The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [11]
“Oh my, oh my, it’s the gwerbret himself. Veddyn, get out here! It’s the gwerbret and his men! Oh my, oh my! Your Grace, such a great honor, oh you must try some of our new dark and there’s a cask of bitter, too, oh my, oh my!”
“Don’t dither, woman! Gods! You’ll drive his grace daft.” Tall and lean, hawk-nosed, and perfectly bald, Veddyn strolled out and made Blaen a perfunctory bow. “Honored, Your Grace. What brings you to us?”
“Thirst, mostly, good Veddyn. Do you have tankards enough for me and mine?”
“It’d be a poor brewery that couldn’t serve six travelers, Your Grace. Just you all tie up those horses and come inside.”
Blaen handed his captain a handful of silver to pay for the ale, ushered his men inside, then lingered briefly in the yard with Twdilla while Veddyn followed them in. Once they were alone, she dropped her dithery ways.
“I take it that Your Grace is here for news?”
“That, and to look in on Camdel, poor lad. Is he any better?”
“Quite a bit, actually, but he’ll never be right in the head again after what they did to him.” She crossed her fingers in the sign of warding against witchcraft. “He’s mucking out the cowbarn at the moment, so I’ll wager Your Grace doesn’t want …”
“By the gods, it doesn’t matter to me what he smells like. Let’s stroll over, shall we?”
As it turned out, they found Camdel sitting behind the cowbarn on an old stump and eating his lunch, a chunk of bread and slices of yellow cheese laid out neatly on an old linen napkin. When he saw Blaen, he got up and bowed with a sweeping courtly gesture that went ill with his dirty shirt and brown brigga, but although his eyes betrayed a flicker of recognition, he didn’t truly remember Blaen and had to be told his name. He was, however, physically healthy again and even somewhat happy, smiling as he spoke of his quiet life at the brewery. Blaen was well-pleased. The last time he’d seen the man, Camdel had been a quivering shrieking wreck, stick-thin and utterly mad from the tortures of those who followed the dark dweomer.
And now, or so Blaen had been told, his beloved cousin, Rhodry was in the hands of those same evil men. Although he generally could keep the thought at bay, at times, when he least expected it, when he was talking with some vassal or merely walking down a corridor or looking idly from a window, the memory would rise up like an assassin and stab him: Rhodry could be suffering like Camdel did. With the thought came a breathless rage, a gasp for air that seared his chest and made him swear yet one more time a vengeance vow: if these evil magicians had made his cousin suffer for so much as the length of a cockcrow, then nothing on earth, not king nor dweomer, would stop him from raising an army and sweeping down on Bardek like a flock of eagles, even if he had to bankrupt his rhan and call in every honor debt and alliance anyone had ever owed him. Since he made the vow to his gods as well as to the honor of his clan, it was no idle boast.
He would have been surprised to know that the Dark Brotherhoods knew of his rage but pleased to learn that they feared it.
The central plateau and especially the hill country of southern Surtinna, the biggest island of the Bardekian archipelago, was at that time sparsely populated, a vast sweep of rolling downs descending from the knife edge of a young mountain range. Nominally the downs came under the jurisdiction of the archons of Pastedion and Vardeth, who parceled out land grants to their supporters at whim, since the hawks and field mice who lived there never bothered to argue about it. The land owners in turn rented out parcels for farms or cattle ranches or even, in a few rare cases, for summer homes and country retreats for the rich. Although the income from the grants was sparse, the prestige was enormous. As a further benefit, the archons and the laws were far,