Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [110]
“Dar’s sent me his own bow,” he said. “Now that’s an honor I never thought to have.”
“Well, it seems the least he can do. It’s his lady you’re risking your life for.”
“Jill, ye gods! You have a way pf taking the bloom off a fine gesture, I must say.”
“It comes from having been born a silver dagger’s bastard.”
“Well, no doubt. Now that I’ve spent many a long year at the bottom of things, as I’d suppose you’d call it, I begin to see your point. But still.” He ran a loving hand along the bow’s shaft. “I appreciate this stick of wood. Tell my prince that I’m honored.”
“I will, then.”
They hesitated, looking at each other in the bizarrely colored light.
“This is farewell, isn’t it?” Rhodry said. “Think we’ll ever see each other again?”
“I hope so. If we don’t, somewhat will have gone badly wrong for one or the other of us.”
“That’s what I fear, sure enough. Ah, well, if my lady Death snatches me away from you, it’ll only be retribution for the way the dweomer took you from me, all those years ago.
“Rhodry, I had to go.”
“Do you want to know a strange thing? I see that now. Now. All these years later.” He smiled briefly. “Do young men ever see the truth of their women’s lives? I doubt it, I doubt if they can, I doubt if we could and go on being the men our fathers and our king expect us to be, truly. But now, well, I don’t remember how many years I’ve lived, but it’s getting close to four score, isn’t it? Must be by now, if not more. And I do see things a bit more clearly.” He turned away and busied himself with wrapping the bow back up. “I just wanted you to know that. I don’t know why.”
“My thanks. It means a great deal to me, a very great deal indeed. It’s ached my heart, all these years, knowing you’d never forgiven me for riding away with Nevyn.”
He shrugged and tucked the last corner of cloth round the quiver, as lovingly as a mother swaddling her baby.
“One last thing,” he said. “Do you remember when you came to fetch me from Aberwyn?”
“I do.”
“I’d hoped that we could ride together again.”
“I knew it.”
“You were cold enough to me, cold as a winter storm.”
“I had to be, you dolt!”
“Your Wyrd again?”
“Not mine; yours. You no more belong to me than I do to you, but I knew that you’d never listen to simple reason. You had to find a new road, Rhodry. I honestly thought you could live in peace out on the grasslands, find a new love, no doubt, and a new life. I never dreamt that the dweomer had its claws in you so deep.”
He spun round, startled.
“So.” He managed a grin. “You dweomermasters don’t know everything there is to know, do you?”
“Of course not. If we did, you and I and Carra and everyone else wouldn’t be in this wretched mess now.”
He laughed his berserker’s howl, and hearing him sound so daft ached her heart. As if he’d picked up her change of mood he choked the laugh off. For a moment they looked at each other in a silence that rang loud.
“But, Jill,” he said at last, “if the worst happens, remember how I loved you, will you?”
“Always, Rhodry. And remember that before my Wyrd tore me away, I loved you.”
She turned on her heel and hurried out pf the chamber, headed for the door and fast, because for the first time in some forty years, she was afraid that she would weep. As she walked back to the dun, she was remembering the hideous omen of a few days past, when she’d seen lib Wyrd devour him. No one, not dweomermaster nor king nor priest, can turn a man’s Wyrd aside, but Jill vowed that night that if ever she could undo Rhodry’s fate after it had come upon him, she would risk whatever needed risking to do so.
Just at dawn Yraen woke up in the barracks to gray light, falling in squares through unshuttered windows. For