The Dragon Revenant - Katharine Kerr [82]
“Oh come now, don’t be morbid!”
“Morbid, is it? You’re the one who had me caught and locked up in here.”
“Well, so I did. But the more I study you, the more I’m sure you’re not a criminal—at least as far as Jill’s concerned. On the other hand, you really should have known better when it came to all those horses. Stealing is wrong.”
“That’s what Jill always said, too.” Perryn looked utterly confused. “But um, well, er, she never could explain why.”
“Indeed? Well, there’s lots of reasons, but consider this one, lad. When you steal a horse from someone, you may be taking away a thing they may truly need someday.”
“But I only took them from lords who had lots.”
“Just so, but how do you know what the future and their Wyrd might bring them? The day might come when the horse you took would be the last left to them, and they might die in battle from its lack, and that death might set off some vast and subtle chain of events beyond anyone’s control. Now I admit, this all must sound very farfetched, but you never know. That’s the crux of it: you never know.”
Perryn looked profoundly unconvinced.
“Well, then, here’s an example that should lie close to your heart. Consider Jill and Rhodry. When you took her away, you didn’t even know that Rhodry was Aberwyn’s heir, did you? If he hadn’t been following you and Jill all over the wretched Cerrgonney wilderness, his enemies would have had a hard time kidnapping him. Come to think of it, Jill might have been able to stop them. She has dweomer, so the Wildfolk would have warned her, or she would have felt danger on her own. In either case she could have called for help—from me, or Salamander, or simply from your uncle or another local lord.”
Perryn sat straight up in bed, and his face turned pale.
“My lord, I hear the guards talking. They say there could be a war because Rhodry’s gone.”
“They’re quite right.”
“But the noble-born fight on horseback in this part of the kingdom. If there’s a war, horses are going to be killed in droves.”
“And men, too, I might add.”
Perryn seemed deaf to Nevyn’s qualification. He was staring off into space, and his eyes were filled with tears.
“All those horses,” he whispered. “Ah ye gods, I’m sorry!”
“Are you? Then I suggest you think about what I’ve said.”
It was well after the noon meal that Elaeno came back from his trip to the guildhall. Nevyn had just returned Rhodda to the women’s hall after their daily walk when Elaeno met him on the stairs. The Bardekian’s face was grim indeed.
“We’ve got to talk privately.”
“You’ve got news, do you?”
“Of a sort. Very much of a sort.”
They went into Nevyn’s tower room, and although Nevyn settled himself in the cushioned chair in the window, Elaeno paced restlessly round and round as he talked.
“A man who was calling himself Alyantano and claiming to come from Orystinna passed through Aberwyn and the guild a couple of months ago. By asking a lot of questions I finally figured out who he really is. Now he’s never been associated with the dark dweomer in any true sense, but he’s as rotten as a beached hull nonetheless. He comes from the city of Naralion, his real name is Lerranno, and he’s known as the Butcher of Vulture Pass.”
“A lovely tide, sure enough. How did he get it?”
“Well, he was an officer in command of a couple of regiments on what should have been a routine exercise—oh about a year ago now, I think it was. Since I only heard the general gossip, I’m not sure of all the details. The upshot, though, was that he ordered a hundred citizen recruits across a rope bridge after he’d been warned it was unsafe. The bridge pulled free, the men all died, and he was—let me see, you don’t quite have the words for these terms in Deverry, but he was tried in a special kind of malover by other army officers and found guilty