A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [49]
Smiling and curtsying, they all withdrew, and he could hear them chattering down the hall on their way to round up a servant to fetch the refreshments. Without waiting to be asked Nevyn sat down next to her and launched into his story, though he did omit telling her about the dismembered baby, just to spare her feelings. As she listened her wide eyes grew even wider, and she became all still attention.
“Will you take this thing and hide it, Your Highness?”
“I will, but I do wish you hadn’t told me what it was. If this casket’s got a secret compartment, you could just have shoved it in and sealed it up.”
“You have to know what you’re guarding, Your Majesty, and besides, never would I leave such an evil thing in someone’s presence without their consent.”
“Well, you’re right, of course. Very well, I shall gush over the casket itself, and be very casual about what I put in it, as if it doesn’t really matter much. And if ever anyone asks me for it, I’ll refuse because to give it away would break poor stunted Otho’s heart.”
“Splendid, Your Highness! The exact right thing to say.”
Yet even as he spoke, he felt a cold line of dread coil round his heart, wondering if he’d just given danger for a gift. Oh, don’t be a dolt, he told himself irritably—the wretched thing can’t have that much power, or you’d know! And sure enough, once it was bound inside the dwarven silver and sealed with his spells, he could no longer sense the slightest trace of evil leaking from either tablet or casket. On the morrow morning he and Otho together presented the casket to the queen, who in a fine show of being ever so surprised and pleased gave the dwarf a kiss, which made him blush and stammer and curse publicly—but from then on, Otho was the queen’s man, heart and soul.
And together at the head of an army, Nevyn and Maryn set out on the long ride that later historians call the Rousing of the River Valley, the summer that would eventually bring lord after lord and warband after warband round to the new king’s side and turn the hope of victory from an impotent dream to a sound gamble. Since he could foresee neither success nor failure that bright morning as they left the towering stone rings of Dun Cerrmor behind, Nevyn could only hope that he’d made the right decisions in more than the matter of the curse-tablet. Although the dweomer and the priesthoods had schemed and plotted and planned for many a long year, the matter was now far beyond their control. With the High King rode not their politicking, but his Wyrd.
The Wmmglaedd copy of the chronicle broke off in the middle of a page. Jill suddenly realized that gray morning light had overwhelmed her candle flame, and that her back was aching and stiff from her long night’s trance. With a grunt of pain she turned from the lectern and found the fire dead in the hearth. Annoying though it was to lose the rest of the story, she didn’t really need it, she supposed, because she could now remember the detail she needed. Otho the dwarf had made the rose ring for the queen to give to Maddyn the bard, years later, just as a token of thanks for some little favor he’d done her. In the closed and cloistered atmosphere of that court, where all the women were as confined and guarded as a treasury, there were those who had chosen to misunderstand the token, just—or so Jill suspected, looking back—to give themselves something to do. Whatever the reason, envy had come of it, and whispering rumor. What came of it she didn’t know, though she could guess that the story had ended badly. In fact, as she thought about it, her ignorance was so complete that she could assume that Branoic had died shortly after the ring was made and given—in some battle, most like.
Those battles were long gone, their stories told by a thousand bards and chroniclers, but their repercussions still echoed, though it was two hundred years and more ago. And what of the other people involved? The