A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [197]
“Page! Go find Nevyn right now!”
“I’m up here, lad!” Nevyn called back. “I’ll come down.”
“Don’t! I’ll come up. It’ll be private that way.”
Maryn dismounted, tossed his reins to a page, and raced for the ladder. Over the winter he had grown two inches; his voice had deepened as well, so that more and more he looked the perfect figure of the king to be, blond and handsome with a far-seeing look in his gray eyes. Yet he was still lad enough to shove whatever he was holding into his shirt and scramble up the ladder to the ramparts. Nevyn could tell from the haunted look in his eyes that something had disturbed him.
“What’s all this, my liege?”
“We found somewhat, Nevyn, the silver daggers and me, I mean. We went down the east-running road. It was about three miles from here that we found them.”
“Found who?”
“The corpses. They’d all been slain by the sword. There were three dead horses but only two men in the road, but we found the third man out in a field, like he’d tried to run away before they killed him.”
With a grunt of near physical pain, Nevyn leaned back against the cold stone wall.
“How long ago were they killed?”
“Oh, a ghastly long time.” Maryn looked half-sick at the memory. “Maddyn says it was probably a couple of months. They froze first, he said, and then thawed probably just last week. The ravens have been working on them. It was truly grim. And all their gear was pulled apart and strewn around, like someone had been searching through it.”
“Oh, no doubt they were. Could you tell anything about these poor wretches?”
“They were Cerrmor men. Here.” Maryn reached into his shirt and pulled out a tarnished message tube. “This was empty when we found it, but look at the device.”
Nevyn turned the tube and found a strip graved with three tiny ships.
“You could still see the paint on one shield, too,” Maryn went on. “It was the ship blazon. I wish we had the messages that were in that tube.”
“So do I, your highness, but I think me I know what they said. We’d best go down and collect the entire troop. No doubt we’re months too late, but I won’t rest easy until we have a look round for the murderers.”
As they hurried back to the broch, it occurred to Nevyn that he no longer had to worry about communicating with his allies by dweomer. It was obvious that their enemies already knew everything they needed.
Even though Maddyn considered hunting the murderers a waste of time, and he knew that every other man in the troop was dreading camping out in the chilly damp, no one so much as suggested arguing with Nevyn’s scheme. If anyone had, Maddyn himself would have been the one to do it, because he was a bard of sorts, with a bard’s freedom to speak on any matter at all, as well as being second in command of this troop of mercenaries newly become the prince’s guard. The true commander, Caradoc, was too afraid of Nevyn to say one wrong word to the old man. Carrying what provisions the dun could spare, the silver daggers, with Maryn and the old man riding at the head of the line, clattered out the gates just at noon.
“At least the blasted clouds have all blown away,” Caradoc said with a sigh. “I had a chance for a word with the king’s chief huntsman, by the by. He says that there’s an old hunting lodge about ten, twelve miles to the northeast, right on the river. If we can find it, it might still have a roof of sorts.”
“If we’re riding that way to begin with.”
They found the murdered men and their horses where they’d left them, and it ached Maddyn’s heart to think how close they’d been to safety when their Wyrd fell upon them. While servants looked for a place where the thawing ground was good and soft, Nevyn coursed back and forth examining