Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [65]
“What’s so wrong?” he said. “It’s just me.”
Jill let her hands fall.
“I’ve too much dweomer spinning round and round in my mind these days, Rhoddo. Forgive me—you just startled me, that’s all.”
He smiled, rocking a little on the balls of his feet, glancing round, as wary as a wild animal even in his temporary lord’s hall. For a moment she could remember what it had been like to love him, all those many years ago.
“Forgive me,” she said again. “My heart aches, just from sheer weariness. I’ll need to talk with you, but there’s no hurry.”
“You’re not ill again, are you?” His smile turned to alarm, and he reached out an automatic hand.
“Not in the least.”
She dodged round him and made her escape, hurrying out to the fresher air of the ward, before she made a horrible mistake and told him what she’d seen. Some omens were best left unread. Yet all afternoon she found herself thinking of Rhodry, just in odd moments as she went about her magical work in the tower. All men die, she reminded herself. He’s courted death for years, whether he was a silver dagger or a warlord in Aberwyn, and now he’s pressing his suit night and day, him with his strange talk of his lady Death and the love he bears her. He’s growing old. We both are. That’s no doubt all the omen meant.
As twilight began to deepen over the dun, she found it impossible to stay in her chamber alone, as she usually did. She went Mown, slipped into the great hall, and got a seat back in the curve of the wall where none would notice her. That evening Meer performed, the first time anyone in Deverry had ever heard a Gel da’Thae bard. In the dancing light and shadow from torch and candle-lantern, Meer stood by the dragon hearth to sing. For the occasion he had put on a leather tunic that was painted in strange designs— characters from the elven syllabary, but oddly distorted and forming no words, set round with bands of flowers and looping vines that had obviously been copied from some elven source. He’d washed and redone his huge mane of hair, too, and all the little charms and amulets braided into it caught the light and glinted when he moved. As he sang he kept time on a small drum, slapping it with one huge hand, while his new friend the bard struck chords on the harp behind him.
Strange though the music was, every person in the hall sat rapt, aware that this was a momentous event they were witnessing. As Jill listened to the music rise and fall, wail and tremble, she came close to weeping, just from feeling the eternal sadness of the life that all sentient beings, whether Horsekin or elf or human, must share upon this earth.
3
PUELLA
A fortunate figure, especially when it disposes itself into the House of Gold and the House of Steel, and yet, such are all things female that at times it does undermine the figures round it and turn them into twisted ways. If it fall into the House of Lead a great heaviness shall wear it down, and sickness prevail over the strong.
The Omenbook of Gwarn, Loremaster
THE WOMEN’S HALL OCCUPIED the entire second floor of the main broch, except for the small, closed-off landing round the spiral staircase. In the company of the gwerbret’s wife, Labanna, and her two serving women, Princess Carramaena spent much of her time in this ample chamber during the day, while her husband was off with the men, hunting and tending to other important affairs. Since before her marriage Carra had been only the