Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [120]
His bluntness hit home. Jill looked down and began fiddling with the reins in her hand.
“I know what’s aching your heart,” he went on. “You think that I don’t value your swordcraft. That’s not true. You’re good enough with the blade, but riding into a battle’s a cursed different thing than playing out a mock combat to amuse a lord in his hall.”
“Well, true enough.” Jill looked up with a faint smile. “Da, do you truly think I’m good with a blade?”
“I do.”
The way she smiled in childlike delight wrung his heart. It was at moments like these that Cullyn felt an ugly knowledge pressing at the edge of his mind, that maybe he loved his daughter far too well. He grabbed his horse’s reins from her.
“Don’t go getting all puffed up because I said that,” he snapped. “You’ve got a stinking lot more to learn.”
Leading the horse, he strode away to join Rhodry’s warband. Although he knew how badly he’d hurt her, he refused to look back.
When the army headed south to meet the baggage train, Dregydd the merchant left them. Jill went over to say farewell to him, and he shook her hand vigorously for quite a long time.
“My thanks, to you, lass, and to your Da, too. And here’s a bit more than thanks. I know blasted well you two saved my life.”
Dregydd slipped her a small pouch, heavy with coin, then trotted off to get his caravan in order. Rather than giving it to her father, Jill kept the pouch. When this hire was over, they’d need the coin, and Da would only drink half of it away if she let him know that she had it.
When Jill fell back into line at the rear of the army, she found herself next to Nevyn, who greeted her too courteously for her to be able to just move away from him, as she rather wanted to do at first. All the dweomer around her was frightening in itself; that she seemed to understand some of instinctively was terrifying. Yet much to her surprise, she found Nevyn congenial, with his candid blue eyes and ready smile, dressed like a farmer in a plain shirt and brown brigga instead of the long robes embroidered with peculiar signs and sigils of her fancies.
Since he’d seen even more of the kingdom than she had, they talked of their various travels. As the afternoon wore on, she found herself thinking of him as a long-lost grand-father whom sheer bad luck had kept her from meeting before.
“Tell me somewhat, child,” Nevyn said at one point. “Your father seems an unusually decent man—the way he cared for you and all. Do you know what drove him to take the silver dagger?”
“I don’t, and if I were you, I’d never ask him. But he took me with him because he loved my Mam so much. She died when I was just a little lass, you see, and at the time, I didn’t understand at all. Da just rode in one day and off we went. But I’ve often thought about it since. Da had an awful lot of coin from a noble lord’s ransom. I’ll wager he was planning on settling down with us—getting a farm, maybe, somewhat like that. And there he rides in to find her dead. He was more than half mad that day.”
“So he must have been, the poor lad. Ye gods, that was a cruel jest his Wyrd had on him, and on you and your Mam, too.”
He spoke with a warm, sincere sympathy that took Jill by surprise. Somehow she’d always thought that people like a silver dagger and his bastard would be beneath the notice of a man who’d studied strange magicks. And yet Nevyn was an herbman, too, who tended the poor folk. He made the dweomer seem a human thing, but there was no doubting that it was dweomer nonetheless, and for some reason that she couldn’t put into words, she was terrified by the very thought.
Late in the afternoon the army met the baggage train, a straggling line of wooden carts, servants, and spearmen, just about three miles from the seacoast. Since