Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [77]
“I said leave the lad alone,” Nevyn whispered.
Tanyc nodded in terrified agreement. When Nevyn released him, he turned and ran for the gates of the dun.
“Cadda, take Addo back to his mother,” Nevyn said. “I’m going back to the farm.”
So all the actors in their grim little farce were there, even Gerraent, face to face again in a way that Nevyn had never foreseen. He realized that he’d fallen into a last vestige of royal pride, which values only the prince and princess and sees those around them only as supernumeraries. For the next few days, Nevyn stayed away from the dun and his old enemy, but in the end, Lyssa came to him, turning up at the farm one day with the plausible excuse that she’d come to fetch Aderyn home. Nevyn sent the boy out on an errand and offered Lyssa the only chair he had, a wobbly three-legged stool. She perched on it and looked idly around at the hanging bunches of drying herbs.
“The smell in here is so lovely. It’s kind of you, sir, to be so patient with my Addo. You should hear him chatter about it at dinner—today we learned about dog’s tooth herb, today we dried the comfrey roots. His father hardly knows what to think.”
“Does it vex Gweran? Most men want their sons to show an interest in their own calling.”
“Oh, it doesn’t, because my man is the best-hearted man in the world. I think he’s glad to see Aderyn taking such an interest in something. He’s been a strange child from the moment he was born.”
Nevyn smiled, quite sure of that.
“I’m surprised you don’t have more children. You seem to love your lads so much.”
“Well, I hope and pray to have more soon.” Lyssa looked away, her eyes dark. “I had a daughter, you see, between the two lads, but we lost her to a fever.”
“I’m truly sorry. That’s a hard thing for a woman to bear.”
“It was.” Her voice went flat from remembered grief. “Well, doubtless it was my Wyrd, and my poor little Danigga’s, too.”
Nevyn felt a cold touch as he wondered if indeed it was her Wyrd, since she’d drowned a child with her on that terrible night. So she had. The dweomer-cold ran down his back as he realized who that child might have been if it had lived to be raised with himself and Rhegor: a great master of dweomer indeed. Lyssa smiled, looking out the door.
“Here comes our Aderyn now,” she said.
Although she was only speaking casually, “our” Aderyn meaning only the “Aderyn we both know, not some other Aderyn,” her words turned Nevyn cold to the heart. I swore I’d raise the child as my own, he thought. A vow’s a vow.
That night, Nevyn went down to the ash tree by the riverbank and sat down to watch the slow water run. As it came clear, his Wyrd lay heavy on him. In this life, Brangwen was gone from him; she would have to repay Blaen for the hopeless love of her that had led him to his death, and repay Aderyn, too, for cutting short his previous chance at life. Nevyn owed Blaen and Aderyn a debt as well, since his scheming had left Brangwen there with her brother’s lust. Only once those debts had been repaid could he take her away for the dweomer. Yet Aderyn would be under his care for the next twenty years, because the dweomer is a slow craft to learn. In twenty years, Nevyn was going to be over ninety. And what if he had to wait for her to be reborn again? He would be well over a hundred, an unthinkable age, so old and dry that he would be helpless in a chair, like a thin stick or drooling babe, his body too old for the soul it carried, his mind a prisoner in a decaying lump of flesh. At that moment Nevyn panicked, shaking cold and sick, no longer a master of the dweomer but an ordinary man, just as when a warrior vows to die in battle, but as the horns blow the charge, he sees Death riding for him and weeps, sick of his vow when retreat is impossible.
Around him a tremor of night wind picked up cool, rustling the canopy of branches above him. Nevyn rested his face in his hands and called on his trained