The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [121]
“Well, true spoken, I suppose, but—”
“Nah nah nah, none of that supposing! Your lass is right. It’s all on the knees of the gods, anyway, what a man’s Wyrd may bring.”
“That eases my heart. You can’t know how much. I was so afeared, thinking everyone would hate me.”
“What?” Branoic laughed at that. “My lady, I doubt me if you could ever do anything vicious enough to make me hate you.”
He was staring at her so intensely, so sincerely, that Lilli turned tongue-tied. With a little cough, Clodda got up and curtsied.
“I’d best go inside, my lady,” Clodda said, “and not sit here eavesdropping.”
“You can stay,” Branoic said. “I’m not going to say anything dishonorable.” He turned back to Lilli. “The prince has offered all of us silver daggers a boon once the wars are over. If the gods let me live, I’m going to ask him for enough land to support a wife. And so I want to ask you to be so kind as to just keep me in mind, like. Neither of us have much of a place in the world now, but it would gladden my heart to earn one for us.”
“But I hardly know you!”
“Well, and I don’t have the land yet, either.” Branoic gave her a grin. “Just think about it.”
He bowed, then turned on his heel and hurried away before Lilli could say one thing more.
“Oooh, how exciting!” Clodda said. “He’s awfully handsome, isn’t he?”
“Do you think so? He’s too beefy for me.”
“Oh my lady! You’re just saying that to be haughty, aren’t you? I mean, ladies are supposed to be haughty to their suitors and all.”
“I’m not! I mean it.”
When Clodda giggled, so did she, covering her mouth with one hand. I certainly don’t want to marry Branoic, she thought, lands or not! But she had to admit that she found it comforting that someone wanted to marry her, an exile without so much as a horse for her dowry.
Later that night, when she was falling asleep, she realized that she would worry about his safety on the morrow during the battle, that once again she would wait helplessly with nothing to do but pray that a man she cared something for would live through the fighting. She fell asleep at last to dream of Peddyc and Bevyan. She woke in tears.
Not long after dawn the attack on the last wall began. With the last of the silver daggers around him, Prince Maryn took his place on the fourth wall. The rams and the assault ladders stood in position at the fourth-wall gates, and assault men stood ready to winch them open at the prince’s signal. On the fifth and last wall between the Red Wyvern and Dun Deverry, the false king’s men waited in utter silence. A revulsion so physical that he felt like vomiting made Nevyn turn away long before the fighting began. He left the prince, climbed down the catwalk, and trotted downhill until he reached the outermost wall and the refuge of the camp.
All that day Nevyn worked with the chirurgeons. The wounded men who could walk or crawl to safety kept them busy enough that he avoided thinking about the men worse off, left lying when they fell. By the time anyone could spare the effort to get them off the battlefield, most would have died. Not, of course, that there was much the chirurgeons could have done for them, anyway—Nevyn was always aware of the deadly limits of his knowledge. He had studied physic and chirurgy for nearly two hundred years, and yet he knew with a sour certainty that he lacked the keys to unlock the mysteries of wounds. Some went septic; some did not; why? The theory of humors in the books of that learned Greggyn, Gaelyn, never had answered this question nor the hundred others that haunted him as he worked, arms red to his elbows, washing wounds, stitching wounds, desperately trying to staunch wounds. Another mystery—why did some wounds ooze bluish blood but others pump out bright red? Those with slow bleeding he could save; few who bled fast lived to reach him.
Up the hill from the chirurgeons the battle raved in a thousand