Daggerspell - Katharine Kerr [89]
Lovyan wondered if he were saying only what she wanted to hear. With a sigh, she sat down across from him and let him squirm for a while. All told, Lovyan had given birth to four sons. The eldest, Rhys, now ruled as gwerbret in Aberwyn; the second had died in infancy; the third had grown to manhood only to be killed in a war. Rhodry was her youngest. Some time before his birth, her husband had taken a young mistress and spent so little time in Lovyan’s bed that Rhodry was her last.
The mistress had produced a pair of bastards, and it had fallen to Lovyan to make provision for the girls. Now Rhodry was grown into a man much like Gwerbret Tingyr.
“It’s time you married,” Lovyan said at last. “You can at least provide a few legitimate heirs for the tierynrhyn since you’re so fond of this sport.”
Rhodry winced.
“I wonder if the Goddess keeps cursing your betrothals because she knows what kind of man you are,” Lovyan went on. “Three times now I’ve tried to marry you off, and three times she’s taken a hand to spare the poor lass.”
“Mother, by all the ice in all the hells! I’m sorry, truly I am! I know you need the coin I’ve just made you spend, and I know you need the town’s goodwill, and truly, my heart aches for poor Olwen, too.”
“You might have thought of all that before you lifted her dresses.”
“Mother!”
“I don’t want to hear of this happening again. Save that winning smile of yours for the lasses who stand to make silver out of it in more usual ways.”
Rhodry flung himself out of his chair and ran, slamming the door so hard behind him that the swords on the wall rattled. Lovyan allowed herself a small smile of revenge.
For the rest of the day, Rhodry avoided her, which was easy to do in a dun the size of Cannobaen. Out on what might as well have been the western border of Eldidd, since there was nothing much beyond it, the dun stood on the twisted headland of its name at the top of a sheer cliff overlooking the Southern Sea. Stone walls enclosed a crowded ward of about two acres. In the middle rose a four-story broch surrounded by storage sheds and a kitchen hut. Off to the seaward side stood the Cannobaen light, a hundred-foot tower, wound with a staircase, where on clear nights the lightkeeper and his sons kept an enormous fire burning under a stone canopy or rang the bronze bell when it was foggy.
Beyond the dun, the empty grasslands ran for miles in either direction along the cliff tops, while inland were the farms of Lovyan’s personal demesne. It was a lonely place, suitable for retiring from worldly pursuits—if only Lovyan had been allowed to go into retirement. She’d been given Cannobaen as a dower gift from the Maelwaedds upon her marriage, and when her husband died, she’d gone there to live far from the temptation to meddle in the new gwerbret’s affairs. Just this last year, however, her only brother and his son had both been killed in an honor war. Since there was no other heir, their father’s property had come to Lovyan under that twist in the laws designed to keep land holdings in a clan even if a woman had to inherit them. Lovyan may have married into the Maelwaedds, but by blood she was still one of the Clw Coc, the clan of the Red Lion, which had held a vast demesne in western Eldidd for over a hundred years.
Blood and clan, children, and their children—they ruled every aspect of a noblewoman’s life, and it was about such things that Lovyan was musing for the rest of that dripping-cold summer’s day at Cannobaen. She profoundly hoped that Rhodry’s bastard would turn out to be a lass, not a troublesome son, and as pretty as her father was handsome. If she were, then Lovyan could ultimately arrange a marriage between her and one of her many land-poor relations. The Red Lion had done Lovyan a great favor when she inherited the tierynrhyn by adopting Rhodry into the clan, thus making it possible for him to inherit upon her death, rather than having the land revert to the gwerbret for