Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [180]
“Don’t you want to know why I called you home?”
“Well, I assumed you wanted to take me to task for being a wastrel, scoundrel, lazy sot, or perchance total fool.”
“Nothing of the sort. I’ve got important news. This spring I discovered that you have a half brother I didn’t even know existed. His mother is a Deverry woman like yours, and he’s ended up a silver dagger.”
“Rhodry.”
“That’s his name, sure enough. How do you know?”
“Ah, by the Dark Sun herself, I met him, and just this spring. I kept staring at him and wondering why I thought I knew him. Here, Da, he looks a cursed lot like you.”
“So I’ve been told. Do you remember that silver ring, the one with the roses on it? It’s for him. Now, look, I can’t go riding around the kingdom, so when spring comes, will you take it to him?”
“Of course. After all, since I’ve met him, I can scry him out easily enough.” Suddenly he shuddered.
“It looks to me as if you’ve taken a chill. I’ll put more wood on the fire.”
“It’s not that. The dweomer-cold took me.”
Devaberiel felt like shuddering himself. Realizing that his son was one of those persons that the elves call “spirit friends” always creeped his flesh. He busied himself with finding the leather pouch and tossing it to Ebañy, who shook the ring out into his palm.
“It’s a strange trinket, this.” Ebañy slipped into Deverrian when he spoke. “I remember when you showed it to me, all those years ago. I wanted it so badly for some reason, and yet I knew it wasn’t mine.”
“Do you still covet it?”
“I don’t.” He closed his fingers over the ring and stared into the fire. “I see Rhodry. He’s up in the north somewhere, because he’s riding through snowdrifts. The ring quivers in my hand when I watch, so it’s his, true enough. Oh, it longs for him, it does, but I think me that in the end it might bring his death.”
“What? By the barbarian gods, maybe I should just chuck the thing into a river.”
“It’d only find a man to fish it out again.” Ebañy’s voice was soft, half-drunken. “And he’ll not die, our Rhodry, till his Wyrd comes upon him, and what man can turn that aside? Not even his own father, and you know it well.”
Yet Devaberiel felt heartsick, that his son saw some grave thing come toward them from the future.
It was a long time before the Old One fully pieced together the story of the summer’s debacle in Deverry. When the appointed time for Alastyr and the Hawks to return came and went, he knew that something had gone seriously wrong and sent spies off to the kingdom. Before they could return, however, he received alarming news from more or dinary sources. Over in Deverry the king’s wardens and the gwerbret of Cerrmor’s men swept in and arrested several of their most important agents in the opium trade. Fortunately, Anghariad had been poisoned before she could babble secrets under torture, and Gwenca knew little of dark dweomer besides superstitious rambling that the gwerbret disbelieved. Still, the arrests were a severe blow to the opium trade, which provided the Dark Brotherhood with a significant part of its income.
Yet the worst news of all arrived with the shaken spies. As the Old One had long believed, Alastyr and his apprentices were dead, and the books of power in Nevyn’s hands. The Old One longed to know what Sarcyn had told the old man before his public hanging; he simply couldn’t believe that Nevyn would waste a chance to torture every possible scrap of information out of the apprentice. The thing, however, that made him rage and swear for long hours was that Nevyn had pulled a final trick on them. When in his gratitude at having the Great Stone returned, the king had offered the dweomerman a boon, Nevyn had asked for a court appointment for his “nephew” Madoc, the Master of Fire and a man of considerable power. With him there on guard, the dark dweomer would never be able to meddle directly at court again.
For several days the Old One shut himself up in his study and poured over the astrological data and the written records of his meditations. Somewhere