The Bristling Wood - Katharine Kerr [87]
“Let’s lie down together, my love,” he said. “It’s going to be a long while before I sleep in your bed again.”
Once she was lying in his arms, Jill felt the wondering grow to a cold stab, closer and closer to fear. She held him tight and let his kisses drown it away.
Early on the morrow, the warband made a sloppy muster out in the ward. Jill stood in the doorway and watched as the men drew their horses up in a straggling line behind the two lords. The four men at the rear, including Rhodry, led pack horses laden with provisions because Nedd didn’t own an oxcart and couldn’t have spared the farmers to drive it if he had. Just as it seemed the line was finally formed, someone would yell that he’d forgotten something and dash back to the house or the stables. At the very last moment, Nedd discovered that Perryn didn’t own a pot helm. A servant was dispatched to the stables, which apparently did double duty as an armory, to look for one.
Perryn stood rubbing the back of his neck with one hand while Nedd berated him for a woodcutter and worse. When Jill caught Rhodry’s eye, he sighed and glanced heavenward to call the gods to witness Perryn’s eccentricity. She had never seen a noble lord like Perryn, and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry over him. He was tall, but slender and ill proportioned, with narrow shoulders, long arms, and big, heavy hands out of scale to the rest of him. Although his face wasn’t truly ugly, his eyes were enormous, his mouth thin, and his nose on the flat side. When he walked, he had all the grace of a stork strutting.
When the servant came back with a rusty helm, Nedd announced that if anyone had forgotten anything else, he’d cursed well have to do without it. Jill gave Rhodry one last kiss, then ran to the gates to wave the warband out. In a disorderly line they trotted down the hill, then into the road, disappearing to the west in a spatter of mud. With a prayer to the Goddess to keep her man safe, Jill turned back to the dun and the long tedium of waiting for news.
The small demesne of Tieryn Graemyn lay three days’ ride to the west of Nedd’s dun. The road ran narrow through sharp hills and scrubby pine, mostly uninhabited, until some ten miles from the tieryn’s dun the warband came to a small village, Spaebrwn, one of three that paid Graemyn allegiance. As the warband watered their horses at the village well, Perryn noticed the townsfolk watching with frightened eyes. A Cerrgonney war was like a Cerrgonney storm, blowing the thatch from cottage and lord’s manor alike.
Late in the afternoon they reached Graemyn’s dun, set up on a low hill out in the middle of a stretch of fairly flat pastureland bordered by trees. The big gates swung open to admit them into a ward crowded with men and horses. As Nedd’s warband dismounted, stableboys ran to take their horses and lead them away into the general confusion. The tieryn himself strolled out to greet these reinforcements. A grizzled dark-haired man, he bulged with muscles under his linen shirt.
“I’m truly glad to see you, Nedd,” he remarked. “Your twelve brings us up to what strength we’re going to have.”
Under the tieryn’s firm voice there was an anxious edge that made Perryn apprehensive, and for good reason, as it turned out at the council of war in the great hall. Even with Nedd and three other allies, Graemyn had only some two hundred men. Ranged against them were Tieryn Naddryc and his allies with close to three hundred. The dispute concerned two square miles of borderland between their demesnes, but it had grown far beyond the land at stake. Although Graemyn was willing to submit the matter to the arbitration of the high king, Naddryc had refused the offer some weeks past. In a subsequent skirmish between mounted patrols, Naddryc’s only son had been killed.
“So he wants my blood,” Graemyn finished up. “I’ve stripped