The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [175]
“Let the lady breathe, lads!”
As Tevylla made her way clear to the group of women standing near the main door, Calonderiel flung the mead in his goblet straight into Cullyn’s face. At the signal mead seemed to come from everywhere and drench her new husband like a summer storm. With a whoop, the warband grabbed the struggling, swearing Cullyn and carried him bodily toward the ornamental pond round the side of the broch complex. Laughing and calling, the women hurried after, their brightly colored dresses billowing and streaming in the wind.
With one last howl the warband dumped Cullyn into the pond and ducked him a couple of times when he tried to scramble out. When they finally let him go, he was soaking wet but laughing, taking mock swings at his men and vowing that he’d chop them into dog meat. In a great pretence of terror they danced back out of reach. Laughing herself, the tieryn appeared and began calling for order.
“Let the captain go change his clothes,” Lovyan said. “We’ve got a feast on the way, you know, and mead all round.”
The men spontaneously cheered the lady who was their lord.
Although the evening meal included an entire roasted hog and other fancy dishes, there was, all in all, as little fuss as Tevylla wanted. When Cullyn fed her the first bite from the trencher they shared, the warband did cheer, as they did again when they shared a goblet of mead—or at least, she took a few sips and let him finish the rest. At the end of the meal, she was planning on retiring with the other women and letting him drink with his men, but when she left the table, he came with her, taking her hand as they walked to the staircase.
“The warband can drink itself sick without me,” he remarked.
She was so pleased to hear him say it that she suddenly realized just how much she wanted him. Yet with her wanting came a shyness, a sudden feeling that she hardly knew him, a last reserve about letting him close to her in such an irrevocable way. Her early fear of him, she saw then, was a fear that she might love this man too much, if she let herself, a warrior whose craft might take him away from her for long months at a time, whose death might claim him at any moment. And now she had gone and married him, right when the province was on the brink of open war. In her mind she heard her mother’s weary voice: have you no common sense, lass? No, she answered, and I’m proud of it.
In her chamber, strangely silent without Rhodda there, his wet clothes lay in a puddle on the floor. She picked them up, glad of the excuse to keep from looking at him, leaned out the window to wring the worst of the water from the clothes, then draped them over the sill to dry.
“My apologies,” he said. “I was just in such a cursed hurry to get back downstairs.”
“Oh, I don’t mind.”
“You’re rid of Rhodda for the night, and so you need someone to play the nursemaid for.”
When she forced herself to turn around and face him, she found him smiling at her, his hair half-silver, half-gold in the candlelight, with such good humor that her shyness vanished.
“Nursemaid? Oh, I wouldn’t call it that.”
He caught her by the shoulders and kissed her openmouthed, just once before he let her go—the first kiss he’d ever given her. She untied her kirtle and laid it down on the table carefully, smoothing the elaborate needlework. While she took off her overdress he unbuckled his sword-belt and slung it onto the table, the scabbard lying golden and heavy across the embroidered flowers. She felt weary, as if at an omen. Ah well, she thought, we’ll have our good times before I have to wear black again. Cullyn looked at her so solemnly that she thought he was about to speak, but he picked her up like a child and carried her to their bed.
At the Inn of the Flying Fish, down near the harbor in Indila, Jill had spent the past three days working harder than she ever had in her life. Not only was Nevyn’s idea of mental exercises a good bit stricter than Salamander’s, but the old man set her to