Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [72]
“Oh, ye gods! Well, that’s a pack of noble-born warriors for you.”
“Don’t you like riders and battles and stuff?”
“Not truly, but I suppose you do. Lads usually do.”
“I don’t.” Aderyn wrinkled up his nose. “I’ll never be a rider when I grow up. It’s just being cattle thieves. I don’t care what anyone says.”
In surprise Nevyn considered the lad. Aderyn twisted one foot behind the other, balanced precariously, and looked wide-eyed around the hut.
“Well, here,” Nevyn said. “Would you like to show me where this farm is and help pick herbs? We’ll have to go tell your mother where we’re going first.”
“Oh, I would. There’s never anything to do up in the fort. Let’s go ask Mam.”
Nevyn got a cloth sack, some clean rags to wrap herbs in, and his small silver sickle. With Aderyn chattering all the way, they went up to the dun. As soon as they came through the gates, Cadda ran over and grabbed Aderyn’s arm.
“Where have you been?” Cadda said. “I’ve been worried sick.”
“I just went down to see the herbman. Where’s Mam? I’ve got to ask her if I can go for a walk.”
“She’s waiting upon Lady Cabrylla, but your Da’s in the great hall.” Cadda glanced at Nevyn. “Shall I tell our lord’s lady that you’re in the village, sir? I’ll wager she’d like a look at your herbs.”
“I’d be most grateful if you would.” Nevyn made her a bow. “Tell her I have perfumes and hair rinses and suchlike as well as medicine.”
Although Cadda’s eyes lit up at the thought, Aderyn grabbed Nevyn’s shirt and dragged him firmly off to the great hall, where Gweran the bard was drinking at Lord Maroic’s table. A solid-looking man in his thirties, with blond hair and a long blond mustache, Gweran rose to greet his son and this stranger. Nevyn got his second shock in as many days—Blaen! All at once Nevyn wondered about Aderyn’s mother. Oh, ye gods! he thought. Brangwen can’t be married to another man! But even as he thought it, he had the uneasy feeling that the Lords of Wyrd were laughing at him.
While Aderyn chattered out his request, Gweran listened with a pleasant smile.
“Very well,” he said. “If it’s truly all right with you, good sir.”
“It is. Your son’s remarkably bright, good bard. I always enjoy teaching someone a bit about herbs.”
After an afternoon gathering yellow dock, feverfew, and mallow in the abandoned fields, Nevyn took Aderyn back to the dun, then returned to his hut. He trimmed up the plants, cut off the useless parts, and laid the leaves and stalks out carefully on clean cloth to begin drying. As he worked, his mind ran restlessly of its own accord: Blaen and Ysolla here together. He had never expected to see the other actors in his and Brangwen’s tragedy again. It was ominous, troubling, making him wonder if his burden of Wyrd was heavier than he’d ever dreamt. So many lives were ruined along with hers, he thought, and all because of me and Gerraent. He decided that tomorrow he’d take his wares up to the dun and get a look at this bard’s woman. Until then, he put the matter firmly out of his mind. He had other work to do.
Just at sunset, Nevyn left the farm and went down to the riverbank, where he found an ash tree and sat down under its spreading branches to watch the river. A sluggish, sullen flow, bloody tinged in the last of the sunset, the river was weak even on the inner planes. Using the second sight, Nevyn could see how its raw elemental force ran tangled. Permeating, interpenetrating, and surrounding the world men call real are other worlds, or states of being, or even forces, if you would call them that. The dweomer calls them planes, knows their dwellers, studies their forces, and has ways to see them and to know that they’re as real as the only world most people can see. That the human mind is the gate between the planes is a safe secret to tell, because it takes years of study and work before the gate will open, years that impatient fools won’t spend to learn secrets they shouldn’t have.
One of these planes, the etheric, is the root of the elementals (what men call