A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [12]
“Naught, and forgive me for opening an old wound.”
With a toss of his head Aethan strode off into the darkness. Maddyn hesitated, then decided it would be best to leave him alone with his ancient grief.
“I am sorry,” Nevyn said. “Did Aethan get thrown out of the warband for courting the gwerbret’s sister?”
“He did, but things came to a bit more than fine words and flowers, or so I understand.”
“Ah. I saw the Lady Merodda once. She was the most poisonous woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. I wonder, lad. I truly wonder about all of this. Here, keep what you just heard to yourself, will you? The men have got enough to worry about as it is.”
“And I don’t, I suppose.”
“Oh, here.” Nevyn chuckled to himself. “As if you weren’t burning with curiosity.”
“My heart was ice, sure enough. Well, my lord, I’m about snoring where I stand, and I’d best get some sleep.”
Once he lay down in his blankets, Maddyn drifted straight off, but he did wake once, not long before dawn, to see Nevyn still sitting up and staring into the last embers of the fire.
On the morrow a subdued troop of silver daggers rode straight home to Dun Drwloc. That night Nevyn summoned Maddyn and Caradoc to the king’s private chambers for a conference. Casyl had a map of the three kingdoms, drawn in great detail by the priests of Wmm, and, as he remarked, it had cost him far more than the weight of its thin parchment in gold. While Nevyn and the king chewed over the problems involved in getting Maryn to Cerrmor, Maddyn stared fascinated at the map in the flaring candlelight. Although he couldn’t read, he could pick out the rivers and the mountains, the Canaver and the Cantrae hills where he’d lived his early life, the long rivers of central Deverry running down from the northern mountains, and, finally, the Aver El, the river with the foreign name whose source lay in the lake just outside the window of the conference room.
All the borders of the kingdoms and their provinces were there, too, marked in red. Even without letters Maddyn could see that it was going to be a long ride and a dangerous one from Loc Drw down to Cerrmor. As long as the prince was in Pyrdon, he was safe, but the Pyrdon border lay a good hundred miles from the border of the Cerrmor holdings. Part of his journey, therefore, would have to lie through hostile Cantrae lands.
“It aches my heart that some enemy knows of Maryn’s Wyrd.” Casyl’s voice brought Maddyn back to the present meeting. “What matters the most, of course, is where their lands are, and whether or not the prince is going to have to pass through them, though I can’t help wondering just who they are, and where their loyalties lie.”
“I strongly suspect, my liege,” Nevyn said, “that their loyalties lie only to themselves, but I’ll wager they’re not above selling information to whomever can buy it.”
Caradoc nodded in a grim agreement.
“There’s mercenary troops, and then there’s mercenary spies,” the captain pronounced. “I’ve come across a few of the latter. Fit for raven food and naught else, they were. All the honor of stoats.”
“If that’s the case,” Casyl went on, “then I’ll wager the chief buyer for their foul goods is the king in Cantrae.”
“Don’t forget, my liege, that Cerrmor is doubtless boiling over with intrigue at the moment,” Nevyn said. “For a long while now there have been omens of the coming of the true king as well as much speculation as to his