Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [143]
“Oh, by the hells, how do you know about her?”
“Your lady mother made a point of telling me when I was at Cannobaen.”
“Curse her! What—why—”
“She pointed out that was I beautiful, too, and I think me that she knows his lordship very well. I may be a silver dagger, my lord, but there’s only one way I earn my hire.”
Rhodry felt himself blush.
“Oh, ye gods,” he said at last. “You must despise me.”
“I don’t, but I don’t want one of your bastards.”
Rhodry flopped onto his stomach and studied the grass, which had suddenly become profoundly interesting.
“When we ride out,” Jill said, “Nevyn told me to camp with Aderyn, and I’m following his orders.”
“You’ve made your cursed point. Don’t pour vinegar into my wounds, will you?”
Rhodry heard her get up and walk away. For a long time he lay in the grass and wondered at himself, that he would be so close to tears over a lass he barely knew.
Nevyn was walking back to the wagons after tending the wounded when he heard Jill hail him. As he waited for her to catch up, he noticed that all the men in camp looked up when she passed by. Some rose to bow to her; others called out her name like a prayer. They saw her as a dweomer talisman, he realized, and one that at last, after so many terrifying things, they could understand. He also realized that if he did try to keep her out of the battle, as he was sorely tempted to do, Rhodry would have a mutiny on his hands. If only Calonderiel or Jennantar had trained with a sword, he thought bitterly. But he knew that neither of those two archers stood a chance against a warrior lord like Corbyn, for all that a sword in an elven hand would have slashed Loddlean’s prophecy to shreds, and there was no time to send west for an elven swordsman.
“Did you want to speak with me, child?” Nevyn said to Jill when she came up. “Is somewhat wrong with your father?”
“Naught, truly, or well, naught’s changed for the worse. I just wanted a private word with you.”
They strolled past the wagons and out into the meadowland, where there was no one around to overhear. Jill looked badly troubled, and she stood in silence, staring at the ground, for a long time before she finally blurted out what she had to say.
“Do you remember how I knew that Da had been wounded? Well, I saw the whole cursed thing in a vision, and it came on me from nowhere.”
Nevyn caught his breath in surprise; he’d been assuming that she’d just had a sudden intuitive knowledge of his danger.
“Will I keep doing things like that?” she went on, and her voice was shaking. “I don’t want to. I don’t want the dweomer. It’s haunted me all my wretched life, but I never asked for it. It’s all very well for such as you, but I don’t want it.”
“No one can force you to take the dweomer.” Nevyn hated every bitter truth he spoke, but vows forced him to tell them. “You have raw talent, certainly, but if you don’t train it, it’ll simply fade away, much as your legs would wither if you never walked.”
She smiled in an evident relief that wrung his heart, then let the smile fade.
“But what about the Wildfolk? Will I stop seeing them, too?”
“Oh, no doubt. You know, many children can see the Wildfolk, but they lose the talent by the time they’re ten or so. It’s odd that you still can, truly, without having been trained.”
“I don’t want to lose them. They were the only friends I had on the long road.”
Her voice ached with remembered loneliness, and at that moment, she looked as much a lass as a woman, caught on the edge of her childhood.
“Well, Jill, it’s your choice. No one can make it for you, not your da, not me.”
She nodded, scuffing at the grass with the toe of her riding boot, then suddenly turned and raced back to camp. As he watched her go, Nevyn cursed her and his Wyrd both. Sharply he reminded himself that she was just a young lass, overwhelmed by the strangeness of this irruption of dweomer into her life. Although his vows forbade him to argue or plead, he could become her friend, and in time, she would see that the dweomer was in its own way perfectly natural—or he could hope she would.