The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [52]
“By the feet and feathers of the holy birds! Can it truly be Nevyn?”
“It is, at that. Do you remember me? Why, it must have been twenty years ago that I was here.”
“It was, but you made quite an impression on me. It’s a marvel to see you looking so hale. You must be the best testimonial for your herbs that ever a man could have, or is it the dweomer that keeps you so fit?”
“The dweomer, truly, in its own way. It gladdens my heart to see you, too.”
Pedraddyn ushered him into a spare stone room that held one table, one bench, a narrow cot, and a vast set of shelves, stacked with codices and scrolls in leather cases. In the pink sandstone fireplace a peat fire smoldered to take off the sea chill. When the high priest clapped his hands, a servant came in the back door. He was a man in his thirties, dark-haired, and he had the worst scar on his face that Nevyn had ever seen, thick knots and welts of shiny scar tissue that ran through his left cheek and clotted at the corner of a mouth twisted in a perpetual parody of a smile.
“Davyn, get our guest and me some spiced milk. Then you can do what you’d like until dinner.”
With a silent nod he left by the same door.
“He can’t speak clearly,” Pedraddyn said to Nevyn. “He was an Eldidd sailor once. We found him washed up on our beach and bleeding half to death from those wounds. That was about six years ago now. He begged to stay here with us, and I can’t say I blamed him for wanting out of the wars. A silent man makes a good servant for a priest.”
After Davyn brought the milk, priest and sorcerer sat down together by the fire. Nevyn had a sip of the sweet milk and wished that the priests of Wmm weren’t forbidden to drink ale and mead.
“With your skill in dweomer, I’m surprised you’d come to us for an oracle.”
“The oracle I need concerns the entire land of Deverry and Eldidd, not merely my own doings, Your Holiness. I also came to ask your aid in a certain peculiar matter. Tell me, does it ache your heart to see the wars raging and no end in sight?”
“Do you truly need to ask? It would ache the heart of any sane man.”
“Just so. We who serve the dweomer of light have joined together, and we have a plan to end the wars, but we can’t do it without the help of those who serve the gods. I’ve come to beg you to help put the one true king upon his throne.”
Pedraddyn’s eyes widened like a child’s.
“Who is he?” he whispered.
“I don’t know yet, but you have every important genealogy and noble bloodline stored away in your records. Once Great Wmm gives us an omen, surely we can interpret it with the help of the archives.”
“I see. And once you know his name?”
“Then the dweomer will put him on his throne. Let me tell you my scheme.”
Pedraddyn listened quietly at first, then flung himself out of his chair and began pacing back and forth in sheer excitement.
“It could work!” the priest burst out. “With the help of the gods, and the dweomer behind it, we could do it. The cost, though—by my most holy lord, a good many men will die in such a war.”
“Will it be any more than are dying already? At least this war will put an end to it, or so we can hope. What hope do we have now?”
“None, sure enough. On the morrow we’ll consult the god.”
Dinner that night was served in the broch in a vast round room, smoky from the torches and the peat fire, that served as refectory and kitchen both. The five priests, their three servants, and whatever guests there were all ate together at two long tables with no show of rank. Even the high priest got up to fetch himself more milk and stew if he wanted them. The quiet talk was of books and gardening, the religious exercises of the priests and the slow life of the island. Nevyn envied them. His life would soon revolve around kings and warfare, politics and death—the very things he’d tried to leave behind when he chose the dweomer road, as he remarked