The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [141]
“So would I.” Lilli’s voice broke suddenly into weeping. “Oh ye gods! So would I!”
“Well, come along!” Maddyn said. “It’s time to go.”
“Go where?” Branoic said.
“To watch Merodda hang.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What? What’s wrong with you?”
Branoic merely shrugged. He didn’t understand himself sometimes, and this was one of them. He should want to see the prince’s executioner take Aethan’s revenge for him, shouldn’t he? Maddyn set his hands on his hips and glared at him.
“You go,” Branoic said. “You can tell me about it.”
With one last shrug Maddyn turned and strode out of the great hall. Almost everyone in the dun seemed to agree with the bard about this morning’s entertainment. Branoic was left alone with one serving girl, who sat weeping on the bottom step of the curving staircase. On an impulse he got up and walked over.
“What’s so wrong?” he said.
“They can say what they like about Lady Merodda,” the girl snivelled. “But she saved my life and my baby’s too, when the battle was on.”
“Did she now? That’s the first good thing I’ve heard about her.”
The girl wiped her face on her sleeve. She was wearing much better clothes than the usual wench, better enough to make him wonder if she too were a lady in disguise, until she pulled up the hem of her overdress and blew her nose upon it.
“Ah well,” Branoic said. “At least the lady will have someone to mourn her. It would be a hard thing to leave the earth knowing everyone was celebrating your going.”
She nodded and let the dress hem fall.
“That’s true,” she said. “Oh ye gods, I’d best hurry! I was supposed to bring some water upstairs, for that old man, the councillor, the one with hair.”
“Nevyn’s upstairs?”
“He said there was a lady with him who’d been taken faint.”
Lilli, I’ll wager! Branoic thought.
“Here, I’ll take it up,” he said aloud. “And a bit of mead, too, should help.”
With a goblet of mead in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other, Branoic trotted upstairs to find an impatient Nevyn standing out in the corridor.
“What happened to that lass?” the old man said.
“She was overcome with grief, like, my lord. Merodda had done her a good turn or two.”
Behind Nevyn stood an open door; Branoic ducked around him and carried the water inside before Nevyn could say a word against it. Sure enough, Lilli was sitting on the end of the bed, all pale and puffy-eyed—with grief, he assumed.
“My lady,” Branoic said. “My heart aches for your loss.”
“Oh, does it really?” she snapped. “I don’t want false sympathy! I know you hated my mother.”
“Well, then, it aches because you’re so sad.”
“That’s better.”
“But I didn’t hate her.” Branoic glanced around for a table, found none, and put the pitcher and goblet down on the windowsill instead. “It’s our Maddo who’s gone daft on the subject, not me. All I cared about was the wrong she did Aethan, and by the gods, when she said she wanted to ride off with him, maybe I’m a dolt, but I believed her.”
“So did I,” Nevyn said. “And it’s a pity the gods didn’t allow it. The omens would be a cursed sight better for the new kingdom if they had.”
Branoic was about to ask what he meant when from out in the ward a roar went up, a crowd of voices all raised in mockery and cheers.
“It’s over,” Lilli said.
Branoic was expecting her to weep, but instead she lay down across the end of the bed and curled up like a dog in straw. Nevyn hurried round and sat next to her.
“Get out, Branoic,” the old man snapped. “Now.”
Branoic turned and fled. He avoided angering sorcerers as a matter of principle.
Although the priests had decreed that Maryn could not become High King until the white mare had been found, they saw nothing wrong with the prince celebrating his victory with a feast. In Dun Deverry’s stores lay the best of a spring harvest, laid up for men now dead in a siege now over. All afternoon servants kept bringing food and mead, while bards sang manfully against the noise, and the laughter