Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [17]
“I told you to stay away,” he said.
“I just forgot. I couldn’t think.”
“I suppose not. What’s that on your mouth? Did you throw up?”
Jill wiped her face on her sleeve. He was still her da, her handsome, wonderful da, but she had just seen him kill a man. When he laid his hand on her shoulder, she flinched.
“I’m not going to slap you,” Cullyn said, misunderstanding. “I threw up myself the first time I saw a man killed. Ah, by the hells, another man dead over pig food! I hope our driveling fool ends this here.”
“Ynydd, you mean?” Abryn said.
“Him, too.”
The warband took the dead man’s body back to the dun for the tieryn to send to Ynydd in honorable return. Since the dead man’s horse had fled in the rout, Abryn had to give up his pony and ride behind Cullyn. When the riders tied the corpse to the saddle, Jill made herself look at it, flopping like her rag doll, not a man any more at all. She felt sicker than before. When they reached the dun, Glyn and the servants ran out to meet them. In the confusion, Jill slipped away, going around behind the broch and finding a quiet spot to sit in the shade of the ruined wall. She knew that Abryn would run to his mother, and she envied him bitterly.
She’d been there for some time before Cullyn found her. When he sat down next to her on the ground, she could hardly look at him.
“The herald’s riding out now to take that poor lad home. This corpse should end the thing. The honor of Braedd’s piss-poor warband has been avenged, and Ynydd’s had all the gas scared out of both ends of him.”
Jill looked at Cullyn’s hands, resting on his thighs. Without his heavy gauntlets, they looked like his hands again, the ones that gave her food and combed her hair and patted her on the shoulder. She wondered why she’d thought that they would have changed. He’s killed lots of men, she thought, that’s why he has all that glory.
“Still feel sick?” Cullyn said.
“I don’t. I didn’t think blood would smell like that.”
“Well, it does, and it runs like that, too. Why do you think I didn’t want you riding with us?”
“Did you know someone would get killed?”
“I was hoping I could stop it, but I was ready for it. I always am, because I have to be. I truly did think those lads would break sooner than they did, you see, but there was one young wolf in the pack of rabbits. Poor bastard. That’s what he gets for his honor.”
“Da? Are you sorry for him?”
“I am. I’ll tell you something, my sweet, that no other man in Deverry would admit: I’m sorry for every man I ever killed, somewhere deep in my heart. But it was his Wyrd, and there’s nothing a man can do about his own Wyrd, much less someone else’s. Someday my own Wyrd will take me, and I’ve no doubt it’ll be the same one I’ve brought to many a man. It’s like a bargain with the gods. Every warrior makes it. Do you understand?”
“Sort of. Your life for theirs, you mean?”
“Just that. There’s nothing else a man can do.”
Jill began to feel better. Thinking of it as Wyrd made it seem clean again.
“It’s the only honor left to me, my bargain with my Wyrd,” Cullyn went on. “I told you once, never dishonor yourself. If ever you’re tempted to do the slightest bit of a dishonorable thing, you remember your father, and what one dishonor brought him—the long road and shame in the eyes of every honest man.”
“But wasn’t it your Wyrd to have the dagger?”
“It wasn’t.” Cullyn allowed himself a brief smile. “A man can’t make his Wyrd better, but it’s in his hands to make it worse.”
“Do the gods make a man’s Wyrd?”
“They don’t. Wyrd rules the gods, too. They can’t turn aside a man’s Wyrd no matter how much he prays