Darkspell - Katharine Kerr [57]
Eventually he made a polite escape and returned to his chamber. He could never bring her to the dweomer now, because studying magic demands the sanest of all possible minds. Those who are the least bit unbalanced when they begin dweomer-study soon find themselves torn apart by the powers and forces they invoke. In this life, he knew, she would never have her true Wyrd. As he paced around his chamber, Nevyn suddenly began to tremble. He sank into a chair and wondered if he was ill until he realized that he was weeping.
The summer rains had turned the dun of the Wolf clan into a pool of muck. The gutted roofless broch rose in the middle of black mud, ashes, and charred timbers, all cracking on the cobbles, clogging the well, and stinking with the sickly-sweet stench of burning and rot. Here and there in the shade of the walls molds and mildews lay clammy, like diseased snow. Gweniver and Gwetmar sat on horseback in the opening that had once been the gate and looked it over.
“Well,” Gweniver said, “you’re a great lord now, sure enough.”
“Will Your Holiness partake of the hospitality of my splendid hall?” He made her a mock bow. “We might as well ride on and take a look at the village.”
“Truly. You won’t have time to rebuild Dun Blaedd before winter.”
They rode back downhill to the waiting army. Besides their own warband, about seventy men in all, they had two hundred of the King’s Men, led by Dannyn. Glyn’s generosity extended to a long baggage train of supplies and a contingent of skilled craftsmen to fortify whatever buildings they found still standing. As they rode across the Wolfs lands, Gweniver began to wonder if the demesne could be saved, because the bondsmen who worked the fields had all fled. Twice they passed the site of one of their villages to find the rough huts burned, as if the bondfolk had decided to show their contempt for their former masters as they escaped. The village, however, which had been held by freemen, still stood, even though the inhabitants were gone, driven in their case by fear of the Boar, not the Wolf. The weeds grew thick and green around the village well and down the paths. Under the apple trees the un-gathered fruit lay rotting like gouts of blood. The houses seemed to be crouching together, the shuttered windows sad eyes reproaching those who’d deserted them.
“I’ll be a fine lord indeed with no folk to rule,” Gwetmar remarked with a false-ringing jest in his voice.
“The villagers will come back in time. Send messengers to the south and east, where they have kin. As for your own lands, my friend, I think me you’ll have to be content with rents from free men—if you can find some who want to settle here.”
Gwetmar unceremoniously broke the padlock on the blacksmith’s house and claimed it as his own, simply because it was the biggest. With no time to build a proper stone wall, the master mason and the master carpenter decided on an earthwork and ditch to ring an inner palisade of logs. While the slow work got under way, the army rode constant small patrols along the border between the Boar and the Wolf lands. Yet it was a fortnight before the trouble came. Gweniver was leading a squad through deserted meadows when she saw, far down the road, a cloud of dust announcing that men rode toward them. She sent a messenger back to Dannyn and the main body of the army, then drew up her warband in battle order across the road.
Slowly the dust resolved itself into ten riders, coming at an easy jog. When they saw the squad, they halted and formed