The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [117]
Red-haired Trevyr was sitting on a bit of broken wall. Blood crusted on his face and lay thick on his muddy shirt. At his feet lay Albyn, sprawled like a sack of meal. Maddyn knew he was dead the moment he saw him. He dismounted, threw the reins of his horse to one of the servants, and hurried over. Trevyr looked up at him as if he were thinking himself delirious.
“It’s me,” Maddyn said. “Nevyn scried you out.”
“May the gods bless him! The captain’s dead. We tried to get to him, but he went down in the middle of a mob.”
For a moment Maddyn could neither move nor speak. In the sky above, ravens shrieked and wheeled. Trevyr raised a hand black with dry blood as if to fend them off. It looked like all his fingers had been broken by one blow, and Maddyn wondered how he could possibly move it.
“Did they get the gates?” Trevyr said.
“They did. Owaen still lives, and Branoic. Can you ride?”
Trevyr considered this question for a long moment, then tried to smile. The wound on his face cracked and oozed.
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” He glanced down. “Allo died out here. At least he made it this far.”
“Lilli!” It was Anasyn’s voice, howling toward her. “Lilli, hurry!”
Lilli rushed out of her tent. Still in his mail Anasyn stood waiting for her, and the way he stood, head back, hands clenched in fists, his mouth twisted in pain, told her what must have happened.
“Father?” she whispered.
“He’s dead. Branoic and I got him free of the fighting, but it was too late.”
Lilli threw back her head and keened, a long wail that seemed to burst out of her heart. Anasyn threw his arms around her and pulled her tight. They held on like children, swaying together while he wept.
“He’ll be with Bevva in the Otherlands,” Lilli said. “They’ll be together now.”
At that she could weep, sobbing and keening in long hysterical gulps while her maidservants crept out of the tent and hovered uncertainly nearby. Anasyn stroked her hair and murmured, “Here, here,” over and over again. At last she calmed herself and looked up. With his warrior’s control he’d stopped weeping; his face seemed drawn on parchment like one of Brour’s diagrams, all stretched tight and flat. Around them stood a circle of men, watching silently. Nevyn pushed his way through.
“Lilli, I’m so sorry,” the old man said. “Tieryn Anasyn, the prince has need of you.”
“I’ll go to him straightaway,” Anasyn said. “Please—keep an eye on my sister?”
“I will, lad. Don’t worry.”
Lilli laid a hand on Nevyn’s arm and looked around dazed. Tieryn Anasyn? Of course. Anasyn was the Ram now, and it was his warband who stood watching her with such sad eyes, as if she were doing the mourning for all of them. Peddyc’s captain stepped forward.
“We’ll avenge him, lass. Don’t you trouble your heart about that.”
Lilli tried to thank him, but the keening burst out of her mouth instead. Nevyn grabbed her arm and unceremoniously dragged her into her tent, where she could mourn with her women around her.
By noon the situation clarified. The prince’s men held the entire hill except for the crest and Dun Deverry itself. The regent’s forces held the broch complex and the inner ward around it, defended by one last towering stone ring. This left the deserted village and its patches of open ground a no-man’s-land of some sixty yards wide between the prince’s men on their wall and the regent’s on theirs. The side ward that contained the bolthole belonged, however, to Maryn, as did the dun’s cattle and swine.
“We can send more men through the bolthole now,” Maryn said. “It’ll be a fair bit easier to attack the king’s position over that low wall.”
Nevyn was about to reply when they both heard shouting on the fourth wall—screaming, really, a berserk howl of pure rage. When the prince took off running toward the sound, Nevyn was forced to follow. He barely restrained himself from shouting, “Be careful, Your Highness,” as if the prince were still a child. Maryn flung himself onto a ladder and climbed to the