Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [192]
“So! You’d draw on a gwerbret in his own hall, would you?”
Rhodry had the brief thought of killing him, but Lovyan threw herself in between them. The entire great hall was silent, staring. When Rhodry sheathed his sword, the slap of metal into leather seemed to ring to the ceiling.
“Rhys,” Lovyan hissed. “You provoked that!”
“It’s no affair of yours, Mother.” Rhys caught her arm and shoved her aside. “Call your women to you and leave the hall. Go!”
Her head held high, Lovyan turned away just as the shouting broke out on the riders’ side of the hall. Rhodry dodged Rhys and ran for his warband, who were rushing to meet him. Cursing and shoving, Rhys’s men were on their feet and trying to surround the Clw Coc men, but there were only two men between Rhodry and Cullyn. The way the silver dagger looked at those two made them back off, and Rhodry was through to the solid comfort of his twenty-five loyal riders. Cullyn gave him a grim smile.
“Do we make a fight of it, my lord?”
All round them the two hundred men of Rhys’s warband went dead silent, hands on sword hilts as they waited for Rhodry’s answer. Rhodry glanced round and saw that his men were ready, that they were willing to die there with him in one last hopeless fight. All he had to do was say the word, and Rhys’s great hall would run with blood. He could die clean, not hang like a horse thief. He wanted it so badly that it was like a fever, burning him, troubling his mind as slowly his hand drifted to his sword hilt. But some of that blood would belong to Jill’s beloved father, and to men who had no graver fault than the ill luck to be serving the Clw Coc. He wrenched his hand away.
“We don’t. Stand aside and let them take me. Cullyn, serve my mother faithfully, will you?”
“I will, my lord, and I’ll see you again.”
The meaning hung there as clear as a noose—again, before they drag you out and hang you. Rhodry had one last thought of drawing and fighting, but he forced himself to stand still as his men drew back and the gwerbret’s men grabbed him by the arms, hauled him forward, and disarmed him.
Nevyn was eating in the privacy of his chamber when Cullyn burst in to give him the news. Cullyn spoke briefly, quietly, his eyes so bland that Nevyn feared he would murder Rhys if all else failed. As he followed the captain back to Lovyan’s suite, Nevyn was remembering Gweran the bard, who so long ago had played a similar trick himself. I tried to warn him, Nevyn thought, I told him that it would come round on him someday. Only then did Cullyn’s news come real to him, that the man who carried Eldidd’s Wyrd in his hands was going to hang on the morrow morn.
Lovyan’s reception chamber was packed with angry lords, cursing Rhys and his provocations. Lovyan herself half reclined in a chair with Jill and Dannyan hovering behind her. When Nevyn came in, Lovyan looked his way with hopeless, tear-filled eyes. Jill ran to her father and buried her face in his chest.
“If Rhys hangs Rhodry,” Sligyn announced, “he’ll have a rebellion on his hands that will make the Delonderiel run red. I heard what he said to the lad. We all did, eh?”
“Just so,” Peredyr said. “We’d best get the men and ride out tonight, before he traps us here.”
“Hold your tongues!” Nevyn snapped. “Until we have just cause, let us not discuss rebellion, my lords. I intend to speak to the gwerbret myself, and I’m going to do it now.”
They cheered him as if he were the captain and they the warband. When Nevyn left, Cullyn came along with him.
“I’ve ridden outside the laws for so long that I don’t remember them much, but doesn’t a lord’s captain have the right to beg for his lord’s life?”
“He does.” Nevyn was surprised that he hadn’t remembered that himself, but then he realized that he’d been assuming that Cullyn would have been unwilling to