Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [168]
“Brin Mawrvelin!” Rhodry gasped.
“It is, Silver Dagger.” He was panting for breath himself. “I’m Matyc’s brother.”
Rhodry shrilled with laughter that he could no more have controlled than he could have stopped the sun in its course, but it seemed that Lord Tren heard it as mockery. With a bark of rage, he spurred the gray straight forward. As the roan danced to the side and past, Rhodry twisted and struck at his shield arm from behind the shield. Tren swore and let the shield dangle, then fall. He leaned and swung the gray round with his weight and his knees just as Rhodry struck again. This cut missed, and once more they faced other, Tren dead pale and swaying. His arm hung useless at a wrong angle.
With a dangerous lean, Rhodry ducked under Tren’s weak stab and slapped the sword blade hard across the lord’s mouth. He reeled back in the saddle. On the backhand, Rhodry smacked the gray hard on the neck. When the horse reared, Tren tumbled off into the mud of the battlefield. Chortling under his breath, Rhodry dismounted and ran to him. In the slippery welter, Tren was trying to get up. He leaned on the broken arm, cried out, choked on the blood from his broken mouth, and fell back again. Rhodry wrapped both hands round his sword hilt and raised it high.
“Yraen!” he cried out, then plunged the point into Tren’s neck.
Laughter overwhelmed him. He pulled the sword free and stood beside the corpse, howling and swaying, until he saw, far above him, a raven, far too large to be an ordinary bird.
“Come down!” Rhodry shrieked. “Come down, my lady raven! Come down, and we’ll have a fight of it on my ground.”
With a long cry, she flew off, heading north into the hills. Rhodry felt the berserker fit leave him. For a moment, he stood panting for breath; then he wept in a brief scatter of tears. Without another glance at Tren’s body, he mounted the roan and rode off, back to a dying battle, still screaming behind him.
When the battle began that morning, and all the men in the dun had gone down to the gates to wait for their chance to sally, Lady Labanna gathered all the women round her in the great hall, where they would wait, or so she announced, for the outcome. For some while, Carra dutifully sat in a chair near the lady’s own and waited with Lightning lying at her feet. Every servant and wounded man in the dun eventually drifted in to join them; as the hall filled up, it grew hot and the air heavy with the smell of the barely washed. News came only rarely, when one of the men up on the dun wall thought to climb down and relay to the lady what little he could see. Standing in the doorway, Jahdo did report the dragon’s flight over the dun, and briefly, everyone cheered. More waiting, no news; Carra decided to use her condition to her advantage.
“My lady, I feel so faint,” she whispered. “May I go to my chamber and lie down?”
“Certainly, child! Ocradda, will you help Her Highness?”
Up in her chamber, Carra listened at the door until she could be sure that Ocradda had gone back downstairs, then crept out and hurried up to the roof. Passing through the landing where she’d seen Jill lying dead was no easy task, but remembering that Jill would have wanted her to be strong kept her climbing. Panting for breath and slightly dizzy from the climb, she hauled herself onto the roof among the heaped stones and bundled arrows, while Lightning whined below at the foot of the ladder he couldn’t climb.
“I’ll be right down. I daren’t stay here long.”
Carra walked to the southern edge of the dun and looked out, peering through the smokey air, only to find that she could see little and interpret less. Far below, like pieces on the board of some mad game, clots of