paradise, when he’d had good company and a woman of his own, when he’d had a glimpse of a wider, freer world of peace and dweomer—a little glimpse only; then the door had been slammed in his face. He was back in the war, a dishonored rider whose one goal in life was to earn the respect of other dishonored men. At least Belyan was going to have his baby back in Cantrae, a small life who would outlive him and who would be better off as a farmer than his father would be as a warrior. Thinking about the babe, he could fall asleep at last, smiling to himself.

On the day that Maddyn left Brin Toraedic, Nevyn spent a good many hours shutting up the caves for the summer and loading herbs and medicines into the canvas mule packs. He had a journey of over nine hundred miles ahead of him, with stops along the way that were crucial to the success of his long-range plans. If he were to succeed in making a dweomer king to bring peace to the country, he would need help from powerful friends, particularly among the priesthoods. He would also need to find a man of royal blood worthy of his plans. And that, or so he told himself, might well be the most difficult part of the work.

The first week of his journey was easy. Although the Cantrae roads were full of warbands, mustering to begin the ride to Dun Deverry for the summer’s fighting, no one bothered him, seemingly only a shabby old herbman with his ambling mule, his patched brown cloak, and the white hair that the local riders respected as a sign of his great age. He followed the Canaver down to its joining with the river Nerr near the town of Muir, a place that held memories some two hundred years old. As he always did when he passed through Muir, he went into the last patch of wild forest—now the hunting preserve of the Southern Boar clan. In the midst of a stand of old oaks was an ancient, mossy cairn that marked the grave of Brangwen of the Falcon, the woman he had loved, wronged, and lost so many years ago. He always felt somewhat of a fool for making this pilgrimage—her body was long decayed, and her soul had been reborn several times since that miserable day when he’d dug this grave and helped pile up these rocks. Yet the site meant something to him still, because, if for no other reason, it was the place where he’d sworn the rash vow that was the cause of his unnaturally long life.

Out of respect for a grave, even though they could have no idea of whose it was, the Boars’ gamekeepers had left the cairn undisturbed. Nevyn was pleased to see that someone had even tended it by replacing a few fallen stones and pulling the weeds away from its base. It was a small act of decency in a world where decency was in danger of vanishing. For some time he sat on the ground and watched the dappled forest light playing on the cairn while he wondered when he would find Brangwen’s soul again. His meditation brought him a small insight: she was reborn, but still a child. Eventually, he was sure, in some way Maddyn would lead him to her. In life after life, his Wyrd had been linked to hers, and, indeed, in his last life, he had followed her to the death, binding a chain of Wyrd tight around them both.

After he left Muir, Nevyn rode west to Dun Deverry for a firsthand look at the man who claimed to be king in the Holy City. On hot spring day, when the sun lay as thick as the dust in the road, he came to the shores of the Gwerconydd, the vast lake formed by the confluence of three rivers, and let his horse and mule rest for a moment by the reedy shore. He was joined by a pair of young priests of Bel, shaven-headed and dressed in linen tunics, who were also traveling to the Holy City. After a pleasant chat, they all decided to ride in together.

“And who’s the high priest these days?” Nevyn asked. “I’ve been living up in Cantrae, so I’m badly out of touch.”

“His Holiness, Gwergovyn,” said the elder of the pair.

“I see.’” Nevyn’s heart, sank. He remembered Gwergovyn all too well as a spiritual ferret of a man. “And tell me somewhat else. I’ve heard that the Boars of Cantrae are the men to watch in court circles.”

Even though they were all alone on the open road, the young priest lowered his voice when he answered.

“They are, truly, and there are plenty who grumble about it, too. I know His Holiness thinks rather sourly of the men of the Boar.”

At length they came to the city, which rose high on its four hills behind massive double rings of stone walls, ramparted and towered. The wooden gates, carved with a wyvern rampant, were bound with iron, and guards in thickly embroidered shirts stood to either side, Yet as soon as Nevyn went inside, the impression of splendor vanished. Once a prosperous city had filled these walls; now house after house stood abandoned, with weed-choked yards and empty windows, the thatch blowing rotten in dirty streets. Much of the city lay in outright ruin, heaps of stone among rotting, charred timbers. It had been taken by siege so many times in the last hundred years, then taken back by the sword, that apparently no one had the strength, the coin, or the hope to rebuild. In the center of the city, around and between two main hills, lived what was left of the population, scarcely more than in King Bran’s time. Warriors walked the streets and shoved the townsfolk aside whenever they met. It seemed to Nevyn that every man he saw was a rider for one lord or another, and every woman either lived in fear of them or had surrendered to the inevitable and turned whore to please them.

The first inn he found was tiny, dirty, and ramshackle, little more than a big house divided into a tavern room and a few chambers, but he lodged there because he liked the innkeep, Draudd, a slender old man with hair as white as Nevyn’s and a smile that showed an almost superhuman ability to keep a sense of humor in the midst of ruin. When he found out that Nevyn was an herbman, Draudd insisted on taking out his lodging in trade.

“Well, after all, I’m as old as you are, so I’ll easily equal the cost of your herbs. Why give me coins only to have me give them right back?”

“True-spoken. Ah, old age! Here I’ve studied the human body all my life, but I swear old age has put pains in joints I never knew existed.”

Nevyn spent that first afternoon in the tavern, dispensing herbs for Draudd’s collection of ailments and hearing in return all the local gossip, which meant royal gossip. In Dun Deverry even the poorest person knew what there was to know about the goings-on at court. Gossip was their bard, and the royalty their only source of pride. Draudd was a particularly rich source, because his youngest daughter, now a woman in her forties, worked up in the palace kitchens, where she had plenty of opportunities to overhear the noble-born servitors like the chamberlain and steward at their gossip. From what Draudd repeated that day, the Boars were so firmly in control of the king that it was something of a scandal. Everyone said that Tibryn, the Boar of Cantrae, was close to being the real king himself.

“And now with the king so ill, our poor liege, and his wife so young, and Tibryn a widower and all . . . ” Draudd paused for dramatic effect. “Well! Can’t you imagine what we folk are wondering?”

“Indeed I can. But would the priests allow the king’s widow to marry?”

Draudd rubbed his thumb and forefinger together like a merchant gloating over a coin.

“Ah, by the hells!” Nevyn snarled. “Has it gotten as bad as all that?”

“There’s naught left but coin to bribe the priests with. They’ve already gotten every land grant and legal concession they want.”

At that point Nevyn decided that meeting with Gwergovyn—if indeed he could even get in to see him—was a waste of time.

“But what ails the king? He’s still a young man.”

“He took a bad wound in the fighting last summer. I happened to be out on the royal road when they brought him home. I’d been buying eggs at the market when I heard the bustle and the horns. And I saw the king, lying in a litter, and he was as pale as snow, he was. But he lived, when here we all thought they’d be putting his little lad on the throne come winter. But he never did heal up right. My daughter tells me that he has to have special food, like. All soft things, and none of them Bardek spices, neither. So they boil the meat soft, and pulp apples and suchlike.”

Nevyn was completely puzzled: the special diet made no sense at all for a man who by all accounts had been wounded in the chest He began to wonder if someone were deliberately keeping the king weak, perhaps to gain the good favor of Tibryn of the Boar The best way to find out, of course, was to talk to the king’s physicians. On the morrow he took his laden mule up to the palace, which lay on the northern hill. Ring after ring of defensive walls, some stone, some earthworks, marched up the slope and cut the hill into defensible slices. At every gate in every wall, guards stopped Nevyn and asked him his business, but they always let a man with healing herbs to sell pass on through. Finally, at the top, behind one last ring, stood the palace and all its outbuildings and servant quarters. Like a stork among chickens, a six-story broch, ringed by four lower half-brochs, rose in the center. If the outer defenses fell, the attackers would have to fight their way through a warren of corridors and rooms to get at the king himself. In all the years of war, the palace had never fallen to force, only to starvation.

The last guard called a servant lad, who ran off to the royal infirmary with the news that an herbman waited outside. After a wait of some five minutes, he ran back and led Nevyn to a big round stone building behind the broch complex. There they were met by a burly man with dark eyes that glared under bushy brows as if their owner were in a state of constant fury, but when he introduced himself as Grodyn, the head chirurgeon, he was soft-spoken enough.

“An herbman’s always welcome. Come spread out your wares, good sir. That table by the window would be best, I think, right in the light and fresh air.”

While Nevyn laid out packets of dried herbs, tree barks, and sliced dried roots, Grodyn fetched his apprentice, Caudyr, a sandy-haired young man with narrow blue eyes and a jaw so sharply modeled it looked as if it could cut cheese. He also had a club foot, which gave him the rolling walk of a sailor. Between them the two chirurgeons sorted through his wares and for starters set aside his entire stock of valerian, elecampane, and comfrey root.

“I don’t suppose you ever get down to the seacoast,” Grodyn said in a carefully casual tone of voice.

“Well, this summer I’m thinking of trying to slip through the battle lines. Usually the armies don’t much care about one old man. Is there somewhat you need from the sea?”

“Red kelp, if you can get it, and some sea moss.”

“They work wonders to soothe an ulcerated stomach or bad bowels.” Nevyn hesitated briefly. “Here, I’ve heard rumors about this peculiar so-called wound of our liege the king.”

“So called?” Grodyn paid busy attention to the packet of beech bark in his hand.

“A wound in the chest that requires him to eat only soft food.”

Grodyn looked up with a twisted little smile.

“It was poison, of course. The wound healed splendidly. While he was still weak, someone put poison into his mead. We saved him after a long fight of it, but his stomach is ulcerated and bleeding, just as you guessed, and there’s blood in his stool, too. But we’re trying to keep the news from the common people.”

“Oh, I won’t go bruiting it about, I assure you. Do you have any idea of what this poison was?”

“None. Now here, you know herbs. What do you think this might be? When he vomited, there was a sweetish smell hanging about the basin, rather like roses mixed with vinegar. It was grotesque to find a poison that smelled of perfume, but the strangest thing was this: the king’s page had tasted the mead and suffered not the slightest ill effect. Yet I know it was in the mead, because the dregs in the goblet had an odd rosy color.”

Nevyn thought for a long moment, running over the long chains of lore in his memory.

“Well,” he said at last. “I can’t name the herbs out, but I’ll wager they came originally from Bardek. I’ve heard that poisoners there often use two different evil essences, each harmless in themselves. The page at table doubtless got a dose of the first one when he tested the king’s mead, and the page of the chamber got the other. The king, alas, got both, and they combined into venom in his stomach.”

As he nodded his understanding, Grodyn looked half sick with such an honest rage that Nevyn mentally acquitted him of any part in the crime. Caudyr, too, looked deeply troubled.

“I’ve made special studies of the old herbals we have,” the young chirurgeon said. “And never found this beastly poison. If it came from Bardek, that would explain it.”

“So it would,” Nevyn said. “Well, good sirs, I’ll do my best to get you the red kelp and what other emollients I can, but it’ll be autumn before I return. Will our liege live that long?”

“If no one poisons him again.” Grodyn tossed the packet of beech bark onto the table. “Ah ye gods, can you imagine how helpless I feel? Here I am, fighting to undo the effects of one poison while someone is doubtless scheming out a way to slip him a second!”

“Wasn’t there any inquiry into this poisoning?”

“Of course.” Abruptly Grodyn turned guarded. “It found out naught, though. We suspect a Cerrmor spy.”

Oh, I’ll just wager you do! Nevyn thought to himself; that is, if there are Boars in Cerrmor, anyway.

Their business over, Nevyn put on a good show of expressing the gossipy interest that any visitor to the palace would have in seeing the place where the king lived. Caudyr, who seemed to be a good-hearted lad, took him on a tour of the semi-public gardens and outbuildings. It took only the slightest touch of Neyyn’s dweomer to sense that the palace was filled with corruption. The omen came to him as the smell of rotting meat and the sight of maggots, crawling between the stones. He banished the vision as quickly as he: could; the point was well made.

As they were walking to the front gate, they saw a noble hunting party returning: Gwerbret Tibryn of the Boar, with a retinue of servants and huntsmen behind him and his widowed sister at his side. As Nevyn led his mule off to the side out of the way of the noble-born, he noticed Caudyr watching the Lady Merodda wistfully. Just twenty, the lady had long blond hair, bound up in soft twists under the black headscarf of a widow, wide green eyes, and features that were perfect without being cold. She was truly beautiful, but as he watched her, Nevyn loathed her. Although he couldn’t pinpoint his reasons, he’d never seen a woman he found so repellent. Caudyr was obviously of the opposite opinion. Much to Nevyn’s surprise, when Merodda rode past she favored Caudyr with a brilliant smile and a wave of her delicately gloved hand. Caudyr bowed deeply in return,

“Now here, lad,” Nevyn said with a chuckle. “You’re nocking an arrow for rather highborn game.”

“And don’t I just know it? I could be as noble as she is, but I’d still be deformed.”

“Oh, my apologies! I meant naught of that sort.”

“I know, good sir, I know. I fear me that years of being mocked have made me touchy.”

Caudyr bowed and hurried away with his rolling, dragging limp. Nevyn was heartsick over his lapse; it was a hard thing to be handicapped in a world where women and men both worshipped warriors. Later that day, however, he found out that Caudyr bore him no ill will. Just after sunset Caudyr came to Nevyn’s inn, insisted on buying him a tankard, and sat them both down at a table in a corner, far from the door.

“I was wondering about your stock of herbs, good Nevyn. You wouldn’t happen to have any northern elm bark, would you?”

“Now here! I don’t traffic in abortifacients, lad.”

Caudyr winced and began studying the interior of his tankard.

“Ah well,” the lad said at last. “The bark’s a blasted sight safer than henbane.”

“No doubt, but the question is why you’re doing abortions at all. I should think that every babe these days would be precious.”

“Not if it’s not sired by your husband. Here, please don’t despise me. There’s a lot of noblewomen who spend all summer at court, and well, their husbands are off on campaign for months at a time, and well, you know how things happen, and well, they come to me in tears, and—”

“Shower you with silver, no doubt.”

“It’s not the coin!”

“Indeed? What is it, then? The only time in your life that women have come begging you for somewhat?”

When tears welled in Caudyr’s eyes, Nevyn regretted his harsh accuracy. He looked away to give the young chirurgeon a chance to wipe his face. It was the infidelities more than the abortions that bothered Nevyn. The thought of noblewomen, whose restricted life gave them nothing but their honor to take pride in, turning first to illicit affairs, then to covering them over, made him feel that the kingdom was rotting from the center out. As for the abortions, the dweomer lore teaches that a soul comes to indwell a fetus only in the fourth or fifth month after conception; any abortion before that time is only removing a lump of flesh, not a living child. By the time a noblewoman was in her fifth month, Nevyn supposed, her indiscretion would be known already, and so doubtless Caudyr was solving their little problems long before the fetus was truly alive.

“Now one moment.” Nevyn was struck by a sudden thought. “You’re not using ergot, are you, you stupid little dolt?”

“Never!” Caudyr’s voice rose in a sincere squeak. “I know the dangers of that.”

“Good. All it would take is for one of your noble patients to die or go mad, and then you’d be up to your neck in a tub of horseshit good and proper.”

“I know. But if I didn’t find the right herbs for these ladies, they’d be cast off by their husbands, and probably end up smothering the babe anyway, or they’d go to some old witch of a farmwife, and then they would die.”

“You split hairs so well you should have been a priest.”

Caudyr tried to smile and failed utterly, looking like a child who’s just been scolded when he honestly didn’t know he’d done a wrong thing. Suddenly Nevyn felt the dweomer power, gathering round him, filling his mouth with words that burned straight out of the future.

“You can’t keep this sort of thing quiet. When the king dies, his murderers will need a scapegoat. It’s going to be you, because of this midnight physic you’ve been dispensing. Live ready to flee at the first sign that the king is sinking. Can Tibryn of the Boar find out about your unsavory herbs?”

“He could, the lady Merodda . . . I mean . . . ah ye gods! Who are you, old man?”

“Can’t you tell dweomer when you hear it? The Boar will take his sister’s evidence, turn it against you, and have you broken on the wheel to avert suspicion from himself. If I were you, I’d leave well before the end comes, or they’ll hunt you down as a regicide.”

Caudyr jerked to his feet so fast that he toppled both his tankard and Nevyn’s, then fled, racing out of the tavern door. Although old Draudd gave Nevyn a questioning look, he also shrugged as if to say it was none of his affair. Nevyn retrieved the tankards from the floor, then turned on the bench so that he could look directly into the peat fire smoldering on the tavern hearth. As soon as he bent his mind to Aderyn, his old apprentice’s image appeared with his enormous dark eyes and his gray hair swept up in two peaks at his forehead like the horns of a silver owl.

“And how’s your scheme progressing?” Aderyn thought to him.

“Well enough, I suppose. I’ve learned one very important thing. I’d rather die than put any Cantrae king on the throne.”

“Is it as bad as all that?”

“The palace stinks like the biggest dung heap on the hottest day of the longest summer. I can’t see how any young soul could grow up there without being corrupted from birth. I’m not even going to bother talking to the priests here. They’re corrupt, too, and doubtless in new and unusual ways.”

“I haven’t seen you this angry in about a hundred years.”

“Naught’s been so vexing in a hundred years. The most honorable man I’ve met here is an abortionist. Does that give you a hint?”

Floating about the fire, Aderyn’s image rolled its eyes heavenward in disgust.

Caradoc and his band of mercenaries left the deserted hunting lodge soon after Maddyn and Aethan joined the troop. Although everyone was speculating about where they would go, the captain told no one until the morning of their departure. Once the men were mounted and formed up in neat ranks that would have done the king’s guard credit, Caradoc inspected them carefully, then pulled his horse up to face them.

“It’s Eldidd, lads. We’ve got too many men who can’t let themselves be seen around Dun Deverry to take a hire on Slwmar’s side, and I don’t dare be seen in Cerrmor. I’ve hoarded some coin from the winter, seeing as our lodging was free and all, so I think we can ride straight there.”

Although no one cheered this prospect of leaving home for a foreign land, no one muttered in discontent, either. Caradoc paused, as if waiting for grumblers, then shrugged and raised his hand.

“Otho the smith’s meeting us on the road with a wagon. Forward . . . march!”

With a jingle of tack the troop executed a perfect turn in ranks and began to file out the dun gate, two by two. As a mark of honor to a bard, Maddyn rode next to Caradoc at the head of the line. Over the next few days, as they worked their way southwest as quickly as possible, he had plenty of chances to study his new leader. The biggest puzzle that ate at his bardic curiosity was whether or not Caradoc was noble-born. At times, when the captain was discussing some point of the royal law or giving orders with his firm authority, Maddyn was sure that he must have been bom the younger son of a lord. Yet when it came to coin, he had the grasping shrewdness of an old peasant woman, an attitude he never would have learned among the nobility. Occasionally Maddyn dropped hints or half-questions about the past into their conversation, but Caradoc never rose to the bait. When the troop camped for the night, Caradoc ate alone like a lord, and Maddyn shared a fire with Aethan and a small crowd of Wildfolk.

After a week of riding, the troop crossed the Aver Trebyc at a point about a hundred miles west of Dun Deverry. Caradoc gave orders that the men were to ride armed and ready for trouble. He sent out point men and scouts ahead of the main body of riders, because they were approaching the border between Cerrmor-held and Cantrae-held territory. The precautions paid off with a rather strange prize. On the second day of riding armed, when they were finally getting close to the Eldidd border, the troop stopped for the noon rest in a grassy meadow that had never known plow or herd. When the point men came back to change the guard, they brought with them a traveler, an unarmed man with rich clothing, a beautiful riding horse, and an elegant pack mule that had obviously been bred from the best stock. Maddyn was surprised that the poor doll had survived unrobbed for as long as he had. The young, sandy-haired fellow looked so terrified that Maddyn supposed he was thinking similar thoughts.

“He says he comes from Dun Deverry,” the point man said. “So we brought him along in case he had any interesting news.”

“Good,” Caradoc said. “Now look, young fellow, we’re not going to slit your throat or even rob you. Come have a meal with me and Maddyn here.”

With a most discourteous groan, the stranger looked around at the well-armed troop, then sighed in resignation.

“So I will, then. My name’s . . . uh . . . Claedd.”

Caradoc and Maddyn each suppressed a grin at the clumsiness of the lie. When the stranger dismounted, Maddyn saw that he had a clubfoot, which seemed to ache him after so many days in the saddle. As they shared a meal of flatbread and cheese, the supposed Claedd told them what little he knew about the troop movements around the Holy City. The current rumor was that the northern forces were planning to make a strong strike along the eastern borders of the Cerrmor kingdom.

“If that’s true,” Caradoc said thoughtfully, “we’ll have no trouble getting a hire in Eldidd. Probably the Eldidd king will want to take the chance to raid into Pyrdon.”

“Oho!” Claedd said. “Then you’re a free troop! Well, that’s a relief.”

“Oh, is it now? Most men would think the opposite.” Caradoc shook his head, as if he were utterly amazed at the innocence of this lad. “Well and good, then. Who’s chasing you? It’s safe to tell me. I’ve sunk pretty low, lad, but not so low that I’d turn a man in for the bounty on his head.”

Claedd concentrated on shredding a piece of flatbread into inedible crumbs.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Caradoc said after a moment. “But think about traveling with us. You’ll be a blasted sight safer. Ever had a fancy to see Eldidd?”

“That’s where I was trying to go, and you’re right enough about it being safer. I’ve never swung a sword in my life. I’m a . . . uh . . . a scholar.”

“Splendid. Maybe I’ll need a letter written some fine day.”

Although Claedd managed a feeble smile at the jest, his face stayed deadly pale. Yet, when the troop rode out, he came with them, riding by himself just behind Otho’s wagon. At the night camp, Maddyn took pity on him and offered to let him share their fire. Although he brought out food from his mule packs, Claedd ate little of it, merely sat quietly and watched Aethan polishing his sword. When, after the meal, Caradoc strolled over for a chat, Claedd again said little as the captain and the bard talked idly of their plans in Eldidd. Finally, though, at a pause he spoke up.

“I’ve been thinking about your offer, Captain. Could you use a troop chirurgeon? I finished my apprenticeship only a year ago, but I’ve had an awful lot of practice at tending wounds.”

“By all the ice in all the hells!” Maddyn said. “You’re worth your weight in gold!”

“Cursed right.” Caradoc cocked his head to one side and considered the young chirurgeon. “Now, I’m not a curious man, usually, and I like to leave my lads their privacy, like, but in your case, I’ve got to ask. What’s a man with your learning doing traveling the long lonely roads like this?”

“You might as well know the truth. First of all, my name’s Caudyr, and I was at the court in Dun Deverry. I mixed up a few potions and suchlike for some highborn ladies to rid them of . . . ah, well . . . a spot of . . . er, well . . . trouble now and again. The word’s gotten out about it in rather a nasty way.”

Caradoc and Aethan exchanged a puzzled glance.

“He means abortions,” Maddyn said with a grin. “Naught that should vex us, truly.”

“Might even come in handy, with this pack of dogs I’ve got,” Caradoc said. “Well and good, then, Caudyr. Once you’ve shown me that you can physic a man, you’ll get a full share of our earnings, just like a rider. I’ve discovered that a lord’s chirurgeon tends his lord’s men first and the mercenaries when he has a mind to and not before. I’ve had men bleed to death who would have lived if they’d gotten the proper attention.”

Idly Maddyn happened to glance Aethan’s way to find him staring at Caudyr in grim suspicion.

“Up in Dun Deverry, were you?” Aethan’s voice was a dry, hard whisper. “Was one of your highborn ladies Merodda of the Boar?”

In a confession stronger than words, Caudyr winced, then blushed. Aethan got to his feet, hesitated, then took off running into the darkness.

“What, by the hells?” Caradoc snapped.

Without bothering to explain, Maddyn got up and followed, chasing Aethan through the startled camp, pounding blindly after him through the moon-shot night down to the riverbank. Finally Aethan stopped and let him catch up. They stood together for a long time, panting for breath and watching the silver-touched river flow by.

“With a bitch like that,” Maddyn said finally. “How would you even know that the babe was yours?”

“I kept my eye on her like a hawk all winter long. If she’d looked at another man, I’d have killed him, and she knew it.”

With a sigh Maddyn sat down, and after a moment, Aethan joined him.

“Having a chirurgeon of our own will be a cursed good thing,” Maddyn said. “Can you put up with Caudyr?”

“Who’s blaming him for one single thing? I wish I could kill her. I dream about it sometimes, getting my hands on her pretty white throat and strangling her.”

Abruptly Aethan turned and threw himself into Maddyn’s arms. Maddyn held him tightly and let him cry, the choking ugly sob of a man who feels shamed by tears.

Two days later the troop crossed the border into Eldidd. At that time, the northern part of the province was nearly a wilderness, forests and wild grasslands broken only by the occasional dun of a minor lord or a village of free farmers. Plenty of the lords would have liked to hire the troop, because they were in constant danger of raids coming either from the kingdom of Pyrdon to the north or from Deverry to the east. None, however, could pay Caradoc what he considered the troop was worth. With thirty-seven men, their own smith, chirurgeon, and bard, the troop was bigger than the warbands of most of the lords in northern Eldidd. Just when Caradoc was beginning to curse his decision to ride that way, the troop reached the new town of Camynwaen, on the banks of an oddly named river, the El, just as the spot where the even more strangely named Aver Cantariel flows in from the northwest.

Although there had been a farming village on the site for centuries, only twenty years before had the gwerbret in Elrydd decided that the kingdom needed a proper town at the joining of the rivers. Since the war with Pyrdon could flare up at any time, he wanted a staging ground for troops and a properly defensible set of walls around it. Finding colonists was no problem, because there were plenty of younger sons of noble lords willing to risk a move to gain land of their own, and plenty of bondsmen willing to go with them since they became free men once they left their bound land. When Caradoc’s troop rode into Camynwaen, they found a decent town of a thousand round houses behind high stone walls, turreted with watchtowers.

About a mile away was the stone dun of Tieryn Maenoic, and there Caradoc found the kind of hire he’d been looking for. Although Maenoic received maintenance from the gwerbret to the south, there was a shortage of fighting men in his vast demesne, and he had a private war on his hands. Since the authority of his clan was fairly new, he was always plagued with rebellions. For years now the chief troublemaker had been a certain Lord Pagwyl.

“And he’s gathered together a lot of bastards like himself,” Maenoic said. “And they claim they’ll ask the gwerbret to give them a tieryn of their own and not submit to me. I can’t stand for it.”

He couldn’t, truly, because standing for it would not only take half his land away but also make him the laughingstock of every in Eldidd. A stout hard-muscled man, with a thick streak of gray in his raven-dark hair, Maenoic was steaming with fury as he strode back and forth, looking over the troop, who were sitting on their horses outside the gates to Maenoic’s dun. Caradoc and Maddyn followed a respectful distance behind while the lord judged the troop’s horses and gear with a shrewd eye.

“Very well, Captain. A silver piece per week per man, your maintenance, and of course I’ll replace any horses that you lose.”

“Most generous, my lord,” Caradoc said. “For peacetime.”

Maenoic turned to scowl at him.

“Another silver piece per man for every battle we fight,” Caradoc went on. “And that’s paid for every man who dies, too.”

“Far too much.”

“As it pleases your lordship. Me and my men can just ride on.”

And over to your enemies, perhaps—the thought hung unspoken between them for a long moment. Finally Maenoic swore under his breath.

“Done, then. A second silver piece per man for every scrap.”

With an open and innocent smile, Caradoc bowed to him.

Maenoic’s new-built dun was large enough to have two sets of barracks and stables built into the walls—a blessing, because the mercenaries could be well separated from Maenoic’s contemptuous warband. At meals, though, they shared the same set of tables, and the warband made barely tolerable comments about men who fought for money and quite intolerable comments about the parentage and character of such who did so. Between them Caradoc and Maenoic broke up seven different fistfights in two days before the army was at last ready to ride out.

After he called in all his loyal allies, Maenoic had over two hundred and fifty men to lead west against his rebels. In the line of march, Caradoc’s troop came at the very end, behind even the supply wagons, and ate dust all day long. At night they made camp by themselves a little way off from the warbands of the noble-born. Caradoc, however, was summoned when the lords held a council of war. He came back to the troop with solid news and gathered them around him to hear it.

“Tomorrow we’ll see the first scrap. Here’s how things stand, lads. We’re coming to a river, and there’s a bridge there. Maenoic claims the taxes on it, but Pagwyl’s holding out. The scouts say Pagwyl’s going to make a stand to prevent the tieryn from crossing, because once he crosses against Pagwyl’s will, it’s his bridge again in everybody’s eyes. We’ll be leading the charge—of course.”

Everyone nodded, acknowledging that they were, after all, the disposable mercenaries. Maddyn found himself troubled by a strange feeling, a coldness, a heaviness. It took him a long time to admit it, but then he realized that he was quite simply afraid. That night he dreamt of his last charge up in Cantrae and woke soaked cold sweat. You coward, he told himself; you ugly little coward! The reproach burned in his very soul, but the truth was that he had almost died in that last charge, and now he knew what it felt like to be dying. The fear choked him as palpably as if he’d swallowed a clot of sheep’s wool. What was worst of all was knowing that here was one thing he could never share with Aethan.

All night, all the next morning, the fear festered so badly that by the time the army reached the bridge, Maddyn was hysterically happy that the battle was at hand and soon to be over. He was singing under his breath and whistling in turn when the army crested a low rise and saw, just as they’d expected, Lord Pagwyl and his allies drawn up by the riverbank to meet them. There was a surprise, however, in the men who waited for them: a bare hundred mounted swordsmen, eked out by two big squares of common-born spearmen, placed so that they blocked any possible approach to the bridge itself.

“Oh, here,” said Maddyn, forcing a laugh. “Pagwyl was a fool to rebel if that’s all the riders he could scrape together.”

“Horseshit!” Caradoc snapped. “His lordship knows what he’s doing. I’ve seen fighting like this before, spearmen guarding a fixed position. We’re in for a little gallop through the third hell, lad.”

As Maenoic’s army milled around in confusion, Caradoc led his men calmly up to the front of the line. The enemy had picked a perfect place to stand, a long green meadow in front of the bridge, bordered by the river on one side of their formation and on the other, the broken, crumbling earthwork of some long-gone farmer’s cattle corral. Three rows deep, the spearmen stood shield to shield, the spearheads glittering around the chalk-whitened oval shields. To one side of the shield wall, the mounted men sat on restless horses, ready to charge in from the side and pin Maenoic’s men between them and the river.

“Horseshit and a pile of it,” Caradoc muttered. “We can’t wheel round the bastards without falling into the blasted river.”

Maddyn merely nodded, too choked for breath to answer. He was remembering the feel of metal biting deep into his side. Under him, his horse tossed its head and stamped as if it, too, were remembering their last charge. When Caradoc trotted off to confer with Maenoic, Aethan pulled up beside Maddyn; he’d already settled his shield over his left arm and drawn a javelin. While he followed the example, Maddyn had to work so hard to keep his horse steady that he suddenly realized that the poor beast did remember that last charge. He had a battle-shy horse under him and no time to change him.

The spearmen began calling out jeers and taunting the enemy for scum on horseback, screaming into the sunlight and the wind that blew the taunts into jagged, incomprehensible pieces of words. Some of Maenoic’s men shouted back, but Caradoc’s troop merely sat on their horses and waited until at last their captain left the lord’s side and jogged back, easy in his saddle, a javelin in his hand.

“All right, lads. We’re riding.”

There was a gust of laughter in the troop as they jogged forward to join him. Maenoic’s own men pulled in behind, but the rest of the army wheeled off, ready to charge the enemy riders positioned off to the side. With an odd jingling shuffle, like a load of metal wares jouncing in a cart, the army formed up. Caradoc turned in his saddle, saw Maddyn right next to him, and yelled at him over the noise.

“Get back! I want to hear our bard sing tonight. Get back in the last rank!”

Maddyn had never wanted to follow an order more in his life, but he fought with himself only a moment before he shouted back his answer.

“I can’t. If I don’t ride this charge, then I’ll never have the guts to ride another.”

Caradoc cocked his head to one side and considered him.

“Well and good, then, lad. We might all be doing our listening and singing in the Otherlands, anyway.”

Caradoc turned his horse, raised his javelin, then broke into a gallop straight for the enemy lines. With a howl of war cries, the troop burst after him, a ragged race of shrieking men across the meadow. Maddyn saw the waiting infantry shudder in a wave-ripple of fear, but they held.

“Follow my lead!” Aethan screamed. “Throw that javelin and wheel!”

Closer—a cloud of dust, kicked-up bits and clods of grass—the infantry shoving together behind the line of lime-white shields—then there was a shower of metal as Caradoc and his men hurled javelins into the spearmen. Shields flashed up, caught some of the darts, but there was cursing and screaming as the riders kept coming, throwing, wheeling, peeling off in a long, loose circle. Maddyn heard battle yells break out behind as the reserve troops charged into Pagwyl’s cavalry. Snorting, sweating, Maddyn’s horse fought for the bit and nearly carried them both into the river. Maddyn drew his sword, slapped the horse with the flat, and jerked its head around to spur it back to the troop.

The first rank of Maenoic’s men were milling blindly, waving swords and shouting, in front of the shield wall. Caradoc galloped among his troop, yelling out orders to re-form and try a charge from the flank. Maddyn could see that Maenoic’s allies had pushed Pagwyl’s cavalry back to expose the shield wall’s weakest spot. In a cloud and flurry of rearing horses, the troop pulled around and threw itself forward again. Maddyn lost track of Aethan, who was shoved off to the flank when Maenoic’s men, blindly pulling back to charge again, got themselves mixed up with the charging mercenaries. One or two horses went down, their riders thrown and trampled, before Caradoc sorted out the mess into some rough order. Maddyn found himself in Maenoic’s warband. For one brief moment he could see Caradoc, plunging at the flank of the shield wall with a mob behind him. Then his own unit rode forward for the charge.

On and on—the shield wall was trembling, turning toward its beleaguered flank, but it held tight directly ahead of Maddyn. From the men behind him javelins flew. Maddyn’s horse bucked and grabbed for the bit; he smacked it down and kicked it forward. A split-second battle—of nerve, not steel—Maddyn saw the slack-jawed face of a young lad, his hands shaking on his braced spear, his eyes suddenly meeting Maddyn’s as he galloped straight for him. With a shriek the lad dropped his spear and flung himself sideways. As the man next to him fell, cursing and flailing, Maddyn was in. Dimly he saw another horseman to his right. The shield wall was breaking. Swinging, howling with an unearthly laughter, Maddyn shoved his horse among the panicked spearmen. Ducking and bobbing in the saddle like a water bird, he slashed out and down, hardly seeing or caring whom or what he was hitting. A spearhead flashed his way. He caught it barely in time and heard his shield crack, then shoved it away as he twisted in the saddle to meet another flash of metal from the right. Always he laughed, the cold bubble of a berserker’s hysteria that he could never control in battle.

His horse suddenly reared, screaming in agony. As they came closer the horse staggered, its knees buckling, but it couldn’t fall. All around was a press—panicked infantry, trapped cavalry, horses neighing and men shouting as they shoved blindly at one another. Desperately Maddyn swung out, cutting a spearman across the face as his dying horse staggered a few steps forward. All at once the line broke, a mob-panicked scuffle of men, throwing spears down, screaming, pushing their fellows aside as they tried to get away from the slashing horsemen. Maddyn’s mount went down. He had barely time to free his feet from the stirrups before they hit the ground hard, a tangle of man and horse. Maddyn’s shield fell over his face; he could neither see nor breathe, only scramble desperately to get up before a retreating spearman stuck him like a pig. On his knees at last, he flung up his shield barely in time to parry a random thrust. The force of the blow cracked the shield through and sent him reeling backward to his heels. He saw the spearman laugh as he raised the spear again, both hands tight on the shaft to drive it home for the kill; then a javelin flew into the press and caught the man full in the back. With a scream, he pitched forward, and the men around him ran.

Staggering, choking on dust and his own eerie laughter, Maddyn got to his feet. Around him the field was clearing as the horsemen charged the fleeing infantry and rode them down, slashing in blind rage at men who could no longer defend themselves. Maddyn heard someone yell his name and turned to see Aethan, riding for him at a jog.

“Did you throw that dart?” Maddyn called out.

“Who else? I’ve heard you laugh before, and I knew that cat’s squalling meant you were in trouble. Get up behind me. We’ve won this scrap.”

All at once, Maddyn’s battle fever deserted him. He felt pain, bad pain, cracked ribs burning like fire. Gasping for breath, he grabbed at Aethan’s stirrup to steady himself, but the movement made the pain stab him into crying out. With a foul oath, Aethan dismounted and caught him round the shoulders, a well-meant gesture that made Maddyn yelp again.

“Hard fall,” Maddyn gasped.

With Aethan shoving him from behind, Maddyn managed to scrabble his way onto the horse. He kept telling himself that riding was better than walking, but he hung on to the saddle peak, with both hands to brace himself against the motion as Aethan led the horse out of the death-strewn welter of the battlefield. As they went by, he saw some of Caradoc’s men looting the dead, friend and enemy alike.

Up the riverbank the chirurgeons and their apprentices were waiting for the wounded. Aethan took Maddyn over to Caudyr, then went back to the field to pull more wounded men out of the dead and dying. When he tried to walk to the chirurgeon’s wagon, Maddyn fell, then lay on the ground for an hour while Caudyr frantically worked on the men who were far worse off. At times Maddyn drowsed, only to wake with an oath for his burning ribs; the sun was hot, and he sweated copiously inside the mail he couldn’t remove by himself. All he could think about was water, but no one had time to bring him any until Aethan returned. He fetched him a drink, unlaced the mail and helped him slide it off, then sat down beside him.

“We’ve won good and proper for all the good it does us. Maenoic’s got Pagwyl’s body at his feet, and his allies are all suing for peace right now.”

“Is Caradoc alive?”

“He is, but not a lot of the godforsaken rest of us are. Maddo, we’re down to twelve men.”

“Ah. Can I have some more water?”

Aethan held the waterskin so he could drink again. Only then did he truly understand his friend’s words.

“Oh ye gods! Only twelve?”

“Just that.”

After another hour Caudyr came, his shirt blood-soaked down the front and up to his elbows. All he could do for Maddyn’s ribs was to bind them with a wet linen band. As it dried in the sun, it would tighten enough to let him sit up. Maddyn’s left shoulder was also a mass of bleeding, ring-shaped bruises: the mark of his own mail, pressed right down through his clothes when he’d fallen. Caudyr washed them down with a slop of mead from a wooden cup. Maddyn shrieked once, then bit his lower lip to keep from doing it again. Caudyr handed him the cup.

“Drink the rest of this,” Caudyr said. “I put some painkilling herbs in it, too. It’ll take the edge off.”

The stuff was bitter and stinking, but Maddyn got it down a few sips at a time. He was just finishing the cupful when Caradoc came over and half sat, half fell next to him. Caradoc’s sweaty face was spattered with some other man’s blood, and his eyes were dark and exhausted. With a long sigh he ran grimy hands through his hair.

“This is the worst scrap I’ve ever fought.” The captain’s voice was halfway between a growl and a whisper. “Well, what else did I expect? That’s what we’re for, this dishonored pack of dogs thrown out ahead of everyone. It’s going to happen again, lads. Again and again.”

Since the herbed mead was making Maddyn’s head swim, he had to bend all his will to understand what Caradoc was saying. Aethan put one arm around him and helped him sit up.

“It’s a fine short life we’re going to have,” the captain went on. “Ah, horseshit and a pile of it! Now listen, Maddo. I know you rode into that scrap with no guts for it, and I honor you. That’s enough. You’ve proved you’re not a coward, so stay out of it from now on. A bard’s too valuable a man to lose.”

“Can’t. What kind of honor would I have?”

“Honor?” Caradoc tossed his head back and howled with high-pitched laughter. “Honor! Listen to you! You don’t have any honor, you god-cursed little bastard! None of us do. Haven’t you listened to one piss-poor word I’ve been saying? No noble lord sends men with honor into a suicide charge, but they sent us, and I took it because I had to. We’ve got as much honor as a pack of whores: all that counts is how good we fuck. So stay out of it from now on.” He laughed, again, but the pitch was closer to his deep-voiced normal tone. “Listen, when my Wyrd takes me, I want to know that there’s a man still alive who can take over whatever’s left of the troop. You pack of whoreson bastards are the only thing I have in life, and blasted if I know why, but I want to know the rotten-assed troop will last longer than I do. From now on, bard, you’re my heir.”

Caradoc got up and strode away. Maddyn slumped back and felt the world spin around him.

“Do what he says,” Aethan growled.

Maddyn tried to answer but fainted instead.

By the time the army returned to Maenoic’s dun, another man in Caradoc’s troop had died. That left eleven, plus Caradoc himself, Otho, and Caudyr, to huddle dispiritedly in a corner of a barracks that had once housed nearly forty of them. The war over, Lord Maenoic turned generous, telling Caradoc that he was welcome to his shelter until his remaining wounded (Maddyn and Stevyc) were ready to ride. He also promptly paid over the negotiated wages and even added a couple of silver pieces as a bonus.

“Bastard,” Caradoc remarked. “If he hadn’t hired me to do it for him, he would have had to lead that charge himself, and his piss-proud noble lordship knows it.”

“He’d be dead, too,” Maddyn said. “He’s not half the man on the field that you are.”

“Don’t flatter the captain, you whelp of a bard, but as a cold, hard assessment, like, you’re right enough.”

After a day or two in bed, Maddyn was well enough to go down to the great hall for dinner. Caradoc and his men sat together as far away from the rest of the warband as they could, drank hard, and said next to nothing, not even each other. Occasionally Caradoc would try to joke with his demoralized pack, but it was a hard thing to smile in answer to him. When Maddyn grew too tired to sit up, the captain helped him back to the barracks. Otho was already there, twining the rings of a bit of shattered mail by lantern light.

“I’ve been thinking, smith,” Caradoc said. “Remember our jest about the silver daggers? We’ve got a good bit of extra coin. Is it enough to make us some?”

“Mayhap, but how am I going to work metal on the road?”

“We’ll be sheltering here for at least one week, and if Maddyn and Stevyc groan and moan like dying men, we can eke out another. There’s a forge here in the dun, and the blacksmith says it’s a good one.”

Otho considered, running gnarled fingers through his beard.

“You need somewhat to pick the lads up a bit,” the dwarf said at last.

“I do, and my own spirits could use a little raising, for that matter. A silver dagger—it’s a nice bit of jewelry for a man to wear.” Caradoc paused to stare into the hearth fire for a long moment. “I’m beginning to get an idea. Do you know this troop is going to survive? By being the rottenest pack of black-hearted bastards Eldidd has ever seen, by making it an honor to become a silver dagger, an honor to a certain kind of man, I mean. Someone like our Aethan. He’s as death-besotted and hard a man as I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t cross him myself. Never wanted to die with a slit throat in a brawl.”

Maddyn was shocked to the heart. Caradoc was right about Aethan, he realized; his old friend would never again be the man who used to laugh and jest and solve all the little problems of the Cantrae warband. It hurt worse than his cracked ribs, thinking about it.

“When you break a man down to naught, he turns into an animal,” the captain went on, somewhat meditatively. “Then if you give him somewhat to live for, he turns into a man again, but it’s a hard kind of man, like the blade of a sword. That’s the kind of lads I want, and the silver dagger’s what they’re going to live for.” All at once he grinned, his hiraedd lifting. “Oh, they’ll beg us for it, one fine day, but by every sticky hair on the Lord of Hell’s ass, they re going to have to earn it. What kind of metal do you need, Otho? I’ll ride into town on the morrow and see if I can buy it for you.”

“You won’t. You’ll give me the coin and let me see if I can find what I need. No man learns the formula for this alloy—I cursed well mean it.”

“Have it your way, then, but I want a dagger for every man we’ve got left, and, say, five more for new recruits—if I can find men worthy of the things, that is.”

“Then I’ll get started on it right away.” All at once, Otho grinned, the first smile Maddyn had ever seen on his face. “Ah, it’s going to feel so good doing a bit of smelting and mixing again.”

Otho was as good as his word. On the morrow he first bribed Lord Maenoic’s blacksmith into letting him use the dun forge, then rode off into town, with his wagon. He returned late in the day with sundry mysterious and heavy bundles, which he refused to let any man touch, not even to help him unload. That very night he shut himself up in the forge and stayed there for a solid week, sleeping beside his work, if indeed he slept at all. Once, in the middle of the night, when Maddyn went down to the ward to use the privy, he heard hammering coming from the forge and saw red light glowing through the window.

On the morning when the daggers were finished, Caradoc decided that it was time to leave Maenoic’s hospitality. Not only were Maddyn and Stevyc both healed, but he wanted Otho to display his handiwork someplace where he could avoid awkward questions about it. After a last farewell to the lord, the troop saddled up and rode out, but they went only a half mile down the road before they turned off it, jogging out into a wild meadow and forming a rough circle about the smith and his wagon.

“Get ’em, out, Otho,” Caradoc, said. “Dismount, men, so you can see clearly.”

The troop clustered round while a proud if somewhat weary Otho unpacked a large leather sack. Nestled in straw were daggers for each of them, beautiful weapons, with a blade that glowed like silver but was harder than the finest steel. Maddyn had never handled weapon or tool with such a sharp edge.

“You won’t have to polish those much, neither,” Otho said. “They won’t tarnish, not even in blood. Now, if any of you wants a mark or device, like, graved onto it, I’ll do it, but you’re paying me a silver piece for the job.”

“This’ll do to cut a throat with, won’t it?” Aethan said to Maddyn.

“Blasted right. I’ve never had a knife I liked more.”

As solemnly, as carefully as priests performing a rite, the troopers drew their old daggers and replaced them with the new. Although Caradoc seemed to be hardly watching, his eyes lazy and heavy-lidded, Maddyn knew that he was judging the effect of the gesture. The men were smiling, slapping each other on the back, standing straight for a change, their morale better than it had been in days.

“Well and good, then,” Caradoc said. “We’re all silver daggers now, lads. Doesn’t mean a lot, I guess, except that we fight like sons of bitches, and we earn our hire.”

Spontaneously the troop cheered him, ragged remnant though it was. When they remounted, they all formed of their own accord into a tight military order and trotted down the road to Camynwaen, where Caradoc had promised them a day of liberty before they started searching for a new hire. Near the west gate they found an inn that seemed big enough to shelter the lot of them, but the skinny, trembling innkeep announced that it was full.

“The stable looks empty to me,” Caradoc said. “We’ll pay you the going price.”

“And what if you wreck the place? The wretched coin won’t do me one bit of good then.”

“And what if we wreck it without paying you first?”

Although he moaned and wrung his hands, the innkeep gave in quickly. In truth, he did have some custom, enough so that Aethan and Maddyn ended up sharing a small chamber tucked under the roof. While they ate their noon meal in the tavern room, the entire troop talked about women. Caradoc dispensed what was left of their wages along with some orders.

“We’re in a town we may visit again someday, so you keep your paws off any lasses who don’t want you, and your fists out of the faces of decent citizens, and I don’t want to hear about anyone puking their guts out in a townsman’s garden, either. Do it in the gutters, and leave their daughters alone.”

After one hurried goblet of mead, Maddyn and Aethan went out for a stroll. By then it was midafternoon, and the streets were full of townsfolk, hurrying about their business. They all took one quick look at the pair of mercenaries, then either crossed the street or turned down an alleyway to avoid them. After a leisurely circuit of the town, they found a little tavern next to the baker’s and went in. They had the place pretty much to themselves, except for the serving lass, a tousled sort of blonde with a soft, round face and heavy breasts. When she brought them tankards of dark ale, she lingered with an impartial smile for them both. Not bad, Maddyn thought, and he could tell from Aethan’s predatory eyes that he agreed.

“What’s your name?” Aethan asked.

“Druffa, and what’s yours?”

“Aethan, and this is Maddyn. You don’t happen to have a friend as pretty as you, do you? We could all sit down and have a bit of a chat.”

“Chat indeed. And I suppose you lads are interested in a nice game of carnoic or gwyddbwcl.”

“Do you have a better sort of game in mind?”

“I might. It depends on how generous you are.”

Aethan raised a questioning eyebrow in Maddyn’s direction.

“What about that friend?” Maddyn said.

“Well now, most of them would be busy this time of day. It’s a pity you didn’t come by at night, like.”

“Ah, by the hells, then why bother?” Aethan said with a shrug. “Why don’t you just come back to our inn with us? We’ve got a proper bed, better than a hayloft, and we’ll buy a skin of mead.”

Caught between drunkenness and fastidiousness, Maddyn shot him a foul look, but Aethan was paying strict attention to the lass. Druffa giggled in a pleasurable surprise.

“It might be rather amusing,” she announced. “I’ll go get the mead and just tell Da where I’m going.”

When she minced off, Aethan turned to Maddyn with a shrug. “Wet fur, dry fur—does it matter?” His voice cracked. “They’re all bitches anyway.”

Maddyn finished the ale in his tankard in two long gulps. He had the vague thought of slipping away on the street, letting Aethan have this lass and finding himself another, but he was too drink-muddled to find his way back on his own in this unfamiliar town. When they came round to the back door of the inn, Aethan paused long enough to lean Druffa against the wall and kiss her. Maddyn found the sight exciting in a troubling sort of way. He made no protest when the lass suggested they all go upstairs.

Yet once they were in the quiet chamber, Maddyn’s shyness returned in force. He barred the door behind them and rummaged in a saddlebag for a wooden cup, while Aethan untied the mead skin. Druffa giggled and took it away from him.

“Let’s leave the drinking for later. You promised me a bit of fun, Aethan.”

“So I did. Take off that dress, then.”

With a peal of giggles, Druffa began to untie her highly inappropriate virgin’s kirtle. The cup clutched in his hand, Maddyn watched as she undressed—slowly, smiling at the pair of them the entire time. When she stepped out of the underdress to reveal soft, pale skin and dark nipples, he felt the sexual tension in the room like a stroke across his groin. She gave Aethan one kiss, then turned to Maddyn, took the cup out of his hand, and kissed him, too, drawing them both after her to sit down on the bed.

It was several hours after sundown before they let her make her escape, pleading exhaustion between giggles. In a drunken, satisfied gallantry, Maddyn put on enough of his clothes to escort her downstairs and press a clutch of coppers into her hand. Although he may have been overpaying her, he felt she’d earned it. When he staggered back into the chamber, he found the candle burning itself out in the lantern and Aethan sound asleep and snoring on his side of the bed. Maddyn took off his brigga, threw a blanket over Aethan, then blew out the candle and lay down. The room spun slowly and majestically around him in a gold-flecked darkness. And what would old Nevyn think of me now? he thought; well, thanks be to the gods, he’ll never know what became of me. Then he fell asleep as suddenly as he’d blown out the candle.

When he left Dun Deverry, Nevyn headed straight south, following the open road that ran beside the Belaver. He’d gone no more than five miles when he met a mounted patrol of five of the king’s riders, coming right for him. Automatically, thinking little of it, he pulled off to the side to let them pass, but their leader hailed him and trotted over, blocking his path.

“That’s a fine mule you’ve got there, herbman. He’s going to see the king’s service, too.”

“Oh, is he now?” Nevyn looked deep into the man’s eyes and sent a soothing flow of magnetic force out of his aura. “You don’t want this mule. He comes up lame too often to be of use to you.”

“Do you think I’d fall for such a clumsy ruse?” He started to laugh, then merely shook his head, his eyelids drooping. “Clumsy ruse. I don’t want that mule.”

“Truly, you don’t want this mule.”

The warrior yawned, shook himself, then turned his horse around.

“Come on, lads, we don’t want that mule. He comes up lame too often to be of any use to us.”

Although they looked puzzled, the others obeyed him without question and trotted after as he headed back toward Dun Deverry. In a bad temper, Nevyn rode on, and this time he kept a good watch out for mounted men. The incident made him think over his proposed route. Although he’d been planning on riding to Eldidd, he disliked the idea of having to ensorcel endless patrols of confiscating warriors the whole way there. Thanks to the war, he could no longer simply take a ship from Cerrmor, but just possibly there were less legitimate ships than ran the border far out to sea where few could catch them. Even though it was a good bit out of his direct route, he decided to swing by Dun Mannanan and see what he could find.

At that time Dun Mannanan was a pleasant-looking little town of some two thousand souls, whose round houses marched up from the harbor in tidy semicircles. Despite the war every house looked oddly prosperous, with fresh thatch, nicely whitewashed walls, and a handsome cow and a flock of hens in every yard. The town’s one inn was clean and tidy, too, with a proper stable out back. It was quite a surprise, then, when he went into the tavern room and found the innkeep cooking stew at a hearth where the spit across the fire, the kettle itself, and the long spoon were made of bronze, not iron. When he commented about it, the innkeep snarled under his breath.

“You won’t find a bit of good iron all along the Cerrmor coast, good sir. Naught can come south through the Cantrae battle lines, you see, and our wonderful king and his wonderful warbands to have shoes for their misbegotten horses and swords and suchlike. So they strip every bit of iron they can find, right down to the rotten buckle on your belt, and if you ask for repayment, you get it in bruises.” He paused to spit into the fire. “Even the plowshares are tipped with bronze, and they don’t plow as deep, I tell you. So there’s less of a yield every year, and the misbegotten king still takes the same taxes out of it.”

“I see. Ye gods! I never dreamt things had gone as far as all this.”

“I only wonder how far they’ll go. Soon enough we’ll all have gold hinges on our privy doors—it’ll be cheaper than iron.” His laugh was not a pleasant one.

As the evening wore on, a fair amount of customers drifted into the inn. As soon as they realized that Nevyn was an herbman, he had custom of his own and set up something of a dispensary on a table in the curve of the wall, out of the tavernman’s way. When he was done, a young sailor named Sacyr, who’d bought herbs to ease a bad hangover, settled down next to him and insisted on buying a round of ale so that he could start developing his symptoms all over again.

“Will you be staying in Dun Mannanan long, sir?”

“I won’t, truly. I’m hoping to find a ship going to Morlyn—on the Eldidd border, you know—one that has the draft to take my horse and mule. There are some valuable herbs that only grow in that part of the kingdom.”

Sacyr nodded, taking the lie with the faith of the ignorant, and considered the question.

“Well, I do know a man who’s running a good-sized boat west. He might be stopping in Morlyn.”

“Stopping there? How much further west can you go these days?”

Looking suddenly stricken, Sacyr devoted himself to his tankard.

“Now, here.” Nevyn dropped his voice to a whisper. “I’d truly like to get to Eldidd, and I’ll pay well for my passage. Is that at all possible?”

“It just might be. Wait around here a bit.”

In about an hour, a stout, graying man in the checked brigga of a merchant appeared, pausing in the tavern door and looking around carefully before he came any further. When Sacyr hailed him, he strolled over to the table, but he had a cautious eye for Nevyn.

“Sit down, Cabydd,” Sacyr said. “There’s coin in it”

With a small smile, the merchant sat. Sacyr leaned across the table to whisper.

“This herbman has a great desire to get to Eldidd. He needs a ship that can carry stock. I don’t suppose you’d know of such a thing.”

“Well.” Cabydd paused to size Nevyn up. “It’s a dangerous trip, good sir. I can’t guarantee your safety if the Eldidd war galleys catch us.”

“Ah, I see.” Nevyn was quite sure that he could do the guaranteeing, though he didn’t dare tell Cabydd that, of course. “But slipping across the border by land won’t be much safer, and it’d be a cursed sight longer.”

“True enough. But what if you came across from the west, right by Cannobaen?”

“Perfect! That’s exactly where I want to go.”

“Well and good, then. How many head of stock do you have?”

“Only one horse and a mule.”

“Oh, well now, that’s no trouble at all. You see, I’ve got a cattle boat that’ll hold a hundred head easy, but we’ll be running empty on the westward trip.”

“I think I begin to understand. You’ve found a less than patriotic Eldidd man who’s selling you war horses for the Cerrmor army.”

“Not an Eldidd man.” Cabydd leaned close to whisper. “Some of the Westfolk. Ever heard of them? They’re a strange lot. They crop their babies’ ears like calves, and they speak this language that’d break your jaw, but they raise beautiful horses. But best of all, they hate the men of Eldidd with a passion, so they sell at good prices to supply Eldidd’s enemies.”

Nevyn caught his breath. Although he knew that the elves never forgot a grudge, he was surprised at how far they would go to satisfy one.

On the next night, Nevyn went down to the dark, silent harbor at about the middle of the third watch, when the tide was turning to run out. At the end of a long wooden pier, muffled lanterns winked with a narrow beam beside the squat shape of the cattle boat. Nevyn coaxed his animals across the gangplank and settled them in solitary splendor in the hold, then came back up on deck. Cabydd showed him the low cabin, built on deck like a hut, that they would share: two narrow bunks bolted to the wall, and a tiny table and bench bolted to the floor.

“The lads sleep on deck, but we do put up an old tent if it rains,” Cabydd remarked. “The ship has to look shabby, you see, and I have to look poor.” He shuddered briefly. “Let’s pray to Mannanan ap Lier to keep the Eldidd galleys away! Once we pass Cerrmor, I’ll pick up an escort—you’ll see—but I’ve no desire to find myself in the middle of a sea battle.”

Even though the wind was brisk, it took them two full days to reach Cerrmor in the lumbering, awkward boat. They never put into the harbor, because a sleek Cerrmor war galley was already waiting for them. Cabydd ordered the sails down and let the boat drift while the galley manoeuvered alongside and grappled on. The rowers, all free men and marines, rested at their oars while their captain made the precarious jump up to the cattle boat’s deck.

“We’ll follow the usual plan,” he said to Cabydd. “You stay about fifteen miles out to sea. We’ll follow a parallel course, just in sight of you. We’ll meet at the usual harbor near the Westfolk’s camp.”

“Done, then, but come in our way every now and then so I can see that we haven’t lost you.”

As long as they were in Deverry waters, the two ships sailed close together, but about noon of the next day, Cabydd and his crew turned the cattle boat’s clumsy nose out to sea and wallowed along against the tide until the galley’s captain hailed them and told them they’d gone far enough out. Although Cabydd turned again, the galley kept going, heading out to sea. From that point on, Cabydd spent most of his time in the bow, keeping watch himself rather than trusting one of his men.

Four long anxious days and nights on the open sea brought them finally far enough west to turn back inland. Soon the Cerrmor galley joined them, and they sailed together to a tiny harbor, little more than a bite out of the chalk cliffs, with a short, rickety pier. Although the cattle boat edged in beside it, the galley headed straight for the sandy beach. As the high carved prow scraped on land, the marines jumped over the side, grabbed the gunwales in well-trained unison, and ran her up onto the sand.

“Well, Nevyn,” Cabydd said. “Will you shelter on board tonight?”

“My thanks, but it’s just a bare hour past noon. I’ll be on my way.”

As soon as Nevyn got his horse and mule on deck, they smelled land and practically bolted for it. He led them across the soft sand to the scrubby grassland just beyond the beach, then returned to fetch his saddles and mule packs. A couple of the sailors helped him carry the gear over.

“Look.” One of the lads pointed. “Westfolk.”

On golden horses two men and a woman were riding up, sitting easy in their elaborately stamped and tasseled leather saddles, their pale hair like moonlight to their mounts’ sun. The sailors dumped Nevyn’s gear near his stock, then ran back toward their ship as if they thought the elves would eat them or suchlike. When Nevyn called out a friendly greeting in Elvish, the woman turned her horse and trotted over, though the two men continued on to meet the marines.

“Greeting, elder one,” she said in the same tongue. “You speak too well to be a merchant.”

“No, I’m not. I’m a friend of Aderyn of the Silver Wings. Do you know him?”

“I know of him, but never has the honor been mine to meet him. Do you study the moonland lore, too?”

“Yes. I’m going to be traveling east from here, going to Eldidd. Will I be safe on the road?”

“A man like you is always safe among the People, but watch out for the Eldidd swine. You never know what they’ll do.”

“Oh yes.” Nevyn agreed for politeness’ sake. “I’m surprised you’ll trade with my people at all.”

“The longer the war goes on, the more Eldidd men die. Besides, they won’t be trying to take our lands as long as there’s fighting to the east.” She raised her hand in mock salute. “May there be a king in Cerrmor for a hundred years!”

Although he was planning on going to Eldidd eventually, Nevyn’s real destination lay just to the west of the border, where out to sea rise the three drowned peaks that form the islands of Wmmglaedd. Nevyn rode along the sea cliffs through meadows of tall, windswept grass for the rest of that day and on into the next, when he reached the low hills where neither men nor elves lived. On the third day, he came through a narrow pass to a wide, rocky beach, where the slow waves washed over gravel with a sad mutter, as if the sea were endlessly talking to itself. A scant two miles offshore, he saw the dark rise of the main island against the silver glitter of the Southern Sea.

Since the tide was at its full, Nevyn had to wait before he could cross over. He led his animals down to the two stone pillars that marked the entrance to the stone causeway, still underwater at the moment, and watched the waves lapping at the carved notches. Sure enough, the tide was turning, as each wave fell a little lower han the one before. Crying and mewling, seabirds swooped down as if to take a look at him, the graceful gulls, the occasional osprey, and the ungainly pelicans who were sacred to the god Wmm.

As he idly watched the birds, Nevyn thought over the job ahead of him, convincing the priests of the Water Temple to aid the dweomer in the work of healing the torn kingdom. He was oppressed by doubts; thinking about his elaborate scheme in cold blood made it seem daft.

As the waves fell back, the long causeway emerged, streaming water like a silver sea snake. Nevyn waited until the sun and wind had dried it off, then led his balky stock across. Snorting, they picked their hooves up high on the unfamiliar footing. Ahead the island rose up, about ten miles long and seven wide, with a low hill standing in the midst of meadows of coarse sea grass. Since the day was sunny (a rare thing at Wmmglaedd), he could just pick out the temple buildings themselves as he went across. At the end of the causeway stood a stone arch, carved with panels of interlace and roundels decorated with pelicans, and an inscription: “Water covers and reveals all things.”

Just as Nevyn left the causeway for solid land, a young priest came hurrying across the meadow to meet him. A blond lad of about sixteen, he was dressed in dark brigga and a linen overshirt of an ordinary cut, but on the yokes of the shirt, where a lord’s blazon would go, were orange pelicans.

“Welcome, good traveler. What brings you to the water temple of Wmm?”

“I need the help of the oracles of the god. My name is Nevyn.”

“And mine’s Cinrae. The god gives oracles to all who ask.”

The temple complex was a good mile away across the windblown meadow. As they walked along, Cinrae said not a word more, and Nevyn wondered about him and his reasons for choosing this lonely life so young. He was a good-looking boy, though his slender face was chapped and red from the continual sea wind, but his blue eyes were oddly distant, a bit wistful, as if he felt that ordinary life had nothing to offer him. In the shelter of the hill rose a high stone broch and, scattered around it, some storage sheds, two small round houses, and a stables. A few wind-gnarled trees cast small patches of shade; a few flowers struggled to bloom in the shelter of walls. The wind sighed around the buildings and swirled the sandy dust in a perpetual scour. Out beyond the complex Nevyn could see kitchen gardens, a field of barley, and some white cows at pasture. Although the pious made donations to Wmm when they wanted his advice, the coin would never have been enough to provision the temple. Cinrae pointed to a small round hut with a freshly thatched roof right by the stable well.

“That’s the guesthouse, good sir. I’ll put your baggage in there after I’ve stabled your horse and mule. See the big house over there? That belongs to the high priest and you can pay him your respects straightaway.”

“My thanks, and I will. Is Adonyc still the head of the order here?”

“Oh he died ever so long ago. Pedraddyn was called to replace him.”

As so often happened, Nevyn was caught by surprise at just how fast the time seemed to go—for other men. He remembered Pedraddyn as an earnest acolyte not much older than Cinrae, but the man who greeted him at the door of the high priest’s residence had a streak of gray in his dark hair and the slow, solid walk of a man secure in his years and his position.

“By the feet and feathers of the holy birds! Can it truly be Nevyn?”

“It is, at that. Do you remember me? Why, it must have been twenty years ago that I was here.”

“It was, but you made quite an impression on me. It’s a marvel to see you looking so hale. You must be the best testimonial for your herbs that ever a man could have, or is it the dweomer that keeps you so fit?”

“The dweomer, truly, in its own way. It gladdens my heart to see you, too.”

Pedraddyn ushered him into a spare stone room that held one table, one bench, a narrow cot, and a vast set of shelves, stacked with codices and scrolls in leather cases. In the pink sandstone fireplace a peat fire smoldered to take off the sea chill. When the high priest clapped his hands, a servant came in the back door. He was a man in his thirties, dark-haired, and he had the worst scar that Nevyn had ever seen, thick knots and welts of shiny scar tissue that ran through his left cheek and clotted at the corner of a mouth twisted in a perpetual parody of a smile.

“Davyn, get our guest and me some spiced milk. Then you can do what you’d like until dinner.”

With a silent nod he left by the same door.

“He can’t speak clearly,” Pedraddyn said to Nevyn. “He was an Eldidd sailor once. We found him washed up on our beach and bleeding half to death from those wounds. That was about six years ago now. He begged to stay here with us, and I can’t say I blamed him for wanting out of the wars. A silent man makes a good servant for a priest.”

After Davyn brought the milk, priest and sorcerer sat down together by the fire. Nevyn had a sip of the sweet milk and wished that the priests of Wmm weren’t forbidden to drink ale and mead.

“With your skill in dweomer, I’m surprised you’d come to us for an oracle.”

“The oracle I need concerns the entire land of Deverry and Eldidd, not merely my own doings, Your Holiness. I also came to ask your aid in a certain peculiar matter. Tell me, does it ache your heart to see the wars raging and no end in sight?”

“Do you truly need to ask? It would ache the heart of any sane man.”

“Just so. We who serve the dweomer of light have joined together, and we have a plan to end the wars, but we can’t do it without the help of those who serve the gods. I’ve come to beg you to help put the one true king upon his throne.”

Pedraddyn’s eyes widened like a child’s.

“Who is he?” he whispered.

“I don’t know yet, but you have every important genealogy and noble bloodline stored away in your records. Once Great Wmm gives us an omen, surely we can interpret it with the help of the archives.”

“I see. And once you know his name?”

“Then the dweomer will put him on his throne. Let me tell you my scheme.”

Pedraddyn listened quietly at first, then flung himself out of his chair and began pacing back and forth in sheer excitement.

“It could work!” the priest burst out. “With the help of the gods, and the dweomer behind it, we could do it. The cost, though—by my most holy lord, a good many men will die in such a war.”

“Will it be any more than are dying already? At least this war will put an end to it, or so we can hope. What hope do we have now?”

“None, sure enough. On the morrow we’ll consult the god.”

Dinner that night was served in the broch in a vast round room, smoky from the torches and the peat fire, that served as refectory and kitchen both. The five priests, their three servants, and whatever guests there were all ate together at two long tables with no show of rank. Even the high priest got up to fetch himself more milk and stew if he wanted them. The quiet talk was of books and gardening, the religious exercises of the priests and the slow life of the island. Nevyn envied them. His life would soon revolve around kings and warfare, politics and death—the very things he’d tried to leave behind when he chose the dweomer road, as he remarked to Pedraddyn.

“The man who runs from his Wyrd finds it waiting for him, or so the proverb goes,” the priest said. “But yours seems to be an unusually fast runner.”

After a pleasant night in the clean, comfortable guesthouse, Nevyn woke to a world turned gray by fog. It lay so thick on island and sea that land and water seemed the same element. In the windless damp, every word spoken hung in the air like a tuft of sheep’s wool caught on a bramble. When Cinrae came to fetch him, the lad was wearing an orange cloak with the hood up against the damp.

“I hope the fog doesn’t bother you, aged sir.”

“It doesn’t, lad, but my thanks for your concern. I’ve got a good heavy cloak of my own.”

“Good. I like the fogs. They make a man feel safe, somehow.”

Cinrae led the way through the gray-shrouded complex and out to the gardens, where Pedraddyn was waiting. Although it was only about a hundred yards away, the top of the broch was lost in fog. Without speaking they walked up the grassy hill to the small round temple at the top. Inside was a single plain room of worked stone, with eight freestanding pillars set around and eight small oil lamps on the altar. Pedraddyn and Nevyn knelt before the altar while Cinrae lighted the lamps, an eerie pale glow in the heavy air. It seemed that the fog had followed them inside and hung over the altar and the niche behind, where there was a statue of Wmm, or Ogmios, as he was known in the Dawntime. The god was sitting cross-legged on a stool, with his right hand raised in benediction and his left holding a reed pen. As the light flared up, his calm face seemed to smile at his worshippers. Cinrae knelt down beside Nevyn and stared at his god in sincere devotion.

Pedraddyn prayed aloud, asking the god to favor Nevyn’s request and to grant them both wisdom, and he went on at a good length, his voice echoing through the room. Although the usual worshipper would have been listening to the priest and little more, Nevyn had the skills to make a direct link with the force—or the part of the Innerlands, if you prefer—that Wmm represented. In his mind he built up a thought form of the god behind his statue, carved it from the blue light, worked and perfected it until the image lived apart from his will. Then he used a trick of the mind to force his imaginings out through his eyes until he saw it standing behind the altar. Slowly, the god force that Pedraddyn was summoning came to ensoul it. Nevyn knew he was successful when Cinrae cried out, a sob of joy, and raised his hand to greet what he saw as a visitation of the god. Nevyn felt a bit dishonorable, as if he’d tricked the lad, but on the other hand, the image did represent a truth.

At the end of the prayer, the three of them sat for a long moment of silence. A bit at a time, Nevyn withdrew the force he’d put into the actual image and thanked the god for appearing to them. Cinrae’s devotion kept it alive a little longer, but soon the unstable etheric substance went its own way, spinning off, swirling, and dissolving as the god force left its temporary home. Cinrae sobbed once under his breath, like a child who sees his mother go off to work in the fields but knows he can’t call her back. Pedraddyn rose and closed the temple working with a short chant, then clapped his hands eight times in slow, stately succession.

“We are blessed,” Pedraddyn said. “He has appeared to us.”

Again, Nevyn felt rather shabby. He felt sorry for the priests, particularly young Cinrae, who would never know the truth about the object of his devotion, never realize that he could learn to call the god at will. Yet, as he thought about it, perhaps it was better that way. How, after all, can one love an objective natural force that can be summoned in cold blood to ensoul an artificial image? In a way, there’s little room for love in the dweomer, which is why mankind needs priests like Cinrae.

Silently, in single file, they left the temple and walked down the far side of the hill. The fog still lay thick, but through the clinging damp came the distant boom and echo of wave striking rock. As they picked their way through a vast meadow of coarse sea grass, the waves grew louder and louder, until at last they reached the cliff at the far side of the island. Down below, across a graveled beach, great rocks rose jagged out of the swirling white surf. The ocean crashed over them with sheets of spray like birds’ wings, then flowed all white and foaming through the narrow channels between.

“Behold the voices of the god!” Pedraddyn cried.

The ocean roar answered him with a hundred tongues. As they slowly made their way down the damp, treacherous stairs cut into the side of the rocky cliff, the roar and boom of the surf grew so deafening that it seemed to echo inside Nevyn’s mind as well as in his ears. At the tide line the three of them knelt on the slimy gravel and raised their hands palm outward to the oracle. Each great wave swept in like an omen, spraying over the rocks and swirling with white foam up almost to their knees.

“O mighty Wmm,” Nevyn called out. “We beg you: guide us in choosing the one true king of all Deverry. O mighty Wmm, put the true king on the throne and no other. O mighty Wmm, lend us your power to tell truth from falsehood.”

One after the other, the waves swept in from the gray, misty ocean that might have broken on Eldidd’s shore or on that of the Otherlands, for all they could tell. The voices roared and boomed incomprehensible answers to Nevyn’s question. All at once, Cinrae sobbed and rose slowly to his feet, his eyes staring all-unseeing in deep trance. When he spoke, his thin lad’s tenor had changed into a voice as deep and hollow as wave on rock.

“Look in the north and west. The lad who will be king has been born in the north and west. The king of all Deverry and all Eldidd has been born in a lake among the fishes and the water reeds. He who will give peace trains for war.”

With a sharp cry Cinrae fainted, falling forward headlong as the god left him. Nevyn and Pedraddyn raised him up, then carried him away from the tide line to the tenuous shelter of the foot of the cliff. Pedraddyn stripped off his own cloak and wrapped it around the boy.

“Nevyn, he’s the priest you get only once in a hundred years, if that. He’ll succeed me and surpass me a thousand times. I thank the god every day for bringing him here.”

“So you should, and for his sake, too. I don’t know what would have happened to him if he hadn’t found the way of the god.”

“Oh, his family thought he was a bit simpleminded, sure enough. They brought him here to ask the god’s advice when he was but a tiny lad, and he’s never left. Sometimes I wonder if there’s some Westfolk blood in our Cinrae, but of course I couldn’t possibly go asking his kin a shameful thing like that.” He laid a fatherly hand on the boy’s cheek. “He’s icy cold. I wish we could get him away from the damp.”

“Naught easier. Just give him to me.”

Nevyn called on the spirits of the elements, an almost automatic task there in that rage and vortex of elemental force, and asked them to support the lad’s weight. With their help, he picked Cinrae up like a sack of grain and carried him up the steps without even having to pause for breath. He brought the lad well away from the edge, then laid him down gently in the cushioning grass while Pedraddyn stared in utter amazement. In a few minutes Cinrae tossed his head this way and that, then opened his eyes.

“I can walk soon, Your Holiness,” he whispered.

“When you’re ready, lad, and not before.” Pedraddyn knelt down beside him. “And someday soon you’ll learn how to control the force of the god.”

Nevyn walked a few steps away and turned to look over the distant swirl of fog and ocean. The voices of the god echoed softly in the distance. North and west, he thought; I would have been wasting my time if I’d gone to Cerrmor. He had no doubt that the omen was a true one; reinforced by the ritual and the dramatic physical setup of the oracle, Cinrae’s raw psychic talent had tapped in deep to the Deverry racial soul. Born in the midst of reeds and fishes—that particular phrase bothered him but he was sure that in time everything would become clear. All in all, he was well pleased. Only later did he remember that ominous phrase, king of all Deverry and of all Eldidd, and wonder just what mighty forces he had set in motion.

That afternoon, while Cinrae slept, Nevyn and Pedraddyn went to the Chamber of Records, which occupied the entire second floor of the broch. Aided by another neophyte, they sat at a table by a window and pored over dusty codex after dusty codex of genealogies. As they compiled lists of heirs, both direct on the male line and indirect through the sons of royal women, one name reappeared three times: Maryn, marked prince of the small kingdom of Pyrdon, related vaguely to the Eldidd throne, tightly to the Cantrae claimant through his mother, and most directly indeed to the Cerrmor line through Prince Cobryn, Dannyn’s son. Realizing that a man of Dannyn’s line might someday hold the throne of all Deverry made Nevyn shudder with the dweomer cold. It was just the sort of irony that the Lords of Wyrd seemed to love.

“This lad interests me.” Nevyn tapped the name with a bone stylus. “Do you know anything about him?”

“I don’t. Pyrdon’s a long way away. At times I even have trouble getting correct information for my records.”

“You don’t think the lad might be dead or suchlike?”

“I doubt that. Usually someone will make an effort to tell me of a thing as important as the death of a marked prince. I only meant that I’ve never laid eyes on the lad or his mother. I saw his father once when Casyl was . . . oh, twelve, I’d say. He impressed me as a nice child, but still, who knows what’s happened since then?”

Since, if their plan was to succeed, they would need the help of at least one powerful priest of Bel, Nevyn headed directly back to Deverry rather than going hundreds of miles out of his way to Pyrdon. He gave the job of looking over young Prince Maryn to Aderyn, who was roaming with his alar near the border of the kingdom. Nevyn had just crossed into Deverry proper when Aderyn contacted him through his campfire.

“I think we’ve found our claimant.” Aderyn’s image was smiling, but in a thoughtful sort of way. “Pyrdon’s a harsh place, but it’s the right sort of harshness, the kind that keeps a man mindful that he needs other people to survive. I was most impressed with King Casyl; he has an honor that’s rare even in the best of times. The young prince seems bright beyond his years, but he’s only five, so it’s a bit early to tell how he’s going to turn out. He seems healthy, though. It would be a pity if he died in childhood.”

“True-spoken, but then Casyl might have another son or two yet. I hate storing all my mead in one skin.”

“So do I, but we’ve got to. The whole problem is that we’ve got too beastly many would-be kings.”

“Just so. What about the omens?”

“They couldn’t be more right. Dun Drwloc is Casyl’s primary residence, and that’s where the young prince was born. It’s a fortified island, right out in the middle of a lake.”

“Excellent! My thanks for your help. I’m on my way to Lughcarn. I remember the high priest of Bel there as being a decent, honorable man—well, if he hasn’t up and died on me, anyway.”

Since it was far enough from the Cerrmor border to be spared the worst ravages of war, Lughcarn was still prosperous, and the biggest city left in Deverry. The center of the iron workings, it was continually dusted with fine dark ash from its smelters, forges, and of course the big beehive ovens where wood was turned into charcoal. In the still summer air, the haze hung over the city and turned the sky yellow. Nevyn made his way to the center of town, where the temple of Bel stood among soot-dusted ancient oaks. He was well known there, and neophytes came running to take his horse and mule as soon as he entered the sacred grove. Much to his relief, Olaedd the high priest was very much alive, though severely troubled by pains in his joints. A neophyte ushered Nevyn into Olaedd’s chamber, which was bare except for a narrow, hard pallet on the floor and one chair.

“You’ll forgive me if I don’t rise, Nevyn. The pain in my back is bad today.”

“You’ve got to get yourself a proper bed. It doesn’t have to be soft or some such sinful thing; you’ve just got to get out of the draft.”

“I’ll consider it, then.”

The neophyte brought Nevyn a low stool, then took himself away. Nevyn launched straight into his plans. The priesthood of Bel was in the perfect position to interpret oracles and omens in the “correct” way, simply because so many men came to them with puzzling dreams or events. When the time came, too, they would be the ones to proclaim the new king and marry him to the sovereignty of the kingdom.

“And I’ve no doubt he’ll reward the temples once he’s gained the throne,” Nevyn finished up.

“No doubt, oh no doubt, but why are you coming to me instead of the high priest of the Holy City?”

“I was recently there. I heard Gwergovyn is the new high priest.”

“Um. He is, of course, my superior, no matter what I may think of him.”

For a moment they considered each other, each wondering just how much could be said aloud. Since he was running the lesser risk, Nevyn spoke first.

“I realize that traditionally the priesthood of Deverry has always claimed supremacy, but as I remember, anyway, it’s only tradition—not law—that gives them their place.”

“True enough.” Olaedd’s dark eyes blinked once. “So it is, truly.”

“That tradition might be badly shaken if the priesthood there supports the wrong claimant to the throne.”

“While Lughcarn supports the right one?” Olaedd put the tips of his fingers together and studied his arched hands for a moment “In just an eightnight there’ll be a convocation of the northern temples here in Lughcarn.”

“Won’t the Dun Deverry priesthood send an envoy?”

“Of course, but there are always ways for a few trustworthy men to talk privately. Ride back when the convocation’s over. We’ll speak of this matter again.”

Nevyn went to a small village about ten miles north of the city and camped in a farmer’s barn on the pretense of gathering herbs in the neighborhood. Since not only the farmer in question but the whole village was glad to have an herbman nearby, he was soon well known. During his second week there, the miller’s little daughter came running to tell him that a marvel had happened: one of the goats had given birth to a two-headed kid. Mostly because she expected him to, Nevyn went to look and found most of the village crowded round the pen. Weighed down by its deformity, the kid couldn’t even stand, while its mother bleated in a hopeless sort of way even as she licked it clean.

“It doubtless won’t live the day,” Nevyn remarked to the miller.

“Couldn’t agree more. Do you think someone bewitched my goats?”

“I don’t.” Nevyn was about to launch into a long discussion of the interrelationships of the four humors in animals when he got a much better idea. “The gods sent it as an omen, I’ll wager. Here, can an animal with two heads live? Of course not. So, then, can a kingdom with two kings do much better?”

The crowd nodded sagely at this display of erudition.

“I’ll wager you’re right,” the miller said, “I’ll send my eldest lad to the local priest about this.”

“Do that. He’ll find it interesting, I’m sure.”

When he returned to Lughcarn, Nevyn found that indeed the news of the two-headed goat had preceded him. As soon as Olaedd and he were alone, the priest mentioned it.

“Now, even though you were the one to interpret the omen for the village, I’m sure Great Bel sent it. Your interpretation is the same as I’d give, too. If the civil wars go on much longer, there won’t be any kingdom to fight over, just a pack of minor lords each squabbling over his borders, We discussed this at length, during the convocation. After all, if there’s no king, who will protect the temples?”

“Just so.”

Olaedd looked absently away for a long moment, and even when he spoke, he didn’t look directly at Nevyn.

“There was some small discussion of Gwergovyn. It seems that there are some who are less than pleased with his presidency over the Holy City.”

“Ah. I wondered if that might be the case.”

“There are some good reasons for this dissatisfaction, at least if certain rumors are to be believed.” Again the long pause. “I do not think that they need concern you. Let me only say that I found them most distressing.”

“I have perfect faith in Your Holiness’s judgment.”

“My thanks. You may, however, count on the northern temples for any aid we can render you. Ah, at times I feel so weary! We’re talking of a plan that will take many years, but who better to start a plan than old men who have the wisdom to pick the young men to finish it?”

“Just so. I take it none of the priesthood in the Holy City will be consulted?”

Olaedd smiled, answering the question the only way such things can be answered: by silence.

Late in the autumn, when the trees stood stark beside the road and the morning sky smelled of snow, Nevyn returned to Brin Toraedic. Since the caves were musty and damp from being shut up so long, he lit fires and sent the air elementals sweeping through the chambers to cleanse the fetid air, then took his mule and went down to the village to buy food. When he rode in, everyone ran over to greet him. They all knew what his real work was and were proud to have something that no other village did, or at least, none that they knew of: their own local sorcerer. While he packed up some cheese, a ham, and barley for porridge, Nevyn also heard the summer’s worth of gossip, much of which concerned Belyan, big with a bastard child and not telling a soul who the father was. When Nevyn took his stock over to the blacksmith’s to be reshod, the smith’s wife, Ygraena, invited him in for a drop of ale.

“Have you seen our Belyan yet?” she remarked, ever so casually.

“I knew about the child before I left. I’ll be going out to the farm to buy dried apples, so I’ll see how she fares then.”

“I’ve no doubt she’ll have an easy time of it. I’ll admit to being ever so envious of the way she has hers, just like a cat.” She hesitated, her eyes as shrewd as ever Olaedd’s were. “Here, good Nevyn, some people are saying that she got this child from one of your spirits.”

When he laughed so hard that he choked on his ale, Ygraena looked bitterly disappointed: such a lovely theory, and all exploded.

“I assure you that the lad was real flesh and blood, and hot enough blood at that, judging from what’s happened to Bell. If she’s keeping her own counsel about it, well, she always was a close-mouthed lass.”

Belyan had the baby just four days later. Nevyn was sweeping out his caves when the oldest lad came running to tell him that Mam was starting to have the new baby. By the time he packed a few herbs and rode down, Ygraena’s prediction had come true: Bell’s new son was already born, and an easy time he had coming, too. While the midwife washed the babe and got Belyan comfortable, Nevyn and Bannyc sat by the fire.

“And how do you feel about this new cub in the litter?” Nevyn said.

“Well, I wish she would have married some lad if she wanted a babe that bad, but Bell was always too headstrong for me to handle. He’s healthy, the midwife says, and so he’s welcome enough. You can always use another pair of hands around a farm.”

With a deep heave of a sigh, Bannyc went out to tend his goats. Nevyn stretched his feet out to the warmth of the fire and thought of Maddyn. Quickly enough his image grew in the fire, a tiny figure at first, then swelling until Nevyn could comfortably see the entire scene around him. Maddyn was sitting in a dirty tavern room with about a dozen other men, all of them drinking hard and laughing. At their belts each had a dagger with an identical pommel decorated with three silver balls. When one of the men idly drew his to gouge a splinter out of the table, Nevyn could see that it was some peculiar metal, a kind of silver, he thought, but the vision was not sharp or detailed enough for him to be sure. What did seem obvious was that Maddyn had found himself a place in a mercenary troop. Nevyn’s first thought was pity; then it occurred to him that such a troop, one with no fixed loyalties, might be very useful for the work he had ahead. He made a mental note to keep better track of Maddyn in the future.

Later, Nevyn went in to see Belyan, who was sitting up in bed with the babe at her breast. A big baby, easily eight pounds, Daumyr had a soft crown of fine blond hair, and he was sucking eagerly with an occasional bird chirp of satisfaction.

“I’ll be getting the true milk soon,” Belyan said. ‘The way this hungry little beast is nursing.”

“No doubt. Do you miss his father?”

Belyan considered while she changed the babe to her other breast.

“A bit,” she said at last. “What with all I had to do around the farm, I hardly thought of him all summer, but now that winter’s almost here, I find myself remembering him. I hope he’s safe and well, wherever he is. It’s better to wonder where he is than to go visit his grave.”

“It is, at that, truly.”

With a smile, Belyan gently stroked the baby’s hair.

“He’s a bit different than my other lads were when they were born, and he’ll doubtless look different, with Maddyn’s curly hair and all, but in time, he’ll grow to be like us. It’s a bit like needlework, having a babe. You’ve got your cloth, and you’ve got your colors of thread, but it’s up to you how the pattern grows.”

Nevyn suddenly smiled. She’d just handed him the missing piece of his plan. What better way to have a true and noble king than to raise the prince? Maryn was still young and malleable; he needed tutors, and he would respond to the proper influence. One of us can find a way into the court, Nevyn thought; we’ll make sure the lad grows up well while we lay the rest of the groundwork.

That night, Nevyn walked on the hill just as the full moon was at her zenith. Clouds came in from the north, casting moving shadows across the sleeping countryside. For too long now, darker shadows had killed all joy in Deverry. Nevyn smiled to himself. Deep in his heart, he saw the coming peace and the victory of the light.