The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [10]
“So it seems. And it was his ill luck that the womb that caught him was kin to Tieryn Benoic.”
“Who by all accounts was the last man in the kingdom to understand what a strange fish his wife’s sister had netted.” Nevyn shook his head in bafflement. “Well, when he’s stronger we’ll try the fire-vision again, but I think me we’d better wait some days.”
“He couldn’t take the strain right now, truly. How goes the other hunt?”
“For our murdering troublemaker? Very badly indeed. For a while there I thought I was on his trail, but he’s disappeared. The stinking gall of him, trying to attack the child! If I get my claws into him, I’ll tear him limb from limb, I swear it.”
“He doubtless knows it, too. Once he realized that you were looking for him, he probably ran off somewhere to hide.” Elaeno considered the problem for a moment. “Well, maybe if he’s properly scared, he’ll leave us alone.”
“Always full of hope and raw optimism, aren’t you? No doubt he’ll lie quiet for a while, but he’ll come back. His kind always does, like a witch’s curse.”
After being in attendance on the King for two long months, both pleading his cousin Rhodry’s cause and tending to business of his own, Blaen, Gwerbret Cwm Pecl, was profoundly relieved to ride home to his own city of Dun Hiraedd. With the fall harvest his taxes were coming in, and he spent a pleasurable pair of days playing the role of the rough country lord, standing round his ward with the chamberlain and bailiffs and counting up the pigs and chickens, cheeses and barrels of apples, sacks of flour (both white and barley), tuns of mead and ale, as well as the occasional hard coin that was his due. He had a private word or a jest for every man who came to deliver his taxes, whether he was a lord’s chamberlain riding ahead of a pair of laden ox carts or a local farmer carrying a wicker cage of rabbits on his back and a sack of flour in his arms.
Yet soon enough he left the taxes to his highly efficient staff and decided instead to make a small progress among his vassals. There were many lords that he hadn’t seen since the spring at the great feast of Beltane, and he liked to keep a personal eye on potential squabblers and grumblers. He had another reason, as well: to look for some likely parcel of land, at least ten farmsteads worth, to bestow on Rhodry’s woman, Gilyan, Cullyn of Cerrmor’s daughter, along with letters patent of nobility. Although, with a good half of his demesne wilderness, finding the land would be easy, enticing the free farmers to work it was another matter indeed. What counted now, though, was that Jill have land and a tide of her own; the income would be superfluous once she was married to Rhodry and he’d been installed in Aberwyn.
Since his wife, Canyffa, was pregnant, Blaen left her behind to rule dun and rhan in his stead and took only some twenty-five men of his warband along as an honor guard. They rode north first, stopping at Cae Labradd and the dun of the tieryn, Riderrc. To celebrate the gwerbret’s visit there was a great feast one night and a hunting party the next day, but on the third day Blaen told the tieryn that he wanted merely to ride around the rhan on his own. With only five men for an escort he set out in mid-morning, but rather than viewing the tieryn’s fields and woods, he rode straight for town.
Just at the outskirts of Cae Labradd, on the banks of a tributary that flowed into the Canaver a few miles on, stood a brewery that was known as the best in all Cwm Pecl. Set behind a low, grassy earthenwork wall was a cluster of round buildings, freshly white-washed and neatly thatched, the brewer’s living quarters, the malt house, the drying house, the brewing house proper, the storage sheds and, off to one side, the pigsty and the cowbarn. When Blaen turned off the road and led his men toward the brewery, they all cheered him, quite spontaneously and sincerely.
Over the door of the main house hung a rough broom of birch twigs, scented