A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [24]
“I was just starting to enjoy myself!”
“Come along and now! You won’t be enjoying yourself if the captain decides to take the skin off your back, will you?”
Without another word Branoic followed him into the shadows by the open back gate, where Maddyn was riding one horse and holding the reins of two others. Out on the riverbank he could see the rest of the silver daggers, mounted and ready to ride.
“No one can beat a silver dagger when it comes to ducking the law,” Aethan said, grinning. “Mount up, Branno. The town wardens are pounding on the front gate.”
After he mounted, Branoic turned to the bard.
“Maddyn, I’m cursed sorry.”
“Oh, hold your tongue! We’ll sort it all out later, but I tell you, lad, I don’t want to see your ugly face till I’m a good bit calmer, like.”
As they rode back to the inn, at a nice stately trot to avoid suspicion, Branoic was thinking seriously of starving himself to death out of shame.
With all the trouble brewing out in the tavern yard, Nevyn and Maryn easily slipped out the back gate and rode off with barely a soul noticing. As soon as they were back at their own inn, Nevyn turned the horses over to another silver dagger and dragged the prince up to his private chamber. Although he tried to feign embarrassment, Maryn couldn’t quite keep from grinning.
“Listen, lad,” Nevyn said, and he felt defeated before he truly began his little lecture. “It’s your safety I’m worried about. Slipping off into town with only those two bumbling idiots for guards was a very bad idea.”
“Well, t-t-true enough, and I’m sorry.”
“You don’t look sorry in the least. After this, if you simply can’t live without a lass, have your friends bring you one. For enough silver that sort of lass is always willing to take a little walk.”
“No doubt my learned c-c-councillor would know.”
Nevyn restrained the impulse to give the one true king of all Deverry a good slap across the chops. Very dimly he could remember being both that young and that smug about his first lass—some two hundred years earlier or about that, anyway. Such anniversaries had rather lost their importance for him. All at once Maryn let his grin fade and sat down in the one rickety chair to stare at the floor.
“Somewhat wrong?”
“Not tr-tr-truly. I was just thinking. Both you and Father were telling me that I’d have to marry Glyn’s daughter.”
“So we were, and so you do.”
“How old is she?”
“Thirteen.”
“Well, at least she’s old enough.” He looked up with a worried frown. “Is she pr-pr-pretty?”
“I have no idea.”
“I suppose I’ll have to m-m-marry her even if she’s got twenty wens and a besom squint.”
“Exactly right, Your Highness. She represents the sovereignty of the kingdom.”
Maryn groaned and went back to studying the floor.
“Well, I hope she is pr-pr-pretty,” the prince said at last. “Now that I know what…” And then he did blush, looking at that moment some ten years old. “I’d best get to b-b-bed.”
“So you had. If I were you, I’d pretend to be asleep and snoring when Maddyn comes storming in. Our bard didn’t seem to find the evening’s sport amusing.”
In the morning, over breakfast, Maddyn assembled the silver daggers who’d been at the Tupping Ram to piece out what had happened. He knew that it would be a good bit better for the miscreants if he settled this matter before Caradoc or Owaen took it in hand. As this less-than-pleasant meal progressed, he noticed that Branoic sat at the end of the table as far from him as possible, ate nothing, and spoke only when the others tormented him into doing so. Although Maddyn started out furious, by the time Branoic, stammering as much as the prince and twice as red, repeated the whore’s remark about coring apples, he was laughing as hard as all the other men there.
“Oh, well and good, then,” Maddyn said at last. “No one was killed, and so that’s an end to it. Cheer up, Branno. I can’t lie and say that I’d never have done such if I’d been you.”
Everyone smirked and nodded agreement. Looking a bit less miserable, Branoic grabbed a slab of bread and busied himself