A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [162]
“See those men?” Nevyn thought to them. “They’re very bad men. They want to kill Aderyn and Halaberiel.”
If they could have screamed in rage, they would have as they swept off through the camp. They pinched and kicked and bit, hammering the men, grabbing the horses. In a yelling, neighing, swatting, kicking chaos, the camp erupted. At this point, Nevyn realized that he was dangerously exhausted. He rushed back along the silver cord to the dun and slipped into his body. As he woke to normal consciousness, he found that he was lying all in a heap in the curve of the wall. Panting for breath, Aderyn had his arms around him.
“By the gods!” Aderyn snarled. “If I’d known how strong you are in trance, I’d’ve got Maer up here to help hold you down.”
“You have my sincerely humble apologies. Are you all right?”
“You gave me a clip on the jaw, but otherwise I am. How did it go?”
“Taking the smoke into the etheric mold worked splendidly. Humph, I certainly wish I’d known this trick during the civil wars! As for the results, well, let’s take a look in the fire and see, shall we?”
But when they scried out the camp, they saw only trampled blankets, scattered gear, broken tether ropes, and Gwerbret Gatryc, sitting alone at the fire and cradling his inflamed arm while he stared into the face of despair. If it weren’t for the death he would have brought to the people of Eldidd, Nevyn might have found it in his heart to pity him.
In effect, the rebellion ended that night. Most of the common-born riders disappeared into the countryside, slinking back to their families and taking their old places on their father’s farm or in his shop to wait and see just how lenient Aeryc was going to be. To protect their families, the remaining rebel lords and their last few loyal men surrendered to Aeryc, who pardoned the riders and hanged the lords. Gatryc committed suicide, but his infected wounds would have killed him in a few days anyway. While Aeryc rode at a leisurely pace to Cannobaen, all Eldidd waited and trembled. With their fathers slain, boys were the only lords the province had, but everyone knew that Aeryc would attaint the rebel duns and redistribute them to loyal men from Pyrdon and Deverry itself.
Pertyc wasn’t in the least surprised when Halaberiel announced that he and his men would be leaving before the king arrived. There was no need, as the banadar remarked, to turn his highness’s whole view of the world upside down over a petty little rebellion like this.
“But I thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming, my friend,” Pertyc said. “And it gladdens my heart that none of your men were killed over this.”
“Mine, too.” But Halaberiel spoke absently. “And I’ll be seeing the rivers of home soon enough.”
“You must be glad of it.”
“I suppose.”
Pertyc hesitated on the edge of comment.
“I’m growing old.” Halaberiel said it for him. “I think that somewhere deep in my heart I was hoping for a glorious death in battle, clean and sudden. And now it doesn’t seem likely, does it? I see naught but peace ahead for my last few years. Ah well, what the gods pour, men must swallow, eh?”
“Just so. I understand.”
“I thought you might. Well, if I see your wife, shall I give her any message from you?”
“That the children are well. That I wish she still loved me.”
“She never stopped loving you, Perro. She just couldn’t bear to live with you. It was the Round-ear ways, not you.”
“Oh.” Pertyc considered this revelation for a long moment. “Well, then, tell her that if she wants, she can come and take Beclya away with her. And as for me, say that I never stopped loving her, either.”
Surrounded by an honor guard of a mere four hundred men, King Aeryc arrived at Cannobaen on a day that threatened rain but never actually delivered it. Although Pertyc suspected that Nevyn had something to do with the accommodating weather, he never had the nerve to ask the old man. Even though the king had left most of the army back in Aberwyn, there