A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [34]
“Too obvious,” Caradoc said. “We’ll just go on like we were doing, Your Highness, if it’s all the same to you. Seems to have worked splendidly so far.”
“So it has.” Nevyn thought for a moment. “Do you think I should go take a look at our Maddyn?”
“Leave him alone with his grief, my lord. There’s naught any of us can do to heal that wound, much as it aches my heart. Ah, by the hells, he knew Aethan these twenty years at least, more maybe, ever since he was a young cub and fresh to a warband.”
“That’s a hard kind of friend to lose, then, and you’re right. I’ll leave him be.”
For a few minutes they sat there silently, looking into the flames, which swarmed with salamanders—though of course, only Nevyn could see them. Now that he’d rolled his dice in plain sight, he saw no reason to try to lie about his score, and Wildfolk wandered all over the camp, peering at every man and into every barge. Later, after the camp was asleep, he used the dying fire to contact the priests in Cerrmor. They needed to know that the one true king was only some three days ride away and that his enemies had tried to slay him upon the road.
2.
The year 843, We discovered that Bellyra, the eldest daughter of Glyn the Second, King in Cerrmor, wad born upon the night of Samaen. The High Priest declared it an omen. Just as she wad born on the night that lies between two worlds, and thus partook of the nature of both, so she was destined to be the mother of two kingdoms. Yet some within the temple grumbled and said that no good thing could come from such a birth that bridged the worlds of the living and of the dead, because she would belong to the Otherlands and only be a real woman on Samaen itself. She was, or do these impious traitors said, the lass who wasn’t there….
The Holy Chronicles of Lughcarn
In the very heart of Dun Cerrmor, at the center of all the earthworks and the rings of stone walls and the vast looming circles of joined brochs and towers, lay a garden. Although it was only about thirty yards across, it sported a tiny stream with an equally tiny bridge, a rolling stretch of lawn, some rosebushes, and an ancient willow tree, all gnarled and drooping, that, or so they said, was planted by the ancient sorcerer who once had served King Glyn the First, back at the very beginning of the civil wars. By hiking up her dresses and watching where she put her feet, Bellyra could climb a good way up into this tree and settle into a comfortable fork where the main trunk provided a backrest. In the spring and summer, when the leaves were draped down like the fringe on a Bardek shawl, no one could see her there, and she would often sit for hours, watching the sun glint on the stream and thinking about the history of Dun Cerrmor and her clan, and indeed, at times, about that legendary sorcerer himself.
Some years before she’d found a dusty old codex in a storage room up at the top of a tower. Since her father had insisted that all his children be taught letters, she’d been able to puzzle out the eccentric script and discover that her new treasure was a history of Dun Cerrmor, starting when it was built—some ninety years before the war—and proceeding, year by year, down to 822, when, much to her annoyance, the history broke off in midpage, indeed in midsentence. Over the past few years she’d used the old book as a guide to explore every room in every tower that she was allowed into and, by using a bit of cunning, most of the ones that she wasn’t. With a stolen bottle of ink and reed pens that she made herself, she’d even continued the history, until almost all of the blank pages were full of scraps of information, gleaned from the scribes and the chamberlain, about the more recent additions and remodelings.
No one had ever noticed her poking around. For most of her life, no one had paid much attention to her at all, other than to make sure she was fed, clothed, and put to bed whenever someone remembered that it was growing late. Even her lessons, in reading, singing, needlework, and riding,