The Black Raven - Katharine Kerr [46]
At the edge of the crowd stood Rhodry, his hands dangling easily by his sides. The sooty torches cast more shadow than light, but she could see him smiling with a tight twist of his mouth. When a torch flared and washed his face with light, the look in his eyes turned her cold; they were as blank and hard as a hawk’s. All at once he stepped forward; it seemed the argument between Prince Daralanteriel and the gwerbret’s captain was heating up. Someone in the crowd yelled, “filthy thieves, all of you—thieves and silver daggers.”
Rhodry moved, struck, had the fellow by the neck with both hands.
“Rhodry!” Dallandra screamed. “Don’t!”
Rhodry threw his prey to the ground and twisted free. Hands reached down and hauled the fellow to his feet; he was choking and shaking but mostly unharmed. Rhodry turned toward her and laughed in a high-pitched shriek of merriment.
“My thanks!” he called out. “I would have killed him if it weren’t for you.”
“So I thought,” Dallandra muttered, but too quietly for him to hear. “You berserk bastard.”
The riders all turned to look at her, and she saw most of them holding up crossed fingers in the gesture of warding against witchcraft. Some stepped backwards into shadows, then turned and ran; others slipped away more slowly, but they got themselves gone nonetheless until only Rhodry and Draudd, one of the gwerbret’s sworn men, stood alone in the smoke-stained torchlight.
“I’m blasted glad you came along.” Draudd bowed to Dallandra. “Ye gods, the little slut’s not worth a man’s life!”
“That blonde lass—she was the cause of this, then?” Dallandra asked.
“She was,” Draudd said. “Keeping two hearths warm at once, if you take my meaning, like.”
“Will there be more trouble over this?” Dallandra said to Draudd.
“Not from any of us. Since it never came to drawn steel, the gwerbret doesn’t have to know. Well, unless he heard the scuffle?”
When Dallandra went to the door of the great hall and looked in, she found the gwerbret’s chair safely empty. Jahdo came running and told her that His Grace had gone early to bed.
“His leg’s bothering him,” the boy said. “The twisted one.”
“No doubt, in this cold and damp,” Dallandra said. “Well, I’ll brew him up some poultices in the morning.”
For a moment she stood watching the men filing back into the hall. When she turned back, Rhodry had gone.
She found him up in their tower room, feeding twigs by candlelight into the charcoal brazier. She shut the door, but he ignored her and bent down to blow upon the coals. Finally, the tinder caught; he added a few thin twigs of charcoal, then some bigger chunks.
“I think that’ll take,” he said.
“Looks like it, truly.”
In the candlelight and faint glow from the brazier, his face was unreadable. With an irritable snarl, Dallandra called on the Wildfolk of Aethyr. A silver ball of light appeared, hovering over the table. Rhodry looked up. His eyes seemed huge, his dark brows straight above them, but his soft mouth hung slack; he could have been thinking murder or nothing at all.
“Would you really have killed that fellow?” she said.
“Most likely.” With a shrug he turned away from the brazier and wiped his hands on his brigga. “I’ve never been a patient man. And it’s been too long since I sent my Lady Death a courting-gift. She’s even less patient than I am.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go on like that about your Lady Death. It’s such a daft fancy!”
“Is it? Why?” All at once he was grinning, his eyes narrow with delight. “Haven’t I served her faithfully all these years? You’d think a true lover would have had his reward by now, wouldn’t you?”
She could only stare at him. Ye gods! she thought. Is this the evil Wyrd that Jill saw? That he’d go mad—if it is madness? His smile faded.
“What is this?” Dallandra said suddenly. “Are you saying you want to die?”
“Who wouldn’t, after the life I’ve led?” Rhodry turned his back on her and walked a few steps away.
When she walked over and laid her hands on his shoulders, she could feel