The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [129]
“That’s how I was remembering it, too.” He glanced at the younger men. “And so Otho borrowed his lordship’s blacksmith’s forge and made up the first daggers.”
They nodded, smiling a little, and Branoic drew his dagger from his sheath and held it up. In the firelight the peculiar alloy gleamed as if it burned from within.
“Our honor and our curse,” Branoic said. “To the long road that brought us here!”
Everyone drained their drink, whether it was from wooden cup or looted goblet.
“Let’s fill them up again,” Maddyn said. “Who knows what our Wyrd will bring us next, eh?”
They drank late into the night, and yet no one could think of a jest, it seemed, or start a song that didn’t trail away into miserable silence. From the rest of the camp they heard laughter and singing, or ragged outbursts of cheers for no particular reason, but none of them found the heart to join in. Finally toward dawn the celebrations died into silence. One at a time the other silver daggers drifted away, leaving Maddyn alone to tend a dying fire. He put on the last few sticks of wood just for the light and poked the coals around them, then knelt in the dirt to watch the salamanders playing in the flames and the sylphs that hovered in the smoke above. His little blue sprite appeared and leaned against him while she sucked on her forefinger.
“They say the Wildfolk can travel to the Otherlands and back again,” Maddyn said. “Go tell Caradoc that the prince has his victory, will you?”
She looked up at him and nodded, then disappeared.
“Ye gods, Maddo lad,” Maddyn told himself. “You’re drunk, aren’t you? And a cursed good thing, too.”
He dropped his face to his hands and wept.
• • •
Just at dawn Merodda wrenched herself awake from an uncomfortable sleep to find herself on the edge of screaming. Someone had come into the chamber. He was standing by the door and threatening her—except that no one was or had. The sensation lingered so strongly that she knew she’d not been having anything as ordinary as a dream. A dweomer-warning, more like, and a logical one, that some of the new king’s men would be searching for her.
And what would they do when they found her? She would have to plan her escape carefully, and get out of the dun as soon as possible, too, before they found her. She got up and went to look out the window of the women’s hall. The gates were still shut and guarded. Soon they would open, and she’d have to be ready when she saw her chance.
The soldier shoved the tent-flap aside and let the grey dawn light in with him.
“My Lord Nevyn?” He carried something in his arms, wrapped in a bit of sacking. “Councillor Oggyn sent me to give this to you. He says it has your name written inside it.”
“Indeed?” Nevyn took the parcel, and the moment his fingers felt the smooth leather binding through the sack, he laughed. “I’ll wager it does, at that. Let me just get this off—hah! It’s my book indeed, one that was stolen from me many a year ago now.”
Nevyn ran his hand down the leather and gloated. Aside from a bit of mildew, the lore-book seemed unharmed. The soldier, still in his filthy mail, smiled indulgently at the way he clucked over it.
“Where did Oggyn find this?” Nevyn said.
“He told me that one of the men brought it to him, and some other odd stuff as well, from that room where we captured the queen and her women. Since it was a book, they figured he’d want it, but he opened it, and here it was yours. A weird thing, that, he said.”
“Mayhap it was Wyrd, indeed. My thanks for bringing it, and I’ll give the councillor a thousand thanks when I see him.”
Nevyn stowed the book away in his campaign chest, then left his tent. In the early morning the king’s men were hard at work, digging long trenches to bury the dead from the last battle in the dun and royal broch. They would pile the earth high over them, here in the parkland outside the dun walls, in memory of the slaughter that put the true king upon his